IN THE EARLY DAYS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17126, 5 December 1929, Page 16

IN THE EARLY DAYS

SETTLER'S REMINISCENCES QUEER TIMES IN WAIROA (Herald Correspondent.) Mr. T. Lambert, who attained his seventy-tilth birthday last Tuesday, and who lias been it. resident of Wairoa for close <m 54 years, has given a few brief but interesting reminiscences of early days in southern Hawke’s Hay and Wairoa. These tend to confirm the oft-repeated statement that the life of the pioneers in those times was not all “beer and skittles” j. nor "was their bed one of roses; the latter was usually chopped fern or flax, and lumpy at that, and certainly not in the least comparable with the soft ones so much favored by Wairoa residents to-day. The subject of the sketch left Plymouth, England, on July 6, 1875, with under £2 in his possession, in the barque Inverness (Captain Courtenay) of 900 tons burden, a vessel barely five times the size of the s.s. Tangaroa. She carried 120 i. immigrant passengers, and the 90-day trip was uneventful. Mr. Lambert landed at Napier from the old Tararua on October 4. Napier even then was a very small place surrounded by swamps. The port, or as it was called then, “The Spit,” was a scattered collection •of workers’ cottages, with a few hotels, which did a roaring trade, wholesale houses, and a few wool stores. Westshore then was far from looking a desirable place of residence, having to be reached by ferry or by swimming one’s horse. The new arrival in the land of the Maori soon found employment on the late Hon. J. 1). Ormond’s Wallingford estate, then managed by Mr. Midgely, so long and favorably known by Hawke’s Bay people. The 'immigration and public works policy of the late Sir Julius Vogel was then in full swing, and wages were low, but even £1 a week and found was not to be sneezed at in those days, for many received even less than that. The Napier-Wellington railway then only ran as far as Pakipaki, southwards, though the formation of the permanent way was well advanced miles beyond, and the jonrney to Wallingford had to be made by coach, and a weary one it was, boggy in parts; and it remained so until £20,C00 of the accrued Wairoa land fund was snapped up to make it a presentable highway. The bulk of the country between Napier and Wallingford, included in the Seventy Mile area, was bushclad, milling not having begun at that time. Prior to that period, Wairoa from her many sawpits had supplied much timber to build up Napier and Ahuriri, and the first post office at the latter place was wholly built of Wairoa timber. LONG FRIENDSHIP FORMED. It was on the station at Wallingford that Mr. Lambert met Mr. G. C. Ormond, then a lad of 15 years, and a friendship began when ho took up Mahia which has never been broken. Wallingford was evacuated by Mr. Lambert in favor of Wairoa a week before Christmas, 1875, and as the mail coach had become bogged “somewhere in the Forty-Mile bush,” he had to “hump his bluey” right down to Pakowhai, sleeping a night out under a wool-wagon at Kaikora (now Otane). Pakipaki was reached on Christmas Eve, and the Maoris were having a' kind of saturnalia. The attitude of some of them was quite disagreeable. There was still, in fact, a good deal of anti-Maori feeling on the one hand, and of jealous apprehension of the advances of the land-grabbing pakeha. The fun went on far into the night, and the observer might be pardoned for the fear that it would not have taken a great deal to provoke serious trouble. It took a week for the old s.s. Result (Captain W. E. Baxter) to negotiate the Wairoa bar, and the supplier of these notes landed in Wairoa on January 1, 1876, the day that ushered in tlie enactment of county v. provincial government, under which latter form Wairoa had been studiously neglected. The bar was then close up under the pilot station, Rangihoua bluff, but previously the river entered the sea well up the Ohnia lagoon, to the eastwards of the Heads. The Result landed at a “wharf” comprising two 16in. planks run out from the bank opposite the general store conducted by Mr. and Mrs. W. Atward, parents of Mrs. 0. Johansen, of Wairoa. The an nual Wairoa sports ( were then in progress, the sports ground being a narrow strip of land lying between the Wairoa and the Clyde hotels, the general limit of the perambulations of the male population of old Wairoa. The Clyde Hotel blocked the present Marine Parade at the west end, and not long before that Mr. E. W. Knowles’ store, known as “Noah’s Ark,” blocked the other end, so that the vista of the future burgesses of Wairoa was very limited. The Maoris, of course, outnumbered the pakehas when events called them to town, in, perhaps, the proportion of 20 to one. They made some stirring scenes at Land Court times, most of the native oratory being delivered on the riverbank, and men like Apatu, Ihaka Whaanga, To Ota, Karaitinna, Areta Kerei, and others, made the welkin ring as they stamped and gesticulated in pursuing some points in land' matters, and on one or two occasions the guns were looked up, but better counsels prevailed. The natives were very poor, ill-fed, and badly clothed, owing to the aftermath of war, and the neglect of the cultivations ; diseases, too, brought about by “wai pirau,” shortage of food, changes of food and modes of life, coupled with the ravages of tohungaism, were taking heavy toll of life. Tangis were of daily occurrence, and in epidemics j each produced a fresh crop of cases, and the authorities and pakehas genl orally took little notice. It was a 'shameful tragedy to shoulder out the Maoris and do so little to save their lives.

HARDSHIPS OF SETTLERS. Nor were the Europeans much better off, in the town, at least. The effects of the war lingered long in the _ distriet, and many of the men were either unaccustomed to manual labor or unwilling to buckle to. As one of them put it, “he preferred to shoot natives at six boh a day.” But perhaps their scope was too limited, or their means too meagre, for the military settlers of Wairoa could not make a living off the 40-acre sections granted them by the Government. Prices for primary produce were low and uncertain, and goods were held up by bar troubles for six months at a time; bills fell due more than once while the equivalents were in the hold of some bar-bound craft. Wages ranged from 4s 6d to 7s 6d a day (now 14s), and various attempts were made to bring about a reduction to 2s 6d, hut the County Council outvoted the proposal. But if wages were low, the cost of living also was low. The best meat, including pork, was only 3d per Jb-; now it is over Is por lb. for fillet steak, with an average of Bd. Bread was 3d per 21b., loaf, and at times of competition, 2|(1; now it is 8(1. A sack of potatoes could be had for 2s 6d—and they were good potatoes, too, bet ter than any present-day Sbuth Island ones at 20s to 255. The Maoris then dug and pitted them for 4d per sack in a good crop; now they ask 3s. Chaff was sold at 2s 6(1 per sack, the latter included; now it is 11s; and so on, through all the series of necessaries of life. Clothing was dear, even if the price of wool was low, and the Maori

people, when they ceased making the native garments, were very ill-clad, and much could be got from an unsophisticated native for an old coat. It is on record that a pair of trousers dangled in front of a bare-limbed native secured the final vote in the cession of the site of the present borough to the Crown One of the chief objectors, Pntoko, was observed by Mr. Donald (afterward Sir Donld) McLean, to be intensely ragged as he. strutted about Kairakau pa (near Grey street), and be presented him with a new pair of trousers. Never came such a change in any man’s attitude. “Let the land go to sea,” lie said (or he sold). The sum of £30,000 was asked, hut Mr. McLean would not go beyond £BOO. This offer the natives laughed at, declaring the land was “the gem of the Wairoa,” but eventually the deal was closed at £I2OO. A MIXED POPULATION.

The population on the European side was a much mixed one. There were good living, hard working settlers in the town, hut. some were not so; remittance men, whose great recreation was “looking upon the wine when it was red,” and others came in sucli a way that it did not do to he too inquisitive regarding the past. There were, however, still left as dwellers in Wairoa solne sterling characters, bearing names suggestive, of many peculiarities, and they tilted- very well into the life of Wairoa m olden days. Such were Captain J. 11. Sturley, who first sighted New Zealand in 1829; dominie R. T. Mcßoberts, of the Waihirere native school, whose wife died only a short, while ago at the Heads at tiie reputed ago of 105 years; Tommy Ralph, who ran a ferry opposite the first Wairoa Hotel: “Tommy the Cow,” so called because he was Wairoa’s first bullock puncher; Pompey, a coloured rnan, who died not long ago at a great age; Johnny Wi Wi (oui oui), because he was a Frenchman; “Flukey Shuffler” Reed, “Darkie Coon,” “Black Harry”; W. Lewis, who originated the farming of tlie Wairoa flat by grazing 200 head of cattle (or more), anil paying as rent one bullock per annum ; “Flash Jack” ;

“Scotch Jock,” or Gamble; Thomas Bill, afterwards “The Hermit of the Kermadecs,” who died not long ago; Billy Thompson, Billy Luley, “Billy-the-Goose, “Stephen Debenture,” who gained his title by his efforts j.o “raise the wind” by issuing debentures in his own name; Joe Carroll, acclaimed by his friends as “King of the. Wairoa” ; Joe Burton, Spooner and Lockwood, who have given their names to pleasure resorts.

In the county a much better stamp of settler resided, witli less of the flotsam and jetsam about—men who had m war days carried a, slash hook in one hand and a pistol in the other; men who worked fro daylight till dark in Hie endeavor to carve out a home in the wilderness, and they did it, too. These men, to reach their homes in winter, had to make their way over unformed “roads,” or climb up or around cliffs. Much of the country was bush-covered or fern-dad, and it was comparatively cheap. It had to lie, for there was, as yet, no unearned increment in the shape of roads, bridges, harbors, or railways. Yet people in these days daily rush into print with their grievances and hardships. These are as nothing compared with what the pioneers had to endure. The Maoris received very little for their land, and I doubt if anyone possessing vision could say that the following was the real (prospective) yalue: Waihua cost the Crown only Is per acre; Mahia, 3s 3fd; Turiroa, 3s 7jd; Nuhaka, 7s 7gd; Wairoa, 13s 6Jd; Mohaka (much of it) Is 4d per acre. PRACTICALLY NO ROADS. Roads and bridges there were practically uone. Transit was bad and restricted. The road to Napier only ran part of the way, and to reach Turiroa the rider had to scale up and down a steep hill. Waikaremoann was inaccessible, and Te Reinga little better, but one could reach Poverty Bay via the coast, almost by the present railway route. The toll of life at fords in flood time was large. It was a day’s journey to Nuhaka or Mohaka, while to Mahia or Waikaremoana meant nearly a week’s trip. Per contra, there were no traffic inspectors or burdensome regulations, no unions, no awards, and as to by-laws of any kind, well—Rafferty rules prevailed all round. The town was originally laid out round Spooner’s Point—and well laid out, too Had it remained there, Wairoa would have been a very compact town, and more picturesque than it is at present, with its one long riverfront business street. At that time all the area to the west of Wairoa, Waikaremoana, Waiau, Te Reinga and Ruakituri was in the hands of the natives, and as the road to Napier could not be said to exist till Captain Turner’s survey was made, supplies came and went by sea. There was some sort of communication with Poverty Bay, and a bridge at Spooner’s Point was) contemplated in the dim future. Then when the Napier road was pushed on, and the Maoris were dealt with by confiscation, the inland road to Poverty Bay via Te Reinga and Pnrikanapa changed the whole course of events, and the town began to move westwards along the parade from Spooner’s Point, and soon the school, the courthouse, and the police station also went, in the geographical sense. All this did not eome about without a struggle. There was war in the town—east versus west. The contest went on for years. When the timber arrived for the town wharf, no agreement could be come to about the site, and it was dumped by the contractor at Delhi street in the centre of the scene of conflict—the No Man’s Land of Wairoa — and there it was built. At that time the whole of the back area of the borough was under bush, scrub and sweetbriar, the Tawhara area especially so. Scrub grew as close to the town as the County Council’s chambers site in Queen street, then accommodating I the drill hall, and from the west down to Paul street; whilst on the north side the Maori land in the Ruatanewha area was swamp, and to the east was covered with sweetbriar and blackberry, both about 6ft. high. Gradually the newly constituted local authority began to put things into shape, but with the later progress this settler is not concerned—the picture sought to he faintly illustrated is that of Wairoa in the seventies. Mr. Lambert concluded; “I wonder if people to-day are any happier, with so ma,nv pleasures that they must surfeit, and with still some wants unsatisfied?”