The impact of communications in Manawatu-Kairanga, 1874 - 1916

Abstract

The dawn of European occupance in the central districts of New Zealand dates from the faltering beginnings of the New Zealand Company settlements at Wellington,Nelson,Wanganui and New Plymouth. Each was a marginal niche in the forest, possessing a cramped hinterland, but long ocean highways lay at their disposal. These islands of settlement were linked by the sea but their immediate lack was a hinterland,productive of trade. Midway between the settlements at Wellington and Wanganui an accommodating river mouth was known to exist and by the mid 1850s a trading port on the Manawatu had opened for Wellington (and to a lesser extent for Wanganui) a supply of potatoes and flax from its alluvial riverbank plots. Before long this port of Foxton itself felt a need for a larger hinterland and interest turned to the potential wealth of its inland forests and their soils. As upstream river transport soon proved inadequate, the first roads appeared. At the terminus of the first crude 26 miles, Palmerston, a milling centre, came alive. In only five years, Foxton, the mother of the district, had been outgrown, and the inland township was spreading out its own road pattern to grip the district to itself. The pattern of township fostering hinterland, had been repeated once more. Gordon East has observed that in the extensive steppe-desert belt of the Old World natural obstacles, such as forests, were at a minimum and here communications, and the movements of man were relatively unrestricted East (1958):66-67. Only at a later phase when cultivation lands were scarce did man migrate to contend voluntarily with the forest habitats of the New World. Such is the pattern observed in the local district, although the time and areal scales were obviously much smaller. In Manawatu-Kairanga scrubland pastoral holdings were leased from Maoris as early as the 1840s, preceding by thirty years the European penetration of the bush and solid effort at land development.