The Mōtiti Road Rail Ferry

 

Two maps of Mōtiti.  Neither is contemporaneous with Brain’s work on the island, but the coloured image shows the settlement pattern of the island’s residents in 1929; the black and white sketch map shows the route (dashed line) of the tramline that once led to Orangatea Bay.  Images: (left) Western Bay of Plenty District Libraries, SAK 34A, digital only; and (right) Te Ara, An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A. H. McLintock, 1966

I first began researching the people who lived in the Brain Watkins House back in the early 2000s  when I was working for NZ Historic Places Trust (now Heritage New Zealand).  Among the listed achievements of Joseph Brain was “a tramway on Mōtiti Island to transfer cattle to a ship waiting off shore”.

George Alexander Douglas, An Irishman, originally from Derry, moved down from Auckland to Tauranga and received a Crown Grant of a piece of land in 1867. He became a successful storekeeper when he arrived in Tauranga.

He had begun working in Auckland as a commissariat contractor supplying the military forces in the country and was elected a member of the Auckland Provincial Council from 1869 to 1873. G A Douglas leased a portion of Mōtiti Island from a local chief Tupaea, probably commencing in 1867 but he did not move there to live until 1870. He improved the breeding of cattle and Clydesdale horses on Mōtiti. He was also responsible for the introduction of the Bumble Bees that were essential for the fertilization of the Red Clover flowers. The clover had been introduced to boost the quality of the stock food but could not flourish without the bees. The soil on Mōtiti was fertile, water was abundant from numerous springs, but it lacked a natural harbour. 

S.S.Staffa   Image: Te Ao Māramā – Tauranga City Libraries Photo 04-593

To ensure transporting stock and goods, Douglas bought a small coastal steamer S.S. Tauranga in 1870. From 1876 to 1881 he had the S.S.Rowena and S.S.Staffa. The difficulty created by the lack of a harbour was loading the stock onto his ship before he could send the cargo to Tauranga.

In Orangatea Bay Douglas built a system of stock yards, and tramline. The late local historian Alister Matheson, in his book Motiti[1], tongue in cheek, named the project “The Motiti Road Rail Ferry”. The stock yards held the stock until they were loaded on a punt that could hold twenty cattle. The punt sat on a cradle or bogie that ran down the tramline, gaining speed, and was attached by a rope on a winch on land. When the punt reached the steamer it was secured and the rope wound back by the winch. The cattle were individually lifted by slings on to the steamer, which then sailed to Tauranga.  Douglas was helped in the construction of the tramline system by Joseph Brain, the experienced ship and bridge builder of Tauranga.

Hoisting fat cattle from the wharf to a steamer for shipping from Auckland to Sydney, Australia, 1902. 

Image: Supplement to the Auckland Weekly News, 14 August 1902, p. 10

In an interview with Mrs Elva Brain Watkins, the youngest daughter of Joseph, Matheson learned that Brain’s practice was to row across the harbour to Mount Maunganui then walk along the ocean beach until he was opposite Mōtiti Island where he would signal his arrival.  A boat from Mōtiti would then pick him up from the beach. In his boatyard on The Strand Brain employed Māori men from Mōtiti who would stay at the Mōtiti Hostel across the street.

J. D. Brain, Brain Watkins House Collection.  Image: Shirley Arabin

At the time that Matheson wrote the book the only remnants of the Mōtiti Road Rail Ferry were decaying puriri posts at the site, so it is unlikely that there will be any evidence left of this project today.

When George Douglas visited Napier in 1892 to purchase sheep he fell ill and died there.  He had not married and in his will the beneficiaries of his estate were his nieces and nephews.

 [1] Matheson A.H.,Motiti,pub. Whakatane & District Historical Society P O Box 203, Whakatane 1979.

 

Editorial note: Readers may be interested in finding an extended photo-essay on Mōtiti Island life in the 1960’s by Tony Ahern, editor of Tauranga Photo News, Issue No. 34, April 3 1965:

https://paekoroki.tauranga.govt.nz/nodes/view/101354 

Flo Chapman's Farm Diaries

Flo's diaries, 1935, 1940, 1957

Farm diaries hardly ever survive. Because – if used as the publishers of these practical tools of farming life intended – they were there at the docking race, the hayshed or the A&P show. They, like their owners, had a hard life. Used to record only the dullest and most quotidian details from year to year they, mostly, were discarded as soon as the farm accounts were beyond the reach of auditors and the taxman.

Notwithstanding their usefulness for farming life, in fifty years of publication the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture makes only four references to the farm diary. These references are, however, very telling. The diary is an essential aspect of prudent husbandry [1] and land management [2]. It supports the farm’s business records [3] and can be used to satisfy an inquiring accountant of just when and why that cheque stub recording “Cash  - Repairs and Maintenance” (often abbreviated to “Cash - R&M”) was written out [4].

Perston Collection plan showing Chapman's farm, n.d.

You can therefore imagine the excitement felt by the archivist of the Te Puna Community Archive when, among the items stashed in a cupboard of the soon-to-be-demolished Te Puna Community Library, were found three battered volumes, each, apparently, recording day-to-day activities on George Chapman’s farm along Wairoa Road in Te Puna. The earliest has the scrawled inscription “1935” on its cover. The next carries an advertisement for boot polish and is from 1940, the first full year of the Second World War. The third, in slightly better nick, is confidently labelled, “Whitcombe’s New Zealand Farmers’ Diary for 1957” and carries the exhortation, below an image of exemplary mixed-country industriousness and prosperity: “This Diary will help you to increase your profit very materially, if you will keep a record of the notable facts and incidents, relating to your farming operations from day to day.”

How wonderful, the community archivist (the present writer) thought, in a landscape so changed and fractured by horticulture and life-style blocks as Te Puna’s, to have even three separate years’ record of day-to-day farming on a single farm before, during and in the decade after, WW II.

Vicinity of Chapmans farm, 2024, riverline in distance

George and Florence (always known as ‘Flo’)  Chapman’s farm was close [5] to those of H J Perston [6] and Arthur Todman [7].  If a conscientious record of ‘notable facts and incidents’ on their  property had been kept, the mid-twentieth century rural economy of quite a large swathe of land above the Wairoa River [8] might, by inference, be available to future researchers.

It turns out, not. The diaries are, each of them, Flo’s brief and unemotive account of the doings on, off and around the farm and within her household. There’s hardly a day missed, except for some blank sequences when she is evidently away from the farm. The weather is invariably reported on, but as often in terms of getting the washing dry as getting the haymaking done – or even, being “too wet to work this afternoon”. There are many references to arable crops – mangolds, onions, lucerne - and very few to animals. Pigs are delivered or sent away and the bobby calves are put out for the truck, which sometimes fails to turn up. (George’s carriage-horse hobby, for which he won prizes in 1927 [9], seems to have faded by 1935.) And his activities in the Farmer’s Union, which had been prodigious through most of the 1930’s [10], were much curtailed for the year of the 1940 diary. On January 26, Flo notes, “Men went to a farmers meeting, I went to the pictures”. After that, although they are sometimes in town on the day of Union meetings, Flo does not record any specific purpose for the trip. Fuel was tight in wartime, costs were rising in the war economy, and labour was in short supply. Their farm worker, Richard (Dick) Flavell was called up in early October [11] – nowhere mentioned in the diary – and was still on-farm for Christmas and Boxing Day, because Flo notes he had both days off.

In the easier economy of 1957, or maybe after some hard-won experience, Flo’s farm diary becomes more like the record idealised in the Journal of Agriculture. She notes the cost of baling 333 bales of hay on January 8: “£25-13-0 paid”. One-and-six a bale would have seemed a lot compared to 1935, when George and helpers built a haystack, but, unlike stacked hay, bales maintain higher nutritional qualities and all of every bale is quick and easy to feed out. The herd tester is there for the afternoon and morning milkings over 24 and 25 March. The dairy season re-starts on 7 July, when the first calf is born on a morning of “very heavy frost”. The first can of cream is sent off on 19 July, presumably still in excellent condition after eight successive days of frost that ended only on the 17^th. As the cows “come in” for the new milking season, arrivals of bobby calves and the first lamb are interspersed with car repairs and Flo’s bowling scores. On the same day she got a £2/7/2d cheque for the bobbies, George got measured for a suit. Flo has hot water piped to her wash house and carpet in her kitchen. Things are looking up on the farm.

Flo's handwriting, 31 Dec 1957

Such threads and patches are probably insufficient to support any firm historical conclusions about mid-twentieth century farming life in Te Puna. But, lodged safely as they are in the Te Puna Community Archive, the diaries are valuable as representative examples of rural work and local society, only occasionally resonant of the world a long way away [12] and often silent or only hinting at issues that must have had significant impact on the Chapman’s life on their farm [13].  These humble volumes would repay more considered study.

All images by Beth Bowden

References

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[1] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 20 June 1914 | WORK FOR THE COMING MONTH.  Author, Primrose McConnell

[2] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 16 June 1947 | STUDIES IN FARM MANAGEMENT  Author, J G Richards

[3] Papers Past | Magazines and Journals | New Zealand Journal of Agriculture | 15 August 1945 | SEASONAL NOTES  Farm Records, author E M Bates

[4] Author’s personal recollection, Ettrick Farms Limited records (private archive).

[5] Trespass warning, Papers Past | Newspapers | Bay of Plenty Times | 28 April 1921 | Page 1 Advertisements Column 7

[6] I am indebted to René Swan of Tauranga City Libraries for finding Perston’s survey drawing in their collection of local maps and plans

[7] https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2021/11/after-demobilisation-arthur-weber.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[8] https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2024/05/maihi-te-poria-and-wairoa-road.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[9] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19270224.2.20 

[10] Papers Past, multiple references; for background to farming politics at the time, see also https://taurangahistorical.blogspot.com/2019/12/putting-matters-right.html  Author, Beth Bowden

[11] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT19401003.2.32

[12] Diary entry, 4 October 1935:  “War started between Italy & Abyssinia.”

[13] Farm labour, for instance.  Not only was Dick Flavell’s departure to be a soldier delayed for months after he was balloted in 1940;  Flo’s 1935 entries between the fortnight beginning 30 September – 13 October tersely describe the strains created by worker Reg’s decision to leave.

The Lady Jocelyn, SS Hinemoa and Adela Blanche Stewart, 1878 -1910

Early Maritime Tauranga: Vessels, Visitors  Settlers and Events,  Part XXV

On 17 August 1878 the clipper ship Lady Jocelyn (Captain Jenkins) arrived at the port of Auckland after a passage of 88 days from Belfast. Aboard the vessel were 451 passengers, including 378 ‘special’ immigrants. Part of George Vesey Stewart’s No. 2 Party of Ulster Scots from County Tyrone, the 378 were bound for Katikati via Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty.¹  In 1878, Lady Jocelyn was the biggest immigrant and trading ship to visit New Zealand. Many of the Vesey Stewart settlers were men and women ‘in prosperous circumstances’, and their arrival was regarded as a distinct forward step in the settlement of Katikati, the Tauranga district, and the colony itself.² 

Lady Jocelyn under full sail, 1852, by W. Gippoer
Collection of National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Ref. PAH0623

The Lady Jocelyn was built by Mare of London in 1852 as a 2,138 ton, iron auxiliary steamer for the East India trade, before being purchased by Shaw Savill & Company for the Australasian immigrant and cargo trade. Refitted and fully rigged as an immigrant clipper and with the engines removed, she was described as ‘a splendid ship; the saloon table alone holds 100 persons; the state-rooms hold but two persons, preventing the crowding suffered by the passengers in the Carisbrooke Castle’.³ Lady Jocelyn made four notably swift voyages to Auckland, Wellington, Lyttelton and Port Chalmers between 1860 and 1900.⁴

Aboard the Lady Jocelyn were Mrs Adela Blanche Stewart, her husband Hugh (a Royal Artillery Lieutenant and the brother of George Vesey Stewart) and their son Mervyn aged seven. In her journal later published as My Simple Life in New Zealand (1908), Adela casts light on the voyage to New Zealand and the settlement and progress of  the Katikati  district. Though generally rated  ‘a happy one’ by the immigrants, the voyage was marked by seasickness, being becalmed ‘with six vessels in sight’, an outbreak of small-pox (supressed by the ship’s surgeon), mumps that ran rampant, rain, snow, hailstorms and heavy seas that swamped the cabins and broke almost all crockery. There was ‘great excitement’ when the ship’s newspaper Lady Jocelyn Herald was printed, joy at the birth of a little girl, ‘Jocelyn, of course’, and the satisfaction of ‘greedily devouring’ New Zealand bread and butter on arriving in Auckland.⁵ 

Adela and Hugh Stewart with their son Mervyn (standing far left)
Front cover of My Simple Life in New Zealand, by Adela B. Stewart (London, 1908, reprinted Typographix, Katikati, 1996)

On 19 August, the Auckland Star’s maritime reporter noted:

         A large number of the passengers by the Lady Jocelyn, were on shore this morning, making purchases, and seeing the sights of the place, such as they are. They appear a fine class of people and very, desirable fellow colonists and, as they have all some capital, they will soon be able to bring their land, or the greater portion of it, under cultivation…. This morning they were engaged in packing up and making the necessary arrangements to leave the vessel. They will, we understand, be conveyed to Tauranga in the Hinemoa, the Lady Jocelyn remaining here to discharge her cargo… We understand about 40 of the party who were left behind are following in the ship Halcione, which left London on May 30.⁶

The New Zealand Government Service Steamer Hinemoa off the Kaikoura Mountains
Oil painting on board by Frank Barnes, 1911
Collection of Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa), Ref. 1992-0035-1910

SS Hinemoa conveyed Lady Jocelyn’s No. 2 Katikati Party to Tauranga without charge. Built in 1875 by Robert Scott and Co. at Cartsdyke, Greenock, Scotland for £23,500, it was a three-masted, 551 ton, New Zealand Government Service steamer. Designed for servicing lighthouses and patrolling the coastline, it had a length of 207 feet (63.1 metres), a beam of 25 feet (7.6 metres) and a draught of 15 feet (4.6 metres). Also required to carry out castaway checks on the sub-Antarctic islands and searching for missing ships in the Southern Ocean, it was, of necessity powered by two steam engines generating 150 bhp apiece.⁷ Adela Stewart recorded that after boarding the Hinemoa at Auckland ‘during torrents of rain’, they were conveyed in ‘a good 12 hours passage to Tauranga, arriving there on a sunny morning at 11 o’clock’.⁸  

At Tauranga, the entire European and Maori population turned out to greet the new settlers who ‘were mutely frightened… at the sight of tattooed Maoris smiling Tena koe (‘Welcome’) and anxious to rub noses… the children did howl and tried to hide behind their parents, themselves bewildered by the novelty of the scene’.⁹  Adela Stewart and her family, along with their servants, three children and ‘beds, bedding, provisions, luggage’, were conveyed in three trips from Tauranga’s Town Wharf to Bowentown and Katikati with the help of little coastal steamers Buona Ventura and Katikati.¹⁰

SS Katikati (left) at Pilot Bay, Mount Maunganui, 1910
Photographer unknown
Collection of Tauranga City Libraries, Pae Korokī, Ref. 00-338

As well as performing a host of unfamiliar domestic duties, Stewart joined her husband in ‘pulling up fern roots’ and ‘dug with all her might’ to help clear their 300 acres. ‘Homesick and depressed, also hungry’, they were not impressed with the district which was to become their home for the next 28 years.¹¹  The land was covered in fern, tutu, manuka scrub and swamps, the harbour channel between Tauranga and Katikati had not been marked and not a single river had been bridged. While the Stewart’s second house was tolerably comfortable (the first had been a raupo whare), their servants endured a rat-infested cottage, ‘where these voracious rodents boldly eat the crumbs on the floor, and still worse, far worse, the poor baby’s toe nails at night’.¹² While productive, the Stewart’s estate never generated the profits expected, and they came to regret not following advice to sell quickly and buy elsewhere.

Adela and Hugh Stewart were among some of the middle class emigrants to New Zealand, who later returned home to Britain, having made or not having made their fortunes
‘The emigrants' return’, by Edward Noyce, c1852-1860. (Bauerricher & Co, London)
Collection of Alexander Turnbull Library, Ref: E-079-006

The Lady Jocelyn made ten further immigrant runs to New Zealand after 1878, including one which conveyed a large contingent of Vesey Stewart settlers directly to the port of Tauranga in 1881.¹³ The SS Hinemoa had a remarkably long life, operating in New Zealand territorial waters until 1942 when it was purchased by the Royal New Zealand Navy and converted into a sullage (waste oil) barge for use by American ships under repair at Wellington. Decommisioned in 1944, Hinemoa was sunk in Pegasus Bay, 60 miles north-east of Lyttelton.¹⁴

In 1906, Adela and Hugh Stewart sold their home and estate ‘Athenree’ (800 acres) and returned to England. Over the years, their homestead had become the social centre for the surrounding district, which is known as Athenree to this day. Following the death of Hugh in April 1909, Adela Stewart returned to New Zealand on a visit. She died on the night of her arrival in Katikati on 12 February 1910.^15.

Endnotes

¹ Clement, Christine and Ellen McCormack, The Pioneers, Settlers and Families of Katikati and District, Te Puke, Christine Clement, 2012: 25.

² Brett, Henry, White Wings: Fifty Years of Sail in the New Zealand Trade, Vol. I,  Brett Printing, Auckland, 1924: 41.

³ Poverty Bay Herald, 3 March 1883: 2.

 ⁴ Brett, 1924: 41. Lady Jocelyn (Ship) Items, National Library of New Zealand·https://natlib.govt.nz › tap...

⁵ Stewart, Adela B; My Simple Life in New Zealand, Adela Stewart, 1908, Typographix, Katikati, 1996: 16-18.

⁶ Auckland Star, 19 August 1878: 2.

⁷ Hinemoa (Ship: 1876-1944) - National Library of New Zealand, https://natlib.govt.nz › records

⁸ Stewart, 1908: 19.

⁹  Ibid: 19

¹⁰ Ibid: 22 -23

¹¹ Ibid: 30.

¹² Ibid: 26

¹³ Brett, 1924: 43.

¹⁴  Hinemoa (Ship: 1876-1944) - National Library of New Zealand, https://natlib.govt.nz › records

¹⁵ My Simple Life In New Zealand – The Balance House, https://www.theballancehouse.com › adela-stewart