100 YEARS OLD TOMORROW

Southland Times, Issue 25505, 27 October 1944, Page 4

100 YEARS OLD TOMORROW

Mr Mortimer Hishon

ONE OF SOUTHLAND’S PIONEERS

Mr Mortimer Hishon, of Dee street, Invercargill, one of Southland’s early pioneers, will celebrate his 100th birthday tomorrow. Mr Hishon is still remarkably alert and his only complaint is that his eyesight has failed and he cannot read. However, his daughter reads the newspapers to him each day and he is well abreast of local, national and world affairs. Incidentally, Mr Hishon has been a life-long subscriber to The Southland Times and it is safe to say that he has seen almost every issue of the paper since it was first published in 1862. Mr Hishon came to Southland' 82 years ago and he has seen many changes since then. In an interview yesterday he said that Southland had the best climate in New Zealand. He had farmed in Southland for 50 years —and that was a long time —and he had never seen a farming failure. Hie climate had improved a lot since the days when he first came here. Then, it used to rain all the time. There were swamps and crab-holes everywhere. Now it was quite different. The country was much drier compared with what it was then. If anyone can talk about the climate of Southland, how it has changed during the last three-quarters of a century and how it builds hardy men, it is Mr Hishon. He came to Southland at an impressionable age after living in the open air on gold diggings in Victoria for a time, and he spent 10 or 12 years wagoning in Southland and South Otago and half a century farming. INVERCARGILL A VILLAGE

When in 1874 he took up 320 acres of virgin country at Centre Bush, Invercargill was a village and the back country was more or less a wilderness with just a few settlers scattered here and there with great distances between them and with conditions primitive according to modern standards. He was not the first settler at Centre Bush, but was among the first. It was to the

place known as Old Man’s Flat that he took his wife and two young children. His property was sold for sub-division by the State about 16 years ago. He retired to live in Invercargill about 24 years ago. Mr Hishon has much praise for the old pioneers, especially the women. Casting his mind back to the time when he started farming Mr Hishon thought of the pioneer women, of the odds against which they battled and of the calm fortitude with which they bore the rigours of their lives. No praise, he said, could be too great for them. They all went and lived in the backblocks with their husbands in sod huts in the early days. They had no conveniences as we understood them today and they brought up large families. They were God-fearing women. Mr Hishon is an Irishman. Born in 1844 in County Limerick, he embarked with his parents on one of the old windjammers for Melbourne, arriving there in 1850 after a voyage lasting nine months. The family settled in Melbourne, and Mr Hishon’s father built one of the first houses in Madeleine street, now a busy thoroughfare in the heart of the great city. The wanderlust, however, affected him early. When still a youth he set out for the goldfields and before he was 18 he had worked at Ballarat and at Back Creek, Creswick, Clunes, Daisy Hill, Smeaton’s and several other places. ARRIVAL IN DOMINION

Finished with' prospecting for gold, he sailed from Melbourne in 1862 for New Zealand in the old Gothenburg, no windjammer, but a steamship, which crossed the Tasman in five days. After a year ,or 18 months, during which he worked on the Bluff railway and helped to straighten the Puni Creek, Mr Hishon gradually got ahead.. He bought a wagon and some horses and went wagoning. He was on the road for the next 10 or 12 years, travelling as far as Kingston carting wool, as well as other goods, from various stations in Southland and South Otago to Invercargill. It was a hard life, but it had its own charms. Many are the tales that Mr Hishon can tell now of those days. Of all the wagoners on the road in the sixties and seventies, he is probably the only one living. A few years later, in 1874, Mr Hishon bought a block of land at Centre Bush. It was well that he was used to hard work, for farming the virgin country was a job that exacted long hours of unremitting labour. The country consisted mostly of swamps, crab-holes (holes filled with water) and tussock. The land had to be drained and dried out and tussocks had to be cleared by manual labour. Oats and turnips had to be sown by hand. It was long before the reaper and binder came in, and crops had to be harvested by the “back delivery” method, eight or nine men travelling behind the reapers binding the sheaves.

In the years that followed, bringing closer settlement and prosperity to those on the land throughout the province, Mr Hishon knew that he had pteyed his part worthily as a pioneer in a province that developed into one of the highest producing agricultural and pastoral areas in New Zealand. Then, after nearly half a century of farming, he went into well-earned retirement.

Although he does not now walk into town, Mr Hishon is still able to get about a little. His eyes have failed him, but he has all his other faculties. He likes nothing better than to sit and talk to his friends. He has already received several telegrams from friends in northern centres and he is looking forward to his birthday tomorrow. He will celebrate it quietly with members of his family. Mr Hishon’s wife died 18 years ago. He had a family of eight—three sons and five daughters—and they are all living. The sons, who are all farming, are Messrs William Hishon (Oreti), Mortimer Hishon (Centre Bush) and Richard Hishon (Otautau).