Countryside Wanderings 1911...1980

Press, 4 January 1980, Page 8

Countryside Wanderings 1911...1980

John Wilson arrives at his penultimate area, KAIAPOI, as he updates the path of “Countryside Wanderings, 1917.”

In 1911, Ashley County was a larger unit -than it was to become, and Kaiapoi and Rangiora were described together in the Countryside Wanderings series of that year as the town of that county. But then, as today, they were proudly independent of each other and rivals to some extent. This alone justifies a separate treatment in this series — but there is also the consideration that newspaper readers of 1911 were willing to read long columns of grey type, so that treating two large, flourishing towns together in one article was feasible in a way it is not today. When Europeans first arrived in Canterbury, the author of the 1911 series recalled, much of the Ashley County was swamp. He suggested that the person who drew the old map on which the land between the Waimakariri and Waipara Rivers was described as the “grassy” Wilberforce Plain and made no mentin of swamps, was either ignorant or concealing unpleasant realities.

Where now, he wrote, the northbound express

bowls along rapidly and smoothly through country traversed by level, wellmetalled roads with fine bridges, travellers in the early days were lucky if the country they had to traverse was only moderately swampy and were lucky to find Maoris with canoes to help, them across the rivers. He proposed an interesting origin for the name “Styx,” applied to . the first river north of Christchurch. It acquired this name, he suggested, from a change to a classical spelling of the word "Sticks.” A common way of crossing this river in the early days was to lay bundles of flax sticks on the bed of the stream to make a kind of ford, In 1911, while on the subject of rivers, it is interesting to note that the Waimakariri was only half-way through the changes in its lower course that wiped the name “Kaiapoi Island” from the map. In that year, the name was still in use for the area between the north and south branches of the river, both bridged long since in 1911. The first Whites Bridge

over the then south branch had been built as long ago as .1858, hear to where the present road bridges cross what is now simply the Waimak, neithe north nor south. In 1911, the only major river stil unbridged on the north road was the Waipara. But the roads and bridges of Ashley County in 1911,' for all their being a source of pride in that year, would have seemed primitive by the standards of 1979. Even so, getting round the county, at least between the main towns and Christchurch, was as easy then as it is today. The clue to this is the reporter’s mention of the “northbound express.” Tn 1911, the county was better served by railways than it is today. In that year, the two branches of the north line ran to Culveiden and Domett, branching at Waipara, w.th an extra branch running from Rangiora to Oxford and on to Sheffield to link up with the Midland line. Ytt another ran from the main line through to Bennets to join up with theßangior a-Oxford branch line. It was the heyday of the Canterbury country train. In 1911, Ashley County was in a fine state of agricultural prosperity. The county extended beyond the coastal belt of alluvial and swampy soils on which Kaiapoi and Rangiora were built, to the

light, stony plain around Eyreton and the downs and hill country around Amberley. More of the county’s 1627 square miles in 1911 were in crops than they are todav. There were still more than 20,000 acres each in wheat and oats (the level reached in the early 1880 s) and large area's in turnips and rape. But livestock, too, were important in the economy of Ashley County in 1911. Dairying was .important around Sefton, Leithfield, Flaxton, and Oxford, and the pastures <of the county were supplying the already well-established frozen meat industry. Both Rangiora and Kaiapoi were service centres for the thriving farms of the county in 1911, but Kaiapoi had already assumed a different character from Rangiora from having a stronger, more diversified “industrial” base. Like many other Canterbury towns, Kaiapoi and Rangiora are found where they are today because there were, in the early days, the patches of bush from which the settlers secured firewood and timber for building. Kaiapoi’s "industrial” past preceded the sawmill-, ing of the 1850 s and 1860 s. Old Maoris, settled by the early years of this century at Tuahiwi, could tell of the flourishing trade down the Waimakariri in dressed flax with the “Port Cooper” traders,

who made very early tr ps up the Kaiapoi River with powder, muskets, blankets, and tobacco which they exchanged with ttu Maoris for pork or the product of the Maoris own fiax dressing “industry’. Its access by river gave Kaiapoi a clear advantage over other places north of Christchurch as a trading and manufacturing centre. By the mid-1850s, there were regular runs by small ketches, schooners, cutters, and then steamers to the wharf near the woollen mills, bringing m coal and wire and taking out agricultural produce and wool. The coming of the railway blighted this early river trade, but it picked up later with the formation of the Kaiapoi Shipping and Trading Company whose steamers restored to Kaiapoi the status of a secondary port which it had firmly retained in 1911. , In that year, . Kaiapoi’s earliest industry, ■ flax dressing, along with another early industry, flour milling, was “more or less flourishing.” So were the local brewery and malting, house and the creamery. But in 'the first decade of this century, Kaiapoi’s industrial life was dominated by the woollen mills.

They had grown from the small concern which employed 27 hands in 1878. to a concern which in 1911 employed. more

than 300 hands. Thev cessed 3500 bales of Wool a year in premises which had been rebuilt in jsgi The company as a whole with its clothing factories’ in Christchurch, more than 1000 people- < With its well-built.'cot tages near the neat f ac ton,’ buildings, the woollen mill quarter of Kaiann had ’ ir \ 191 ’’ “ a fl°urishing and businesslike' ai-’> Not so, of course, 's years later. The deserted factory buildings wood make a strange contrast for someone returning from that era viewed beside the growth of the town as a whole, with its extensive areas of, nw housing. In 1911, about . 2000 people were living .in Kaiapoi’s 500 houses, with more near the town but beyond the borough’s boundaries. It was des. cribed in the Countryside Wanderings series as a picturesque, . well-planted and neatly kept town. Its most recent improvement of that year was an acetylene gas plant for street lighting. It boasted also two public domains, a fire brigade, ..and a swimmine baths. Some of the buildings of which Kaiapoi was proud in 1911 axe stih to be seen today — the now superseded but still standing municipal buildings, the Bank of New Zeland built in 1884, St Bartholomew’s, and the now sadly mutilated old post office. .