The Early Settlers

New Zealand has had European settlement only for the past 150 years. There were Europeans here before that but they were transients - sealers and whalers predominantly. The Maori race has been in New Zealand probably as early as the 10th or as late as the 13th century. It is thought they came from South East Asia because the Maori language has similarities with Japanese. They never moved out of the stone age. Life for them in pre-European times was nasty, brutal and short. They practised cannibalism, probably to enhance a diet which was based on fish, birds, and the kumara (a type of sweet potato). Inter-tribal warfare was constant. A man was old at 50 if he managed to escape being clubbed to death by marauding tribes. Although some Maoris look back on pre-European times as some sort of idyllic existence, it wasn't. Far from it. I studied pre-European Maori history at University and they lived on the brink of extinction all the time - usually from each other. They were all the same people, but they had divided themselves into tribes and fought each other. There had been another race in new Zealand before the Maoris arrived. They were called Morioris but the Maoris ate most of them.

When the Europeans began arriving they found a land which looked not unlike Britain, from whence most of them came, and thinly populated with stone age people. I myself had a grandfather from Cavan, in Ireland, a grandfather from Berwick in Scotland, a great-grandmother from England, and another great-grandmother from Scotland - I don't know where. So I am sort of a third generation New Zealander. The settlers came by sailing ship and although there were many ships wrecked with tragic loss of life all around New Zealand's coastline, these wrecks were the exception. Hundreds of sailing ships arrived and departed New Zealand's shores each year, year after year. Many of the ships made regular voyages for years, bringing their quotas of British families to settle in this faraway land. When the settlers disembarked at their port of arrival, they then set out for their final destination, often by bullock train. New Zealand still has the little settlements on each main road, each one separated by the distance it took a bullock train to travel in one day.

My Scottish grandfather arrived in port of Dunedin with his widowed mother and his brother. Both young men (20 and 22) had been given grants of land to take up. William (my paternal grandfather) went to Winton. I know very little about how he set about building a house, buying stock, farm implements, and how he lived generally in the early days. He died when I was only three years of age so I never got to ask him. I do know that he married the daughter of a neighbour and she died after delivering six children, (I suspect from a miscarriage that turned to a haemorrhage) so he went back to the same neighbour and got another of his daughters (my grandmother) who had another six children to him. The odd thing is that the first family was two girls and four boys and so was the second family. My maternal grandparents had eleven children. All grandparents children married and had children and at one count I had 42 aunts and uncles and heaven knows how many cousins.

All my grandparents worked hard. They were working class and expected to do nothing else. But now the odd details creep in. All grandparents and my parents were staunchly Labour (left-wing) voters but ferociously in favour of private property. All had left Britain to get away from a system where they could never advance financially or own property, but all were staunch monarchists. Standing for the National Anthem (God Save the Queen), saluting the flag, and fighting for King and Country was a given, even though they lived 13,000 miles away from the home country for which they were prepared to lay down their lives. Up until 1970, when Britain dumped New Zealand in favour of the Common Market, all New Zealanders were the same. They loved a country they had left and would never return to, or a country they would never see or live in. When I was a child and went to the pictures (as we call the movies here) God Save the King (later God Save the Queen) was played before the pictures started and EVERYONE stood. When I started school the Union Jack was raised on the flagpole each morning. New Zealand was a little England. The early settlers left their homeland and crossed the sea and brought their homeland with them - every last little bit of it - except the class system. That, they left behind and that, they refused to see erected again in their new country. Egalitarianism was the new cry - everybody equal! There were to be no Lords and Ladies and Dukes and Duchesses owning vast tracts of land and being landlords to the peasants. There was to be no forelock pulling, no bowing before inbred and chinless aristrocrats, no workhouse, no enclosures, and there was to be enfranchisement (of the men at first) which meant all had a say in the building of the new country.

There was to be free education, free public libraries, and free health care. Those things which were not to be had back home these free men and women were going to build for themselves. And they did. There was to be a minimum quarter acre section for each home so the men could keep a garden to grow fresh vegetables for their rosy cheeked children. And they did. There were to be playgrounds for the children, ante-natal care for mothers-to-be, and a full fourteen days in hospital when the first child was delivered. Infant mortality was the lowest in the world. Life was good. People who mattered came to visit New Zealand from all around the world, to view for themselves this little land where everyone had everything. Up until 1969 New Zealand had world class roads, safe bridges, cheap electricity, practically no crime rate worth mentioning, very little disease (the TB hospitals had not been used for years), a reasonably good education system, an excellent health system and full employment. The Government employed one in every five people and the jobs were until 65, then retirement on a Government pension. Santa came every year, the church bells rang on Sunday, and it seemed the good life would go on forever. Then Britain joined the Common Market, the EU as it is now known, and little New Zealand had to begin searching for new markets for her sheepmeat, wool and dairy products. And the new markets were tough.