Colonial days were hard

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

Colonial days were hard

Petticoat Pioneers. By Miriam Macgregor. Reed. 264 pp. Index. Illustrated. Few of these North Island women of the colonial era have names familiar to us, though many of the 54 whose stories are contained here come from well-known pioneering families (Colenso, Williams) whose stories are well-known. Most of the women have links with the WairarapaHawkes Bay region, where the author lives. She is preparing a further volume on the Manawatu-Wanganui-Taranaki area. The life-histories, told without adornment, will astound the modern reader, who is advised to use this as an occasional book, and take them a few at a time. The endurance and enterprise of these women can only seem extraordinary until one recognises that they most of them had no alternative. Dangers in the form of some combination of disease, childbirth, hostile natives, lack of shelter, lack of food, flooding, fire, and sudden deaths were part of the lives of every one of them. For example, Elizabeth Colenso, wife of the missionary printer, William

Colenso was teaching in an isolated Maori school in 1842 when she received a proposal of marriage from her future husband, whom she had never met. Colenso had in fact applied for sabbatical leave to find a wife in England, but had been ordered instead to look among the daughters of the missionaries-. It was Elizabeth’s father who decided she should accept him. Their marriage was postponed two years to suit Bishop Selwyn who was to officiate. Despite two children their marriage was not a success. When Colenso admitted being the father of Ripeka’s son Wiremu, he was suspended from holy orders and the baby given to Elizabeth to bring up. Elizabeth spent the last 20 years of her life as a missionary teacher on Norfolk Island. A later story is that of Catherine Dahm, who was married in 1894 in Waipiro from the home of her benefactor and employer, Mrs Jones. Her husband Tom was a road contractor, but they lived in a cottage with only a beach access. There were no white neighbours, and a Maori woman helped at the birth of her children, who arrived . yearly. She suffered typical mishaps:

after the death of her father family belongings were collected from a ship by Tom and transported along the beach by sledge; but the tide caught him and took everything, even the the sledge. While making a hen coop, a flake of wirenetting destroyed the sight of one eye. Eventually they were able to shift to a smallholding, with neighbours nine miles- away. Catherine became an honorary midwife to the district, travelling often at night on an old horse. It was not until her ninth child was born in 1916 that she herself went to a nursing home. Once a year she went to Wairoa to buy bolts of cloth for clothes: “grey flannel to make petticoats for the girls and warm shirts for the boys, materials for dresses and blouses, towelling and bolts of tough unbleached herringbone sheeting. From the 501 b flour bags, of which she used one a week, she made tea-towels, table cloths, pinnies, and lined the boys’ pants.” Despite some innaccuracies of proof-reading, the matter-of-fact statement of the details of dpy-today living cannot help but generate a fascinated interest.