ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4222, 11 December 1939, Page 5

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO

VISIBLE HISTORY. HISTORIC IMPLEMENTS >T THE EXHIBITION. EARLY SETTLERS’ HOUSEHOLD GODS. One hundred years ago in December, 1839, the main contingent of the New Zealand Company’s emigrants were_on the high seas, on board the Aurora, the Oriental, the Duke of Roxburgh, the Bengal Merchant, and the Adelaide. While the passengers looked out at the cold waters of the South Atlantic, or tried to sight the misty outline of Saint Paul Island in the Southern Indian Ocean, they were comforted by the thought of the numerous useful and elegant articles they had carefully stowed away in the hold. For them there was no notion of any cherished piece of furniture, old picture, or fragile china being too good for use in the wild land they were bound for, simply because, with the confidence of inexperience, they already visualised it as tamed, prosperous farm land that they had brought into cultivation within a few months. It was many laborious years before these dreams became reality. A STRIKING INTERIOR. Perhaps the most complete reconstruction of the every-day life of the early settlers at the Centennial Exhibition is provided by the two crowded interiors in the Women’s Court. The raupo whare labelled 1840 faithfully displays the amazing contrast of the earliest years of settlement, the traces of refinement amidst the most uncouth surroundings. In the crudest of huts there is a table, chests, and chairs that would not have been out of place in the London drawing-rooms from which they came. They remind us that taste in furniture was still excellent in 1840. Then there are the ordinary utensils of the time—the camp oven whose ticklish habits had to be mastered with so many tears and so much heart-breaking disappointment. The oven let in below the fire, an immediate ancestor of the range, the iron or copper cooking vessels, the wooden cradle on its rockers betraying seraphic innocence of Plunket methods, and the archaic pattern of the sewing machine in the wax lady’s delicate hands, all build up the atmosphere of a simple early New Zealand home, still looking backward, however, to the culture and leisure of the Old Country. GREATER REFINEMENT AND LESS BEAUTY. The interior of some ten or fifteen years later, which stands beside the 1840 home in the Women’s Court at the Centennial Exhibition, is definitely more comfortable than the raupo whare, but hardly more charming. One is immediately struck by the decay in taste so notorious in the Victorian era. The very congestion of this apartment is a faithful reproduction of the actual conditions of the day, which the pictures, the genuinely old windows, and the “ gothic ” chairs, not to mention the wallpaper, build up in the mind of the beholder. The excellent historical section of the Women’s Court is completed by a collection of exhibits under glass—old china, snuff-boxes, lace, and dresses. As the eye strays ovei these, pleasantly preoccupied with the laborious and teasing needlework with which everything from wedding dresses to tea cosies was adorned last century, the attention lingers for an instant on a candle snuffer or an 1841 cheque of the Union Bank of Australia, which established its first New Zealand branch in 1840. HISTORY IN THE GOVERNMENT COURT. The most considerable display of historical objects at the Exhibition, next to the Women’s Court, is to be found in the Government Court. By far the most striking imaginative reconstruction of the past is evoked by the splendid murals by F>. H. Coventry, one of which is now completea and in place. Here the missionary preaches to a dignified group of Maoris, while the trading schooners anchor in the background. The missionary did more than preach, however. as one may see from the absorbingly interesting display of agricultural implements used on the mission farms about 1820 and even earlier, which is placed in the Hall of Progress. The wooden beam-swung plough, the massive axes, picks, and adzes, the hackle for flax stripping, all bear eloquent testimony to the muscular character of missionary Christianity. , An eight-fold mould for candles and a lantern of perforated tin, dating back 150 years to a time when glass was rare in Scotland, recall the ill-lit homes of the early days. An 1820 handmill for grinding wheat, two tiny millstones, a threshing mill, a hand flail and a specimen of the first mechanical reaping machine, invented m America in 1831, remind us that the processes by which standing corn became bread sweetly baked in a camp oven were usually highly laborious -o the pioneers. The massive strength of all this early ironwork is a testimonial' to the workmanship of' the smiths of one hundred years ago in the age before the increased use ot steel and alloys had lightened all metal work. Early churns and an early milking machine are suitable landmarks in the history of the dairy industry. SEA AND AIR. Both in the Government Court and in the British Pavilion there are exhibits which trace the history of aviation and of shipping. The quaint machines in which men first tempted fortune in the air are like children's drawings—full of energy and imagination, but dangerous as practical models. The British Court exhibits the history of shipping from the coracle to the Queen Mary, not omitting the historic Dunedin, which first took frozen meat from New Zealand to

England. A series of charming paintings in the Navy Department’s exhibit in the Government Court shows the historical ships that have visited New Zealand waters from Tasman’s cockleshells to H.M.S. Philomel of happy memory. THE CHURCHES’ EXHIBITS. The churches of New Zealand have some important historical items in their Centennial exhibits. The Maori Church stall contains some old pictures, about the finest of which is an interior of the Maori Church at Otaki in 1846. The stall of the Society of Friends is soon to have a copy of the Journal of George Fox, published in the seventeenth century. The impressive Roman Catholic exhibit includes the altar of Bishop Pompallier, who reached New Zealand in 1838, and some illuminated manuscripts, especially a late fourteenth-century Florentine choir book, which are of exceptional beauty. Naturally the Centennial Exhibition most clearly illustrates the past in its present-day exhibits, representing the climax of this hundred years of effort and achievement. But many visitors who are interested in history for its own sake will delight to ferret out the more directly historical exhibits which are manv mere than are described in this brief article. It is indeed a> keen nleasure to pass through the Courts in search of history, and find it at haphazard in, for instance, a publisher’s unique collection of autographs or in the massive chair of the Speaker of the Canterbury Provincial Assembly.