As constituted in 1853, the Province of Canterbury occupied the central part of the South Island and extended from east to west coasts. East of the Main Divide the province was bounded by the Hurunui River in the north and the Waitaki River in the south. At that time there was virtually no population outside of Banks Peninsula and the seaboard margin of the Canterbury Plain. West of the Southern Alps settlement began with the gold rushes of 1864–65, and originated from Otago, Nelson, and Victoria rather than from the early settled nucleus of Canterbury around Christchurch. In 1868, after three years of uneasy association under the one provincial government, the communities of east and west Canterbury were separated by the establishment of the County of Westland as a distinct local government entity. Henceforth Canterbury's western boundary was the crest-line of the Southern Alps.
The southern boundary of the province was the cause of confusion and dispute with Otago. The course of the upper Waitaki River was unknown when the boundary was proclaimed in rather vague terms in 1853. As pastoralists spread into the back country, the Otago and Canterbury provincial governments, anxious for pasturage rentals, both claimed land in the Mackenzie Country between Lakes Ohau and Pukaki. After three years of negotiation the dispute was settled by the General Assembly and the boundary was fixed along the Ohau River to Lake Ohau, and thence in a straight line to Mount Aspiring.
When European settlement began in Canterbury in the 1840s, there were probably no more than 500 Maori inhabitants. A few decades earlier the number had been substantially greater before civil wars and raids by North Island warriors wrecked havoc with the local Ngai Tahu peoples. Most Maori settlements were located on the bays of Banks Peninsula and on the fringes of bush patches and swamps on the plains – notably at Kaiapohia, Arowhenua (Temuka), and Waimate. Banks Peninsula was apparently the southern limit of kumara cultivation in pre-European New Zealand but, as crop yields were uncertain, the Canterbury Maori depended largely on fish, fern root, and waterfowl for food supply. The pa at Kaiapohia was an important centre for fashioning tools and ornaments from the West Coast “greenstone” (q.v.) or nephrite, and was the base for a profitable barter trade with northern peoples.
Because of the great extent of tussock-covered plain and downland in proximity to the forests and harbours of Banks Peninsula, Canterbury should have appeared an attractive site for European colonising ventures in the 1840s. Yet, despite many natural advantages and the small number of Maori inhabitants, organised settlement on the Canterbury Plains did not begin until 1851. Banks Peninsula provided the first foothold for European enterprise. Whaling ships of several nationalities appear to have used Port Cooper (later Port Lyttelton) and Akaroa Harbour from 1835 onwards, and shore whaling stations were established on the southern bays of the peninsula between 1837 and 1840. Whaling stations were also established for brief periods at Motunau Island on the north Canterbury coast and at Timaru, where volcanic rock out-cropping on the coast gave a little shelter and made feasible the landing of small boats. An outcome of French whaling activity in Banks Peninsula was the rather forlorn attempt by the Nanto-Bordelaise Company to found an agricultural and whaling settlement. In 1840 some 65 poverty-stricken French emigrants landed at Akaroa and began clearing five-acre “farmlets”. They made slight progress and of those who remained during the 10 years few did little more than cultivate vegetable gardens.
More successful farming ventures were soon established by a few enterprising British families on the northern side of Banks Peninsula, at Akaroa and at Riccarton on the plains. Of these people, the Deans, Hay, Sinclair, and Greenwood families had been immigrants to the New Zealand Company's first settlement at Wellington but were dissatisfied with the agricultural prospects there. By 1845 all of them were sending cheese and fat cattle to the Wellington market. Cattle and sheep numbers built up steadily, outstations were formed on the fringes of the downland across the Canterbury Plains at Motunau and in the Malvern Hills, and farming experience was acquired which was to be of great value when the Canterbury Association settlers took up their land in 1851. By 1848 in the district that was to become Canterbury, there were 265 Europeans, some 300 acres in wheat and potatoes, and more than 700 cattle and 4,000 sheep grazing on land rented from the Maori.
Organised settlement in Canterbury had its genesis in a blending of the ideas and enterprise of two very dissimilar men – Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the colonial theorist and organiser of somewhat tarnished reputation, and John Robert Godley, a young Irish squire of deep religious convictions and with high connections in church and state. In 1848 the Canterbury Association, with an impeccable membership list including two archbishops, five bishops, assorted peers and baronets, members of parliament, and some high business figures, first met in London with the object of founding a Church of England settlement in New Zealand. A surveyor with extensive New Zealand experience, Captain Joseph Thomas was appointed to select a site comprising at least 1 million acres, of which approximately 300,000 were to be easily available for cultivation. The site should have an “almost complete absence of natives”, and, if on a coast, it was to have “a good and commodious harbour”. Few areas in New Zealand away from established settlements met these specifications and, although Thomas intended exploring the Manawatu, the Wairarapa, and the Hawke's Bay plains, his party first examined the country inland from Banks Peninsula. Thomas soon had no hesitation in selecting the Port Cooper plains as the site for Canterbury although a number of shortcomings were recognised in the swampy nature of part of the site for the capital town, the maldistribution of timber supplies, and the difficulty of access between Port Cooper and the plains. In 1850 the Canterbury Association was granted powers to dispose of land within 2,500,000 acres, generally known as the “Canterbury Block”, between the Waipara and Ashburton Rivers and occupying about half the Canterbury Plain.
In keeping with Wakefield's views on the “sufficient price” of land, rural allotments of 50 acres and upwards were to be sold at £3 per acre, 1 to be devoted to the educational and religious needs of the settlement, and another pound to be spent on assisted immigration of labourers. It was believed that the high price of land would prevent undue dispersion of settlement and, by discouraging men of small means from becoming landowners too soon, would ensure an adequate supply of farm labour. Alone among the “Wakefield” settlements the plans for Canterbury gave some recognition to pastoralism although it was accorded a distinctly subordinate and temporary role in the economy. Regulations provided for the leasing of unsold lands under annual licence but at comparatively high rentals and they gave no security of tenure or right of compensation. In contrast to Otago, where the surveyors marked out the 60-acre rural sections before the settlers arrived, in Canterbury rural sections were not surveyed until after the arrival of the settlers and the payments of the purchase money. Colonists were thus free to select land anywhere within the “Canterbury Block” as they saw fit and were not bound by the formal geometry of a prearranged plan.
The settlement was intended to be a transplanted cross section of the best of English society, complete from bishop and gentry to artisans and labourers, and emigrants were to be selected so that as far as possible “none but persons of good character, as well as members of the Church of England, shall form part of the population, at least in its first stage; so that the settlement may begin its existence in a healthy moral atmosphere”. These plans were to be put into effect under Godley's personal leadership and two years were devoted to preparatory work on the site involving surveys, road and wharf building, and the erection of temporary accommodation. The main body of 780 immigrants, 106 of whom were land purchasers, arrived in four ships at Lyttelton in December 1850 and were soon engaged in subduing a wilderness of swamp and tussock. Some 13,000 acres of land were selected, mainly around Lyttelton Harbour and within a four-mile radius of Christchurch, thus achieving, briefly, the concentrated pattern of settlement desired by the founders.
It has sometimes been claimed that Wakefield's colonisation principles more nearly succeeded in Canterbury than in Wellington, Nelson, and Otago. Certainly a more serious attempt was made to apply these principles, and Canterbury attracted a disproportionate share of talented and educated young men, many of whom were to play a leading role in provincial and national affairs in the next 30 years. Of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived on ships chartered by the Canterbury Association, one-third were fare-paying cabin class passengers. Land survey arrangements worked well and the Canterbury settlers escaped the hardships and muddle that afflicted many of the Wellington and Nelson immigrants. Nevertheless, the Canterbury settlers had the advantage of a decade of previous agricultural experiment in their area; they had a supply of acclimatised livestock and could draw on the mistakes of earlier colonising ventures in New Zealand.
There were few serious efforts to attain the rigid denominationalism envisaged by the founders. Canterbury was indeed the most “Anglican” of the provinces for some time: in 1861 sixty-seven per cent of its population professed adherence to the Church of England compared with 45 per cent for New Zealand Europeans as a whole. But Canterbury was soon surpassed in the proportion of Anglicans in the population by the provinces of Hawke's Bay, Taranaki, and Marlborough, none of which was founded with any thought of denominational exclusiveness. As for Canterbury's distinctively “English” character, 73 per cent of the overseas-born population of the province at the census of 1861 were born in England – a proportion slightly less than that of Nelson and Taranaki. In the composition of its original settlers Canterbury was only slightly more “English” than were Wellington, Hawke's Bay, and Marlborough. The English element among later immigrants to the province diminished. Of the 13,700 assisted immigrants brought out by the Canterbury Provincial Government between 1857 and 1870, some 45 per cent were of Irish or Scottish birth.
The prosperity of Canterbury in the 1850s owed more to the export of merino wool and to the unexpected development of a market for the products of intensive agriculture on the Victorian goldfields than to colonising theories. Canterbury maintained something of an English class structure and a “landed gentry” because colonists with capital in the 1850s chose to invest it in sheep flocks on distant pastoral leaseholds rather than purchase the freeholds of arable farming estates near Christchurch. In the later 1850s and the 1860s it was the “small men”, including artisans and labourers, who were the purchasers of freehold land in Canterbury.
The “pastoral invasion” of the South Island grasslands had already begun when the Canterbury settlement was founded. Australian graziers with capital and merino sheep were arriving in the district and were occupying lands outside the Canterbury Block at low rentals. Godley and the Canterbury settlers, placing economic gain before theoretical principles, persuaded the Canterbury Association in 1852 to grant cheap pastoral licences on terms comparable to those of the New Zealand Government's Crown Lands Ordinance of 1851. Pastoral occupation surged rapidly across the plains. By 1855 all the plains and downland and the “front country” of the ranges had been taken up in runs of 5,000 to 10,000 acres. The tide paused for two seasons until C. G. Tripp and J. B. Acland proved at Mount Peel that sheep could be wintered successfully in the high country. Then the sheepmen moved rapidly into the alpine valleys and interior basins and by 1860 had established a skeleton occupation of all the grasslands back to the beech forests and snowfields.
Everywhere, stocking was preceded by vast tussock fires, and although necessary at first to clear spiny growth, massive burning became so ingrained in the habits of two generations of pastoralists that widespread and permanent damage to plant and soil cover has resulted. By 1858 Canterbury had surpassed Nelson as the premier sheep farming province, a position it lost to Otago, however, by 1867. Sheep numbers grew fivefold from 500,000 in 1858 to 2,500,000 in 1867 and to a peak of 5,000,000 in 1886. Thereafter Canterbury sheep numbers declined until the late 1920s. Although much attention has been given to the rapid spread of extensive pastoralism after 1852 and the manner in which it disrupted plans for close settlement, most of the population, in fact, continued to live near Christchurch. Of the 16,000 people in Canterbury in 1861, four-fifths lived in a narrow coastal strip between Rangiora, Christchurch, and Lyttelton and on small farms on the shores of the Banks Peninsula bays.
Mixed farming and closer settlement spread out from two points: from the early settled lands near Christchurch, and from Timaru, where the first direct immigrant ship arrived in 1859. Land sales were stimulated after 1856 when the price of rural land in Canterbury was reduced from £3 to 2 per acre and the minimum area from 50 to 20 acres. Near the towns this action helped the settler of limited means to become a landowner, but in more distant areas the large runholders were able to freehold the most desirable parts of their properties and check the spread of closer settlement.
Small farmers occupied the deep, fertile loams of the coastal lands, and with axe, spade, and wooden plough they cleared the flax and tussock, drained the swamps, and enclosed their fields with cob walls capped with gorse hedges. Heavy demands were made on Canterbury's meagre and patchy supplies of timber and many latter-day market towns, including Rangiora, Oxford, Geraldine, Temuka, and Waimate, originated as sawmilling centres in the 1850s and 1860s. Nor'west winds were a grave fire hazard and much of the Banks Peninsula forest and most of the timber patches on the plains and downland were accidentally destroyed before milling was complete.
In provincial New Zealand the strength of provincial sentiment diminished with increasing distance from the provincial capital. In the 1860s the growing community of South Canterbury, separated from the seat of Government in Christchurch by wide unbridged rivers and the sparsely occupied lands of mid-Canterbury, twice made a bid to become a separate province or county. In 1867 the General Assembly responded to Timaru's separatist agitation by creating the Timaru and Gladstone Board of Works – a body endowed with a specific proportion of the Canterbury provincial land revenues and authorised to construct and maintain harbour works and local roads and bridges.
The 1870s were years of spectacular change on the Canterbury Plains. The introduction of the double-furrow steel plough speeded up the conversion of the tussock into paddocks of grain, root crops, and English grasses. The construction of water races allowed cultivation and settlement to spread on to higher and drier parts of the gravel plains, while reaping machines and steam threshing machines made possible the large-scale cropping of wheat for export. Much of the Central Government's public works programme was directed to the building of some 400 miles of railway in Canterbury. Settlement spread quickly into the plains land between the Rakaia and Rangitata Rivers. Land sales increased rapidly as runholders, readily supported by banks and credit agencies, purchased the remaining leasehold portions of their runs.
Between 1871 and 1881 the area in cultivation increased from 300,000 acres to 1,307,000 acres and the area in wheat rose from 46,000 acres in 1871 to 249,000 acres in 1883. Between 1870 and 1879 Canterbury received 25,700 assisted immigrants, or 28 per cent of those who came to New Zealand under the scheme initiated by the Vogel Government. Many of these immigrants formed roving labour gangs of navvies, teamsters, and ploughmen; some were established as semi-subsistence farmers on small “village settlement” blocks of two to 10 acres and many others were absorbed into expanding factory industries in the towns. During the seventies a number of farmers, including John Grigg of Longbeach, were building up flocks of specialised mutton breeds of sheep – Shropshires, Leicesters, Lincolns, and Romneys – and Canterbury farming was thus able to take ready advantage of the new markets opened up by the frozen meat trade in the 1880s.
The early settled parts of Canterbury, including Banks Peninsula and the plains area between the Waimakariri and Waipara Rivers, attained their maximum rural population as early as 1886–that is, within one generation of initial settlement. In mid-and South Canterbury, and especially on the downlands, the subdivision of the great estates between 1896 and 1911 caused a later infilling of the settlement pattern. Government purchase of estates under the Lands for Settlement Act was confined mainly to the area south of the Rangitata River, where 348,000 acres were resumed and settled by 1914. The largest purchase was Allan McLean's Waikakahi estate near Waimate, where 48,000 acres were bought in 1899 and subdivided into 162 farms and small grazing runs. In mid-Canterbury, where estate owners saw the logic of rising land values and increasing taxation on large properties, there were many private subdivisions in the first decade of the century, the most notable, perhaps, being the sale of Sir John Hall's Terrace estate at Hororata in 1907 and Duncan Cameron's Springfield estate near Methven in 1909. Cameron had been a pioneer in water-race construction and Hall in the planting of windbreaks – two practices which have been vital to the success of close settlement and mixed farming in Canterbury.
There have been few major changes in the economic pattern of Canterbury over the past 50 years. Since 1911 the rural population of Canterbury as a whole has been stationary and all net growth in the provincial district has occurred in the towns and cities. Almost all new manufacturing industries have been located in the Christchurch urban area and, to a lesser degree, in Timaru. With improvements in transport the large centres have grown bigger while most of the small towns and villages have remained stable or declined.
Standards of grassland farming have greatly improved while the relative importance of grain cropping has diminished, although acreages fluctuate with varying returns from fat-lamb farming. Irrigation schemes constructed in the 1930s have given greater security to farming on the shallow gravelly soils of Ashburton County but as yet have had little effect in promoting closer settlement. However, the introduction of subterranean clover and the use of lime and fertiliser have greatly improved the productivity of “dry” farming on some 850,000 acres of stony plains land.
Early shelterbelts of exotic trees planted by farmers and local bodies have matured and provided a valuable timber supply since about 1940, while extensive State forests have been established in areas where farming had failed, as on the porous gravels at Eyrewell and on sour downland soils at Ashley.
The Canterbury high country has not shared in the growing productivity of the plains. Its farm population is probably less than it was in the 1870s and, although the area suffered less from the depredations of rabbits than did Marlborough and Central Otago, sheep flocks have fallen well below the peak numbers attained about 1890. The introduction of deer, chamois, and thar for sporting purposes has hastened deterioration of higher-altitude vegetation. Advances in agricultural knowledge during the 1950s suggest that considerable improvement of pastures on lower slopes is possible and that the growing of fine wool and breeding stock there is not incompatible with the retirement of the higher lands from grazing. Increasingly, the high country has been utilised for its hydro-electric power resources and scenic and recreational attractions. Considerable areas near the Main Divide have been set aside as national parks, forest parks, and watershed protection forests.
The population of the provincial district was 58,775 in 1874, 173,443 in 1911, 307,513 in 1956 and 336,705 in 1961. Canterbury has long been the province with the highest proportion of females to males in the population. This reflects the early economic maturity of the province and the absence of activities calling for predominantly male workers. Since 1911 there has been a small but consistent inwards migration to Canterbury, a trend which has increased slightly since 1945. The bulk of the population growth, however, has been due to natural increase of the local population.
by Murray McCaskill, M.A., PH.D., Reader in Geography, University of Canterbury.