by Michael King
One of the functions of provincial governments, which they had fulfilled with varying degrees of conscientiousness, was the provision and support of schools. Abolition meant that this responsibility had to be taken over by central government. The new arrangements were set out in the 1877 Education Act, prepared by the Atkinson ministry and put into effect by the Grey ministry which succeeded it. This provided for ‘free, secular and compulsory’ primary education throughout the country. There was to be a three-tiered system of administration. At the top was a new department and a Minister of Education (the first of whom was John Ballance, who fifteen years later would become the first Liberal Premier). Below that were district education boards, which largely corresponded to those that existed under the provincial system. At the grass roots were school committees elected by local householders and responsible for management of schools in their own communities. This last element was the weakest in the system, particularly in rural areas where communities were often scattered and communications still primitive. Secondary education, which would not be free until the election of the first Labour Government in the 1930s, was provided by high schools established under separate Acts of Parliament.
Maori children could, if they or their parents so wished, attend local board schools, but they were already catered for by the 1867 Native Schools Act, which enabled primary schools to be established at the request of Maori communities under the supervision of the Native Department. At the specific request of Maori parents, the medium of instruction in these schools was to be English. Most of those parents who expressed a view on this issue in the 1860s thought that Maori was best learnt at home and English in the schools, to give pupils access to a wider world of knowledge. This policy was sometimes taken to extremes in the years that followed, with many children reporting that they had been punished for speaking Maori within school boundaries.
The Atkinson premierships – five of them between 1876 and 1891 – coincided with what came to be called the ‘Long Depression’. It began with falling wool prices in 1877 and merged into a period of worldwide recession in which the New Zealand economy did not grow for around sixteen years. It led to regional unemployment, a deterioration in working conditions and a tendency among urban employers to take on women and children rather than men, so that they could be paid at lower rates. Atkinson, as Colonial Treasurer for ten of the depression years, refused to countenance Vogel-type responses. As Judith Bassett writes, he saw ‘hard work, thrift and moderation’ as the keys to eventual recovery. This was hardly a message calculated to enthuse Parliament or the wider electorate. But Atkinson continued to move into and out of office as politicians with more radical proposals, such as George Grey, were tried and in their turn found wanting.
Former Governor Grey became Premier in 1877. He had entered Parliament two years earlier while holding office as Superintendent of Auckland Province. One of his aims in entering national politics was to save the provincial system, but in this he failed. When Atkinson lost the confidence of the House on unrelated issues, Grey took office with a mixed cabinet of conservatives and liberals, the latter including Robert Stout and John Ballance, both identified early in their political careers as likely Premiers of the future. Parliament turned to the by then 65-year-old statesman because of the residual mana and charisma of ‘Good Governor Grey’, but his premiership was not a success. The former proconsul found the transition to politician difficult. Grey was not accustomed to being challenged. He was also by this time autocratic and cantankerous, and prone to riding off on hobby-horses of his own. He became extremely hostile towards the operations of a speculative land enterprise called the New Zealand Agricultural Company in which two of his ministers, Stout and Larnach, were involved. Eventually the Government lost the 1879 election, in part because of the persistent effects of the depression.
Grey remained in Parliament as a backbencher until 1894, though his interests were by then focused more closely on his home on Kawau Island, and on the enormous range of plants and animals he had acclimatised to living there, including wallabies and kookaburras which were still established in the region more than a century later. He was also much taken up with his scholarly pursuits, which had included correspondence with a range of scientific pioneers such as Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. Grey’s last service to his adopted country was as one of three New Zealand representatives at the Australian Federation Convention in Sydney in 1891, at which he opposed New Zealand’s joining the federation – a position supported by the New Zealand Parliament. He died in a London hotel in 1898, a year after reconciling with his long-separated wife, Eliza.
The Long Depression continued to blight the prospects and shorten the lives of the seven ministries which held office through the 1880s. Among the consequences outside Parliament, Raewyn Dalziel identified ‘unemployment, poverty, the exploitation of women workers, ragged children in the streets, threadbare men on the tramp, damp dark cottages in mean alleys …’ In addition, ‘urban growth made social differences more noticeable’.
More women joined the workforce in this decade in an effort to contribute more to family incomes. But, as Keith Sinclair noted, ‘the conditions of urban workers steadily deteriorated … Labour was so cheap that secondary industry was actually expanding and the country was able to export small quantities of its manufactures … In 1888 respectable citizens … were shocked to learn from a sermon on “The Sin of Cheapness”, delivered by a Presbyterian minister in Dunedin, that “sweated labour” existed in the clothing industry … [A] great many people found it intolerable that such an evil, which they believed had been left behind by the immigrant ships, should so soon be reproduced in “this young fair land”.’ A royal commission in 1890 reported long work hours, poor pay and, in particular, the exploitation of women and children. The shocked response to this report was one of the factors that boosted the Liberal Party’s election campaign in that year.
Even as economic conditions appeared least promising, however, developments in technology were laying foundations for future prosperity from a source previously undreamed of: refrigeration. In February 1882 the sailing vessel Dunedin sailed from Port Chalmers with a cargo of 4460 frozen mutton and 449 frozen lamb carcasses from the Totara estate near Oamaru. The vessel reached London three months later with the meat in perfect condition. For New Zealand, the world was suddenly a less frightening place than it had been – though this perception would take time to filter through society at large.
The breakthrough meant that the country had a major new export commodity in addition to wool and grain, and by 1890 it was worth £1 million a year, nearly a quarter of the value of wool exports. By 1910 that figure had jumped to £3.8 million, nearly half the value of wool. This new option radically changed the nature of farming in New Zealand. Previously sheep farmers had been forced to slaughter animals – sometimes by simply driving them over cliffs. Now they could raise sheep for meat and wool, which made smaller farms considerably more viable than they had been. It also resulted in a move away from merinos, useful only for their wool, and towards such breeds as Romney, which provided both commodities. The need to slaughter and prepare animals for export and for wider domestic distribution created the country’s first large-scale industrial plants, freezing works, which also processed by-products such as skins, tallow and manure. The new trade revived ports in smaller centres such as Bluff, Oamaru, Timaru, Gisborne and Napier.
Refrigeration also allowed the export of butter and cheese, previously produced only for local consumption. This sector was slower to gather momentum than the meat industry, because sheep could be produced on existing farms, whereas land for dairying had to be cleared and broken in over many parts of the country, especially in the Auckland provincial region, which had been focused for so long on extractive industries such as timber, gold and kauri gum. Parts of Southland were able to convert to dairy farming immediately, and the country’s first dairy factory opened in Edendale in 1882. As other districts caught up, Tarana
ki and Waikato joined Southland as the major producers of butter and cheese. The export value of these products began to rise sharply in the early 1900s, reaching nearly 45 per cent of the country’s total exports by the early 1920s. As with meat, almost all this produce went to Britain, and New Zealand was well on the way to acquiring its identity as the ‘dairy farm of the Empire’.
It is difficult to see how New Zealand could have survived as a viable country had it had to continue to rely solely on wool and grain and extractive commodities for its national income. Wool and grain production could have been sustained, though competition from Australia would have increased. Timber would soon have been exhausted, as it was being harvested unsustainably, and the end of kauri milling was already in sight by early in the twentieth century. The demand and price for gold and kauri gum were unstable, and New Zealand’s reserves of the former were limited and the market for the latter would disappear altogether as synthetics became available for the production of varnishes and linoleum. Rather than the country’s being forced to wrestle with these considerations, however, the coincidence of refrigeration technology and a guaranteed market in Britain would soon deliver to New Zealanders one of the highest living standards in the world. It was a fortunate outcome, though one that would generate a new set of problems when questions eventually had to be asked about whether the extent and scale of grass farming that New Zealand had opted for was in fact sustainable in the light of the country’s soils, climate and land instability.
The 1880s, as well as being the period when major adjustments began to be made to the pattern of farming activities, was the first decade in which the three major issues which had preoccupied early colonial politics were absent. The country by this time had representative and responsible government; the years of overt Maori–Pakeha conflict were over and British sovereignty – now meaning the authority of the colonial government – was a reality throughout the land; and the struggle between central government and the provinces had been resolved in favour of the centralists. Coalitions in Parliament could now form around the social and economic issues that engaged Pakeha New Zealand society as a whole. By 1890 the more radical MPs who sought labour and industrial reforms, better conditions for urban working families and the breaking-up of big estates to give small farmers a chance to participate in the country’s agricultural sectors had formed themselves into the Liberal Party under the leadership of John Ballance. They would be the first group in the country’s history to go into an election campaign, held at the end of 1890, with a programme that a wide slate of candidates was pledged to support. The effects of this introduction into New Zealand of the kind of party politics that had already emerged in democracies in other parts of the world would be revolutionary and wide-ranging.
[1] All four Russell brothers became successful lawyers, and all four founded law firms that survived, with appropriate name changes, into the twenty-first century. Thomas Russell’s firm became Bell Gully Buddle Weir.
[2] Income tax was not introduced in New Zealand until 1891, as part of the Liberal Government’s reform programme. Up until that time, government revenue was drawn from a combination of customs and excise duties, stamp duties, property tax, land sales and death duties.
Chapter 17
Maori Lifeways
The national web of roads, bridges, railways and telegraph cables which the Vogel administrations had so greatly extended in the 1870s had not, on the whole, encompassed Maori communities unless they were located close to European areas of settlement. And conditions in those communities varied enormously from district to district and from hapu to hapu – so much so that it is difficult to generalise about Maori life in the later years of the nineteenth century. One reason is that the basis of this life remained whanau (extended family) and hapu. Maori generally did not view themselves as ‘Maori’, a single race and culture, even after the word Maori had come into common usage from about halfway through the nineteenth century. Consequently there was little incentive for them to behave in a uniform way, other than to continue, in characteristically tribal fashion, to disparage and compete with Maori from other hapu and other places. The very persistence of tribal feeling had worked against the continuation of ‘nationalist’ experiments such as the Kingitanga (though the Kingitanga survived, largely as the responsibility of Tainui tribes).
Persistence of tribal feeling as the very essence of Maori identity prevented Maori from acting as a pressure group commensurate with their numbers. Even though four specifically Maori seats were created in the national Parliament in 1867, extending the franchise to all Maori men, tribalism and regionalism prevented the members from acting in concert to promote common Maori objectives (as did the fact that most of those early Maori MPs were not proficient in English, and few Pakeha members spoke Maori).
Despite such diversity, most Europeans, unless they had married into Maori families, rarely distinguished one Maori from another or one tribe from another – a fact especially evident in cartoons of Maori of the period. Maori were simply ‘Native’ in official language; those of part-Maori descent were almost always identified exclusively with that side if their features or colouring were even slightly Polynesian in character.
One of the reasons for this was that most Pakeha living in, say, the four main centres were by this time unlikely to come into direct contact with Maori, and even in a provincial centre such as Hamilton Maori appeared only to sell vegetables door to door and did not live in the town. Those few Europeans who visited a Maori community were very much aware that they were glimpsing a world quite different from their own. The disposition of such settlements, the provision of communal meeting, cooking and eating facilities, the styles of houses, the materials from which they were built, the nature of the activities that went on in and around them, the language that was spoken, the kind of food that was eaten and the manner in which it was prepared – all these features suggested to Europeans a distinctively Maori way of life and one that seemed indistinguishable from place to place.
Traditional Maori clothing had gone out of general use by the 1850s (and much earlier in communities associated with whaling and trading and those close to European settlements), though it would still be donned, especially cloaks, for ceremonial occasions and cultural performances. As the European settler population had begun to swell in the 1840s, so European clothes, new and second-hand, had become widely available along with blankets, which had the advantage of being usable as clothing and/or bedding. These items were sold by travelling merchants and storekeepers who sometimes exploited the Maori market for excessive rewards, especially in places where whole communities had recently come into money from land sales or the trading of commodities. There was a simultaneous and continuing Maori demand from the same entrepreneurs for pipes, tobacco, axes, spades, cooking utensils – especially billies, camp ovens, kettles, buckets and knives – and for metals with which to make other tools.
Generally in the nineteenth century Maori settlements continued to be built around family and hapu membership, and they ranged in size from half a dozen households to several hundred. Each community was likely to have five kinds of building: whare mahana or sleeping houses; kauta or communal cookhouses; pataka or storehouses; whata or shelters for storing wood (for a long time the only source of fuel for cooking and heating); and, more often as the century drew near its close, wharepuni or community meeting houses. A whare mahana might shelter an immediate family or an extended one. It was common for children to live and sleep with members of the extended family who were not necessarily their birth parents. Such houses would rarely be used for cooking and eating, which would more commonly take place in community facilities. The size and style of these and other Maori constructions gradually changed with the increasing availability of European tools, garments, utensils and other materials. Houses progressively became larger and better ventilated, and chimneys and European-type fireplaces were being added in many districts from the 1870s. It was becoming common by the cl
ose of the century for rangatira families to live in well-built and well-endowed European-style houses.
Wharepuni increased greatly in size to the kinds of dimensions that would become common in the twentieth century. The incentive to build larger facilities was greatest where tribes had regular inter-hapu or inter-tribal meetings to sustain – such as Waikato with its Kingitanga poukai or loyalty hui and Tuhoe with its Ringatu tekaumarua or holy days, or those communities in Northland and Wairarapa who became closely involved in the Kotahitanga movement, which attempted to unify Maori politically. Observers noted in the 1870s and 1880s that large and well-catered functions were becoming an increasingly common feature of Maori life now that fighting was no longer available to provide an incentive and a focus for community effort. The larger and more lavish the hui or gathering, the more mana accrued to the host community – prestige in Polynesian terms being measured by what was given away rather than by what was accumulated. And, of course, such occasions required reciprocation by guests, the custom of utu or balanced exchange being as important to the functioning of Maori society in the nineteenth century as it had been in the eighteenth.