Page:Ashburton•Scotter•1972.pdf/89

which wheat was grown, the Ashburton Guardian took on itself in early 1892 to admonish the farmers not to run the risk of threshing from the stook or of leaving stacks unthatched. After describing large areas under wheat with expected yields of up to sixty bushels an acre, the newspaper declared that there was ‘every prospect of the realization of that rare combination of circumstances, a bountiful harvest and good prices for grain. Farmers need all their good fortune after some five years of droughts, indifferent yields and low values.’ It expressed the hope that ‘every pains will be taken in the ingathering of the best crop, take it all round, that has been seen on the Plains for a good many years past.’^[1]

Springfield and Longbeach employed one to two hundred men throughout the year and three hundred at harvest time. Many an old man has been heard to speak with nostalgia of the attractions of working on these and other estates. But there was little to remember with pleasure about the life of the harvest hands. They were the ‘roosters’ who ‘perched’ on the fences around Baring Square, Ashburton, and awaited engagement each January and February. Then after three months of toil from dawn to dark, they returned to the town and kept the police busy on their annual collection of ‘harvest drunks’ who were ‘on the bash . . . knocking down cheques’.^[2]

Soon after the threshing mills set out on their tours of the countryside, wheat began to pour into Ashburton. West Street, as far north as Saunders’s mill, was deep in straw and manure and crowded with waggons day after day. It seemed that the great stores—it was said that Friedlanders’ would hold 800,000 bushels—could hardly cope with the supply.^[3] Chertsey and Rakaia awoke to unusual, bustling activity as drays, waggons and traction-engine trains arrived in a steady stream from the Acton and Corwar estates and from the dozens of other farms which reaped up to a thousand acres each. When a fire occurred at the Cairnbrae railway station in 1881, some 2000 sacks of wheat from Springfield were burnt. In the following year this estate sent 52,000 bushels to England on the Westerfield. The Springfield grain shed at Lyndhurst railway station held 90,000 bushels. In 1896 Grigg sold 30,000 bushels of wheat to a Sydney buyer at 3s 3d a bushel on the trucks at Winslow. His men regularly loaded well over twice this amount each year at the same railway station.

While the extensive areas planted in wheat on the estates and