SIXTY YEARS AGO

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 October 1938, Page 9

SIXTY YEARS AGO

SHEEP FOR BOILING DOWN SOLD AT 4d AND 6d. CONDITIONS IN CANTERBURY. It is not generally know that in the Canterbury district about sixty years ago thousands of sheep were sold for boiling down at 4d or 5d a head. That was in the days before the freezing industry was established and there was no market for the sheep, although there was a fairly good return from wool. The farmers had to get rid of their surplus sheep or they would have been overstocked. That was one of the interesting statements made to a “Times-Age” representative by Mr W. Rutherford, of Masterton, who spent a considerable period of his earlier years in the Mid-Canterbury district, when, during a conversation, he recalled some of the events of those days.

Mr Rutherford added that the stock from which these sheep had been bred, Merinos, had been imported from Australia at a cost of 30s per head. He remembered the slaughtering of 2000 sheep on Mesopotamia Station. These animals had to be destroyed to prevent overstocking and after being killed were thrown into a deep hole in a river flowing through the property. The life of squatters in the Canterbury back country fifty or sixty years ago was a rather strenuous one, he said. There were no roads and the approved means of transport was by horse. When snow fell, it was the practice to shift the sheep to the lower country but even so numbers were lost. He said he had seen sheep “snowed in” for three months. They had trampled down the snow around them and in some cases were so hungry that they had eaten eaqh other’s wool. FIRST POTATOES.

Mr Rutherford spent his boyhood days at the head of the Rangitata River, where his father was employed as a shepherd on the sheep station of Messrs W. and A. J. Walker, of Mt Possession, about 25 miles from Ashburton, which was the nearest town. A man who had purchased a small quality of potatoes gave his mother two tubers and it was from the multiplication of these that the family’s needs were supplied in subsequent years. They had no milk or butter for many years but eventually his father bought an old cow for £25 and they then enjoyed these products. In those days there were no schools and all the tuition he received was in the evenings from one of the owners of the station. There were thousands of pigs and Maori hens (wekas) in the back country at that time, but these had all disappeared. Mr Rutherford said his father bought the first piece of land at Springburn, in the Mt Somers district, about 50 years ago. When he went there a large stream flowed through the property. The house was built on one side of it and the cowbail on the other and it was possible to step across it. Now the same stream had a bed seven chains across and the river-beds were the same everywhere, he said. Wherever man had appeared, everything had changed.

GRAZING RIGHTS. In those days, said Mr Rutherford, the squatters had grazing rights only and did not have me right to crop for commercial purposes. He knew of one squatter who, all the same, -had grown about 100 acres of fine wheat without having any title to the land. Two men came around, ostensibly after pheasants, and the owner of the wheat, after directing them to some, bush nearby, immediately secured the best horse he had and rode as quickly as possible to Timaru, where he purchased the land at £2 per acre. On his return journey he met them proceeding to Timaru for the same purpose. Mr Rutherford added that there were enormous areas sown in wheat in parts of Canterbury at that time. One man, Duncan Cameron, the owner of a large area, in one year had 20,000 acres in wheat. They were not rosy times, he said, and many of the runholders went bankrupt. Mr Rutherford mentioned an instance in which he asserted that a horse had remained without access to water for four years. It had apparently strayed away and found itself in a large paddock entirely without water. In spite of that, the horse had remained there for a period of four years.