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town and county both for keenness as sporting men and for professional competence.

The subject of irrigation was on several occasions before the public and even the Provincial Council during the late 1860s. In 1870, C. E. Fooks reopened the question with a lengthy two-part letter to the Lyttelton Times. The Provincial Government then called on him to report on the possibility of irrigating the Malvern district, and his recommendations, after two other engineers had agreed with him, led in 1877 to the commencement of the Malvern water-race, the first one made by any authority in Canterbury. The publication of his report in 1872 also produced a newspaper debate on the feasibility of using open channels instead of pipes to carry the water. Finally it should be mentioned that the Provincial Council voted but never paid £25,000 for a water supply for the Ashburton plains.^[1]

In spite of all these preliminaries, Duncan Cameron could fairly claim to be ‘the first to establish a systematic water supply on the dry but otherwise fertile lands of Central Canterbury’.^[2] During the early 1870s he made four miles of race, and in 1876, acting as his own engineer, he constructed thirteen miles of open channel over all sorts of land from an intake in the hills. This experiment proved so successful that, by 1880, he had forty miles of race running to all parts of Springfield.

As has been said^[3] the prospect of organising a county-wide water supply was probably the main reason for the County Council’s acceptance in 1877 of the full powers given it by Parliament. Conditions appeared to favour prompt action. A drought encouraged ratepayers to meet at Rakaia in January 1878 and to petition the council to undertake an ‘irrigation’ scheme immediately. Funds were available from the county’s share from land sales. Fooks, Cameron and others had decided, it seemed, the question of the relative merits of pipes and open channels. Yet three years passed before water flowed into the first county stock race.

There were many reasons for this tardiness. The drought ended. The extreme economic conditions, boom or slump, did not dispose the councillors to plan calmly for the future. They took a further year to appoint an engineer, William Baxter beginning his long term in that position in February 1879. By June of that year, the council was studying a water supply bill clause by clause. It then referred the bill to the road boards for comment and considered the objections that were raised. Two acts were necessary. A counter