Making New Zealand – Pictorial Surveys of a Century

MAKING
NEW ZEALAND

VOLUME ONE

Below –  The settlers prosper, and in this scene of pasture and in Hawke’s Bay we see the ambition of the emigrants realised.

GOVERNMENT TOURIST

Below – A ‘Bird’s Eye View of the Town of Napier,’ an early sketch from the art collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. In a province of large land holdings, Napier grew with the development of sheepfarming.

[…] On Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira, in the North Island, young men lived in a reed hut on bread, mutton, wild pork, and potatoes, and the station itself was a wilderness of bracken, bush, and flax. To-day there are cob huts used as chicken houses which the first owners were glad to consider their homes. […]

Above – Erosion at Te Pohue, Hawke’s Bay.

THE WEEKLY NEWS

Right – Slips and flood damage in Hawke’s Bay due to erosion.

Left – A sheep station in the Esk Valley, Hawke’s Bay, where one of the problems facing the settler is the growth of manuka, blackberry, and gorse on country that previously carried fern or bush.

GOVERNMENT TOURIST

[…] The Scandinavian settlers who made their homes at Norsewood and Dannevirke in the seventies, on land under heavy bush, did not have a single cow amongst them for many months, a condition that bore hard upon the mothers of young children.

[…] In Hawke’s Bay Nelson brothers in 1882 installed a refrigerating plant at their Tomoana meat works. Later this firm built four other freezing works in different parts of the country. For some years it used a barque fitted with refrigerating machinery at Plymouth as a distributing centre for the West of England.

Above – the Napier express in the Manawatu Gorge.

NEW ZEALAND RAILWAYS

Above – A tunnel portal on the Wairoa-Gisborne section of the new East Coast railway.

Below – The Mohaka Viaduct on the East Coastline towers 312 feet above the level of the stream.

NEW ZEALAND RAILWAYS

[…] A regular overland service between Auckland and Napier, using natives on foot, was arranged in 1857, with branches a little later to Tauranga via Tarawera and Maketu, and to Poverty Bay from Napier. […]

In the North Island, more heavily forested than the South, the condition of overland routes at this time is indicated by a statement that the Wellington – Greytown mail service was to be extended to Masterton, with a further extension to Napier as soon as a bridle path was cut through the Forty-mile Bush (between Masterton and Woodville).

Left – A Napier street, reconstructed after the disastrous earthquake of 1931.

WILLIAMS

Below – A recent garage in Napier in the modern style. Architects: E. A. and L. G. Williams.

E.A. WILLIAMS

Above – The lounge of a Napier hotel showing floral upholstery with a more modern carpet. Architect: E.A. Williams.

Below – Pastoral country in Hawke’s Bay. The photograph shows a soldier’s farm under the land settlement scheme

LANDS AND SURVEY DEPARTMENT

Below – The first federation council of the Women’s Institutes Movement in New Zealand. This meeting was held at Rissington, Hawke’s Bay, in 1925. Women’s Institutes and the Women’s Division of the Farmers’ Union do much to provide recreational activities for country women, while similar work is done in the towns by the Townswomen’s Guild.

Below – A scar showing advanced erosion at Tutira.

J.D. PASCOE

[…] In the previous year the first tournament played in New Zealand had been conducted by the Hawke’s Bay Lawn Tennis Club of Napier. It was restricted to members of the club, but was so successful that the following year an open tournament was held. They must have been great enthusiasts in Napier in those days, for no flat land was available, and they had to lay out their courts at Farndon, five or six miles distant. In 1886, when a third tournament was held at Farndon, the assembled players, representing the Thorndon, Hawke’s Bay, and Auckland clubs, agreed to call it the ‘Championships of New Zealand.’ At the same time, through the enterprise of J. F. Jardine, secretary of the Hawke’s Bay club, the New Zealand Lawn Tennis Association was formed. The following year the tournament was held at Christchurch. By that time the game was developing rapidly in technique, and the volley, though still considered unsporting in the more conservative circles, was beginning to exert its revolutionary influence.

[…] Rowing has been practised on nearly every New Zealand river and tideway, and some clubs, such as Napier, first established on the Tutaekuri in 1875, have had chequered careers. The original Napier course no longer exists, as the river has been diverted, while the Inner Harbour course, on which the 1908 New Zealand championships were held, was ruined by the 1931 earthquake; but in recent years the sport has been revived on the Ngaruroro River.

[…] there was a growing agitation against ‘speculative teams,’ and a desire for more effective control led to the formation in 1891 of the New Zealand Rugby Union, which was largely a monument to the initiative of E. D. Hoben, of Hawke’s Bay. It adopted black jersey, white pants, and black stockings as the uniform of New Zealand international teams, but this was subsequently changed in favour of the all black outfit which acquired for New Zealand international teams their distinctive name.

[…] Racing began in Hawke’s Bay in the fifties at Waipureku (Clive). An old settler has described one of the earliest of these meetings: ‘the stake money was the accumulated entrance fees and the start was at a walk (and sometimes twenty yards behind the line), my father’s horse was the winner. The Maoris were so enraged that their chief had been beaten that they rode away with the white men’s horses.’ […]

Above – Gully erosion above Lake Tutira, Hawke’s Bay.

J.D. PASCOE

Left – Part of the country between Napier and Gisborne. Erosion scars pock the landscape.

J.D. PASCOE

Above – The author of this survey on the edge of an eroded gully on his run at Tutira.

J.D. PASCOE

Above – A view of the scarred ranges to the east of Lake Tutira.

J.D. PASCOE

Right – A typical ‘under runner’ or subterranean stream, referred to on the opposite page. The roof of this under runner has given way here and there. Presently the erosion will be more pronounced. The sketch from H. Guthrie-Smith’s ‘Tutira.’

The Vanished Woodland

THE change over the past sixty years in two scenes – one in each Island – will illustrate the unhappy story of native New Zealand. Within the boundaries of Hawke’s Bay there once existed a fine fragment of woodland, typical of the so-called light bush of New Zealand. It contained no single forest tree but was lovely in its ngaio, kowhai, ribbon-wood, mahoe, whau, and rangiora. Within its depths twined and coiled thickets of supplejack. Conspicuously arose tail groups of tree-fern and nikau. From a thousand minute green blossomings each springtime its fragrance was renewed. Its uneven borders furnished shrubs that love fuller light – ramblers and bush-edge plants. This little woodland faced south and east, an island of bright green in sombre seas of bracken. Within its shade two streamlets bubbled over limestone falls and runs, and rested in clear pools. The airs that emanated from its green depths were moist; its damps were the exquisite breathing of the forest. In arid summer heats to lie within its noontide twilight was to realise, with the travellers in desert sands, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Sixty years have seen the decline and ruin of this oasis. Another generation will see its absolute disappearance, its entire transformation into turf.

In the beginning decay was slow. Here and there summer firings during gales drove black wedges into its leafy flanks. During winter, when grass was scarce, and during storms cattle penetrated its edges. For forty years, however, there was no very great external change for the worse. Its continuity indeed seemed assured. It was gazetted a reserve. If paper could protect it was safe. In the meantime the blackberry, its bushes at one time to be counted on the fingers, had overrun the district. A palliation for one evil was found in another – the wholesale introduction of goats. Then indeed all was lost. Re-afforestation by seeds ended, saplings were broken down, shrub-growth nibbled, boles barked bare. Simultaneously the bush floor hardened, its loose debris disappeared in rains that ran, not soaked. With scantier leafage dampness exhaled. The exuberance of tree-fern fronds lessened year by year. Grasses intruded, their invasion increasing the perils of fire. Cattle and sheep have followed in the track of goats. Slips have increased. Without one blow of the axe or the sowing of one grain of alien grass the reserve is doomed. […]

Above – In the centre of the right-hand slope is a section of Tutira land fenced off to enable plants and shrubs to grow undisturbed.

J.D. PASCOE

Above – The island on Lake Tutira, known to Maori historians as ‘Tauranga-koau.’

J. D. PASCOE

Nature Retaliates

ANOTHER tale of injury to New Zealand can be told of a flax swamp formerly resting on Tutira Lake. Its surface was smooth. As from a blanket, surplus moisture ran off in ooze and percolation. Throughout the massed rhizomes of the flax no sign of a water-course was visible. It was an expanse everywhere capable of supporting the weight of man and horse had its pristine growth of tall flax made penetration possible. In order after rain more quickly to dry this marsh, a drain was cut along one edge and another across the narrow apex. A subsequent step was the lowering of Tutira Lake by fully two feet. It is necessary here to pause and consider the bearings of such an act, the more so as it is but a sample outrage of the kind that has been and is still the bane of New Zealand. Here was a brace of lads – the writer one of the villains of the piece – barely beyond their teens, new to the country they were pleased to honour with their presence, taking it upon themselves to tamper with a notable feature of the landscape.

Later the flax was burnt and the ground surface sown. For several seasons rainfall was normal. Apparently for all time had an extra spread of rye-grass and several hundred sheep been added to the assets of the Dominion. Then, however, happened one of our Hawke’s Bay floods, a couple of feet falling in two days. The drainages that had heretofore appeared so innocuous and proper then took another aspect owing to the lowering of the lake and consequently more violent scour. The streamlet, formerly losing itself in the apex cut, now gutted out its bed to a depth of twenty feet. Exhumed trees and huge root stubs blocked the passage of the main drain. Over the grassed areas not five acres of turf remained; the balance was submerged in mud but in this first great flood fertile mud, drawn from banks of alluvium immediately beneath the hills. A second great deluge into the deepened streamlet’s course drew down great slices of worthless slope. In 1938, when nearly three feet fell in four days, a third of the swamp was covered with poor sand from one to six feet in depth.

Left – The waterfall outlet of Lake Tutira, which is rapidly receding towards the lake.

J. D. PASCOE

Right – A view of Lake Tutira from the north-eastern shore.

J. D. PASCOE

Below – Lakes Waikopiro and Tutira. Groups of willow-trees have been planted on the tongue of land between the two lakes.

J. D. PASCOE

Above – A tame pigeon feeding from Mr. Guthrie-Smith’s mouth.

J. D. PASCOE