JOURNEY FOR FOUR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 8

JOURNEY FOR FOUR

NE of the most remarkable true adventures involving children in New Zealand was the journey made just over a century ago by the four small children of a_ settler named Bevan. Their story, written into a series of six talks by Celia Manson, and now being heard from 4ZA, will start also from 3XC, 2XN and 2XA in the week beginning May 27. With the first talk, The Bevan Children recreates the harsh world of the early eighteen-forties, when the Wellington settlement was "a strung out huddle of queer little wooden buildings along the beach," when the two great chiefs Te Rangihaeata and Te Rauparaha, of the Ngati Toa, held the Province in terror of their names, and people would rather crowd together and pool their worries than wander abroad unnecessarily. But the Bevan children’s journey was f@ necessary one, for the three boys and their sister, all under the age of ten, had one over-riding aim-to rejoin their father at the new home he was making for them near the Waikawa River in the Manawatu. Bevan arrived in New Zealand minus his wife and one child, both of whom died in the miserable Voyage out in the emigrant ship Lady Nugent. Further misfortune greeted him in Wellington when the farm he had bought in England from the New Zealand Company proved non-existent, his

savings gone and nothing to show for it. However, says Mrs Manson, these weren't. the sort of people to sit down and bemoan their hard lot. "Bevan Senior had been a ropemaker by trade in England, and to be on the safe side had brought out all the equipment needed for starting up a rope walk. . . At Te Aro, in the swamps around the lagoon that is now the Basin Reserve sports ground, there was all the flax growing that he needed to start making rope." So while their father got his business going the children lived in the emigrant barracks with their aunt and uncle, who had also arrived on the Lady Nugent. Then came 1843, the Wairau massacre, and the resulting troubles in the Wellington Province, when the chiefs of the Ngati Toa returned from the south. The Maoris of the Te Aro’ pa, who were organising Bevan’s supply of flax, were affected by the situation, and the supply was cut off. Bevan knew, however, that there were rich flax swamps up the coast on the shores of the rivers and streams of the Manawatu. He decided to transfer the business to Waikawa, near Otaki, leaving the children with their aunt in Wellington until he should send for them. Meanwhile the troubles between Maori and Pakeha grew worse. Raiding

parties made sorties from the coast inland to outlying farms in the Hutt and other. areas. Captain (later Sir George) Grey, as Governor, extended the military outposts up the coasts in preparation for the trouble to come. Then finally the message came from Waikawa for the children to join their father, a message conveyed by the skipper of the little schooner Fidele, which was to take them home. That night when. the schooner. sailed the

children must have thought they were nearly home, but a storm forced the Fidele back to harbour, a storm so wild that (as Thomas, the eldest boy, told Elsdon Best years afterwards) nothing on earth would have got them on board again. The next messenger was Ropina, a Maori who was not only a friend of their father, but related to the hostile chiefs of the Ngati Toa. This relationship was to ensure the children’s safe conduct on a journey of sixty miles through hostile country, hostile not only because of the aroused Maoris, but because of the dark forest, the rivers and not least, exhaustion, which, though meaning nothing to the powerful Ropina, would be more than ‘daunting to four young .children. And so the strange group set out, past the barracks and the redoubt at Thorndon, out along the Hutt Road and into the hills at Kaiwarra, where the forest track began. The first talk in The Bevan Children takes the story thus far, and the others trace the journey up the coast to Waikawa, tell of the people’ met, and the pas and the homesteads visited, giving all the while a picture of how the children’s new world looked in those vastly different days of 1846. The Bevan Children will start from 2XP and 2XG in June, 1XN in July, and from other stations later in the ~ year.