THE PRESS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1982. Our greatest industry

Press, 12 February 1982, Page 12

THE PRESS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1982. Our greatest industry

At Oamaru and at Totara, just south of Oamaru, many people will gather this week-end to celebrate the centenary of the founding of New Zealand’s greatest industry. The week-end’s events will focus on the Totara Estate, where the first shipment of meat to leave New Zealand’s shores under refrigeration was 'prepared before being dispatched to Port Chalmers. The voyage of the Dunedin in 1882 was not the first Idng-distance shipment of frozen meat, nor were those associated with the company that arranged the voyage the only ones active in New Zealand in giving birth to a new industry. The sailing of the Dunedin was an incident only in the early years of the development of New Zealand’s frozen meat industry. Nevertheless, it has come to be seen, justifiably, as a key incident and the celebrations are rightly placed and fairly being made much of.

What happened in Otago in the last months of 1881 and the first few weeks of 1882 set New Zealand on a course that has ensured 100 years of reasonable, if not always .consistent, prosperity based on the export of refrigerated foodstuffs. To this day, frozen meat remains the country’s single most important earner of foreign exchange. The promise that the successful shipment of meat — and butter — in the Dunedin seemed to herald, that New Zealand could prosper on its farmlands, has been largely fulfilled.

. When the chairman of the Historic Places Trust described the shipment of frozen meat on the Dunedin as a “pivotal moment in our history” he was referring to more than the fact that refrigeration lifted New Zealand from its “long depression” of the 1876 s and 1880 s and provided a basis for 100 years of prosperity. The inauguration of the refrigerated shipment of foodstuffs had social and political as well as economic impact on this country. It meant that a good living for a family could be made from a small farm, by dairying or raising fat lambs. From being a country dominated largely by great runs with marked social and economic inequalities, New Zealand became a more egalitarian country characterised by single-family farms. The strains arising from the rivalry

and, sometimes, an antagonism between farmers and freezing workers are nothing to those that might have arisen had refrigeration not intervened, permanently altering the economic, social, and political landscape of New Zealand. The permanent marking of the birthplace of an industry of such crucial importance in the country’s history is highly appropriate. The Historic Places Trust, generously aided by the Meat Board and the freezing industry, has restored the farm buildings on the Totara Estate as the showpieces of the Totara Estate Centennial Park. The opening of this park on Monday will culminate this week-end’s celebrations. South Island members of the trust have long felt aggrieved that the trust has many more properties in the North Island than in the South. The opening of the Totara Estate park, together with other work on farm buildings and early industrial buildings, mostly in Otago but elsewhere in the South Island as well, is doing much to redress the balance.

While the week-end’s celebrations will, inevitably, look mostly backwards, in the minds of many will be the serious and pressing problems that the frozen meat industry faces today. If the export meat industry is to retain the importance to the New Zealand economy that it has had in the past, effort will be needed to ensure the swift and amicable introduction of new technologies in the country’s freezing works and the introduction of other costsaving measures. New markets will have to be exploited to the full and products may have to be constantly adapted to meet the requirements of new markets and the changing requirements of established markets.

The problems are formidable and their solutions can cost millions of dollars. The centenary is an appropriate time to remind all those engaged in the meat industry — from farm pasture to refrigerated container and the meat counters in other countries — that a spirit of innovation and enterprise, a willingness to strike out on new courses, and a determination to do well for the country saw the industry launched one hundred years ago.