OLD LAND DEALS

Evening Star, Issue 19789, 13 February 1928, Page 1

OLD LAND DEALS

EARLY TRAFFICKING NEW ZEALAND IN THE ’EIGHTIES. “ 1 imagine almost all the land to (he northward of the Thames is claimed by Europeans; many tracts have five or six claimants, and 1 know of people in New South Wales having spent as much as six hundred pounds at a time in the purchase of those lands from one ol the claimants, in thorough ignorance of the validity or oven the reasonableness of one claim over another, supposing, of course, that all were valid.”

This paragraph from ‘Hambies in New Zealand’ gives the impression of its author (J. C. Bidwell) concerning land-sharking in northern New Zealand in 1839-10 (states an ex. change). By that date a system of subdivision in fairly small holdings—town acres and rural sections of about 100 acres—was in being at Wellington, but what Mr Bidwell referred to was not systematic subdivision of _ surveyed areas bought from the natives by a responsible company, but the speculative purchase by individual whites of large areas (thousands of acres) of way-back land with ill-defined boundaries. A man who selected a town acre and a hundred acre block at Wellington under the New Zealand Company might claim to be a settler, and, at any rate, was not a land monopolist; but a man who wont to the Bay of Islands, or Hauraki Gulf, or Mercury Bay, and who bought from some native all the land from the beach to the horizon for an old shirt was in an evidently different cate, gory, It was so easy for an irresponsible white to buy from an irresponsible native some other natives’ lands for a song, that these purchases were hound to overlap; hence Mr Bidwell’a assumption that all land in New Zealand northward of the Thames (Waihou) River was claimed by some such purchaser, and that some of the areas included therein were claimed by five or six. (In fact, this multiplication of unjustified land claims had to be washed out some years later by legal process.) That part of the quoted statement is not surprising, but it is of some interest to nolo that the Now Zealand land traffickers of those days were able to “sting” New South Wales people for hard cash in much the same way as post-war Germany “stung” the New Zealand buyers of paper marks. The author goes on to point out (bat the “biglicks” land trafficker’s field in those days was the backblocks rather than the more available silos. Values of the latter, were sufficiently known, even by the Maoris, to check designs tor buying up the whole countryside for a song; so the speculator "went further afield. _ There seem to have been extremes in land buying, some prices being absurdly j low, some absurdly high. “The Mowrios (Maoris) would never soil _ land near their settlements for sufficiently low prices to induce Europeans to become purchasers of more than enough for the sites of their houses, gardens, etc. In two purchases which I saw made, otto- at Tawraiiga (Tauranga) ami the other at, Rotorua (Rotorua), the prices given were preposterous, and could only have been submitted to by the ' purchasers because they could not do without the land. The spot at Tawraiiga was not above fifty feet square, and the cost of it not less than fifty pound in trade. That at Rotorua was about half an acre of water frontage, and the cost twelve pounds ton shillings; but the first was in the middle of a' pa, while the other was only near one, and had always been used by the purchaser as a landing place to his residence ever since he had been at Rotorua. He told me fie considered himself very lucky to get it even for that sum, as he had been trying for years to buy it without success.” WELLINGTON'S ADVANT AGE S. Probably this overlapping speculation in the broader acres of the North helped Mr Bidwell to appreciate the advantages in 1840 of the Wellington settlement. He saw the superiority of Port Nicholson, from a point of view, over the Thames (Waihou) River, but he failed at that time to foresee what the Wairarapa and Mans/wntn level lands would mean to Weilington. Me appreciated the richness of tho Hntt River flats, but not what lay beyond the enclosing mountains—at least, his book does not reflect any such knowledge, though only three or four years later his brother, C. R. Bidwell, became a pioneer Wairarapa sheep fanner. Not appreciating this factor, ho gave tho Waihou credit for a greater area of open level land available for settlement, although its availability was reduced by swamp conditions. Ho foresaw delay in draining the swamps that fringe tho Firth of Thames. (Some of the best of them have been drained only in the last twenty years, and some are still undrained.) The Waitcrnata, Harbor (Auckland) passes with hut scant notice.

Lastly, Mr Bidwell saw that the Wellington of 1840 had a great asset in the quality of its colonists. He saw there “a population at present of between two and three thousand persons, nniong whom are many of high family connections and respectability from England, who have brought considerable capital with them and a consequent demand for labor—most of which advantages are not to he found on the Thames, where there are as yet no emigrants, and where it is very certain none will he sent by Government, and where the population will he made up entirely from the emigration of doubtful characters from New South Wales nr of fickle discontented spirits from this place (’Wellington).” That was at the beginning of the 'forties. For the Thames the whole outlook was changed by discovery of gold in the ’sixties' But Welling, ton found its gold in the grass of the hinterlands, the wool of which was magnetised to its unequalled jjqtt..