PIONEER WOMAN

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19137, 5 October 1936, Page 4

PIONEER WOMAN

MRS. A. J. SUTTON AUSTRALIA'S INFANCY ROMANCE AND HARDSHIPS The romance of tho early days of settlement: in Australia, with its hardships, its perils, and its many compensations, was well represented in the recollections of Mrs. A. J. Sutton, whose death occurred in Gisborne yesterday after an illness lasting three months. The late Mrs. Sutton, who had many friends in this district, had been in 'Poverty Bay since the early years of the century, 'but before coming to Gisborne had spent over 60 years in the Commonwealth, witnessing the growth of settlement and the establishment of the white man's law and culture over a huge continent. Born at Bairnsdale, in the Gippshiiid bush, in 1844, Mrs. Sutton was the daughter of a pioneer family which had settled there two years before, her father having received a grant of land from the Government of the day, which was anxious to induce free white settlers to make their homes in the colony. The newcomers had faced difficulties of a hind unknown even to many of Ihe pioneers of the colony of New Zealand, for in addition to the usual hardships of carving out their homes from virgin bush tracts, they also faced the dangers of marauding blacks, and th even more acute troubles brought about by the activities of bushrangers, most of whom were escaped convicts hardened by their experiences in tho gaols and convict settlements to a complete disregard for the lives and property of others. SETTLEMENT CONDITIONS Community effort helped to clear the bush for the settlers in the first place, and to construct the roads and other necessary public utilities, primitive as they were, with which the newcomers sought to make their surroundings habitable. The land available was allotted on the basis of a man's capital, and £3OO in capital entitled a settler to 2000 acres of country, which he was expected to clear and fence, and equip with the usual necessities of home life. The system of ringbarking the trees, and thus pausing them to die out, was generally followed, the ensuing burning of the standing bush resulting in the destruction not only of the portions required for funning, but also of large areas which might have been saved. The little community had no time for conservation, however, its burning need being to get the land cleared and stocked. Usually, each man worked on his own property, but when the call was sent out for assistance in any particular job, the neighbours answered cheerfully, and some of the happiest experiences of Mrs. Sutton's childhood were associated with these impromptu gatherings.

In later years the settlers banded together to improve their environment generally, and it was a regular custom for each man to give part of his time to the making of roads ana culverts, there being no Government money available for these purposes at that time. EXPORT OF HORSES

Stock-breeding and cropping were the mainstays of the settlement, and many fine shipments of horses left the district for India, where the Australia horses were highly valued for cavalry purposes. Maize was a consistent crop, and prosperous settlers with capital to put into more land quickly acquired huge assets, in the form of extensive station properties. The Land Act of 1863 put a temporary stop to this land aggregation,' though it did not completely cheek it, since those who could afford to do so secured land by the use of dummies, into whose hands they entrusted portions of their land in order to escape the heavy taxation which the Government placed on areas in excess of 320 acres held by any one man.

In her recollections of those days, Mrs. Sutton would mention that many of the squatters were unable later to regain control of these additional areas, as the men they had put in as dummies refused to live up to the bargains, and complaint to the authorities on the part of the squatters w,ould have brought down heavy penalties on the complainants. The confusion continued until in later years legislation was passed permitting the leasing of Crown lands, whereon the aggregation of leaseholds began. DANGER FROM NATIVES The aboriginal natives of Australia wore an ever-present danger to the whires in the bush districts, for although the blacks were intensely wary of the white man's guns, they wore always on the look-out for an opportunity to ambush any straggler. Even on short journeys from their homes, it was necessary for white people to go armed, and when the men were absent, the women and children usually barricaded themselves in their cabins, built of slabs or ofj logs cut from the indigenous timber. Mrs. Sutton recalled many occasions on which tragedy visited her own or neighbouring settlements, as the result of the whites gaining a falso sense of security'. One woman with her children had been tomahawked and spoarcd in the Bairnsdale area while her husband was absent, and occasions arose on which Mrs. Sutton herself had only scared off' marauding blacks by a free display of the fireamrs with; which the house was equipped. Guns and stock-whips were regarded with dread by the blacks, and lacking n gun it was possible to keep them at a distance by cracking a stout whip. Children on their way to a neighbour's for schooling had to be guarded en route, so acute was the danger of massacre in the earlier* years of the settlement. BUSHRANGING INCIDENTS Bushranging incidents also occurred with some degree of frequence in Gippsland, and one of the witnesses at Mrs. Sutton's wedding was a young woman who had been through a holdup ,on the coach road. Coaches carrying mail and passengers, and often with rich shipments of gold fo.r the banks, were the prey of the bushrangers as a rule, and the young woman in question had been accompanying a mail pack-horse lino when the'hold-up occurred. The first warning of danger was the sound of shots which killed the mailman and wounded his guard, and the young woman's horse, startled by the shots, reared and dashed off from the scene.