The Silver Plough

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 34

The Silver Plough

The Atlantic Silver Plough, the trophy for supremacy in New Zealand ploughing, is modelled on the first plough ever used in New Zealand almost 150 years ago. On May 3, 1820, a missionary, the Rev. J. G. Butler, wrote in his diary: “I trust that this auspicious day will be remembered with gratitude and its anniversary kept by ages as yet unborn.” At Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands in the far north of New Zealand he had that day walked behind a team of bullocks drawing that first plough. The Atlantic Silver Plough is an exact replica of the plough which Mr Butler used and which is now preserved in the Old Colonists’ Museum in Auckland. A facsimile of the page from Mr Butler’s diary is mount-

ed on the kauri plinth which supports the silver model of the first plough. The sponsors of the national contest were able to locate the plough and the diary entry with the help of the Turnbull Library. Photographs were dispatched to the Sheffield silversmiths. Walker and Hall, Ltd., and their craftsmen produced the model in oxidised silver. The wooden plinth was cut from a kauri pillar from the 80-year-old building of J. B. McEwan in Wellington, and it probably came from the great kauri forests in the north which Mr Butler knew. The distinguished wood engraver and an authority on Maori art and legend, Mr E. M. Taylor, engraved the plates and earved the frieze at the base, which incor porates the agricultural tools of the Maori—the ko and the pinaki.