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The Historical Explanation of Land Use in New Zealand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Andrew H. Clark
Andrew H. Clark
Affiliation:
Washington, D. C.
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Extract

A Weakness often apparent in interpretations of economic history lies in failure to evaluate properly the factor of relative location and the mechanism of cultural diffusion through which it operates to affect the changing character of regions. In studies of the historical geography of New Zealand, for example, extant interpretations have both emphasized an almost teleological view of unilinear cultural descent and shown a strong tendency toward environmental determinism. Neither of these philosophies or approaches in the writing of history has proved satisfactory in itself, but, taken together (antithetical though they may seem), they have provided a deceptively simple interpretive base upon which there has been almost universal reliance.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , November 1945 , pp. 215 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1945

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References

1 Andrew H. Clark, “The South Island of New Zealand; a Geographic Study of the Introduction and Modification of British Rural Patterns and Practices Associated with the Exotic Plants and Animals of the Island,” a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, and available in the library of that institution.

2 My indictment is of sins of omission and implication, generally, rather than of explicit statement. Few writers have been concerned with the history of land utilization as anything but a distinctly subordinate theme. Among the recent historical works in which there is some consideration of agricultural and pastoral history, however parenthetically, are: Condliffe, J. B., New Zealand in the Making; A Survey of Economic and Social Development (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930)Google Scholar; Cambridge History of the British Empire, VII, Part 2 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1933)Google Scholar; Condliffe, J. B., A Short History of New Zealand (5th ed. rev.; London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1935)Google Scholar; Beaglehole, J. C., New Zealand; A Short History (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1936)Google Scholar; Elder, J. R., New Zealand, an Outline History (London, 1938)Google Scholar; and Morrell, W. P., Britain and New Zealand (London: Longman's Pamphlets on the British Commonwealth Series, 1944).Google Scholar Recent descriptive works which interpret the present scene include: Duff, O., New Zealand Now (Wellington: Department of Internal Affairs, 1940)Google Scholar; Marsh, N. and Burdon, R. M., New Zealand (London: William Collins Sons and Company, 1942)Google Scholar; Nash, W., New Zealand; A Working Democracy (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943)Google Scholar; and Wood, F. L. W., Understanding New Zealand (New York: Coward-McCann, 1944).Google Scholar Three earlier works that have had great influence in shaping the interpretation of New Zealand's economic history are: Parsons, F., The Story of New Zealand (Philadelphia: C. F. Taylor, 1904)Google Scholar; Scholefield, G. H., New Zealand in Evolution (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909)Google Scholar; and Reeves, W. P., Ao-tea-roa, The Long White Cloud (3d ed.; London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1924).Google Scholar There is virtually no significant periodical literature that deals with the history of land utilization even in a corollary sense.

3 See Cumberland, K. B., “A Century's Change: Natural to Cultural Vegetation in New Zealand,” The Geographical Review, XXXI, No. 4 (October 1941), 529–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The standard work on the historical vegetation of Britain is Tansley, A. G., The British Islands and Their Vegetation (Cambridge: The University Press, 1939).Google Scholar There is still some controversy on the question of encroachment of agriculture upon grasslands previous to the nineteenth century, but the consensus among British and American scholars is quite definite that, until the invention of the self-cleaning steel plow, agriculture was confined to the vicinity of forested, or once forested, areas. For two authoritative statements on the issue see Sauer, C. O., “American Agricultural Origins” in Essays in Anthropology presented to A. L. Kroeber in celebration of his sixtieth birthday (Berkeley: University of California, 1936), pp. 279–98Google Scholar, and Clark, Grahame, “Farmers and Forests in Neolithic Europe,” Antiquity, XIX, No. 74 (June 1945), 57–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Calculated and deduced from figures given in the Statistical Report on the Agricultural and Pastoral Production of New Zealand, published for each season (usually May 1 to April 30) and, Great Britain, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Agricultural Statistics, published for each calendar year and covering England and Wales. A somewhat similar table, for an earlier period, is given in Stapledon, R. G., A Tour in Australia and New Zealand (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 18.Google Scholar

5 The story of the acclimatization of exotic animals forms an important section in Clark, “The South Island.”

6 On these developments the best original source of information is the contemporary press of Australia, notably the Sydney Gazette (1803–1842)Google Scholar, a government gazette as well as a newspaper from 1803–32; the Sydney Herald (1831–1842)Google Scholar; and the Sydney Morning Herald (1842).Google ScholarThe Historical Records of New Zealand, I (Wellington, 1908)Google Scholar, is a very useful collection of source materials on early voyages, and McNab, R., Old Whaling Days; A History of Southern New Zealand from 1830 to 1840 (Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1913)Google Scholar, is a largely undigested compendium of the same sort of material. Greenwood, Gordon, Early American-Australian Relations: from the Arrival of the Spaniards in America to the Close of 1830 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1944), contains, in the text and appendices, numerous records of such voyages.Google Scholar

7 This is made clear in the lengthy official correspondence given in Historical Records of New Zealand, I, 729 ff.

8 The most thorough and able handling of the relevant material on the Wakefield experiments in New Zealand is Marais, J. S., The Colonisation of New Zealand (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).Google ScholarHarrop, A. J., The Amazing Career of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1928)Google Scholar, is also very useful. Of Wakefield's own writings, the most pertinent to this theme are: A Letter from Sydney (London, 1829)Google Scholar and A View of the Art of Colonisation (London, 1849).Google Scholar

9 The precise character of the immigrants who came has, I believe, been badly distorted. Though there is an almost universal assumption that they were carefully selected according to high standards, there is no evidence to support the assumption, and every consideration of probability seems to be against it. Marais, p. 62, says that the conditions for the choice of immigrants, which would have assured a very select group, were “rigidly enforced,” but he does not say how he knows this to have been true. Beaglehole, p. 31, may be nearer to the truth in saying: “The colonists of New Zealand came mainly from the class of the Respectable Poor, as distinct from the mere proletarian on the one hand and the thoroughly successful artisan on the other.” To attempt to find supporting evidence for the traditional theses, the large collection of the New Zealand Company Papers (Series N. Z. C.) in the Dominion Archives in Wellington were examined, in addition to the various numbered reports of the company and the issues of its official publication, the New Zealand Journal, which appeared sporadically in London from February 8, 1840, to November 6, 1852. These, taken together with the passenger lists of arriving ships published in the immediately established colonial newspapers, and Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives, give what is known of the skills and backgrounds of the arriving immigrants. The proportion of those with any considerable personal resources, or with agricultural or pastoral skills, is quite low. There is a notable absence from the records of immigrants of the yeoman farmer type—the prosperous, land-owning peasant if you like. One wonders indeed what laborers above the class of penniless paupers or near paupers could have been induced to go to the much advertised terrors of cannibal-ridden New Zealand where little was known of the country, and where it was planned to preserve all the distinctions of a class system, near to the bottom of which they certainly were. A small sum would buy passage to North America, the superior attractions of which included a much shorter voyage in steerage and easier access to land. The patriotic advantage of living under the British flag was equally to be had in Canada, the Cape, or the Australian colonies. That a superior class of laborers should, of its own free will, have chosen to go to New Zealand simply does not make sense. The existing evidence points as strongly toward a generally urban background as toward their poverty, and that, perhaps, is the most significant point here. The evidence on this controversial question is examined in detail in my “The South Island.”

10 See note 6 above.

11 These early settlements are described in a wide variety of sources. Apart from diaries and letters available only in New Zealand's several libraries and archives, these include: The Historical Records of New Zealand, and McNab, Old Whaling Days; McNab, Murihuku (Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909)Google Scholar; E. W. Durward, “The Maori Population of Otago,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, XLII, No. 2; Shortland, E., The Southern Districts of New Zealand (London, 1831)Google Scholar; Roberts, W. H. S., History of Oamaru and North Otago, New Zealand from 183s to the End of 1889 (Oamaru, 1890)Google Scholar; Tuckett, F., “Diary” (of a journey along the eastern and southern coasts of South Island, March 28-June 1,1844)Google Scholar, most readily available in an appendix to Hocken, T. M., Contributions to the Early History of New Zealand (London, 1898)Google Scholar; D. Monro, letters to the editor of the Nelson Examiner, on the same trip, printed in a series beginning July 20, 1844, and ending October 23, 1844; Wakefield, E. J. (a nephew of Edward Gibbon), Adventure in New Zealand (London, 1845)Google Scholar; and H. Thorp, “Reminiscences,” MS in Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

12 Roberts, H., The Squatting Age in Australia 1835–47 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935)Google Scholar, is an exhaustive study of contemporary conditions and events in Australian sheep farming.

13 The letters of two pioneer farmers in Canterbury, recently published as Pioneers of Canterbury: Deans' Letters 1840–54, ed. J., Deans (Dunedin: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1937), contain several references to the purchases of sheep in Australia at such low prices. The cost was generally greater, of course, and the price paid in New South Wales was always less than the value of a sheep landed and acclimatized in New Zealand. Normally 25 to 50 per cent of the animals were lost on the voyage or shortly after landing. In 1847, for example, the Deans purchased 600 sheep in Sydney. Five hundred and fifty-four survivors were landed at Banks Peningula but subsequent losses in lambing and acclimatization resulted in only 430 of the 600 being added to the working flock.Google Scholar

14 The information about this flood of sheep from Australia and their characteristics was obtained from contemporary New Zealand newspapers in both editorial columns and advertisements. The most useful of these were: the Lyttelton Times (published at the port of Christchurch from 1851–1863 and at Christchurch itself thereafter until 1929); the Nelson Examiner (1842–1873); the Otago Witness (1851– ———, later merged with the Times); and the Otago Daily Times (1861– ———). The two last papers were published in Dunedin.

15 Authorities on the Australian development of the Merino include: Atkinson, J., An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales (Sydney, 1828)Google Scholar; Brown, G. A. (“Bruni”), Australian Merino Studs (Melbourne, 1904)Google Scholar; and Cox, E. W., The Evolution of the Australian Merino (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936).Google Scholar

16 See note 13 above.

17 The introduction of this type of cattle into New South Wales and the concentration of interest on it by breeders there is described in part in Atkinson, J., An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, Part 2 (Sydney, 1844)Google Scholar, and Ellis, M. H., The Beef Shorthorn in Australia (Sydney: The Sydney and Melbourne Publishing Company, 1932).Google Scholar

18 Editorial references as well as advertisements of stock for sale “newly arrived from New South Wales” are so frequent and refer so exclusively to “Durham cattle” that the inference of heavy dependence on Australia and on this breed is inescapable.

19 Witness the fact that in the 1840's “ship's dairies” were usually stocked with goats for the voyage to New Zealand. This is attested not only in several diaries of voyages, but in the offering of goats for sale in newspaper advertisements after the arrival of ships, and the absence of early references to ship's cattle. The Barker Letters (in manuscript in Canterbury Museum, Christchurch) mention a price of 10 shillings for a good “milch goat” in Christchurch in 1850. Incidentally, since the goats had no traditional place in the economy of the people, they were not very carefully tended after landing and many escaped to found the flocks of wild goats, now numbering tens of thousands, that roam some of the wilder mountain country in the north central part of the island.

20 As late as 1918, the New Zealand Official Year Book listed the percentage of short-horn types among all of New Zealand's cattle as 58 per cent, and even in 1928 the same source showed shorthorns to be more than a quarter of all cattle in the country. The percentage was always higher in South Island. Though more specialized beef and dairy breeds are rapidly displacing shorthorns in the South Island today, as they long ago succeeded in doing in North Island, this late persistence of the breed is a very good example of the important and continuing influence of the factor of location relative to Australia. Remarkably few shorthorns were ever introduced directly from Great Britain, even when it became more feasible to ship animals in larger numbers over such a great distance.

21 The Statistics of New Zealand, issue of 1871, gives a very clear accounting of the emigration and immigration. Between 35 and 40 per cent of the “net” immigration was from Australian sources.

22 The character of the “diggers” is discussed by a good many scholars, among the best accounts being: C. B. Newling, “The Gold Diggers,” Journal of The Royal Australian Historical Society, II, 262–80; Coghlan, T. A., Labour and Industry in Australia (4 vols., London: Oxford University Press, 1918), pp. 561–62Google Scholar and 874–76; and Shann, E. V. G., An Economic History of Australia (London: Cambridge University Press, 1930)Google Scholar, especially chap. xi. Fitzpatrick has re-examined some of their conclusions in the second of his two excellent volumes on the economic history of Australia: Fitzpatrick, B., The British Empire in Australia, an Economic History (1834–1939) (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1941).Google Scholar In different issues of the Canterbury and Otago papers, there are very vivid descriptions of the men who arrived.

23 The Canterbury Customs House records from January 1 to November 30, 1855, given in an appendix to Paul, R. B., Letters from Canterbury (London, 1857)Google Scholar, showed the distribution of the following export items:

The wool of course must have been largely transshipped at Sydney for Great Britain, but it is doubtful whether any of the other products would have stood the cost of the journey at the time. Wool formed half of the total exports (£21,387/16/0 out of a total value of £40,037/15/1) and was soon to form a much higher proportion of these. The figures indicate the importance of the Australian markets at this time in stimulating dairying and grain farming in South Island.

24 Jobberns, G., “The Canterbury Plains, Their Origin and Structure” in Speight, R., Natural History of Canterbury (Christchurch: Simpson and Williams, 1927).Google Scholar

25 My information about water races comes principally from firsthand accounts obtained from individual farmers during my field work in New Zealand between February 1941 and December 1942 and from the examination of old farm records. It was greatly assisted by the researches of George J. T. Wilson and Noel Barker, both of Christchurch, who have been keen and industrious students of the economic and social history of Canterbury.

A monument has been erected in Canterbury to one Brett who, in 1877, proposed an extensive series of races for the upper-plains area. As a result he has gained the quite undeserved reputation of the “father” of stock water races in Canterbury. Actually such races were in operation in Canterbury in 1863 at “Winchmere” or “Wakanui,” a station just north of the mouth of the Ashburton River.

26 The long-wooled sheep did not produce a fleece worth nearly as much per pound as did the Merino, but, if properly fed, the much greater weight of the fleece meant that they were more profitable animals from the point of view of wool production alone.