MARLBOROUGH PROVINCE AND PROVINCIAL DISTRICT

Formerly part of Nelson, Marlborough was proclaimed as a separate province in August 1859 under the provisions of the New Provinces Act of 1858. The manner of its establishment was characteristic of the “separatist” forces at work during the 1850s and 1860s within the original six provinces. With the spread of settlement, especially pastoral settlement, into outlying parts of the original provinces, complaints were made that although the distant parts contributed much revenue from land sales, they received little of the provincial expenditure. Furthermore, the outlying pastoral runholders were concerned at the growing influence of the small farmer and urban radicalism in some of the provincial governments. They sought to safeguard their occupation of large holdings by controlling the land regulations in their own districts. The best means of ensuring this was to create new provinces, the governments of which they were likely to control.

Provincial Government

The “centralist” or anti-provincial group in the General Assembly, led by E. W. Stafford (himself a runholder in the Awatere Valley), secured the passage of the New Provinces Act, largely as a means of weakening the more powerful provinces. This Act made it remarkably easy for any disaffected outlying district to be made into a new province provided the General Assembly were agreeable. All that was required was a petition from two-thirds of the electors in an area of not more than 3 million acres and with a population of not less than 1,000 European civilians. In three instances, Marlborough, Hawke's Bay, and Southland, separation was achieved in this manner by thinly settled pastoral districts. The creation of such small, financially weak institutions helped to discredit and undermine the whole provincial system of government. At the census of 1861 Marlborough had only 2,300 Europeans but enjoyed the full panoplies of independent provincial status.

Provincial politics in Marlborough had a comic opera quality. There were intense personal rivalries, dissension between the small farmer and pastoral factions, and conflicts between Blenheim and Picton interests resulting in frequent changes of the provincial capital (at first Blenheim, then Picton in 1861, then Blenheim again in 1866). At various times there were separation moves in the Picton, Pelorus, and Kaikoura districts, and at other times strong support for re-annexation to Nelson Province. Appropriately, the visible symbols of Marlborough's factious provincialism – the council chamber and departmental offices – were destroyed by fires at Blenheim and Picton within a few months of the abolition of the provinces in 1876.

Economic Development

Pre-European Maori settlement in the Marlborough area was concentrated at bay heads in the Sounds and on the Kaikoura coast, but at the time of European occupation the number of Maoris had been greatly reduced by raiding parties from the North Island, and the tribes in possession in the eighteenth century had been virtually wiped out. Economic development in European times has followed a contrasted pattern in each of the four main areas. North of the Wairau River, which forms a remarkably sharp boundary between the dry tussock lands and the damp, forested hill country of the Sounds, development has been spasmodic, patchy, and in part based on impermanent resources. Whaling in Cook Strait in the 1830s gave way to small-boat building in the 1840s. Later there was small-scale gold mining and extensive sawmilling in the valleys, followed by widespread bush burning on the hills and the grazing of Romney sheep. In the past 50 years dairying and intensive fat-lamb rearing have become well established in the valleys, but there has been widespread soil erosion and reversion to scrub and second growth forest on the hills. Recently the Sounds have enjoyed greatly increased popularity as a holiday resort, especially for Christ-church and Wellington people. For example, in Sounds County in 1961 holiday baches outnumbered permanent dwellings by three to two.

The second area, the Wairau Plains, with 65,000 acres of fertile alluvial soil, has always been the economic heart of Marlborough and the largest centre of population. Since the 1860s it has been a stronghold of small- and medium-scale mixed farming. Before 1914 much barley, chaff, and potatoes were exported to the North Island, but in recent decades specialisation has been rather towards peas, lucerne, and grass seed. The third area, Kaikoura coastal plain, repeats some characteristics of the Sounds area: its higher rainfall, former forest cover, and its marine resources. There were whaling stations in the 1840s but agricultural settlement was slow until small swamp and bush sections were broken in by the settlers of Irish origin in the 1870s. Dairying and fat-lamb rearing were firmly established by the turn of the century.

The remaining area of Marlborough – the most characteristic Marlborough – is the vast tussock-covered expanse with low and uncertain rainfall between the Wairau Valley and the Seaward Kaikoura Range. This was the first important area of Merino sheep grazing in New Zealand, and the squatters who occupied it were instrumental in achieving separation from Nelson. Excessive burning and overgrazing by sheep and rabbits have severely denuded many parts of the lower country, while wild goats and deer have seriously damaged the plant cover of the higher country. Towards the coast and in the lower Awatere Valley, the former large freehold runs were subdivided at the turn of the century into small grazing runs and mixed farms. Corriedale sheep supplanted the Merino, and sown grasses and arable crops replaced the tussock. On steeper country Merino and half-bred sheep grazing still holds sway, but the remotest frontiers of sheep farming have retreated. The Molesworth run at the head of the Awatere Valley was abandoned by the lessee in 1938 and has since been managed by the Department of Lands and Survey in New Zealand's most extensive example of land restoration and conservation farming. Following suppression of the rabbit menace, cattle were introduced and there has been extensive aerial reseeding of depleted hillsides.

Early Settlement

The first European settlements in Marlborough were the shore whaling stations established by Sydney merchants in the 1830s, at Port Underwood and on Queen Charlotte Sound. Little knowledge of the interior was acquired by the whalers whose interests were essentially maritime, and the next European approach was overland from Nelson by way of Tophouse and the head of the Wairau Valley in 1842. In 1841 Tuckett, the New Zealand Company surveyor, in making a reconnaissance of possible sites for the Nelson settlement, had dismissed the Wairau Plains after a cursory offshore inspection. Had he known of the easy route from the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, Nelson might have been located there. In the event, the Wairau was to be settled as an “over-spill” from Nelson – caused not through pressure of population on the resources of the Tasman Bay area, but because those who possessed capital found it more profitable to invest in sheep grazing in the Wairau than in the agricultural development of their 50-acre “suburban” holdings near Nelson.

The impetuous and ill-advised efforts of the New Zealand Company's Nelson leaders to acquire the Wairau Plains as a site for the 150-acre “rural” holdings, led to the disastrous incident known as the Wairau “massacre” (q.v.) of 1843 – the only armed clash between Pakeha and Maori to occur in the South Island. The district was eventually purchased from the Maoris by the Crown in 1847 and added to the Nelson settlement. The pastoral “invasion” began immediately. In August 1847 Frederick Weld landed the first 2,500 sheep at Port Underwood, drove them across the Awatere River, and established at Flaxbourne the first extensive Merino sheep run in the South Island. Within three years the grasslands as far as the Kaikoura Ranges had been occupied by squatters to the accompaniment of those vast tussock fires (the annual “burn off”), which were to precede the Merino sheep everywhere in the South Island in the next decade. Fourteen-year leaseholds at nominal rentals confirmed a mere 50 or so runholders in control of the grassland areas of Marlborough. After Grey's cheap land sales regulations were proclaimed in 1853, large areas of the best pastoral country were made freehold at the minimum price of 5s. per acre. Because of its early start in sheep farming, Marlborough served as the principal “reservoir” of acclimatised Merinos for the stocking of the Amuri, Canterbury, and Otago tussock lands during the 1850s.

Agricultural settlement on the 150-acre freehold sections of the Wairau Plains expanded steadily after 1855 under the stimulus of rising prices for foodstuffs on the Australian goldfields. In 1861, of the overseas-born population of Marlborough, 66 per cent were English, 16 per cent Scottish, and 8 per cent Irish – a proportion almost identical with that of Wellington Province at the same time. In 1864 the Wakamarina Valley, at the head of Pelorus Sound, was briefly rushed by some 3,000 to 4,000 gold miners, but most of them soon passed on to the West Coast. Assisted immigration in the 1870s brought 1,300 people to Marlborough and slightly increased the Irish-born element in the population.

Large-scale sawmilling began in the valleys of the Sounds district in the late sixties, most of the timber being shipped to Wellington and Lyttelton but by the end of the century the timber camps had given way to dairy and sheep farms. Until 1900 close settlement in Marlborough had not spread beyond the very limited areas of the lower Wairau Plains, the valleys of the Sounds, and the Kaikoura Plain. The great estates on the tussock lands remained intact. In no other province of New Zealand did the land subdivision policy of the Liberal Government play such a large proportional role in promoting closer settlement. Between 1895 and 1915 22 estates, comprising a quarter of a million acres, were subdivided into some 540 farms and small grazing runs. The main areas affected were the middle Wairau and the lower Awatere Valleys, the increased settlement being apparent on the population map of 1911.

Recent Trends

Since the First World War Marlborough has experienced the steady but unspectacular progress of a mature farming district and there has been little change in the outlines of the settlement pattern. The rural population has declined, except in the lower Wairau Valley, and the main trend has been the growth of Blenheim as the regional centre from 3,770 people in 1911 to 12,000 in 1961. The population of the provincial district was 2,300 in 1861, 6,145 in 1874, 16,000 in 1911, 25,700 in 1956, and 27,740 in 1961. Between 1911 and 1951 there was consistent outwards migration of population from Marlborough, but since 1951 there has been a slight gain by migration from other parts of New Zealand. Sheep numbers have remained stable since 1911 although fleece weights and the number of lambs have increased, as have beef and dairy cattle numbers. The only significant industrial development of recent years has been the Lake Grassmere salt works which utilises the high sunshine and low rainfall of the district for evaporating sea water to obtain industrial salt.

Those social characteristics of the population which can be measured reveal little that is distinctive to Marlborough. The patterns of religious adherence, age structures and birthplaces of immigrant settlers have shown little divergence from the New Zealand average during the past hundred years.

by Murray McCaskill, M.A., PH.D., Reader in Geography, University of Canterbury.

• Old Marlborough, Buick, T. Lindsay (1900)
• Marlborough—A Provincial History, ed. McIntosh, A. D. (1940).