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Ashburton

I do not like to see Ladies cooking & scrubbing, but they get used to it & do not complain.[1]

Some pastoralists’ homes did not reach even the low standard which Sewell deplored. In September 1855 John Barton Arundel Acland spent a night with George Gawler Russell of Anama run and James D. Rogers of Maronan, two Australians who worked their properties from the one homestead. He recorded his impressions in his diary:

Russell and Rogers, with Seward and an Irish shepherd are living, and have been living for twelve months, in a large wool shed without doors, windows, or chimneys, built with manuka poles and thatched top and sides with ti-tree [cabbage tree leaves]. The fire is made in the middle of the floor, and at night a blanket is hung up to serve as a door. It is a wonder why some people will make themselves so needlessly uncomfortable.[2]

Acland was making a journey which marked a new phase in the pastoral history of the Ashburton region. He and his partner, Charles George Tripp, had arrived at the beginning of the year and, instead of spending all their capital in buying a run, decided to search for suitable sheep country in the hills. After this visit, Acland wrote in a letter:

Russell laughed at our exploring, and said that the banks of the Rangitata were perpendicular; he would not attempt to take a horse down for fifty pounds, and the opposite country impassable. We replied that it was very likely, but we had a fancy for looking at it. In the Colonies you always like to see for yourself, and the worse account you hear of unoccupied country, the greater the reason for going to look at it.[3]

The partners had in fact already applied for the Mount Peel and Orari Gorge runs on which they later established themselves. But before doing so, they explored the mountainous country between the Rangitata and Ashburton rivers, passing lakes Clearwater and Emma which were named lakes Tripp and Acland on most maps until as late as 1960. In March 1856 they took up Mount Possession and the first run of Tripp’s Mount Somers Station. Kennaway reported that when it became known that Acland had applied for these runs he ‘was generally looked on as a harmless maniac for having done so’.[4] Tripp took over the Ashburton runs and sold them during 1861–2.

More of the back country was occupied by pastoralists as a

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  1. ↑ H. Sewell's Journal (Manuscript), vol 1, pp.785-7
  2. ↑ L. G. D. Acland, The Early Canterbury Runs 1946, pp.283-4
  3. ↑ Ibid, p.140
  4. ↑ Crusts, p.60
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