By B L Orr Pre-settlement: Even if records are not available, there is ample evidence, even now; Maoris inhabited that long before the land in the Hoe-o-Tainui Valley was settled by white people it. There is also evidence that here must have been quite a big Missionary station in the valley. Evidence of this is in the remains of old Hawthorn hedges still in existence and also in old worn down sections of “ditch and bank” walls in odd remaining patches of heavy white ti tree. Around 1913/15, before the ti tree was cleared, there were well-preserved walls. These walls were the fencing used by missionaries for confining pigs. No wire was used even if it was available, which is doubtful. The flats in those early days were infested with briar rose (sweet briar) and hawthorn bushes. There were old but still fruitful pear trees. It would appear that missionaries had left the valley before about 1880. Some church records may exist which would tell the true story. The Maori population must have been quite considerable, with one pa at the western end with Tarapipi the headman. Another pa, at the Waiti end, may have considered Koinaki their headman. Whoever the chiefs were does not matter. There were the families of Matetaka, Jimmy Miller, Tutepoa, Jacob, Walter, Koinaki, Tarapipi, Moana, Matahaire and others. They were quite unspoiled. They were good workers and always seemed happy. Most Sundays were spent either hunting for wild pigs in the bush, or spearing eels or trapping them in the Mangawhara and Waiti Streams. It used to be quite a common site to see dozens of eels hung on clotheslines to dry in the sun. Most families had a couple of horses or more and a single furrow plough. The horses were used for riding and also ploughing patches for potato, kumara and corn growing. Maoris owned practically all the good flat land. The poorer and bush covered areas were still government owned. Self sown grass and clover grew wild among sweet briar and hawthorn bushes introduced by the missionaries. The writer’s father used to graze and fatten hundreds of bullocks on this un-topdressed grass. There were few, if any fences but hardly any cattle got lost. The Maori landowners were a very honest lot.
Roading: Even though the area had been surveyed, there were, 1n1913/15, no, or few properly formed roads. From Morrinsville to Tahuna, the road was formed but un-metalled. From Tahuna to Hoe-o-Tainui, the road was formed for some one or two miles. It was then a track through stunted ti tree to the eastern end of the valley. Although a road was surveyed from the Hoe-o-Tainui hall site, right up the Mangawhara Stream area, it was not useable. To get "“p the Mangawhara”, there was a track along the ridge from where “Longmuir Lodge” sign now stands, to the present grass meal plant. From there on, for most of the way, the creek bed was the road. When the roads were finally formed it was a simple, but oh, how different from today, matter to metal them. River shingle was carted by horses and wagons and tip drays. Men loaded the wagons, drawn by four or more horses, with shovels. Practically all this was done by the Maoris, the only exception being, as with the writer, rate-payers unable to find the cash “worked off” their dept or rate account. The shingle was spread on the road between two lengths of 6 X 2 timber some twelve feet apart. This gave a shingle covering 12’ wide X 6” deep and was expected to last forever. Horse-drawn vehicles do little or no damage to roads compared with faster motor traffic. The Maori, with his natural crafty, or cunning, mind, made dumping of shingle a simple operation. Instead of shovelling the material off the fixed hard wooden bottom of the wagon, he removed the fixed bottom and replaced it with lengths of 3 X 2-timber edge, but loose not nailed down. The ends of each 3 X 2, where it protruded through the back end of the wagon, were rounded to make it easy to grip by hand. It was a simple matter to stop the horses in the right place and dump the load in a few minutes by wriggling one section of 3 X 2 at a time, to allow the shingle to fall through. To shovel the three cubic yards of shingle off would take over half an hour. The drays used carried some one and a half yards. There was one horse in the shafts and one or two leaders. Provided the load was not too heavy in the front, the tip device was easy to work, the whole body tipping as with today’s trucks – minus any hydraulic device. While on the subject of roading, it is interesting to think back a little and recall that road work always started after March 31st. The county had no funds until rates came in. By leaving the making of cuttings and filling in gullies until the rains started meant shocking, almost impassable, parts of mud roads. It was customary, when a wagon or gig really got stuck, for the place to be marked with a big ti tree pole to indicate that there was, at that spot, a particularly deep boggy hole. The light coach, run in those days by Tommy Burgess from Morrinsville to Patetonga, had to have 6 or 8 horses to get through in winter. Timber, iron, wire and fertilisers used in the Hoe-o-Tainui Valley mostly came from Auckland by launch and barge via the Piako River. The goods were dumped on the grass bank a mile or two down the river from Tahuna. In the winter, or when the roads were bad, 4 or 5 horses were needed to cart up to one ton from the landing to the farm in the valley. Sometimes there were misfortunes. For instance, Alister McHardy and the author of this story, on one occasion took 2 wagons plus some borrowed Maori horses to the landing for manure, McHardy had one ton to use for sowing oats, the author ½ ton to sow with some soft turnips. When we got to the landing we could see Mack’s super 5 or 6 feet below the water. The riverbank had given way. There was no half-ton for me. Calling at the store on the return trip, the writer found a letter from his Auckland merchants. It read, “We have received your order, but as you have not paid for the 1 ton of Basic Super you got from us last month, we are not sending the ½ ton ordered”. I had to go without turnips. Roads, or what were called roads in those days, were a problem and yet they were taken for granted and no one really complained or ever thought of giving up and going to town to live. Communication: There were no telephones and no mail or newspaper delivery. It was several years after the valley was settled that the telephone was connected. The settlers had to do the job themselves. The work was organised by Charles Stewart. Birch posts were split in the bush above where the grass meal factory is now sited, "sniged" down the Waiti Road and carted to the telephone line. An equal number of white ti tree poles about 12 feet long and 4 inches in diameter were cut and tied by No 8 wire to the poles after they had been fitted into the ground. One single insulator had first been screwed into the top of the pole. This single wire party line did great service for quite a long while. In the days of Tommy Burgess’ coach, mail came from Morrinsville to Tahuna 3 days a week. Most settlers in Hoe-o-Tainui used this service. If or when we wanted the mail or paper badly enough, we would ride to Tahuna to collect it. We not only collected our own, but that of all the neighbours and delivered it. This was common practice. Early settlement: One of the first people to take up land in the area, although not truly in the valley, was D R F (Don) Campbell. He and one lady schoolteacher had charge of the only school in Morrinsville. Mr Campbell was one of the finest masters one could ever come across, but he was full of theory. He bought some three hundred acres of virgin bush up the Mangawhara Road – until recently farmed by the late Syd Griffiths, the author well remembers at school in Morrinsville, Mr Campbell demonstrating, with chalk on blackboard, how he was to cut bush and grass, so many acres each year. He was to start with, say 20 cows, and build up. Just remember though, there was then no road from the farm to the road at Hoe-o-Tainui, and there was not a road to Tahuna. The track was partly creek bed and partly through private property. Farming operations did not actually start. Some bush was cleared and grass sown. A herd of cows, may have been 15 or 20, were milked. The milker was Con Fortune. He had been a schoolteacher and married a Maori girl. He had to cart the cream on a packhorse two or three days a week all the way to the nearest cream-run, Tahuna. Don Campbell gave up farming – he never gave up his real profession. Another very early settler further up the Mangawhara was Pitoki, of Polish descent and a terrific worker. He was found dead in the bush. A tree, which he was cutting down, had fallen on his foot or leg. There was evidence that he had tried to free himself by cutting off part of his leg with a sheath knife – terrible. Another interesting early-timer in the upper Mangawhara was an ex-wheelwright and his family, Jim Blackburn. He settled in after the road had been formed on a section opposite the Campbell-Griffiths land. A poor hill farm. He went into milking. He built the neatest, smoothest running, water wheel one could ever see. This gave him power for his milking machine. The first major step up in settlement came in 1915 – 20. A syndicate of farmers and professional men had subdivided, and to some extent drained, a block of 1900 acres which they had purchased from the Maoris. The area included both sides of the Mangawhara Road up the valley a mile or more and all the northern side of the Hoe-o-Tainui Road, nearly to the Waiti Road and also both sides of Tui (Tainui) Road. The Hoe-o-Tainui district even today owes a lot to at least two of the original settlers on this 1900-acre subdivision, Ed Harrison and Charlie Stewart. They were both South Island men who really knew how to farm. Their practice with this completely undeveloped area was as follows. The ti tree was felled with axes and slashers by hand some three feet above the ground – this job was done during the winter. In the autumn, February and March, the cut ti tree bush was burned off. There were some terrific fires; the next step was to get rid of the stumps, a pair of horses with collars, chains and swingle trees was hooked onto each stump. The horses, after a few hours at the job, more or less knew what to do. For instance, the pair of horses would be fixed to pull a stump. There was no hope of their being able to pull out of the ground, what was only a few months earlier, a hefty white ti tree. The first job after hooking the horses to the stump was to cut the main surface roots with an axe. Then picking up the reins and telling the horse to “Get up”, the remaining roots would be cut as the horses pulled, and out would come the stump, ready to be put on the nearby heap and burnt. To get rid of the old man Hawthorne trees was a much harder job. Horses were hitched to the tree, only after three or four plugs of gellignite had been exploded under the trees to blow out some soil and make it easier to crawl under and chop roots with an axe. One had to be clever to do a day’s work on this job without having a lot of Hawthorne in one’s back and shoulders. After the land was cleared it was ploughed – 4 or 5 horses in a “medium” swamp plough. Swedes and turnips were sown between Christmas and New Year. Oats, some of which were sold as chaff followed Swedes, and the rest used to feed the working horses. Permanent grass mixtures followed the oats crop. Many of these areas have not been sown since. Personal experiences: Possibly a list of the writer’s personal experiences in the 1918 to 1935 period at Hoe-o-Tainui, which are very vivid in my memory, would better describe the sort of lives the settles lived in those days. Not really very long ago either. 1. Delivering War News. Ed Harrison, father of Russell, and then owner, in partnership with his brother “Wip” of the Longmuir Lodge farm and some 300 acres on the other side of the Mangawhara Road, batched in a small kitchen-bedroom batch. Ed’s brother had left with the main body in the 1914-18 war. He had been reported missing (and had been killed). The Germans were advancing - had been ever since hostilities had started. Ed was despondent. I had taken some store cattle from Te Mimi out to some Maori grazing for my father, somewhere in the present Mohring country. I had left on my way home at about 3 o’clock, when I met Mr Harrison and had a few words with him. He was fencing at the roadside, next to the Hoe-o-Tainui Bridge. Even though I was only 15 at the time, I was really upset at the state of mind of the man who later became a great friend. He thought that the war was lost. He thought that he should have gone to war instead of his younger brother and, of course, he was worried about his “missing” brother. The “War News” had been terrible in France and Gallipoli. I got back home to Te Mimi about 5 o’clock, fed my pony, and went into the old house. I saw the Herald headline news right across the whole page. “Germans Hurled Back”. The French, under General Foch, had stopped the German advance at the River Marne, quite near to Paris. I had my meal and got my father to let me have his hack, rode back to Hoe-o-Tainui and gave Ed Harrison the latest news. He could possibly, probably not have known of it for a week or ten days. We had no telephones, no mail or paper deliveries. I had to ride back home that night as I had to go back to school at Wanganui the next day. That is one of the things I did of which I am pleased. Anyone else at that time, under similar circumstances, would have done the same. 2.War and Ed Harrison. I can recall that Ed joined up not long after his brother was “missing”. He was wounded in France. While in the New Zealand Military Hospital at Brockenhurst, I think that was the one, he collected a few acorns in the New Forest. The result of these acorns can be seen near the middle of Longmuir Lodge, property of G F Temm & Co. 3.Milking cows. For a change of subject, I must record that when I took over 200 acres given to me by my father, the land had only a boundary fence. There was a lot of self-sown grass among the sweet briar and hawthorn bushes on the flats. The rest, with one piece in front of Alex Orr’s and another across the gully, was all heavy standing ti tree with some hawthorn mixed in. I doubt whether any grass had ever been topdressed. I had dreams of cream cheques of eighty pounds ($160) per month. I had not enough money to buy a decent cow or heifer. They were selling for $30 - $40 per head. I had to be content with buying two pens of in-calf shorthorn and brindle heifers in the Morrinsville sale at $12 and $10.50. Some turned out to be suck-teats, as wild as rabbits. The herd of 40 odd averaged 123 lbs. of butterfat. The price which had been the previous season 2/6. 25 cents per lb. butter fat, was down to 8 cents during my first year but, as mine was all second grade, the payout was 6 ½ cents. The cream was second grade because the cream-cart only ran every second day and my shed was not fit to the use anyway. Mr biggest cheque was twenty-six pounds, not eighty as I had expected. What a life! The only part of the cowshed that had a concrete floor was the separator room and bail area. The small yard got so deep in mud quite early in the season, that I resorted to covering it with “fascines” (bundles of ti tree). The stink a month or two later when the weather got hot and the ti tree and dung began to rot was pretty unbearable. My first three years of milking cows cured me. I think that there were others in the valley that worked under similar conditions but I think that I would have been the most stupid of the lot. 4.Rearing calves. I did not stop and think I just reared all of the calves from the 40 heifers. Like their mothers, shorthorns and brindles. The evening job was to feed the calves after dark. I worked up until 5 o’clock cutting ti tree or fencing, then milked the cows and then fed the calves. How well I remember in the wet, under ti tree where the calves were tethered, teaching the fool things to drink. The sad part though, was around April or May when I had to sell them. Charlie Stewart gave me $1.25 for the steers and $1.00 for the heifers. But worse follows! 5.Pigs. The calves that I kept hat first season could not cope with all the skim milk. I bought 5 nice weaner pigs from Jack Stewart at Tahuna. Jack was our riding member on the County Council and also from the north of Ireland. I gave him $4.00 each for the five pigs. A Northern Irishman would not, as a rule, sell for below value. Anyhow, I had a square of about 50’ X 50’ fenced off in the ti tree near the cowshed. The fence was made of ti tree stakes and 4 or 5 barbed wires. In the middle I had made a shelter of ti tree and fern and had also a trough ready, made from two 12 X 1 pieces of untreated pine. Skim milk pumps were not thought of (at least at Hoe-o-Tainui). With these five pigs established in their very cosy pen, I very conscientiously carted, in buckets made from old 4-gallon petrol tins, all the spare skim milk to the pig trough. The “spare” milk went form the old second hand separator to a 40/50 gallon old wooden barrel. The stuff I fed to the pigs was well curdled and a bit stinking. These five pigs were well fed from October until May or June, I then did not have enough skim milk and decided to take the five into Morrinsville where pigs were bought “on the scales” at the railway station. Before I milked the cows one evening, I backed an old ex-army wagon that my good neighbour and I owned, on to the corner of the pig yard. I made what I thought was a race up from the pig yard to the wagon. After I had finished milking, by arrangement Alister McHardy, my neighbour arrived to help me load the pigs onto the wagon. As soon as I tried to get them to run up the “race” I had made, they got excited and broke down the 5-wire fence and disappeared into a patch of some 20 acres of ti tree. I had a useful dog that tracked them down one at a time. I had to tie a short piece of rope to a hind leg and then push the pig through the ti tree to the wagon. If the pig tried to run in the wrong direction, I pulled him back with the rope. Then, at the wagon, Mac and I caught one ear each, joined our hands together under the belly and heaved the brute into the wagon. Mac waited for Shep and me to get the others. We finished well after dark, somewhere about 10.30. I threw a few turnips into the wagon and an old horse cover over the top to keep the 5 animals warm. I
finished milking early next morning and was I well remember, driving
down toward the road as the sun was rising.
Mac was waiting at his road gate, as we had arranged that we
would both go into town. When
he got onto the seat in front with me, hr turned around, looked under
the horse cover and said, “One of them is dead!”
We stopped, heaved the dead pig out onto the road and dragged it
into the scrub, I don’t remember burying the thing – Mac may have.
Anyhow, we arrived at the Morrinsville railway station about 4
hours later and then found that the buying of the pigs had finished for
the season. In desperation,
I rang a butcher, Mr Dendy. He
said that he had more pigs than he knew what to do with.
I pleaded; I must have been almost in tears. Mr Dendy came around to the station and gave me two pounds,
twelve and six for the 4 remaining pigs.
I still had to take them another three or four miles away to his
slaughtering yards and pig farm. Incidentally,
when I rang him I had said that the pigs were “baconers”.
As soon as he saw them he said, “These are choppers, not
baconers”. They were
actually baconers, but about twice the usually accepted weight.
It was about 8 o’clock when we got back to Hoe-o-Tainui with
two very tired horses. All this happened in 1920, or thereabouts.
I had paid $4 (two pounds) each for the 5 weaners – ten pounds
in all. I sold four at two
pounds, twelve and six each and got back from Mr Dendy a cheque for ten
pounds, ten shillings. I
often wonder how many people have done so much work for ten shillings
($1.00), as I did with those pigs. I recall two other pig deals. One was in about 1928. I had a crop of swedes and turnips grown on Maori land. It was Mat. Four sows and 30 odd suckling pigs from a nearby farm kept getting into the turnips and eating and messing the crop. The owner of the pigs could not keep them at home and was unable to get them to the saleyard. I bought the better ones at $1.00 each. I honestly had no idea what they were worth. I arranged with my good neighbour friend, McHardy, to have the use of a pigpen he had. I arranged with the Tahuna storekeeper, Arthur Waide, to get cracking and bring a buyer to McHardy’s at 2.30 that afternoon to buy 30 weaner pigs. I then drove the wagon to the offending pig owner’s farm, loaded the 30 little pigs into the wagon and had them in McHardy’s pig pen at 2 o’clock. Right on the dot, Arthur Waide arrived with Clark, a dairy farmer with a patch of artichokes, from near Patetonga. I said I wanted $2.10 for the pigs. Clarkie said, "Gee, they would not make any more than that in the sale at Morrinsville.” Was I relieved! For all I knew they may have been worth less than I had paid. We made a deal at $2.00, a gross profit to me of $30.00. That helped to make up for my first deal. No record of the early pioneering days would be complete without reference to Arthur Waide and his wife. The way that they ran the store at Tahuna was a real help to the settlers who were trying to develop the Hoe-o-Tainui Valley. The other pig deal I want to note was made during the 1930/34 slump. A very honest, likeable young chap, Tom Donkin, had lost his job at a boiling down works that had closed down. Tom suggested that he would work for $6.00 per week and keep, do some droving and, in the main kill and cook almost valueless old cows and feed them to the pigs. He got the job. We fixed up a cooking outfit, a 400-gallon square tank, with room below for a good fire. We collected some old, useless round water tanks for pig houses. I bought about 100 store pigs and we were in business. I have never seen pigs do better than these. They had the run of a good grass paddock and had all that they could eat and drink of the well-cooked beef and water it was boiled in. But, the financial result was not so hot! Very roughly, the only profit was in the value of the fertiliser. I sent the bones to Horotiu and had them ground into some two or three tons of bone dust Tom Donkins was later, in better times, a stock agent for NZ Loan and is now semi-retired and does some cattle dealing. 6.Crafty Maoris. The experiences I had over, or when trying to, break in the Hoe-o-Tainui farm now owned by Alec Orr may be of interest. For instance, I had managed to get Collins paddock into grass. This is a paddock on the Mangawhara Road. I had got this paddock into very good grass, but across the area was an old sod wall (ditch and bank) about 4’ 6” high and fairly well preserved. It was a nuisance and an eyesore. I spent a full day with a spade and shovel and dug it down for about half a chain. I stood on the bank and reduced it to ground level by digging one spade, or shovel full, at a time and spreading it in the ditch part. The next day a couple of Maoris, on their way across the farm as a short cut from the western end of the valley to the upper part of the Waiti Road, called in the cowshed where I was milking. They wanted a job. I told them the truth; I had lots of jobs that needed doing but not money. They asked if I would let them dig down the old Maori wall. They had seen what I had done. I asked them how much they would want to do it. The answer was five pounds ($10.00). The wall was 15 chains long, at least. I had taken a good eight hours to demolish no more than half a chain. It would take me at least 30 days to level the thing. That meant an awful lot of work for five pounds. I did not have the money but reckoned it would take the two 2 weeks to do the job and by then I would have got the money somehow. My reply was, “Do it for four pounds and it’s a deal.” This was accepted. Next morning, again while I was milking or washing up, I saw the pair with spades and shovels on the way to the nuisance wall. In the evening, again when I was milking, the two Maoris called at the shed and said they had come for their cheque. Quite naturally I said that I would not pay until the job was finished. They said that it was. I made them wait until I had finished the cows. It took only ten minutes to cross the creek and have a look. The job had been done perfectly. I was amazed. These two Maoris, Tamiti Johnson and Jimmy Miller, lived up the Waiti Road next to a good and fairly early settler, Dolf Crocombe. I gave them their two, two pound cheques; I cannot remember how I fixed it with the bank to honour them. What I do well remember was their reply when I asked how they had done the levelling of the bank. Instead of digging down a shovel full at a time, they had walked along one side for about 10 yards, digging their spades in near the bottom of the wall. They then made a cut through the wall and on the other side made a spade cut at the bottom of the wall and heaved, or levered, the whole 10 yards of the wall over into the ditch on the other side. It was a simple matter then to bash the earth more or less level. I never was so pleased in giving these two chaps more than the then rate of 10/- per week. 7.Cream Carting. Cream that came from west of the
Hoe-o-Tainui school and hall corner was carted by horses and wagons to
the railway at Ohinewai. From
the school corner east it was carted to Tahuna.
A wagon and six horses, run by a Bill Shannon, carted cream from
Tahuna to a butter factory at Waihou.
More should be said or published about the Maoris of the early Hoe-o-Tainui days. The few settlers, Harvey Clothier, Bill Collins, Ed Harrison, Charlie Stewart, Mohrings, Bert Kelly, Jack Welham, Jack Laing, Dolf Crocombe, and others could not possibly have converted as area of undrained swamps, heavy ti tree, and no roads or fences, into good farms without the help of the Maoris. They were on call for all of these jobs as well as haymaking. Thanks are due to them for what they did to help make Hoe-o-Tainui what it is today.
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The first contract for carting from Hoe-o-Tainui to Tahuna was
won by a Mr Bidlake who used a double buggy with the back seat removed.