Prices Valley goes back to the birth of Canterbury

Press, 25 July 1981, Page 16

Prices Valley goes back to the birth of Canterbury

A signpost on the to Akaroa, just before Birdlings Flat, directs travellers up a side roadtinto Prices Valley. The valley takes its name from Joseph Price, who. settled there in 1852. Earlier, Price had established a shore whaling station at Hikuraki Bay, a how isolated inlet which lies behind one of the Peninsula headlands which can be seen from the outlet to Lake. Forsyth. It is exactly 150 years since Joseph Price first set foot in Canterbury. A descendant of his, Yvonne Fitzmaurice, of Mitcham, Victoria, has been researching the life of Price. JOHN WILSON has drawn on her information for this article about ode of Canterbury’s earliest European pioneers.

One? hundred ai»xl fifty years ago, at the endj of July or during the first week of August. 1831. one O f Canterbury’s earliest European settlers. Joseph Price-;, first set foot in the provin ce. By the time he died. 70 jyears later, on July 27, 1901, I'.ie had seen Canterbury through its earliest days of tracing for flax, of shore whaling and of pastoral runs, .-md into the era of more settled, freehold farming. ,y Price was bfjrn on May 15, 1809, in Newcastle, England. His father v as a mariner and both pat ents were apparently illiterate. The family beint g pooh, young Joseph wenft to sea at the early age of. 13, His seafaring brought hir n, eventually, to the South T-eas. He arrived at Sydney at the end of / June, 1830, on a vessel tr ansporting female convicts. In Sydney, he signed on to a whaling ship and so f(:und his way, for the first tin* je. into New Zealand waters/by October, 1830. The next year, while at Port Ukiderwood, he changed to anr / her vessel, the Victoria. vrhich sailed into Port Coo? rr (now Lyttelton Harbou?) at the end’of July, 1831. Pre «. in the company of the tn.r hng master from the Victor ia, walked over the RaPa’ ki track and to the great jw i at Kaiapohia. , They spent two days there 0 rading muskets, powder, J blankets, and tobacco for J pigs and dressed flax, before / walking back to the ship, f They were among the hand- ’ ful of Europeans who saw the great pa at Kaiapohia before it was sacked by Te Rauparaha in 1832. • Price’s first acquaintance with Canterbury was brief. The Victoria took on the cargo for which Price and his companion had traded at Purau before sailing on for further trading on the east coast of the South Island. Price then returned with the vessel to Sydney and spent the next few years of his life sailing out of that port as a whaler.

On some of these ’ voyages he touched at times on the New Zealand coast, but his more permanent association with the country, which was to last the rest of his long life, began when jie joined the firm of Weller Brothers of Sydney in 1836.

This firm had a number of shore whaling stations on the South Island’s east coast between Banks. Peninsula and the mouth of the TaierL Price spent his first year ashore in New Zealand, 1837, at the Wellers’ whaiini’ stations in Otago, being put in charge of the “Middle Fishery.” At this time he apparently set up house with a Maori woman who became his de facto wife and moved with him, a few years later, to Canterbury.

Price struck out on his own a year or two after joining the Wellers. In

December, 1839, he began setting up his own shore whaling station at Hikuraki, one of the smaller bays on the south coast of Banks Peninsula, not far along the coast from the outlet to Lake Forsyth. While the question of sovereignty over NeW Zealand was being settled at Waitangi, and the French settlers who were to found

Akaroa were sailing to their destination. Price was busy setting up his own station. He built houses with the timber cut at where Little River was later to become

established, towed down Lake Forsyth, manhandled across the shingle bank, and, taken by sea into Hikuraki. ■’ By May. 1840, he was ready to start whaling with a com- I plement of four boats and | about 30 men. It was a successful season. At its end he despatched 70 tons of oil and 3*/z tons of whalebone to j Sydney. J

Unfortunately, he con- ; signed his goods to his old employers, the Weller Bros, •. who had in the meantime i failed, so he gained nothing. He had the same experience'

with another Sydney firm the next year. He began to prosper -with ’ his third season, which began j in May, 1842; and was able, by 1843. to buy out Captain s George Hempieman, who had his whaling ’.station at Peraki in 1836. By ‘1847-48, Price was the most ’successful of all the Banks /Peninsula shore whalers. In ; 1848 he bought a schooner rand, on one of his many . visits to Sydney, married a : Miss Jane Scott who re--1 turned with him to New Zealand.

The founding of the Canterbury settlement in December, 1850, seems to have turned Price’s interests from sea to land (perhaps it was also a decline in the number of whales which prompted Price, now in his forties, to turn to other pursuits). Whatever the reason, the whaler became the farmer. Some accounts have described him as selling, in 1852, land and his whaling station at Hikuraki to Hugh Buchanan, who founded the Kinloch Estate which was

later to embrace a great tract of south-western Peninsula land. In fact, the land at Hikuraki,’’after Price abandoned whaling, became part of the Kaituna run. taken up under license by members of the Rhodes family in 1851-52. It. was some time later that the land at Hikuraki was bought by Buchanan. Unlike Hempelnian, Price appears not to have pressed any claims to land at his whaling station.

Whaling probably continued in a desultory, intermittent dashion at Hikuraki through the 1850 s and possibly until as late as the mid1870s. blit Price's connection with whaling and with Hikuraki ended in 1852. In September of that year he bought a block of 50 acres “in the valley between Waikoka and Kaituna.”

This block became the nucleus of Price’s farm in the valley which still bears his name, Kelvin Grove. He added to it through the years until by 1870 he owned about 350 acres on which he ran cows and sheep.

He was one of the early cheese-makers on Banks Peninsula, carrying his cheeses by boat across Lake Ellesmere, sledging them over Gebbies Pass, and so getting them to Lyttelton for sale. Price also leased pastoral runs on the shores of Lake Ellesmere, in partnership . with Albert Birdling who, like Price, has left his name in the district.

So the sailor and whaler settled into a more respectable life of gentleman farmer and local notable. He served for some time on the Little River Road Board. He lived to pass, his 90th year, not dying until the century had turned, on July 27, 1901. In June. 1906, his property, nearly 350 acres freehold in Prices Valley and several thousand acres of leasehold land around Lake Ellesmere, was rented out. His wife, Jane, died on December 15, 1908. Less than three years later, in April, 1911, his property was sold, realising a little' more than ,E 26.000 — the material rewards of more than 60 years work in Canterbury. He might have died a fatricher man had he not, so reports have it. spent lavishly in Sydney on his frequent trips there from Hikuraki.

Price’s descendants are myriad, from both his Maori and pakeha wives. A reunion of the pakeha side of the family was organised in 1966 by IVlrs Enid Reid of Christchurch, a great grand-daugh-ter of Joseph’s and. Jane s. The- reunion, attended by members of six generations, included a service in St Andrew’s Church, Little River, in the graveyard of which Joseph and Jane Price are buried.