Demand for workers

How long did it take to arrive here on a boat, and what did they do for money when they arrived here, because they were all poor when they left, so what did they do for money?

Well it obviously depended a little bit when you came. If you came in the 1840s in a very small sailing ship, it could take up to 140 days. That’s about four to five months, which is an awful long time. By the 1870s when the boats were a little bit faster, it normally averaged about 100 days, which was about three months. By the 20th century when they came in big ships like the Southern Cross or the Captain Cook, they were coming here in four to five weeks. So it had become much, much faster.

What often happened (and it was particularly the case around about the turn of the century, when the ships came into port, the people in New Zealand particularly were very keen on women migrants)…because what often happens is, the people who get on a boat and come halfway round the world, often they were men rather than women. And what that meant was, there was a shortage of women in New Zealand. There weren’t enough women to marry off the men, and there weren’t enough women to work as domestic servants, to work in the households of rich people helping to do all the housework. So one of the things that often happened is, when the immigrant ships, the immigrant ships, would come into port, people would meet them off the ships and actually offer them jobs, and particularly if they were women. If they came off the boat as a young unmarried woman of 20 to 25, such a person could be besieged either by rich families saying, “Can you come and work for us as a domestic servant?” or else by kiwi blokes saying, “Can you come and be my wife?” So if you were a young woman you were in hot demand. If you were a strong male you were probably in quite a lot of demand too, particularly if there was a shortage of labour, which there was at certain times.

When people came in the 1950s and the 1960s from England, they usually got free passage paid for by the New Zealand Government. And in return for that the New Zealand Government said you have to stay and work for two years. And what normally happened was that the New Zealand Government would send them to a particular job in a different part of the country. They might be sent to work on a farm, they might be sent to work in a hospital. Basically what happened is, the New Zealand government decided, where have we got a shortage of labour, and they would send those people to those places.