Scrub and Pumice

Te Ao Hou, March 1963, Page 44

Scrub and Pumice Wilderness it was, and wilderness it would have remained for at least another generation had it not been for the vision of Sir Apirana Ngata, farseeing Minister of Native Affairs in the late 1920's. Sir Apirana Ngata began burning the midnight oil in long discussions with Arawa leaders in 1927. Their plan: to turn Horohoro into a Maori settlement scheme. Plans started to crystallize in 1930, when the first group of settlers moved on to the 10,000-acre Horohoro block. The scheme was a daring one. In those days cobalt was unheard of, and stock died like flies in the ‘bush-sick’ pumice country. Few people believed that untrained Maori farmers could ever ‘make a go’ of the Horohoro country. Sir Apirana Ngata was as wise as Solomon. The scheme was planned for the benefit of Horohoro's original Maori owners, the Ngati-Tuara, but Sir Apirana knew that the Ngati-Tuara had never shown any agricultural leanings. To encourage them along the right road he included in the team of picked settlers a party of 14 Kahungunu importees from Wairoa. The Wairoa people had for generations been farm workers and farm owners, and Sir Apirana brought them in to act as a match to light the flame of agriculture among the Arawas and their sub-tribes of Rotorua. The plan worked. Men of two tribes, whose ancestors possibly once fought each other with meres, were soon flighting a new type of duel with plough and haymower, slasher and axe. Success was measured in acres cleared per man, and not in adversaries slain. Times were tough at first. The depression was beginning, and money was short. Most of the settlers were starving before they were selected for the scheme, and they weren't much better off after selection. They were paid at subsistence-level rates. They lived in tents while they toiled on communal projects, clearing land, fencing, building the frugal ‘Ngata-type’ houses. They ploughed with single furrow ploughs pulled by a pair of horses—some of them broken in from the brumbies that roamed the surrounding plains. Their first school was a tent, in which the pupils froze in the frosty blasts of winter. When the scrub was cleared, Horohoro became a treeless, windswept plain, almost as bleak as Siberia.