Barrie Davis: The Colonist

You have arrived with five of your surviving eight children at the new settlement of Wellington, New Zealand on the 500-ton barque Olympus in April 1841.

The captain is John Whyte, there are 16 crew, and the ship’s surgeon is Isaac Featherston who would become Wellington’s leader and one of the colony’s most eminent politicians. On board are 27 married couple emigrants, including yourselves, 16 single men, 11 single women, and 45 children including 5 infants. The males are mostly farm workers with a sprinkling of trades and the females are mostly sempstresses and servants. The ship also carries four hundred barrels of flour to feed the new colony.

The ship had left England on 11 December 1840 and it was a difficult and dangerous voyage. The Pope family brought scarlet fever aboard and on 21 December their six-month old son died of an overdose of laudanum (opium) administered by his mother, Eliza. Eliza also came down with scarlet fever, along with her daughter Jane who died on 23 December. In total, there were four deaths and five births during the voyage. Problems with overcrowding, lack of water, inadequate rations and poor hygiene practices were similar to the voyage of the Salins Castle the previous January and the Lady Nugent in March both of which also had similar death rates.

You arrived as the colonizing fervour evaporated and you immediately realised there was a challenge.

Featherston recorded for posterity:

“But where was the renowned city of Wellington? Did those mud hovels scattered along the beach, or those wooden huts which appeared here and there, did these represent the city of Wellington? Yes, this is the city of Wellington! Where then is the fine fertile land which shall produce such astonishing crops? Surely not those steep & thickly wooded mountains! Oh no. Those mountains are part of the city of Wellington!”

On your arrival, you meet Richard ‘Dicky’ Barrett. Barrett had been a trader operating out of Sydney when he and his partner Jacky Love were invited by Te Ati Awa to set up a trading post at New Plymouth in 1828. The tribe selected wives for the pair: 21-y-o Barrett married 16-y-o Rawinia –niece of Te Puni, sister of Te Wharepouri and the only granddaughter of ariki Tautara – and they had three daughters, Caroline, Mary and Sarah. The Ati Awa were chased out of Taranaki by Te Wherowhero, the first Maori king, who had threatened to steam and preserve the heads of Barrett and Love after they participated in the defence of Otaka pa at Ngamotu in 1833 with three cannon and a swivel-gun, which they had bought from a passing ship. The tribe subsequently migrated to Wellington, where Barrett opened a hotel at the north end of Lambton Quay in October 1840, and which subsequently doubled as the courthouse. Barrett and Rawinia returned to Taranaki in 1841 where Barrett died on 23 February 1847 aged 40 and Rawinia died on 12 February 1849 aged 38. They are buried together in Waitapu cemetery at Ngamotu, along with their daughter Mary who had died in 1840 aged 8.

“Barrett’s Hotel 1843” by Samuel Brees (here).

In the following years you participate in the constitution and construction of a new town and a new country.

In 1847, the Governor, Sir George Grey, claimed that self-government would probably lead to war. In December 1848 the Wellington Settlers’ Constitutional Association was founded, two months later a ‘Monster Petition’ to Queen Victoria was signed by 741 persons, and on 1 March 1849, at a Reform Banquet of two hundred persons, Dr Featherston proposed “Representative Institutions and their immediate introduction”. The New Zealand Constitution Bill received its second reading on 21 May 1852 and Wellington became the capital in 1864.

In 1855, the 8.2 magnitude Wairarapa earthquake raised the seabed and other land around the waterfront, up to 1.5 meters in some places. Queens Wharf was constructed from 1861-65. A further 13 acres of land was reclaimed by earthworks and a sea-wall built after 1866. A gasworks was constructed on Courtenay Place which supplied gas from 1871. Wellington’s population quadrupled in 10 years from 4,700 in 1871 to 19,000 in 1881. There was the Long Depression in the 1890s.

From your arrival in Wellington, you would work for the rest of your life as a parent, a merchant and as a farmer to make New Zealand out of nothing. By the time of your death in 1901, age 93, you will have raised 8 children to adulthood, have 49 adult grandchildren and 99 greatgrandchildren.

At the end of the Victorian era, in 1901, you could not have known that within a century the beneficiaries of your labours would turn against you.

Prior to the First World War, 90 per cent of the Maori population were still living in a traditional environment in what Europeans by then referred to as the countryside. That situation reversed after the Second World War when 80 per cent of the Maori population migrated into the European towns to more fully participate the pakeha taonga. In so doing the Maoris deserted their traditional way of life, including the authority of the chiefs.

By 1970, 90 per cent of the Maori population lived in the towns and some sought to reconstitute Maori chieftainship there. However, the Maoris were unable to grasp the more advanced European philosophy, science and technology. They were patronized by a faction of Europeans who displaced their own irrational feelings of guilt for the Maori disadvantage onto their fellow Europeans. The facts of increased Maori life expectancy and population increase were ignored.

A culture of lying, cheating and propaganda developed, according to which the Maoris were disadvantaged by ‘colonization’. Maori academics on generous salaries published unappreciative books with disparaging titles such as Decolonizing Methodologies and were praised in the universities for doing so. A faction of people in government, education and the media disparaged the colonists until they were vilified in the collective public psyche.

The people responsible for that abhorrent state of affairs are not merely mistaken, they are deranged. The trials and tribulations of the colonists have been forgotten and the population has been conditioned to get what they want by complaining. After all, what is the point of working like a colonist when you can string out living off the proceeds of their labour? Never mind that what they built needs maintaining.

The implied assumption that there will always be a bountiful New Zealand is not grounded in a rational argument. The problem is that we have too much socialism. It is not that New Zealanders are hungry, but that they are not hungry enough. Being a dole-bludger is a stigma, not a vocation.

We need to develop social cohesion and to do that we need to recover shared values and aims, such as a customary work ethic. We have the colonists as exemplars and if we reconnect with their heritage we will participate in their vision and enterprise to build a Better Britain. There is an opportunity for New Zealanders to build on what came before. But we need to seize the opportunity before it is too late.

You can start by putting the colonists back on the pedestal where they belong.

Sources

Biographies

The above story is derived, somewhat creatively, from two 2025 biographies: Isaac Featherston ‘Petatone’: A Colonial Life by John E. Martin and Grace Hurst: A Settler’s Life in New Plymouth by Ian Connor. They are each a wonderful insight to the colonial history of New Zealand.

History of Wellington

Louis E. Ward, Early Wellington, 1928

David Hamer and Roberta Nicholls (editors), The Making of Wellington 1800-1914, 1990.

Angela Caughey, The Interpreter: The Biography of Richard ‘Dicky’ Barrett, 1998.

I chose Wellington because it was the first colonial settlement, it is the nation’s capital and because I live there, but I expect that all of New Zealand’s towns developed similarly.

Picture Books

William Main, Wellington Through a Victorian Lens, 1972.

Graham Stewart, Wellington: Portrait of the Region, 2005.

Leafing through these books of pictures, I am impressed by how quickly Wellington was built and by the elegance of the buildings.

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.