The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  Water, too, is named. The great river to the north is Waimakariri, the estuary at the foot of the peninsula with its teeming populations of shrimp and flounder is Waipatiki. The two small rivers that drain into it are Otakaro and its southern twin, Opawaho, and their tributaries are Wairarapa, Waimairi, Haere Roa. The springs from which they derive are called puna; plants along their banks are tutu, toetoe, kanuka; the birds that nest and feed are putakitaki, weka, pukeko; the creatures in their waters are kokopu, koura, tuna, inaka. The settlements are Te Kai o Te Karoro on the sandspit at the coast, Te Oranga, Puari and, at the point where the Otakaro ceases to be navigable and waka must be pulled ashore, is the largest, Te Whenua o Te Potiki Tautahi, named for a chiefly man who came here from Koukourarata on the farther side of the volcanic hills to gather kai. Here, where tracks and river meet and the little stream, Maka-iti-iti, rushes to join the main current, Tautahi built a whare for himself and the people who were with him, and near here he died, his bones buried in the sandhills. Every hill, every gully, the rock stacks and bays of the coast, the islets of the wetland, all are named for some distinguishing feature or for something that happened there, or to commemorate a person of note.

  On this flat land, amid a dense growth of flax higher than any human, the hills of the peninsula are a constant point of reference. Trees also stand out. The tall columns of a stand of kahikatea and the crowns of ti kouka, with their strappy leaves and heads of white flower, are signposts marking the way through, the way home.

  And then other people come with other names.

  They stand on the banks of the Waimakariri and call it the Courtenay. The harbour in the flooded caldera is Port Victoria, the Opawaho is the Heathcote, the Otakaro is briefly the Shakespeare then the Avon, though not, it seems, in reference to the Bard, but for a river in Scotland, since ‘Avon’ is one of those names that means exactly what it says: it is ‘river’ in the Brythonic tongue once spoken in the British Isles. There are, as a consequence, several Avons in Britain, including one that rises near Stonehenge and flows to the coast past a town named Christchurch. It’s a name that has also been applied in a fairly random fashion to various waterways in places the British colonised, among them a vast river system in Western Australia that is 280 kilometres long and drains a catchment of 12 million very un-British hectares. In Canada, it was given to a river flowing over ancient glaciated rock through woods of maple and birch, past a town called Stratford, though here the bardic referencing ran out. When it came to naming its tributaries, the planners settled for bare-boned colonial practicality: Hislop Drain, Douglas Drain, Sheerer Drain. There’s only so much poetry you can impose on an appropriated landscape.

  A preliminary sketch map prepared in 1849 ‘shewing the Site of the Canterbury Settlement’ has a river that will soon become another in the catalogue of Avons, writhing through an alien landscape to the estuary and the sea. The Canterbury Settlement’s city had been planned originally for the head of the harbour named for a young queen. Christchurch could have developed as did Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, with suburbs built around volcanic hills, while business became established by the port on land reclaimed from the sea.

  But those plains proved irresistible. A surveyor, Edward Jollie, looked down from a path across the hills and saw not wetland but a land of milk and honey, ‘a beautiful agricultural district with a fine stream called the Avon running through it and navigable for boats as far as the lower end of town’. Swamp could be drained. That river would supply the basis for trade and industry, providing a route for goods to and from the port and the wide world. Railways and canals, those modern miracles of engineering, would expand the network and the city could spread unencumbered over flat, accessible land, all of it purchased fair and square from the natives in 1848 in a deal that traded 20 million acres between a line drawn across the island from the Nuggets to Fiordland and from Kaiapoi to the West Coast, for £2000. Which worked out at even less per acre than the French had managed ten years earlier when Captain Langlois bought 300,000 acres of the volcanic peninsula around Akaroa for 1000 francs, a woollen overcoat, six pairs of linen trousers, a dozen waterproof hats, two pairs of shoes, a pistol, two woollen shirts and an oilskin coat.

  This was land with a long history of settlement, but like the original land of milk and honey, it was seen by the newcomers as God-given virgin soil. The Black Maps prepared for survey draw a landscape tangled with hundreds of sinuous watery threads. Rivers and creeks wind through ‘Flax Swamp’, ‘Tutu and Fern’ and ‘Broken Ground’ to the sea. An 1849 sketch map shows no buildings except a store and landing place on the shore, linked to the hatched rectangle that is to be the new city by a ‘Road now in Progress’, and on to a ferry over the Courtenay. Another road crosses the hills to the port at Lyttelton and round the harbour, over the hills to the coastal lagoons and Lincoln and the great grassy expanses of plains now named Whately, which stretch to ‘Snow Capped Mountains’.

  The roads follow well-used routes along high ground through the swamp. They link settlements, but of Te Kai o Te Karoro, Puari, Te Whenua o Te Potiki Tautahi there is no sign. Instead, scattered about the map are areas marked ‘N.S.’ for ‘Native Settlement’, along with an approximate number of Maori residents: near Akaroa (thirty), Wainui (thirty), Birdlings Flat (ten). The Germans and the French have a hillside at a safe distance from the future city. The Canterbury Association’s chief surveyor, Captain Joseph Thomas, draws contour line and fathom mark, estimates the quantity of available timber (237,000 acres), mentions the presence of an excellent seam of coal by the island called variously Motunau or Cook’s Table. All is well, all is promise, on this plain on this island of New Munster on the coast of the great Southern Ocean.

  THE CITY COMES INTO SHARPER focus in a map devised in 1850. It is a grid, laid down upon this landscape of raupo swamp, tutu and fern: 1000 acres will be contained within a rectangle 2 miles wide by 1¼ miles deep, each street exactly 66 feet wide — one unfurling of the standard surveyor’s tool, Gunter’s chain, with its 100 clanking links. A town reserve frames the city and wider terraces line either bank of the river leading to a botanic garden, to permit the healthful circulation of air. At its heart is a cruciform square and, just to the north, a marketplace. The long, straight streets are lined with sections, the land divided as neatly as a large block of butter for ease of purchase. Fifty acres of rural land brings with it a bonus quarter-acre section within the city boundaries. A diagonal road cuts across the grid, joining the city to the port in one direction and to a stand of bush for timber and fuel in the other. Its order is based upon a proper trigonometrical survey, taking as its primary reference point the summit of one of the peninsula hills that for centuries has been called Tauhinu Korokio but is spelled by the newcomers Mt Pleasant.

  This map is proof of an hypothesis. In its plainness, in its sheer rationality, it demonstrates a political ideal, a way of thinking developed by the city’s founders, the New Zealand Company and its offshoot, the Canterbury Association. Both were, in their gentlemanly fashion, radical institutions promoting a new approach to the whole business of colonisation, the theoretical basis of which had been devised in Newgate Prison, where Edward Gibbon Wakefield, bounder and cad, was serving a three-year sentence for the abduction of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The story is recounted in Philip Temple’s biography of the Wakefields, A Sort of Conscience.

  Ellen Turner was the only child of a wealthy textile manufacturer from Pott Shrigley in Cheshire. Wakefield was thirty and already a father. He was also short of cash and desperately keen to enter Parliament. Over several months, with the collusion of his younger brother, William, he came up with a plan. Write a letter, purporting to come from the Turners’ doctor, informing Ellen that her mother is seriously ill and that she should come home immediately. ‘Though I do not think Mrs Turner is in immediate danger, it is probable she may soon become incapable of recognizing any one.’

  Have your French manservant deliver the letter after m
idnight to the headmistress of Ellen’s Liverpool boarding school, then carry Ellen off in a carriage to Manchester, where she believes her father is waiting to meet her. Instead, it is Wakefield. He tells her he is one of her father’s business associates, here to accompany her on her journey.

  They set off, French manservant and William seated outside on the box, Wakefield himself in the carriage, where he surveys his prize with all the cool disinterest of someone examining a new horse. As he reported later in a statement he hoped might exonerate him, the girl was ‘tall of her age … her countenance pale but … enlivened by two piercing eyes, and a finely shaped mouth, with teeth extremely well formed and white.’ Along the way, as the carriage lurches northward, he informs her that her father is in business difficulties so extreme that it has been agreed her immediate marriage to Wakefield is the only way to avoid ruin.

  What option does she have? Fifteen years old, alone in the company of three men who are complete strangers, dragged from her bed into a confusion of lies and deceit, driven off on a journey of 600 bewildering miles? The carriage rattles at haste to Gretna Green where a too-large ring is placed on her finger and she is married to a man she doesn’t know by a seventy-four-year-old parson cum blacksmith, with the innkeeper for witness.

  It’s not clear if Wakefield followed up abduction with rape, but he certainly calculated that Ellen’s parents would presume their daughter was no longer a virgin and wish to protect her reputation. They would have no choice but to accept him as their son-in-law, and fund his parliamentary candidacy. It was a plan he had tried once before with great success. At twenty he had abducted another young heiress, Eliza Pattle, whose mother had come up with the cash. She had accepted the marriage as a fait accompli and settled £70,000 on her daughter and her unprepossessing husband. All had gone swimmingly, until Eliza’s death in childbirth at the age of twenty-four.

  But Ellen’s parents were made of sterner stuff. They pursued their daughter to Calais where, as Wakefield wrote to his brother, Ellen ‘told all, and was anxious to leave me when she knew all’. He then wrote a ‘Solemn Declaration’ that he had not slept with her, that ‘she and I have been as Brother and Sister … I was bound, and it was wise to give some Comfort to Mr Turner’.

  Wise indeed. Wakefield now found himself the monstrous villain in the year’s greatest scandal. The Shrigley Abduction. His trial a year later drew throngs. Abduction was no longer a capital crime, but it carried a possible sentence of transportation or imprisonment with hard labour. When final judgement was made, in London on 14 May 1827, he was sentenced to three years in Newgate.

  And Ellen? A year later she married a neighbour and at the age of 19 she died giving birth. Two years after her death, her parents had her portrait painted. It hangs in the museum at Preston. She looks steadily from a gilt frame, plump and pink cheeked, a blooming girl when she was already lifeless and underground.

  WAKEFIELD, MEANWHILE, HAD PUT his time in prison to good use, reading copiously and developing theories of colonisation that formed the basis of articles published in the Spectator and elaborated in a book, A View of the Art of Colonization.

  Central to this ‘art’ was the concept of sufficient price.

  Historically, Wakefield argued, Britain’s attempts at colonisation had failed because the government had given land away, rather than charging a price that would have deterred firstcomers from seizing ownership of enormous tracts. This had the effect of driving later arrivals further and further into the wilderness if they were to be able to purchase their own little piece of land. Population dispersal meant that proprietors of large estates were unable to recruit the labour required to exploit the full economic potential of their holdings, so slave-owning had become a necessity, and where such labour was unavailable, landowners had been forced to work their holdings themselves, leaving neither time nor leisure for ‘taste, science, morals, manners, abstract politics’, the attributes of civilised existence.

  The solution? ‘To sell land after survey at a uniform price sufficiently high to raise funds for paying the passages of more immigrants.’ At the correctly gauged price, wealthy colonists could afford to buy land, but not in excessive amounts, while poorer colonists — ideally young married couples — would have to work for three or four years to accumulate the capital required to purchase their own property. This ready supply of eager labour would attract men of substance to the colony, which would become economically vibrant while supplying an expanding market for British goods. Politically, each colony would be self-governing rather than directed by some distant Whitehall bureaucrat, and so, with power and commerce concentrated in cities planned on rational principles, with authority to direct their own affairs and with ample labour to make the wastelands blossom, the colonists could develop a truly civilised society. ‘Concentration,’ Wakefield averred, ‘is Civilisation.’

  His examination of earlier colonies also persuaded him of the wisdom of founding colonies around a single faith. The Puritan settlement of New England and the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania had prospered because they possessed ‘moral unity’. Accordingly, when Wakefield turned his attention to the colonisation of New Zealand, he visualised individual settlements for Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics and Zionists.

  WAKEFIELD WAS NOT ALONE IN writing about the art of colonisation in the pages of the Spectator. One equally enthusiastic theorist was an Anglo-Irish landowner named John Robert Godley, whose family’s estates spread over several hundred acres of Counties Meath and Leitrim. Seized from the O’Rourkes during the British takeover of the mid-seventeenth century, these lands had proven fertile and highly productive. They also returned a healthy sum in rents from scores of tenants. In the 1840s, however, these two counties were among the worst affected when Ireland’s potatoes — those big floury Lumpers that sustained millions — began to rot.

  I know a bit about the Famine. Anyone with Irish ancestry knows a bit about the Famine. What I knew as a child growing up in Oamaru was that a lot of people died. They had been so hungry that a lady had come into a shop and tried to pay for food with a dead baby. ‘Be quiet, Jim,’ said our mother as we sat spooning up our golden syrup pudding, children of milk and honey, inhabitants of the proud province from which the first refrigerated ship had sailed for Britain with its cargo of frozen mutton and pigs and hares and pheasants, not to mention 2226 sheep’s tongues. The wealth of the nation had begun right here, just down the road, where a sign marked the source of all that frozen bounty. How could we imagine hunger, hunger so deep, so dark, that a woman would place that sad little bundle on the counter? ‘Stop it,’ said our mother. ‘You’re frightening the children.’

  But the baby was why we were here, wasn’t it? In this town in this country. It was why our dad sang ‘Kelly the Boy From Killane’ when he’d been down at the 2nd NZEF clubrooms and came home roaring. It was why he’d been born in Dundee, why his family had lived there making jute sacks and being soldiers before the big journey to New Zealand. It was why none of us had been born in Ireland. Our father’s ancestors had been driven from County Meath by The Great Hunger, just as our mother’s ancestors had left Speyside, driven out by The Great Disruption, which was a more obscure event altogether, something to do with who got to choose the minister: the landowners or the congregation.

  It was only later, in adulthood, that the cartoon outlines of conflict and despair began to fill with detail.

  I lived for six months in Ireland in 2007, in the south, in a place called Donoughmore. One afternoon a neighbour showed me a mound, a long embankment reaching from one wall across a couple of fields before coming to an abrupt end in a bog. ‘Do you know what that is?’ he said. I presumed an old fence line maybe? Something to do with drainage?

  It was a famine road.

  A road from nowhere to nowhere built by men who had to work to earn some paltry relief. (For women, of course, with their trailing children, there was no relief at all, other than the workhouse, if you could mak
e your way to one, if you could gain admission.) But the men must dig. They must lift rocks, the authorities had decided, but their work must not compete with commercial roadbuilding. So these roads don’t have a destination. They don’t link one place to another place. They are that most demoralising of things: pointless labour.

  Once you know what a famine road looks like, you see them everywhere. You notice also the rough ground of the burial plot, the acre of anonymous bodies, too many to name or even count. You notice the whitewashed stare of former workhouses where people crowded in until the authorities locked the doors. You notice the two little tickets in the museum at Cork to a regatta, a boat race for the gentry, in 1847 when all around in this beautiful green place with its glossy herds of dairy cows, its Butter Road cutting directly across country to deliver the rich produce of the region to the port — all around, people were crawling under hedges to die.

  In 2012, Cork University Press published an Atlas of the Great Irish Famine. It is a massive work of charts and statistics, as a good atlas should be, depicting in careful academic fashion political belief working its inexorable logic on an entire people. It is utterly sickening. I can absorb it only in tiny bites.

  Even before the disastrous season, the areas in which the Godleys owned land were noted for their inequality. A government orthographer checking the correct spelling of those awkward Irish place names that persisted in clinging to the country for the new official 6-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps, recorded his bewilderment: ‘You see rich meadows and luxuriant fields of potatoes, wheat and oats in every direction, and still the people are starving.’