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‘Dr. Ben’ kept open house. Those present formed a Canterbury Pastoral Association.

In the following year (1860) the association held a show at Turton’s on the Ashburton. In the meantime, Dowling had bought Buccleuch Station. He not only did most of the organising for this event but also bore off eleven of the eighteen prizes. He was given credit for being one of the founders of the association—a short-lived institution as it happened. This show was also a social success. J. C. Wilson presided at the dinner, a race meeting took place in the evening and George Hall at Ringwood entertained all comers until near day-break at a ball in his wool-shed.

Three Ashburton landowners were later the foremost importers of stud animals into Canterbury and probably did most for the improvement of all kinds of live stock—John Grigg, Robert Wilkin and George Gould. Yet Ashburton’s two most notable shows, historically, were held before any of them bought land in the district.

Under the Canterbury land system purchasers could buy land from the Crown almost anywhere in sections of twenty acres or more. Surveying was done afterwards. The use that the pastoralists made of these conditions to secure their runs against purchase from outsiders has been described in general histories and so is much more widely known than their use of pre-emptive rights. They bought land along road or river frontages, across the entrance to valleys, or in other areas necessary for the working of the surrounding country. In order to secure as much as possible with the money available, they often bought in twenty acre strips, leaving smaller areas between them which the Crown was obliged to sell by auction. The two methods became known, respectively, as ‘spotting’ and ‘gridironing’.

Small areas in the Ashburton countryside were made freehold before 1864 because they possessed some special advantage. The first and second sections purchased in the present Ashburton County—on 20 August 1857—lay at the mouth of the Wakanui Creek. As they were bought by the Lyttelton shipping firm of Cookson and Bowler they were probably connected with proposals to form a coastal port which came to nothing. (In March and May 1860 ketches were advertised to sail from Lyttelton ‘for the