NAME PLACES AND THEIR NAMESAKES IN NEW ZEALAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3611, 29 May 1923, Page 61

NAME PLACES AND THEIR NAMESAKES IN NEW ZEALAND.

By Edith Searle Gross Manx, M.A. “What's in a name?”—Shakespeare. There is a good deal of petrified history? in the British place names throughout New Zealand, names often so familiar that we attach no bygone significance to them ; names of the old “homeland” ■ of discoverers; of sea captains and their loves; of Prime Ministers in power at the time of discovery, or, in the case of towns and streets, when these first began to be built; of noblemen patrons of the, discoverers ; of the pioneer's native town or village—(and how vividly these open up the vista of the future that stretched before the first settlers’ mental eye, and the far receding avenues of their past)— names of a long roll of New Zealand governors, from Governor Hobson to Lord Liverpool ; of battles and of heroes—these names often given within their own time, or others given when through memories, they were more living memories than now; names commemorating a local mur der, a solitary death, a gold rush, a lucky find; a famine in the camp; of some explorers or surveyors or layers of telegraph wires or makers of roads; a lover’s romance; street names of New Zealand Premiers; of the local mayor; of some wealthy citizen benefactor; sea coast names; of wind and weather; of seafaring men; names recalling the almost forgotten fact that New Zealand was once as it were a province of the colony of New South Wales ; names like Pitt street and North Shore and Newtown taken

from Sydney or from so-me governor or other “big man” who held sway at Sydney. Here, for example, are some of the names given by our first and greatest explorer, Captain Cook, nearly a century and a half ago:—Queen Charlotte Sound, called after the virtuous, stiff, and ceremonious consort of good King George; Mount Egmout, which bears the name of Cook’s patron, Karl Egmont; Poverty Bay (which happens to be about the wealthiest district in New Zealand), so called because he could not get there any food from the Natives; the Thames, the estuary of which brought back to his mind the wide estuary of the English river, lo come to a much later period, Port Chalmers bears the name of Dr Chalmers, leader of the Free Church movement in Scotland. Stewart Island was “christened” by Dugald Stewart, who .first of the pakehas sailed round it and discovered it to be an island, not a peninsula, as Cook and those who followed him had supposed. Port Pegasus in Stewart Island commemorates the ship Begasus, whose captain was the first to sail into its waters. Simmer, the sea suburb of Christchurch, memorises Dr Sumner, who had lately been made Archbishop of Canterbury. The name of the former province and present district of Canterbury is, of course, taken from that most beautiful and ancient town of England, w?liose city w?alls still surround the cathedral of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; the Saxon church, the Chaucerian tavern, the old archway through which “the Canterbury Pilgrims” went. The English name, by the way. originally meant “the burgh or city of the men of Kei t,” so it is an etymological error to api !v it to anything except a town. (By an inoccountable slip in a former article “Christchurch” in New Zealand was said to owe its name to Christchurch in Cambridge. It is, of course, named after the chief college of Oxford, of immortal memory from the time of Wolsey.) The “rising town” of Cambridge, in the Waikato, has, as it were, a kind of souvenir of its namesake in its placid liver and its weeping willow’s, if any place without colleges or chapels, “Backs” (the gardens or meadows behind the colleges), old bridges, or market place, or any architecture could recall the venerable university town. Sydenham, one of the largest suburbs of Christchurch, derives from a noble family of Devonshire; Mount Edgecumbe from the old high-built home of the Earls of Mount Edgcumbe, with “French and Italian gardens,” and orangery and grounds adorned with statuary, standing amidst its woods upon the hill. Our new Ashburton, high on its level plain, girdled by mountains and snow oeaks—its bare, spacious plain, its streets and buildings, new?, crude, raw?, yet not without that distant glory of alps and the perpetual glory of wide and deep skies of blue—contrasts strangely with the Devonian Ashburton in the dreamy atmosphere of the west of England. This old Ashburton is said by the novelist Baring Gould, one of tile chief authorities on Devon, to mean Ash Burn Town, “the town (tun) on ihe burn (or stream) of water, Usk, though others explain Ash as referring to the numerous ash trees in the wood or chase near it. This town can be traced right back to early Saxon days, and later, it is recorded, that Willielmus Zitela (evidently a Latinised name) and Johannes Pope represented Ashburton at the first of all parliaments. Possibly our New Zealand town was meant to commemorate the Lord Ashburton of the day, and not the town itself, but though it might be interesting to ascertain the exact truth, it is not of very much significance since Lord Ashburton’s title is owed to the name of the town. So, too, the most important and prosperous town of the Waikato may owe its name of Hamilton to some forgotten person of the great Scotch clan, or to the ducal head of the famous house, or else to that “princely Hamilton whose proud towers" (as Sir Walter tells us; “ennobled Cadyou’s classic vale.” In a former article Parnell, one of the oldest and best know?n suburbs of Auckland, is assumed to owe its name to the champion of Home Rule, but a recent article in the Auckland Star suggests that it may be due to that Captain Parnell, who, in Auckland’s early days, coasted round these shores. The “god parents” or name givers of few colonial towns never seem to have troubled their heads about any resemblance in patronymics. One can see no resemblance between the sea suburb on Auckland’s North Shore facing the purple volcanic mount of Rangitoto, and the trim Victorian and eighteenth century Cheltenham with its formal parade and gardens, and its mental atmosphere of retired officers’ families and young ladies’ seminal ies. Clouds of rolling smoke brooding over the harbour-river and wrapping modern spire and tower and buildings; rows of electric lights at night; yachts, shipping, and w’harves sw?athed in smoke; mists, backed by rising banks, sometimes lend a real resemblance in the suburb of Chelsea with its begrimed sugar factory to the riverside quarter where Carlyle and Rossetti wrote and where generations of artists have painted. But only sometimes, for the smoke is not yet London fog, theueh if we go on as we have begun it will be some day. And here as always our worth and charm are in the surrounding scenery of Nature and that of the old place lies in association and art. The suburb of Bayswater, with the pretty, modern bungalows perched up amongst their new made gardens on the clay cliffs •Move the harbour, has nothing at all in common with the “select - ’ London suburb, bounded by the wide and crowded thoroughfare that runs into Oxford street and by the iron-fenced beds of crocus, and lawns of grass, and rows of stately planes and sycamores and oaks of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.