OTAGO PROVINCE OR PROVINCIAL DISTRICT

Following its foundation in 1848 the Province of Otago as established in 1853 occupied the southern third of the South Island. Its northern boundary was defined by the course of the Waitaki River from the sea to its source; thence it ran in a straight line to the Tasman Sea at Awarua Bay. As the interior of the South Island was unexplored in 1853, confusion later arose as to which of several branches of the Waitaki River constituted the boundary. After some years of dispute between the Otago and Canterbury Provincial Governments, the central portion of the boundary was defined in 1861 as running along the Ohau River to Lake Ohau and thence by a straight line to Mount Aspiring and Awarua Bay.

In 1861 separatist agitation from the predominantly pastoral settlers in the southern district of Murihiku resulted in the proclamation of the Province of Southland. The new province was bounded in the east by the Mataura River, in the west by the Waiau River, and in the north by a line from Eyre Peak to Lake Manapouri. Stewart Island was added to Southland in 1863 after its purchase from the Maoris by the Central Government. The delights of independence soon faded when the new province accumulated a heavy burden of debt. By the late 1860s most Southlanders were ready for amalgamation with prosperous Otago and reunion was achieved in 1870.

The southern and eastern coastline from the Waitaki River to Te Waewae Bay on the fringes of Fiordland has a record of long, if sparse, Polynesian settlement. Archaeological study of several moahunter camp sites suggest occupation as early as A.D. 1000. Permanent settlement seems to have been restricted to the cloudy and forest-fringed coastline with its resources of fish and bird life. But there is abundant evidence that in drier inland areas purposeful or accidental fires lit by early man destroyed much of the forest cover and extended the area of tussock grassland. There is no record of Maori agriculture in Otago in pre-European times, and in the 1830s the native population south of the Waitaki River was probably not more than 1,000.

European activity began about 1800, when parties from small schooners based on Hobart and Sydney plundered the coasts for seal skins. In 1829 the first shore whaling station was established at Preservation Inlet in Fiordland and in the 1830s at least 12 others were established by New South Wales merchants between Jacobs River (Riverton) and Moeraki. During this same period Otago Harbour and Paterson Inlet in Stewart Island served as temporary bases for the deep-sea whaling ships of many nationalities. Shore-based whaling was a speculative industry, doomed by 1843 because of its own excesses, and the whalers who remained turned increasingly to cultivation and livestock rearing. The most enterprising pioneer in this respect was Sydney-born John Jones who, in 1839, employed 280 men at his seven Otago whaling stations. In 1840 he brought 10 families to farm at the Waikouaiti whaling station and in the next few years his farm developed in such a flourishing condition that it could supply the Scottish immigrants with essential foodstuffs when they landed at Otago Harbour in the autumn of 1848.

The Free Church Project

Organised settlement in Otago had its genesis in a proposal by the Scottish parliamentarian, George Rennie, for a Scottish settlement under the aegis of the New Zealand Company. In 1844 the Company's surveyor, Tuckett, after reporting unfavourably upon the potential of the Port Cooper (Canterbury) district and the Oreti Plains (Southland), selected the Otago Peninsula and the neighbouring Taieri and Tokomairiro Plains as best suited to the requirements of the new settlement. The Otago Block of 400,000 acres was purchased from its Maori owners, 150,000 acres being reserved for the settlement, and the remainder as temporary pasturage for the settlers' flocks. Meanwhile, in Scotland the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland, later known as the Otago Association, gradually assumed main responsibility for the scheme. Its chief promoters, Captain William Cargill and the Reverend Thomas Burns, planned for a purely Free Church colony, but denominational exclusiveness was never attained, only two-thirds of the first group of immigrants being professing Presbyterians.

In keeping with Wakefieldian ideas, the price of land was to be high at £2 per acre, but the 2,000 available properties were to be small. Each consisted of a quarter-acre town section, a 10-acre “suburban” lot, and a 50-acre “rural” lot. In 1846 and 1847 survey parties under Charles Kettle were at work adapting this plan to the varied terrain of coastal Otago. When the first 278 immigrants arrived in March and April 1848, a girdle of “suburban sections” had been marked out along the wooded shores of Otago Harbour. Here the new settlers set to work, cleared the bush by cutting and burning, hoed the ground, and planted potatoes, oats, wheat, and barley. At the head of the harbour the streets of Dunedin had been surveyed in a formal grid, attempting to reproduce something of the plan of Edinburgh, but with scant regard for drainage and the pattern of ridge and gully. Beyond the hills the 50-acre sections were marked out, in chessboard fashion, on the scrub, swamp, and tussock of the plains between the Taieri and Clutha River. This area, together with some fertile flats along the hilly coastlands north of Dunedin, was the nucleus of the Province of Otago. In 1853 it contained only 2,300 European inhabitants.

Early Farming

Arable agriculture made slow progress. By 1855 some 3,600 acres were in cultivation and only 27,000 acres had been purchased. As in the other “Wakefield” settlements of New Zealand, there were many more labourers than could be employed by the few yeoman farmers and “capitalists”. Men of capital preferred to invest their money in sheep and run them on cheaply rented pasturage lands beyond the settlement block. The provincial council passed new regulations reducing the price of freehold land to 10s. per acre, with provision for £2 worth of improvements before full title could be obtained. This helped the small settler to obtain land, but the price was too high for the graziers. Reinforced by men of Australian experience, they continued to press inland with their Merino flocks, burning the country as they went.

In 1854–55 the “pastoral invasion” spread into the rich, grassy plains and downlands of North Otago and into the Southland Plain, and little port hamlets grew up at Oamaru and Bluff to serve the new communities. Then the tide moved westwards, across the mountain ranges or up the river gorges, to the sunlit basins of Central Otago. By 1861 the last runs were being claimed around the western lakes. Sheep numbers had grown from 60,000 in 1855 to 700,000 in 1861, but the runs were not yet fully stocked. By 1871 there were 3·7 million sheep in Otago or 38 per cent of New Zealand's sheep flock, the highest percentage the province ever attained.

The census of 1861, which was taken just after the separation of Southland, gives an indication of the origins of the early settlers in southern New Zealand before the community had been markedly altered by the gold rushes. Of the overseas-born population of Otago Province, 42 per cent were born in Scotland, 36 per cent in England, 15 per cent in Ireland, and 4 per cent in Australia. In Southland Province the Scottish and Australian elements were stronger – 47 and 13 per cent – and the English and Irish representation smaller – 31 and 7 per cent respectively.

Gold Rushes

The pastoralists had scarcely established themselves on their runs when the solitude of interior Otago was interrupted by the entry of tens of thousands of alluvial gold miners, an event which ensured Otago's supremacy in population and wealth among the provinces. The first vital discovery was made by Tasmanian-born Gabriel Read in the Tuapeka district in May 1861, and by the end of the year an estimated 14,000 people were on the diggings. During the next winter the prospectors Hartley and Reilly got phenomenal yields from the river beaches of the Dunstan Gorge near Cromwell, and news of their success triggered off a mass movement of diggers into the dry heart of Central Otago in the spring of 1862. In the summer the tide of mining settlement pushed into the alpine valleys of the lakes district. Later in 1863 it surged back eastwards into the Manuherikia Basin, the Maniototo Plains, and the Taieri Gorge, and the provincial gold yield reached its peak of 600,000 oz. Early in 1864 the pattern of gold discoveries was virtually complete and the maximum goldfields population of about 22,000 had been reached. In this vigorous, migratory society, males outnumbered females by five to one. Although the population was predominantly of British origin, the Irish representation was strong and most miners had spent some years on the Victorian diggings. The exodus to the Marlborough diggings in 1864 and to the West Coast in 1865 reduced the Otago goldfields population to 10,000 by 1866, but on the heels of the departing Europeans came Chinese miners to rework abandoned ground; by 1871 there were some 2,600 Chinese in the province. During the 1870s and 1880s gold mining was maintained by hydraulic sluicing, but yields fell steadily, despite increasing investment in water races and machinery. At least 80 townships originated as mining camps in the 1860s and those located at river crossings or the junction of routeways survived as rural services centres. But the most impressive results of the golden decade were reflected in Dunedin with its imposing commercial and public buildings and its rapid population growth. From a straggling village it grew to some 16,000 people in 1864, and about 24,000 in 1874.

Early Progress

The decline of gold mining in Otago did not check the growth of population and prosperity. Between 1867 and 1881 the combined Otago-Southland population grew from 56,000 to 134,000. Land sales boomed and the province received a good share of the Government expenditure on railways in the 1870s. By 1879 Invercargill and Dunedin were linked by Main Trunk railway to Christchurch, and many branch lines, including one to Kingston on Lake Wakatipu, had been constructed on the open plains and downlands by 1880. But the Central Otago railway, victim of local jealousies and Government prevarication, was a distant dream; it did not reach Alexandra until 1906 and Cromwell until 1921.

During the 1870s Otago received 27,000 assisted immigrants under the Vogel scheme – more than any other province, and 29 per cent of the New Zealand total. Immigrants and former miners swelled the labour pool and Dunedin businessmen had invested their gold-rush profits wisely. For several decades the city was the leading manufacturing, commercial, and financial centre in New Zealand. It was also the pioneer centre of the organised labour movement.

Changes in the countryside also reflected the prosperity generated by wool and gold. By 1880 there were closely settled zones of small arable and livestock farms in coastal Otago from the Waitaki River to the Clutha and on the seaward margin of the Southland Plain. These areas had been freeholded, mainly by settlers of modest means, under Otago's unique policy of deferred payment – a feature of provincial legislation that was incorporated in the land laws of New Zealand in the National Land Act of 1877. Inland from the Southland coast and on the downs of North and South Otago, the runholders had used wool profits to buy their land and create huge freehold estates. Some of these were adorned with gracious homesteads set amid ornamental trees and artificial lakes in the manner of the parklands of the British landed gentry. The estates came in for much criticism as barriers to closer settlement, but several experiments, which were to have revolutionary effects on New Zealand agriculture, were carried out on North Otago and Southland estates during the 1870s and 1880s. These included the breeding experiments between long-wooled and Merino sheep which produced the distinctive Corriedale breed, the first experimental shipment of frozen meat from the Totara Estate via Port Chalmers to London 1882, and the application of lime direct to pastures at the New Zealand and Australian Land Co's. Edendale Estate. Furthermore, during the golden age of the estates most of the flat and rolling tussock land was put under the plough, often through the agency of share croppers, and planted in oats, wheat, turnips, and improved pasture. In the 20 years after 1870 land under grain crops in Otago increased from 80,000 to 284,000 acres and the extent of sown pasture from 130,000 acres to 1,200,000 acres. Central Otago remained largely in leasehold sheep runs, but on the margins of the basins and on fertile river flats former miners were turning their sluicing races to irrigate orchards and small farms.

All was not progress, however. In the dry interior hills and mountains, sheep grazing, burning, and the explosive spread of millions of rabbits bared the land of almost all vegetation except the grey unpalatable scabweed. Rabbit carcasses figured prominently in the exports of Dunedin and Bluff – 14 million were shipped in 1894 – but the increase in Otago's sheep flock came to a halt in 1878 and showed no further advance until after 1920.

Changing Pattern

Between 1895 and the First World War several developments made for increasing diversity in the rural landscape and slightly modified the pattern of settlement. The heavily forested lands of the Catlins in South Otago and the Longwood-Waiau Valley area in western Southland were opened for sawmilling and farm settlement, branch railways reaching Tahakopa in 1915 and Tuatapere in 1909. By 1914 most of Otago's large freehold estates had been subdivided by Government action or private sale into small- and medium-scale farms; grain cultivation declined in favour of dairying and fat-lamb rearing. In North Otago the 15 estates purchased by the Crown were subdivided into 540 holdings; 1,500 people were living on them in 1912. The gold-dredging boom about the turn of the century gave temporary stimulus to mining in Central Otago and to the engineering industries of Dunedin. In 1900, the peak year of the speculative frenzy, over 180 dredges worked on the Clutha River and its tributaries and in the Waikaia Valley. With the decline of dredging there was a boom in orchard planting in the middle Clutha Valley, and in 1912 work began in the Ida Valley on the first Government-sponsored irrigation scheme in New Zealand.

Orcharding, with an increasing emphasis on apricots, peaches, and cherries, and irrigation farming have subsequently been the mainstay of settlement in Central Otago although the construction of the giant Roxburgh power station on the Clutha brought a temporary influx of population after the Second World War. The wholesale destruction of the rabbit in the early 1950s has effected a slow and steady transformation of the denuded hillsides and flats. Coastal and South Otago have had stable or declining populations since the First World War and the agricultural pattern there has undergone little change, although some deteriorated hill lands have been given over to exotic forests. On the Southland lowlands, on the other hand, there has been marked growth of rural prosperity based on intensive fat-lamb production and a high standard of grassland farming which has made good use of the abundant local resources of limestone. In the 40 years from 1919 to 1959 the sheep flock in the Southland Land District increased from 1·7 million to 5.4 million, whereas in Otago the increase was from 3·0 to 5.6 million.

The rates of growth of the urban areas of Dunedin and Invercargill reflect the contrasted conditions of their respective hinterlands. Since 1901 the Dunedin urban area has lagged well behind the other main centres of New Zealand. Its early start in manufacturing has not been maintained and, despite the advantage of its port, its remoteness from the growing areas of New Zealand has tended to deter the establishment of new industries serving a national or even a South Island market. Dunedin's population has grown very slowly from 89,000 in 1926 to 105,000 in 1961, as compared with Invercargill's 22,000 to 41,000 in the same period. Between the 1956 and 1961 censuses Dunedin grew by only 5·7 per cent, whereas Invercargill's rate was 17 per cent, the highest for any urban area south of Napier. In the 1950s Southland, by any objective measure, was the wealthiest community in New Zealand. The Invercargill tax district returned the highest average assessable income and the rise in average incomes between 1947 and 1957 was 134 per cent, as compared with 108 per cent for the whole country.

The population of Otago was 83,700 in 1874, 191,100 in 1911, 252,700 in 1956, and 267,900 in 1961. Since the early twentieth century the provincial district experienced a continued outwards migration of people, but Southland had a slight net inwards migration between 1951 and 1961. The Southland section of the provincial district has recorded a high rate of natural increase of population, whereas the Otago section has long had one of the lowest rates of natural increase in New Zealand. A large proportion of the population is descended from people who arrived in the first two decades of settlement, a factor which has preserved the pattern of religious adherence with remarkably little change since the gold rushes. In 1871, 46 per cent of the population of Otago and 51 per cent of Southland were Presbyterian, while in 1956 the proportions were respectively 44 and 49 per cent. The Scottish inheritance has probably been stronger in Southland than elsewhere, and the burred Scots “r”, which has persisted to the third generation of rural Southlanders, is one of the few regional variations in New Zealand speech.

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

• The Face of Otago, Garnier, B. J. (ed.) (1948)
• Historical Southland, Hall-Jones, F. G. (1945)
• Contributions to the Early History of New Zealand (Otago), Hocken, T. M. (1898)
• The History of Otago, McLintock, A. H. (1949)
• History of the Early Gold Discoveries in Otago, Pyke, V. (1887)
• Port of Otago, McLintock, A. H. (1951).