Right: Grass seeders threshing seed from cocksfoot grass on Banks Peninsula
The Two Volcanoes of Banks Peninsula
Banks Peninsula was formed through volcanic activity. It is comprised of two large volcanoes which were active less than half a million years ago. Their craters were enlarged over the centuries by the eroding action of streams and they were then invaded by the sea during the postglacial world-wide rise in sea level beginning about fifteen thousand years ago.
Those two volcanoes now form the harbours of Akaroa and Lyttelton. The Akaroa Harbour was the larger of the two volcanoes and both have been considered extinct until recently when a steam fissure has opened up. The volcanoes may in fact be just dormant.
Originally the peninsula was in fact an island, but the island became connected to the Canterbury Plains when the growing alluvial plain reached the base of the island. They are now juxtaposed in stark contrast, a steep mountainous peninsula beside a barren plain.
Banks Peninsula has a more gentle climate than the Canterbury Plains, with a higher rainfall and fewer frosts, especially on the lower slopes. The highest slopes do get snowed on during the winter months and the snow may lay for several weeks on the tops.
Anyhow, back in the eighteen hundreds...
The Kemp Purchase of Banks Peninsula
On the 12th of June, 1848, at Akaroa, in an atmosphere fraught with cultural misunderstanding, sixteen Kai Tahu chiefs signed a deed which had been prepared by Commissioner Henry Tacy Kemp. This agreement "allowed" the Kai Tahu iwi to keep their settlements and food gathering sites and also some other reserves.
This agreement opened up land for settlers who were now be able to purchase land on the Peninsula from the colonial government.
When the land was surveyed later in 1848, many of the agreed reserves in the Kemp Purchase were reduced and ignored, a typical scenario of colonialism, and a common theft from indigenous people wherever colonisation takes place.
The Canterbury Association
A lot of surveying was happening both on Banks Peninsula and across on the plain that is destined to become Canterbury. The year 1848 also sees the founding of the Canterbury Association in England. This association is clearly inspired by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, (of New Zealand Company fame), and John Robert Godley.
The Canterbury Association sent out one Captain Joseph Thomas who was apparently undeterred by either the swamps, the lack of timber on the plains themselves (which were covered in native NZ flax and braided rivers), or even the sizable steep hill between the port and the plains. He merely got on with laying out the new port town of Lyttelton and the plains town of Christchurch, and began a road over the port hills, (really it was only a bridle path).
The first four Canterbury Association ships arrived in Lyttelton in 1850 and by 1853, a total of 3,549 new immigrants had disembarked. Of these, some four hundred people had the necessary wherewithall to purchase land for themselves, the rest were mainly labourers and servants.
This was a deliberate goal of the Canterbury Association - like the New Zealand Company their desire was to replicate what they saw as England's stable, class-based society onto this foreign land.
Whakamoa
On the first of May, 1852, James Wright together with an Akaroa resident named William Lucas was allotted Run 13 comprising 5,000 acres. This area covered the whole of the west headland of the Akaroa Harbour, (see map again on previous blog), the boundary running from Island Bay to Cape Three Points.
James and William Lucas were not planning to work this run as partners however. Each had his own stock and Lucas worked the Lands End portion while James worked the other half.
The Forest
Native Podocarp forest, (trees such as Matai, Totara, Rimu, Kahikitea), covered most of the peninsula at this time, with the exception of the drier northern hills now known as the Port Hills (the hills between Lyttelton and Christchurch). The bush was dense in the valleys and on the lower slopes, but were more in the form of scrub and patches of bush on or near the summits.
Sawmilling and land clearance therefore occupied the early would-be farmers and in fact by 1900 the whole forest cover of 140,000 acres would be removed. Today, only a few scattered patches of bush, a total of less than 150 acres, remain.
Cocksfoot Grass
After all that milling the would-be farmers now needed need grass for their stock. The grasses that cows and sheep feed on have evolved with those animals in the northern hemisphere. The new colony of New Zealand had no grazing grass at all and the imported cows and sheep would not feed on the native ferns or tussocks and flaxes. (They still don't eat them which is why I plant flaxes and tussocks along the boundary of my section and the paddocks).
Cocksfoot is a perennial grass which was productive and drought tolerant and was found to flourish on Banks Peninsula, and yielded large quantities of grass seed. Hannah and James and the other settler farmers, as well as capturing the seed for their own use, sold their excess seed all over the rapidly opening up settlements in New Zealand. Cocksfoot grass-seed was also one of our earliest exports to Australia and North America.
So when the bush was cut down and burned, cocksfoot was sown in the ashes. Women as well as men would work to gather in the grass seed harvest using "reap hooks", then with the sheaves laid on the threshing sheet it would have to be flailed.
The Dairy
As fast as the bush was disappearing and a few acres were grassed down small dairies were started. Cheese was quite valuable right now and well worth the trouble of pressing and carrying water for washing it. The water would have to be collected from the creeks that ran down the hillsides and I imagine Hannah would have been setting her children that job.
Cheese making by women had begun on the Peninsula from 1844 and the next year cheese was made for sale, but the first load to Wellington was fated to never reach its destination. The cheese was sent in a small cutter under Captain Sinclair, but the boat was wrecked and the men on it drowned, and all that first years produce lost.
The Farmhouse
The homes of most settlers were sod or slab-built whares, (the Maori word for houses of similar type), they had mud floors which they kept scrupulously clean with manuka brooms. The safest chimneys were generally made from corrugated iron if it was available. Window panes and curtains were very simple - they were the same thing - calico tacked across the opening and easily removed for ventilation or washing. Furniture would be primitive often made from boxes or packing cases, and limited to the barest essentials. Mattresses were often filled with raupo leaves, (flax), which the children collected from the swamps and were dried.
In those early days women mostly cooked over an open fire, meat being cooked on a "crane". the joint of meat would be hung on a jack and someone would have to keep turning it while the fat would be caught in a pan below. Luckier women had a camp oven in which bread could be made.
A "kitchen" was considered too unsafe to be part of the "main" house and was often housed in a separate whare of its own.
A Woman's Work is Never Done
And while Hannah was busy with all this, she was also still having children.
Robert was born on the 13th of September 1853; John Thomas Austin on the 12th of November, 1855; Mark on the 4th of September, 1858; Elizabeth Drury on the 22nd of July, 1860; and Luke on the 12th of September 1862.
John Austain (or Austen or Austin)
Hannah's father John Austain when he was already an elderly man, journeyed the thirteen thousand miles across the seas to New Zealand to live with Hannah and James. There is no record of when he arrived but the local records state that John Austin, farmer, died of dropsy on the 1st of February 1860, aged seventy-three, and was buried on the farm at Whakamoa.
I imagine that the child Elizabeth Drury, born later that year in August, was named in his honour, the original Elizabeth Drury being John Austin's wife and Hannah's mother.
It is also of note that a son, John Thomas Austin was born to Hannah and James in November of 1855, and I cannot help but speculate that this may suggest the year of John Austin's arrival in New Zealand.
TB: very interesting indeed Iri...looking forward to read more
Tuesday 3 July 2007 - 10:07PM (CEST) Mary: Great as usual Iri. I feel like I'm there when I'm reading. Keep em coming.
Thursday 5 July 2007 - 02:56PM (EDT)
 | Up around the Thames/Coromandel areas, the early settlers lived in tents, until the men had chopped and hand milled trees, then built slab huts.
The cooking was done over open fires, until ovens were built out of 'bricks', using mud and straw.
these bricks were alspo used in the chimneys of the early houses, as corrigated iron wasnt immediately available. My great grandmother, born in 1893, was born in one of these houses.
We often used to hear from my grand mother, stories of these early times, such as the local Maoris waiting until the beasts were slaughtered and hung, then in the night, steal them.
My father grew up on the Hauraki Plains, the only son of farming people.
My grandfather was the first recorded death by tractor accident, recorded in the area.
he died when trying to tow a treestump out of the ground, and the tractor flipped over backwards on him. My dad was still in his infancy then. |
 | Whenever i read about those "pioneers" with their tremendous guts and endurance and sheer determination, not just your country and America, anywhere in the past, I cant help thinking that the overweight, overindulgent.. over-everything people feverishly trying to get 26 getting and spending hours out of every 24 hour day, in OUR times, just wouldn't have made it at all - ever! Are we evolving,? Doesn't look like it! |
 | Indeed Tina, I was just thinking the same as I sat with my numb bum in front of the pc.. |
 | How brave and daring the early settlers were to go to a strange land on the other side of the world. Or was it because life was so grim in England at that time they were glad to get away. |
 |  Up around the Thames/Coromandel areas, the early settlers lived in tents, until the men had chopped and hand milled trees, then built slab huts.
The cooking was done over open fires, until ovens were built out of 'bricks', using mud and straw.
these bricks were alspo used in the chimneys of the early houses, as corrigated iron wasnt immediately available. My great grandmother, born in 1893, was born in one of these houses.
We often used to hear from my grand mother, stories of these early times, such as the local Maoris waiting until the beasts were slaughtered and hung, then in the night, steal them.
My father grew up on the Hauraki Plains, the only son of farming people.
My grandfather was the first recorded death by tractor accident, recorded in the area.
he died when trying to tow a treestump out of the ground, and the tractor flipped over backwards on him. My dad was still in his infancy then.  You should be blogging all this story Peter. (oh, for a poking out tongue emote when you want one). |
| I love the way you people add so much to my blogs, great link Rizzy, thank you. |
| Seems like the time changes...............
the dreams remain the same.................... |
| That's because there will always be the dreamers, sometimes they even changed the world.....Let's hope they still will! |
 | 13,000 miles from where one sets out is a staggering distance! I can really get imagery of settlers' ordinary lives from all the domestic details you have....a first-rate piece of scholarship. |
 | at this same period in the newly-opened lands of Mississippi:
separate kitchens were the rule here, because of fires and heat.
the living houses had several fireplaces, because there was more than enough wood
the first chimneys were "mudcats" or cribbed sticks daubed with clay, because few bricks were burned
dirt floors might eventually be replaced with puncheons, logs with a side hewn flat.
a crane was a pot-hook that would swing over the fire; i use one in the winter for beans and stew
they brought the old folks--the children of the Revolutionary era--out in oxcarts after the cabins were raised and the first crop was laid by or made
mattresses were stuffed with corn shucks, or hanging (Spanish) moss where it was available
window holes had a shutter over them, or a greased deerskin
there was a hole left alongside the chimney to let in a little light
re Howard's comment; i have seen replicas of those 18th-19th cen. sailing boats and they must have been mighty desperate to get away. |
| Mary Evelyn it sounds as though houses in the Mississippi (what a horror of a word to spell, thank goodness for spell check) were fairly similar to the colonial homes of NZ. |
| Ari.....when you drive through some of the back roads over there, you'll be surprised at the houses you'll see....some still standing from the slave days...
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| M-I-Crooked letter, crooked letter-I crooked letter, crooked letter-I, humpback, humpback-I |
| lol...we always had a little jingle to learn it with.
Mrs M
Mrs I
Mrs S S I
Mrs S S I
Mrs P P I |
| there was also one about how to spell Maori. I must have been quite young having to learn that one.
Who's going to do the dishes?
Ma or i
simply silly when you think of it...but it has always stuck in my head |
| ifiik wrote on May 17, edited on May 17 my dad taught me the ruler way....
M...whack
A..whack
O....whack
R....whack
I....whack
now, how do you spell..............
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