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Settlement, 1853–78
Communications
The reminiscences of the pioneers usually described their first journeys from the capital to the runs where they were to work. Alex Hewson’s family—father, mother, sister and four boys—reached Cracroft in six days. They were lucky. In February 1861, Andrew McFarlane and his wife, engaged as married couple by Delamain during the voyage from England, spent fifteen days on the road to Alford Station, being delayed five days by the Rakaia River and another five days by losing their bullocks.
Travellers were dependant at first on run homesteads for hospitality; Mrs McFarlane for example ‘got a shake-down’ with the Chapmans of Acton Station while her husband searched for the lost bullocks. Horses could not use the coastal route and the need for avoiding the swamps decided the position of the fords for crossing the Rakaia and Ashburton rivers. As a result, Mrs John Hayhurst, at the Ashburton Station, found herself providing accommodation so regularly that she adopted a system of charges—1s 6d to 2s for a meal, 4s for the night. The boarding arrangements were not elaborate and provided something of a contrast for Henry Sewell, who had to spend two nights with the Hayhursts after leaving Chapman’s house. He wrote in his journal that ‘. . . our hotel . . . in fact . . . was nothing more than the Station house with one or two sheds . . . in one of which, windowless and floorless, upon some tressles and boards, I set up my air-bed, blanket and possum rug and slept soundly’.[1]
The Hayhursts had probably left for the Mackenzie Country before in 1868 a regular postal service was instituted and an accommodation house was opened ‘on the Ashburton’. In April that year, William Baines accepted the contract to carry mails between Christchurch and Timaru for £300 a year leaving on alternate Wednesdays from the two towns. Then on 20 November the Provincial Government issued a licence to William Turton enabling him to open an accommodation house ‘on the Ferry Reserve, north bank of the Ashburton’.[2]
Baines maintained his fortnightly mail delivery unchanged until 1861. He was a small man with a neat beard, was reliable, and was especially noted for his apparently unlimited fund of gossip. He was therefore popular at the homesteads on his route to which he conveyed not only mail and small parcels left at his agents but also the news of the day. At the end of the first year