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have the Canterbury pastoral runs disposed of by auction as elsewhere in the country. He was also one of the three Canterbury members (of twelve) who supported Sir George Grey’s merely obstructive attempt to revive the question of separate governments for the North and South Islands. As already reported, he also raised a storm among road board supporters. However, Wason was still a young man noted rather for the forthrightness of his expressed opinions than for soundness of judgement. He again represented his own district, as part of Selwyn, in the late 1890s, then returned to Britain and sat in the House of Commons for twenty years until his death in 1921.

Only John Hall, of all these representatives played a significant part in the government of New Zealand as a whole. However, as local representative for the Christchurch Country District in the 1850s, he was just at the beginning of his long political career.

The foregoing discussion of the leaders in local and general government, necessary as it is, perhaps gives a misleading air of sophistication to the conditions in the new county at the time of its foundation in 1876. Admittedly the pioneering period, that of large scale pastoralism on leasehold runs on the plains, had come to an end. Yet it would be well to remind ourselves that many families were still only at the beginning of pioneer existence. Some thirty years later one of the women pioneers on the plains below Chertsey during the 1870s looked back over her early experiences. She recalled first how bald the land was, so that her children, riding every day or so on the water cart to the Wakanui Creek, wondered at the sight of the homestead there, ‘the only house with trees’.

We made our own candles in those days, made them in a mould if we possessed one. If not, we made ‘dips’. We made our own bread and our own soap; butter of course as soon as we owned a cow. The bread we made in a camp oven. I had a camp oven for years until a whirlwind came one day and drove the lid up into the air and broke it. By that time I had a colonial oven. . . . The children and I used to gather up dried cow-dung to burn in it, fuel was so scarce and dear. I thought I was a queen when I rose to the dignity of possessing a small cooking range.^[1]