NELSON PROVINCE AND PROVINCIAL DISTRICT

As originally delimited in 1853, the Province of Nelson comprised the whole of the South Island north of the Hurunui River to its source, thence along a line to Lake Brunner and the mouth of the Grey River. Before the provincial boundaries were drawn, there was pressure from the Canterbury settlement to have lands north of the Huruni included within the Canterbury Province. Governor Grey, however, who had full powers to draw the boundaries as he wished, was determined to limit Canterbury, probably because of his distaste for its “exclusive” social character and its policy of high-priced land. In 1859 the north-eastern portion of Nelson was detached to become the Province of Marlborough but the east coast district known as the Amuri – between the Conway and Hurunui Rivers – remained part of Nelson, probably because the size of any new province was arbitrarily limited to 3 million acres. In later years there has been much popular confusion as to the definition of the Nelson district. The provincial district is coextensive with the province as at the time of abolition in 1876. The Nelson Land District, an administrative division of the Department of Lands and Survey, is smaller; the Amuri area is included with the Canterbury Land District, and the Grey Valley with the Westland Land District.

The nucleus of Nelson Province was the Tasman Bay lowland, the site of the second organised settlement of the New Zealand Company. Economically this area has always been characterised by small-scale intensive farming. The outlying areas have had only tenuous economic and social links with the heart of the province. The Amuri was early parcelled into a few large sheep runs and had few people until the end of the nineteenth century. Its commercial links have been with Christchurch rather than Nelson, and today few people there are aware of any former community of interest with Nelson. The West Coast portion of the province was first peopled by gold miners from west Canterbury who, although not hostile to government from Nelson, had little concern for provincial sentiment or institutions. Between Tasman Bay and these outlying areas of settlement lay an extensive forested and mountainous zone whose narrow valleys were occupied by a few prospectors and cattle farmers until dairy farming developed at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Pattern of Settlement

As devised by its New Zealand Company sponsors, the Nelson settlement was to consist of 221,000 acres divided into 1,000 allotments of 201 acres, to sell at £300 per allotment. An additional 100 allotments were intended as native reserves. Each allotment comprised a “package deal” of three geographically separated sections of land – 1 town acre, 50 “suburban” acres, and 150 “rural” acres. As the location of a purchaser's sections was to be fixed by lottery following survey, the “compact and contiguous” settlement envisaged by E. G. Wakefield would be achieved only if the majority of allotments were sold and occupied promptly. The plans were made with no particular site in mind and, although they might have been applicable to a large plain such as Canterbury, were hopelessly ill-adapted to the terrain of the northern South Island with its fragmented pockets of flat land, infertile hill soils, and extensive mountain tracts. The choice of Tasman Bay (then known as Blind Bay) for the site of the Nelson settlement was a hasty compromise. The Company's officials in London hoped to select the grassy plains of the Port Cooper district (later to become Canterbury), but when the advance party arrived in New Zealand Governor Hobson insisted that the settlement be located either in the Cook Strait area on lands already included in the Company's purchase from the Maoris, or on an alternative site near Auckland. Little time could be afforded for exploration, and a hasty reconnaissance of Blind Bay failed to reveal more than a fraction of the 200,000 or so acres of good agricultural land required by the planners of the settlement. However, a port of a kind, behind a long boulder bank, was found to be within ready communication with the small Waimea Plain, and there the new settlers were landed in 1842.

The 50-acre “suburban” sections were laid out on the fern- and scrub-covered Waimea Plain, the Motueka-Riwaka flats, and the northern slopes of the Moutere Hills, but the 150-acre sections were not available until the purchase and survey of the Wairau Plain after 1847. The Nelson settlement had its share of infantile troubles. The population built up rapidly to 2,940 in 1843 but then grew slowly to 3,370 in 1849. Only 40 of the original land purchasers took up their holdings which were scattered amongst unsold lands or those bought by absentee speculators. Most of the immigrants were unskilled labourers, induced to emigrate, no doubt, by the company's assurance of work at reasonable wages until the landowners were able to give employment on their farms. In the event there were few employers, and after much suffering and near starvation it was decided to abandon one of the fundamental “Wakefield plan” tenets and give unsold land for labourers to work without any payment on their part. Finally a deferred payment plan was devised for purchase of small holdings, and the Waimea and Motueka Plains came to be settled predominantly by a “cottier” class of small farmers. Subsistence farming gave way to a mixed livestock, cereal, and potato-growing economy and the small size of holdings encouraged the adoption of crops with a high return per acre. The few men of means in the Nelson settlement preferred to invest their money in sheep farming in the distant grasslands of the Wairau, Awatere, and Amuri, while the lowlands of Tasman Bay became the most intensively settled rural district in New Zealand.

In 1861, of the overseas-born population of Nelson Province, 75 per cent were English, 12 per cent Scottish, and only 5 per cent Irish. Most of the English came from the vicinity of London. A small but significant German contingent among the emigrants of the mid-1840s settled in the Moutere Valley. They were represented in the 4 per cent of the Nelson population who were of Lutheran denomination in the 1861 census – the highest percentage of adherents of this church ever recorded in any province. One feature of Nelson's provincial organisation which had wider implications in New Zealand was its educational system. Its Educational Ordinance of 1856 provided for a school rate of £1 a year on every householder and that “religious instruction, when given, shall be free from all controversial character” and should be given at such times that children could stay away from it. Several other provinces borrowed much of their legislation from the Nelson ordinance and the influence of the province in hastening the movement towards universal public education in New Zealand was substantial.

From Tasman Bay the settlers fanned out in two directions; north-west to Massacre (later Golden Bay), and east and south-east to the Wairau and Amuri. Golden Bay was first settled at Takaka in 1845. The district developed slowly with small-scale farming and timber milling, and spasmodic coal mining until a small gold rush to the Aorere Valley brought in some 300 diggers in 1857. This event turned the thoughts of Nelson people to the possible mineral wealth elsewhere in the province. A few pastoralists quickly established a skeleton occupation and were able to entrench themselves in vast estates with no competition from outside. Between 1859 and 1866 virtually all the plain and downland was bought at between 5s. and 10s. per acre, leasehold areas on the mountains being isolated by carefully selected freehold purchases. The area thus became the stronghold of some of New Zealand's wealthiest and best-known “wool kings” of the seventies and eighties. In 1874, the date of the last census before abolition of the provinces, there were only 350 people in the district.

Gold Mining

The West Coast of Nelson Province was neglected and scarcely known for almost 20 years after the settlement of Tasman Bay. It first excited curiosity late in 1859 when small samples of alluvial gold were discovered in the Buller Gorge by a survey party under J. Rochfort. Vigorous exploratory activity followed in 1860 when provincial government parties were sent to find routeways, map the Buller coalfield, report on timber and mineral resources, and examine potential sites for settlement. A few miners from Golden Bay came by sea to the Buller in 1861 and won small quantities of gold from the river beaches, while in 1863 the open country in the central Grey Valley was taken up in three pastoral runs. The main inrush of the mining population took place in the extreme south of the province in July 1865 when diggers crossed from what were then the west Canterbury goldfields, spread up the Grey Valley and its numerous tributary creeks, and within 12 months were prospecting in the Inangahua Valley. In the spring of 1866 a large rush occurred to the terraces and beaches of the Buller coast plain. Three bustling mining camps, Charleston, Brighton, and Addisons, each of more than 1,000 people, sprang up within a few months. Charleston, with 1,800 people at the 1867 census, was then the second largest urban centre in Nelson Province. Until 1870 only alluvial gold had been worked on the West Coast but in that year gold-bearing quartz lodes were discovered in the hills east of Reefton and at Lyell. A steady flow of population set in to the Reefton district from the declining alluvial diggings and, despite great difficulties presented by the terrain and bush cover, machinery was established on the lodes by 1873. Quartz mining was a more stable basis for settlement than alluvial gold working. The most productive years at Reefton came in the decade after 1900 and new lodes were discovered in the district as late as 1920.

In Nelson, as in Canterbury, the special administrative needs of new mining districts remote from the provincial capital were met, between 1865 and 1868, by granting wide discretionary powers in local government to a nominated official. Nelson was fortunate in its choice of T. A. Sneyd Kynnersley as commissioner of the south-west goldfields. A young former naval officer, Kynnersley displayed remarkable skill and energy in dealing with a roving community of high spirited and independent gold diggers. His popularity, together with the provincial government's willingness to spend money on public works on the goldfields, were probably the main reasons why the Nelson south-west goldfields remained harmoniously attached to the parent province when Westland was agitating for separation from Canterbury.

Nelson Province did not share to any great extent in the colonial public works and immigration developments of the 1870s. Some 1,800 assisted immigrants came to the province, including several hundred to a government-sponsored farm settlement at Karamea on the West Coast. The gold rushes, however, had drawn attention to the bituminous coal resources of the Buller and Greymouth coalfields; the first spasmodic mining had been to supply fuel for steamers in the goldfields trade. A major expansion of coal mining came in the 1880s, the capital being subscribed largely in Dunedin. Within the Buller district a regrouping of population occurred as gold-mining townships on the coastal plain decayed and new coal-mining settlements were established on the high and rainswept plateau north of Westport. The labour force for coal mining was supplied not so much from the ranks of the gold diggers as by direct immigration, over a long period, of family groups from the coalfields of Great Britain.

Farming Development

In 1874 the provincial population was 22,558. By 1911 it was 48,400. Consolidation of settlement had taken place on the agricultural lands of Tasman Bay. Hops were a significant export and a speculative orchard-planting boom was in full swing on the coastal spurs of the Moutere Hills. Some 7,000 acres of land were planted in fruit trees by syndicates between 1911 and 1916 but the horticultural experience of the settlers and the size of the export markets were overestimated. Ultimately a flourishing orchard industry stabilised at some 2,500 acres on the hills and another 1,200 acres on the flats. Farmers in the wetter Golden Bay district were now turning from mixed farming to specialise in dairying. To the south of Tasman Bay the valleys had been occupied by small farmers – in many cases sons of the first Nelson settlers – in the 1890s. By 1911 dairying had been established on the valley flats, and the timbered hills were being cleared for sheep grazing – a process which in many places was to end in widespread reversion to fern, gorse, and scrub.

The population map for 1911 shows that marked changes had taken place since 1874 in the density of settlement in the Amuri district. Under the impetus of the Liberal Government's land policy, the large freehold sheep runs had been parcelled up into medium-sized arable and livestock farms on the plains and downlands and into grazing runs on the steeper, unploughable land. The pattern was set by the purchase by the Government in 1893 of the famous 84,000-acre Cheviot estate for the sum of £260,000. The area was subdivided into 104 farms and 26 small grazing runs. By 1915 five more estates in the Amuri had been subdivided by the Government while the others were gradually fragmented through private sales or division amongst members of the families of the original landowners. The pattern of land use and settlement in the Amuri district thus belatedly came to resemble that of Canterbury, and to the majority of the new settlers the link with Nelson was but a matter of history.

The West Coast area of the provincial district experienced something of a second golden age early this century. Technical improvements in quartz mining, accompanied by an infusion of British capital and more vigorous management, brought about a revival of lode-gold mining at Reefton. Coal production also increased greatly in response to New Zealand's growing demand for fuel in industry and transport. The Buller coalfield attained its maximum output in 1910 and its peak population in 1911. A substantial migration of young Australian miners to the Greymouth and Buller coalfields and the Reefton quartz mines occurred in the first decade of the century, and the radical political outlook of the district was in part related to the influence of this group. Sawmilling was also established by now in the Grey Valley and in the coastal terraces near Westport.

Recent Trends

The major trends of the past half century have been the disproportionate growth of Nelson City and Motueka borough and the relative stability of the towns of Westport and Reefton. The population of the provincial district was 48,463 in 1911, 69,111 in 1956 and 74,281 in 1961. In the Tasman Bay lowlands, farming has become more intensive and specialised, as the climatic endowments of high sunshine, mild temperatures, and freedom from strong winds have been utilised for the growing of cash crops of high value. These include tobacco, hops, raspberries, peas, vegetables, and pip fruits. Concentration on the better flat land for annual crops led to neglect of much of the poorer hill country and its general deterioration, particularly during the depression of the 1930s. Some 70,000 acres of reverted land on the Moutere Hills have been planted as State private exotic forests, but since the mid-1950s new areas of pasture land have been broken in with the use of machinery and heavy dressings of lime and fertiliser.

On the West Coast the population has declined since 1936. Quartz mining ceased when the Waiuta mine closed in 1951 and gold dredging in the Grey Valley ceased shortly afterwards. The Reefton district turned from quartz to coal mining in the 1920s and settlement has been relatively stable there, but the Buller coalfield suffered severe curtailment of its markets during the 1950s. There has been a marked migration away from the district as well as a tendency for settlement to concentrate in Westport, leading to the near abandonment of some of the coalfields settlements.

The Nelson Provincial District has long comprised two communities of rather distinct social characteristics. In the Tasman Bay area a large proportion of the population is descended from the predominantly English settlers of the 1840s, but there has been a significant flow to Nelson City of retired people attracted by the climate. There is also a marked seasonal inflow of holiday makers in midsummer and of seasonal labourers, mainly from the North Island, for crop harvesting between January and April. The West Coast portion of the province, on the other hand, was first settled by gold miners and the high proportion of Irish has been reflected in the high proportion of Roman Catholics. Later migration to the coalfields and quartz mines brought groups of Scots, Welsh, Cornishmen, and Australians.

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

• History of the Port of Nelson, Allan, R. M. (1954)
• The Amuri, Gardner, W. J. (1956)
• Jubilee History of Nelson, Broad, L. (1892)
• Vanguard of the South, Brereton, C. B. (1952)
• Nelson: A History of Early Settlement, Allan, Ruth M. (1965).