Because Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are similar languages, barriers were minimal among the ‘Skandies’, as they were nicknamed. Unlike English settlers, their drink of choice was coffee, not tea.
Social events
In Wairarapa an annually celebrated event was the ringriderfest, in which riders tried to pick up rings from a row of posts with a levelled lance. The game of fugleskydning tested marksmanship, as pot shots were taken at an iron bird atop a post in the middle of a field. Sunday evening dances were popular among the Mauriceville Danes, especially when Jens Larsen fashioned a fiddle out of maire wood. Young settlers kicked up their heels to the polka, waltz and mazurka until sunrise, when they walked home and changed straight into work clothes.
Language
In the early years four periodicals appeared in Scandinavian languages, but these were short-lived. Most settlers were keen to become naturalised as British citizens. With intermarriage and internal migration, languages died with the first and second generations.
Danish was last widely spoken in Dannevirke in the 1900s and Norwegian in Norsewood in the 1920s. Norsewood‘s centenary celebrations in 1972 revived interest in Scandinavian culture, if not language. At celebrations 50 years earlier, an old-timer remarked, ‘practically nothing but Norwegian would have been heard’. 1 Today the main vestiges of the language in these towns are surnames, street names and gravestone inscriptions.
Churches
Many settlers missed their religion. At first, visiting ministers travelled vast distances to hold services in homes or under towering trees. The Scandinavian Wesleyan Church opened at Mauriceville North in 1881, followed by Lutheran churches in Norsewood (1882), Palmerston North (1882), Mauriceville West (1884) and Dannevirke (1887).
Churches were community focal points and ministers organised relief funds for bushfire victims. On Sundays, processions of fair-haired blue-eyed children skipped along the forest roads, preceding mothers wearing embroidered pinafores and customary kerchiefs. Fathers followed in sombre Sunday black. Scandinavians outside the planned settlements made do with rare visits from travelling pastors or changed denominations.