Matamata Pioneer

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30200, 3 August 1963, Page 3

Matamata Pioneer

l Reviewed by

R.C.L.

The Golden Age of Josiah Clifton Firth. By Mona Gordon. (Pegasus Press). 296 pp.

Josiah Firth, who was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, emigrated to New Zealand in 1854 when he was 18. On arrival in Auckland he bought a block of land on which be set qp a brick kiln. According to the author of this book, who is his granddaughter. his early life is not well documented. However, she is able to record that by the time‘he had been five years in New Zealand he had not only married and become the father of two children, but had also become a partner in the firm of Thornton, Smith and Firth, c-nmiliers, whose Queen street premises towered above the Auckland waterfront.

In 1365. largely through his friendship with Wiremu Tamihana, Firth acquired the leasehold of a large tract of land in the Upper Thames d .strict which eventually extended to 56.000 acres taking

in a large slice of the Matamata plains. These plains he converted from a waste of manuka into flourishing fields of grain. It was a vast undertaking, and the magnitude and diversity of the farming operations carried out on the estate are well portrayed in this book, Iffie estate had its worrying aspects For one thing, it cost Firth £lOOO a year to import red clover seed. The clover grew in profusion, but it set no seed as there were no Humble Bees to fertilise it Firth wrote away to England for bees, and expected them by the summer of 1884 —with what success it is not related in the book. 'ln February that year, a consignment of Humble Bees was received by the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, but all were dead on arrival.

It was on Firth’s Matamata esta-.e that Isaac Hopkins established his apiary where he bred Italian queens, sending them to all parts of Australia and New Zealand. His large apiary is described in this book, 'pages 184 and 1851 but is quite overlooked in the book's index.

For more than 20 years Firth farmed this property, visiting it monthly and keeping a manager there, so that he himself could live with his growing family at Clifton, his large Mount Eden home In 1888 his Matamata property was taken over by the Bsnk of New Zealand. To quote the author, he was

“one among many others who had been forced to abandon their land to the tender mercies of the national institution.” His loss was further aggravated when, in the same year, his mill on the Auckland waterfront passed into the hands of the Loan and Mercantile Company. The astonishing thing is that a man of his age—he was then 60— should in the years that remained to him set himself on his feet again. This he did by setting his inventive mind to work on the possibilities of pumice as a substitute for charcoal in the insulation of refrigerating chambers. In 1894 he visited many freezing companies in New Zealand and Australia, and so well was he able to demonstrate the insulating effect of pumice that by the end of that year orders for 15.000 sacks of it (20 sacks to the ton), had been placed with him.

■ The author makes much—and rightly so—of the friendly relations that existed between her grandfather and the Maoris; for certainly he owed his safe tenure of the Matamata property in the war-torn sixties to the friendship of Wiremu Tamihana, head chief of the Ngati-Haua. whose headquarters were close by. When Tamihana. died in 1866. it remained to be seen whether his son. Tana, would maintain the same amicable relationship At first he wrote a friendly’ letter to Firth. A little later he wrote a second letter, saving that he ‘‘intended to break off all his father’s ap-eements” and that he and all the Ngati-Haua refused to acknowledge the Queen’s Government Moreover he warned Firth to remove at once “his servants, his cattle and all his goods” to avoid trouble. Mona Gordon attributes Tana's change of front to plain duplicitv In aomg so she surely overlooks the fact that, between the writmg of the two letters. Waikato militia men had burned Maori villages near Tauranga and destroyed the crops there, so that in reporting this act of extreme provocation, the ‘‘Southern Cross —an Auckland paper—went so far as to say that “Messrs Buckland’s and Firth’s runs” (which were contiguous» "would be in considerable danger of being seized as a reprisal.” In the chapter describing her gi^ndfather’s snagging of the Waihou river which afforded access to the northern boundary of his Matamata estate. Miss Gordon quotes freely from his book entitled “Nation Making” published in 1889. An anecdote related in the same book is retold in her own version (on page 15), though the two versions are noticeably d iff event, (It concerns the Maori chief alleged to have come to a social gathering wearing a heavy overcoat and nothing underneath “but what Nature had provided.’’) The author rather idolises her grandfather, with the result that his portrait is hardly objective enough to do him justice Nevertheless there can be no mistaking his piety his great perserverance and his inventiveness; and the story of his life as re-told in these pages is one that chal-

lenges a-tention The hok is plendidly produced with a wealth of illustration, including some fine coloured plates which are reproductions of watercolours by Clara Bleazard. It should have been better indexed.