The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING “LUCEO NON URO” MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1937. Riverton’s Hundred Years

Southland Times, Issue 23392, 27 December 1937, Page 6

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING “LUCEO NON URO” MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1937. Riverton’s Hundred Years

A glance backwards to the early years of the Southland town which has now entered on its centenary celebrations can be rewarded by an insight into the conditions of pioneer life in New Zealand. There must be many readers of The Southland Times with personal knowledge and farreaching memories of Riverton. These persons will be able to renew their impressions and compare them with those set down in the supplement published today. Other readers can find in these pages a fascinating record of growth and progress, rich with the movement of human life, and yielding notable instances of character and enterprise. The story of Riverton has the elements of historical drama. It has been told in the supplement, with a wealth of fact and anecdote, by Mr H. Beattie, whose research into the history of Southland is worthy of wide and grateful recognition. He tells of a time when men came from Sydney to open a whaling station at the mouth of Jacob’s River. In those days the country must have seemed a wilderness of forest and mountain: to an imaginative man the first small settlement could seem a precarious foothold on an alien soil, with the danger of unknown things lurking beyond the first ridge of timbered hills. But the whalers were not imaginative men. They built their huts and went about their business, and the first years slipped away with few signs of change. In 1840 New Zealand became a British possession, and it is probable that the full significance of this event was not made plain to the southern settlement until the arrival of commissioners empowered to investigate the ambitious claims of land speculators. At this time, too, the annual output of whale oil was decreasing, largely as the result of an indiscriminate slaughter of whales at all seasons; but there was the promise of less picturesque—if more stable —activities when a cargo of livestock came from New South Wales in 1840. Eight years later the arrival in Dunedin of immigrants under the Free Kirk scheme of colonization led to the opening up of new country, and settlers began to follow in the steps of the first surveyors. Explorers were breaking through the bush and bringing back stories of lakes and mountains, and the whalers were beginning to take up pastoral runs, sometimes without waiting for the sanction of the Crown. The pioneers were now clearing the land and building their homesteads, and there are records of the arrival of families whose names are closely linked with the development of the district.

Riverton has passed through changing times since then. ’ It was a trade centre while Invercargill was still in its earliest stage, and although it was later unable to compete with the younger town and never became the “shipping centre” it once promised to be, it had its boom times, its gold rush, the growth of a saw-milling industry, and its steady movement in rural development. There is a temptation to look back somewhat wistfully to those spacious years. Mr Beattie draws an attractive pen picture of Riverton in the fifties. “The bush was criss-crossed with cattle tracks and the houses stood in the clearings here and there. The life of the residents ir.ay be described as of a communal and primitive type, no doubt influenced by Maori custom in this respect. If one was short of food or clothing—well, neighbours were handy . . . .

Peace and plenty reigned supreme.” A closer view might have showed less pleasing features, inseparable from life in a young community—or life anywhere, for that matter. And it must be remembered that the scene was changing even while it seemed to be endowed with permanency. No doubt there were “old-timers” who looked uneasily at the signs of closer settlement, and wondered where the new and bustling activity would lead them. Old landmarks were vanishing then, even as now; and men who come to a new country and clear their own patch of land on the skirts of the forest have a deeply personal attitude to their environment. But if some of them resented interference and believed that progress was not always taking the right direction, they still had one benefit which has now been lost irrevocably. The outside world lay beyond a great distance, and modern science had not yet made possible the invisible contacts that draw us closer to world events. There were long periods of tranquillity in which the pioneer work went steadily forward, without the frequent alarms of modern life. It was a work well fitted to take its place in the larger scheme of colonial development. New Zealand owes much to the men and women who set up their homes in towns like Riverton, farmed their lands, cut their way into the bush, opened saw mills and shops

and left a tradition of honest service which still remains the country’s best achievement. The centenary of Riverton is an occasion of historic importance; yet it has no remoteness, for the men and women of those early years are of the type that most of us have known in different parts of New Zealand—the parents and grandparents whose influence continues to play its part in the growth of a nation.