OLD LAND DEALS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 11, 14 January 1928, Page 8

OLD LAND DEALS

EXTREMES IN PRICES EARLY TRAFFICKING WELLINGTON v. THAMES "I imagine almost all the land to the northward of the Thames is claimed by Europeans; many tracts have five or six claimants; and I know of people in New South Wales having spent as much as six hundred pounds at a time in the purchase of those lands from one of the claimants, in thorough ignorance of the validity, or even the reasonableness, of one claim over another, supposing, of course, that anwere valid." This paragraph from "Rambles in New Zealand," gives the impression of its author (J. C. Bidwill) concerning land-sharking in northern New Zealand in 1839-40. ALL I CAN SEE FOE A SHIET. By that date a.system of subdivision in fairly small holdings—town acres and rural sections of about 100 acres— was in being at Wellington, but what Mr. Bidwill referred to was not systematic subdivision of surveyed areas bought from the Natives, by a responsible company, but the speculative purchase by individual whites of large areas (thousands of acres) of way-back land with ill-defined boundaries. A man who selected a town acre and a hundred acre block at Wellington under the New Zealand Company might claim to be a settler and at any rate was not a land monopolist; but a man-who went to Bay of Islands, or Hauraki Gulf, or Mercury Bay, and who bought from some Native all the land from the beach to the horizon for an old shirt was in an evidently different category. It was so easy for an irresponsible white to buy from an irresponsible Native some .other Natives' lands for a song, that these purchases were bound to overlap; hence Mr. Bidwill's assumption that all land in New Zealand northward of the Thames (Waihou) Eiver was claimed by some such purchaser, and that some of the areas included therein were claimed by five or six. (In fact, this multiplication of unjustified land claims had to bo washed out some years later by legal process,) That part of the quoted statement is not surprising, but it is of some interest to note that the New Zealand land traffickers of those days were able to "sting" New South Wales people for hard cash in much the same way as post-war Germany "stung" the New Zealand buyers of paper marks. PREPOSTEROUS PRICES. The author goes on to point out that the " biglicks " land-trafficker's field in those days was the rather than the more available sites. Values of the latter were sufficiently known, even by the Maoris, to check designs for buying-up the whole countryside for a song; so the speculator went further afield. There seem to have been extremes in land-buying, some prices being absurdly low, some absurdly high. "The Mowries (Maoris) would never sell land near their settlements for sufficiently low prices to induce Europeans to become purchasers of more than enough for the sites of their houses, gardens, etc. In two purchases which I saw made, one at Tawranga (Tauranga) and the other at Eoturoa (Botorua), the prices given were pieposterous, and could only have been submitted to by the purchasers because they could not do without the land." The spot at Tawranga was not above fifty feet square, and the cost of it not loss than fifty pound in trade. That at Eoturua was about half an acre of water frontage, and the cost twelve pounds ten shillings; but the first was in the middle of a pa, while the other was only near one, and had always been used by the purchaser as a landing-place to his residence ever since he had been at Eoturoa' He told me he considered himself very lucky to get it even for that sum, as he had been trying for years to buy it without success." WELLINGTON'S ADVANTAGES. Probably this overlapping speculation in the broader acres of the North helped Mr. Bidwill to appreciate the advantages in 1840 of the Wellington settlement. He saw the superiority of Port Nicholson, from a port point of view, over the Thames (Waihou) River, but he failed at that time to foresee what the Wairarapa and Manawatu level lands would- mean to Wellington. He appreciated the richness of the Hutt Kiver flats, but not what lay beyond the enclosing mountains —at least, his book does not reflect any such knowledge, though only three or four years later his brother, C. B. Bidwill, became a pioneer Wairarapa sheep-farmer. Not appreciating this factor, he gave the Waihou credit for a greater area of open level land available for settlement, although its availability was reduced by swamp conditions. He foresaw delay in draining the swamps that fringe the Firth of Thames. (Some of the best of them have been drained only in the last twenty years, and some are still undrained.) The Waitemata Harbour. (Auckland) passes with but scant notice. Lastly, Mr. Bidwill saw that the Wellington of 1840 had a great asset in the quality of its colonists. He saw there "a population at present of between two and three thousand persons, among whom are many of high family connections and respectability from England, who have brought considerable capital with them and a consequent demand for labour —most of which advantages are not to bo found on the Thames, where there are as yet no emigrants, and where it is very certain none will be sent by Government, and where the population will be made up entirely from the emigration of doubtful characters from New South Wales, or of fickle discontented spirits from this place (Wellington)." That was at the beginning of the 'forties. For the Thames the whole outlook waa changed by the discovery of gold in the 'sixties. But Wellington found its gold in the gniES of the hinterlands, the wool of which was magnetised to its unequalled port.