The promise of land
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Transcript
- Teacher from Piopio College
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Our students want to know if the Government gave the settlers any land when they arrived, or did they all have to buy their land?
- Jock
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That’s a really good question, because one of the reasons that people came to New Zealand, was because they wanted land. And particularly in places like Scotland and Ireland there was a great shortage of land. And it was one of the things that got people to New Zealand. Now in other countries like America, often people who arrived were given land, and that was an incentive. The only place where that really happened in New Zealand was in Auckland. And Auckland province, right through the 1850s and the 1860s they attracted people to Auckland with the promise of land. And every person who came to New Zealand, into Auckland, got 40 acres of land. So that if a man and a woman came with four kids, then they could get, I don’t know…160 acres of land. And sometimes they came as groups. There was group of people who came from the Midlands of England and went up to, off the Kaipara harbour, to an area called Albertland. And actually there is still a community up on the Kaipara Harbour up there called Albertland. And something like 3000 people came out as a group and were given a large block of land up there in Kaipara Harbour.
Another area where that happened was up in Northland in a little community called Waipu where a group of Scots people who had originally left Scotland, gone off to Canada, lived there for 40 years, had a pretty miserable life, then got on a boat, went to Australia, found that the Australians didn’t like them, so they got on a boat, came to Auckland and they got given land at Waipu. And if you go to Waipu now, just south of Whangarei, you’ll find there’s a very nice little museum all about the settlers who arrived from Scotland in the 1850s and had been granted land.
So some of them got land, particularly in Auckland, but most of the others had to work for their wages and then buy land. And the interesting thing is that in 1882, the New Zealand Government did a survey of land holding in New Zealand, and what they found was that one in every two of the adult men in New Zealand had owned some land. So the vast…a majority of those who migrated to New Zealand, in the end, did end up as land owners.