Making Sheep Country: Mt Peel Station and the Transformation of the Tussock Lands
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Making Sheep Country: Mt Peel Station and the Transformation of the Tussock Lands
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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581178 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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Making Sheep Country
Mt Peel Station and the Transformation of the Tussock Lands
By Robert Peden
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2011 Robert PedenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-117-8
CHAPTER 1
The Pastoral Frontier: Occupying the Grasslands
At four o'clock in the afternoon on 4 January 1855, the Royal Stuart dropped anchor at Lyttelton after eighty-six days at sea. Among the passengers was John Barton Arundel Acland, the youngest son of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Baronet, who held the estates of Killerton in Devon and Holnicote in Somerset. Acland, who was thirty years old at the time of his arrival in New Zealand, had been educated at Harrow and taken a degree at Christ Church, Oxford. He had practised law in London, but had become bored with both the law and the city. With his eldest brother, Thomas Dyke Acland, taking a keen interest in the management of the family estates, as well as making a name for himself as an agricultural improver, Barton Acland had to look elsewhere for an opportunity. Encouraged by his friend Charles George Tripp, who was disillusioned by the lack of prospects in England, the two decided to take up the challenge of sheep farming in the colony of New Zealand.
Within hours of arriving, Acland and Tripp walked to the top of the Bridle Path, a steep walking track between the port of Lyttelton and the settlement of Christchurch, to view their new country. Surprisingly, Acland did not record the scene in his diary, but other early visitors to Canterbury did and many of their comments were decidedly unflattering. C. Warren Adams, who arrived in October 1851, trudged up the Bridle Path in a strong southerly soon after landing. Perhaps it was the weather, but he found the view of the plains 'anything but inviting'. 'The mountains in the distance were completely hidden by the thick rain', he wrote, 'and the dreary swampy plain, which formed the foreground beneath our feet, might extend for aught we could see, over the whole island.' When Henry Sewell tramped up the Bridle Path on his arrival in February 1853 he found the view from the top 'imposing', and the vastness of the plains 'very striking'. However, after descending to the plains he was 'oppressed with the dull monotony of a vast flat unbroken by a single visible undulation or a tree'. Samuel Butler, who arrived five years after Acland and Tripp, did not find the outlook quite so depressing, but he was hardly enthusiastic about it either. He described the climb up the steep hill as an 'awful pull'. On reaching the top the view out over the plains 'was of the "long stare" description', he wrote. 'There was a great extent of country, but few objects to attract the eye and make it rest awhile in any given direction. The plains ... were lovely in colouring, but would have been wonderfully improved by an object or two a little nearer than the mountains.'
The main difference between the view that Butler saw and that seen by Acland and Tripp was that in the intervening years the nearer country had been cultivated, fenced and 'squared into many-coloured fields'. Otherwise the two dominating features of the landscape remained the open, empty, windswept plains and the backdrop of blue, lofty mountains. Like many of the newly arrived settlers, Butler found the view back towards the harbour much superior, and more familiar, but the future of the colony lay in the opposite direction.
On their return to Lyttelton, Acland and Tripp called in to see the local clergyman, Benjamin Wooley Dudley, where they were introduced to Henry Sewell, an official of the Canterbury Association and the parliamentary representative for Christchurch. He noted the arrival of the two men with some scepticism, writing:
Acland is a queer addition to the Colony. Will he stay? I do not know. Whether men like the Colony and stay, depends on their success – and whether men succeed or not depends on individual character. Tripp and Acland talk bravely of going up to Sheep Stations to serve apprenticeships. Whether the reality will be as tolerable as they fancy, I doubt. Nous Verrons [we shall see].
By the time Acland and Tripp arrived in January 1855, the expansion of pastoralism through the eastern region of the South Island was well under way. Would-be sheep owners had explored and claimed land in the hills and valleys of modern-day Marlborough, the Canterbury Plains, and parts of North and East Otago, and thousands of sheep were being imported from the Australian colonies. This establishment phase involved an intensive process of environmental learning as pastoralists had to come to terms with the landscape, vegetation and climate of the region. They also had to learn, largely by trial and error, the business of large-scale sheep farming, as most were new to the game. Despite missing these formative years, it turned out that Acland and Tripp were to play leading roles in the expansion and establishment of pastoralism in New Zealand.
Pastoralism Precedes Organised Settlement
Historian John Weaver has argued that exploration by 'resource hunters' extended the frontiers in British and American settlement colonies out beyond the reach of formal authority. That was undoubtedly the situation in the expansion of pastoralism in New Zealand, where people looking for land for sheep farming preceded settlement or soon moved beyond the boundaries of the settlement lands. Formal surveys and the establishment of grazing licences followed the advance of these pastoral entrepreneurs. The distinction between actions of the land hunters and the attitudes of the formal authorities was initially heightened by the underlying ideology of colonisation.
The settlements of Wellington, Nelson, Canterbury and Otago were based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonisation, which arose from his belief that the squatting system in New South Wales, characterised by easy access to land and an industry based on large-scale wool growing, led to the breakdown of the social order. He decided that colonial settlements should be established where companies would buy land cheaply off native peoples and then sell it at a high price to settlers with capital. The high price of land would force workers to work hard and save before they could afford to buy land and set themselves up as farmers. The profit from land sales would fund further immigration and so the colonies would grow. This process, based on the success of agricultural production, would create an ordered system of colonisation in which everybody would have, and know, their place. Essentially, it would transpose a slice of rural agrarian England, with its landlords, tenant farmers and rural workers, to 'new' lands on the other side of the world: there would be no free-for-all.
Wakefield's theory was flawed. One of its significant weaknesses was related to the idea that the economic base of the colonies was to be the production of grain and foodstuffs; but where were the markets for this produce? For all its apparent problems, the pastoral system in Australia that Wakefield so despised had proven to be highly successful. Wool was a commodity that could be stored and shipped without spoiling. It had a ready market in English and European mills, although wool prices were subject to considerable fluctuations. Early settlers soon realised the economic advantage of pastoralism over agriculture. Dr David Munro, who accompanied Frederick Tuckett in 1844 to determine a site for a New Zealand Company settlement in the South Island, wrote that '[p]asture is the natural and great resource of the east coast of this island. Agriculture will be subordinate to it for a long time.' He went on to suggest that the Port Cooper area, which later became the central core of the Canterbury Block, was unsuited for a Wakefield-type settlement because it lacked trees for fuel and timber. He felt that large-scale farming by settlers 'with considerable capital', with 'each having a range of a good many thousand acres, and thus being enabled to combine the rearing of stock and tillage', would better suit the country.
The New Zealand Company had founded the Wellington colony in 1840 and a settlement in Nelson the following year. Both colonies provided the take-off points for pastoral expansion in New Zealand. In 1843 a group of young entrepreneurs – Charles Bidwell, Charles Clifford, William Vavasour, Henry Petre and Frederick Weld – embarked on a venture to establish sheep runs in the Wairarapa on land leased from Maori. In 1844 they landed sheep from Sydney in Wellington and drove them around the coast to stock their new stations. Two years later Clifford and Weld leased a huge block of land on the north-east coast of the South Island from the Maori chief Te Puaha of Kapiti. The run, which they called Flaxbourne, stretched from north of the Awatere River to Kekerengu, and in 1847 they stocked it with 3000 sheep.
The exploration of the land outside the Nelson settlement block began only a year after its foundation, and by 1846 Nathanial George Morse was squatting at Tophouse before Sir George Grey purchased the area from Maori in 1847. Although none of the land had yet been surveyed, Grey's purchase opened the way for pastoralism, so that by 1849 thirty squatters had set themselves up in the Wairau Valley and a year later both the Wairau and Awatere valleys had been almost completely taken up as sheep walks. Soon after, the acting Agent for Nelson issued the first licences to pastoralists, which gave them the right to depasture stock for an eighteen-month period from January 1849 to July 1850. This was an example of formal authority reacting to the reality of the situation. Thereafter, pastoralists were not squatters at all, but graziers who held pasturage rights issued by either the New Zealand government or local provincial authorities.
Men looking for sheep country also preceded organised settlement in Canterbury. The Deans brothers introduced the first sheep onto the Canterbury Plains at their Riccarton farm in 1843. In 1847 the Greenwood brothers formed the first sheep station in Canterbury at Motunau, on the easy hills north of the plains; and Captain Mitchell established a cattle station called Mt Grey on the north bank of the Ashley River in August 1850. Several other runs were formed in 1850 before the arrival of the first Canterbury settlers in December. The Deans stocked Dalethorpe and Robert Waitt established Teviotdale, while outside the Canterbury Block Clifford and Weld set up Stonyhurst in addition to their Nelson (later Marlborough) station Flaxbourne; and the Rhodes brothers formed a huge holding, called The Levels, in the region that later became South Canterbury.
Historians have given considerable credit to a group of Australian squatters who arrived in Canterbury in 1851 for establishing pastoralism in the region. One of them, John Christie Aitkin, is supposed to have persuaded the Canterbury Association's Resident Agent, John Robert Godley, to free up the regulations on the lease of 'waste' land (Crown land that had not been sold as freehold) to enable pastoralists to establish themselves in the Canterbury Block. Godley was no fool. He was well aware how precarious the economic base of the settlement was, and in a letter to his father in 1850 he wrote: 'I wish most heartily that instead of two or three, we had twenty or thirty unlicensed squatters with 10,000 sheep or cattle each; if it were so, I should have tenfold more confidence than I have now in the rapid success of the settlement.' However, his hands were tied as he had no authority to change the regulations established by the Association in London.
To get around the problem, in May 1851 Godley issued a temporary 'form letter' that enabled people to take up pastoral land without having to pay the high price of 20 shillings per hundred acres that was set down in the Association's rules. Godley intended this as an interim measure to encourage those with capital to invest in Canterbury while he waited for official approval to come from the Association headquarters in London. In February 1852, after gaining permission, Godley instituted a system that divided runs into three classes: Class I runs were leased with a pre-emptive right of purchase at 20 shillings per 100 acres; Class II runs took in blocks over 250 acres with the same rental as Class I, but with no pre-emptive right; Class III runs carried no pre-emptive right and had leases that ran for seven years at cheap annual rentals. These new regulations initiated a scramble for runs in Canterbury, so that by the time Acland and Tripp landed most of the plains and easy hill country had been taken up.
In Otago too the 'resource hunters' preceded organised settlement. Whalers began bringing livestock from Australia in the early 1840s, and by 1844 Johnny Jones had 2000 sheep on 40,000 hectares that he had purchased from Ngai Tahu leader Tuhawaiki. The Otago Block was purchased that year and the Scottish Free Church Society founded the colony in 1848. Pastoralism did not proceed as quickly in Otago as it did in Nelson and Canterbury. Herries Beattie records only three runs within the Otago Block, all applied for in 1853; but runs had been established in East and North Otago, outside the settlement block, by that time. The interest in Crown lands outside the Otago Block slowly increased, and pioneers in search of run country explored much of Otago ahead of official surveyors.
Assessing the Canterbury Plains as Sheep Country
Surveyors and exploring pastoralists, who were assessing the country for its value for farming or running livestock, wrote the earliest descriptions of the landscape and vegetation of the grasslands of the South Island. Consequently, its economic potential shaped their appreciation of the landscape. Samuel Butler, after admiring the beauty of Mount Cook, pulled himself up as it clearly had no use as sheep country. He wrote, '[a] mountain here is only beautiful if it has good grass on it. Scenery is not scenery – it is "country".' This pragmatic view of land begs the question of what made good sheep country. After all, the assessment of what constituted good country could have considerable influence on the outcome of any venture.
John Macfarlane, who had shepherding experience both in the Scottish Border country and New Zealand, arrived in Canterbury in November 1850 and the following year occupied the Loburn Run, listed as Run IA. It was a poor property with a good deal of scrub that made mustering difficult. It was not until Macfarlane bought and drained the smaller Coldstream property in the 1860s that he really prospered. One wonders why an experienced hand like Macfarlane chose such a difficult block as Loburn when so much good land was still available.
Another who misread the landscape was Fredrick Tuckett who had been appointed by the New Zealand Company to select a site for the projected New Edinburgh settlement. His employers supposed that Tuckett would confirm Port Cooper as the location, but he judged the land unsuitable for agriculture and chose Otago instead. It turned out that, despite being established before the Canterbury settlement, the Otago settlement languished while the former flourished as both farming and pastoralism expanded.
Dr David Munro accompanied Tuckett on his journey south from Nelson in 1844. He landed at Port Cooper and walked to the Deans' farm located near the site of modern Christchurch and described the country that they passed through:
The part of the plain we crossed ... is uniformly covered with grass of various sorts, mixed with toi-toi and flax in the moister parts, and, in some places, thickly dotted over with the ti-ti. The grass, generally speaking, is a tufty wire grass of a very dry nature, and not relished by stock, but there are finer grasses between these tufts, though sparingly diffused, as well as an abundance of a tufty grass of a larger more succulent species, which I know from experience in this settlement is greedily eaten both by cattle and horses. I should not suppose the pasture to be capable at present of supporting a large amount of stock per acre; but I am satisfied that, by being fed down, its value would greatly improve, and a turf of a much better character rapidly be produced.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Making Sheep Country by Robert Peden. Copyright © 2011 Robert Peden. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface First the Squatter, then the Runholder, after that the Farmer,One The Pastoral Frontier: Occupying the Grasslands,
Two Indiscriminate Burning? Fire as a Management Tool,
Three 'Rabbits on the Brain',
Four Overstocking, Overgrazing, Sheep Numbers and Stock Loading,
Five Constructing the Landscape: Fencing, Cultivation, Oversowing and Drainage,
Six Sheep Breeding: Shaping Sheep to Suit the Land,
Seven 'Not Much of a Business',
Eight Appraising Preconceptions, Prejudice and Proof,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,