Valley of abandoned dreams
Peter Griffin
well-trafficked with cargo and passenger ships in the early 1920s, so there was a reliable supply line to the Mangapu¯ rua landing before narrow roads were eventually carved out on the other side of the gorge, opening an inland route all the way to Raetihi.
The late Arthur Bates, the historian who penned the definitive book on the ill-fated Mangapu¯ rua settlement after taking down first-hand accounts from original settlers, writes that many of them held Massey’s view that ‘‘with a bit of hard work, everything would come right’’.
The most prominent of the soldier settlers in the Mangapu¯ rua was Fred Bettjeman, who arrived in 1917 and with his family was among the last to leave in 1942.
Working for the Westport Coal Mining Company at Denniston when war broke out, Bettjeman joined the 13th Canterbury Company and fought at Gallipoli.
Wounded during the campaign, he ended up in a military hospital in England, where he met a nurse, Agnes McNab. They married and she followed him to New Zealand after he was invalided home.
Fred and Agnes would bring up five children in the valley, with Fred becoming a tireless advocate for development of the region, at times appealing directly to Massey for help. Many of the soldier settlers had been wounded in the war and had varying levels of experience in farming.
‘‘Fred did his best to make a good fist of it,’’ says Steele. ‘‘Some of the settlers were breaking in their land for 10 or 15 years and then they left. Fred thought, ‘That’s all right, I’ll take over their land as well and end up with a really big holding’.’’
If collecting enough from wool sales to pay the bills was challenging, keeping the road through the valley intact proved too much for the Mangapu¯ rua settlers who began departing, family by family, from the late 1920s, leaving their land and homesteads vacant.
Sections of the metal road were regularly flooded or washed away, requiring repairs that the government was less willing to pay for as settler numbers dwindled.
The hulking bridge spanning the Mangapu¯ rua gorge seems like overkill now. But at one point, the government envisaged it as part of a highway cutting east across the North Island from New Plymouth. It was exactly what the settlers wanted. But it came too late.
By 1942, only three families were left farming in the valley when a biblical downpour again washed out the road.
While Bettjeman offered to take over the whole valley and assume responsibility for the road if the government would just fix the latest damage, his plan was rejected. The Bettjemans were ordered off the land, a Cabinet paper signed off by then prime minister Peter Fraser sealing the settlement’s fate.
Bettjeman walked away from the Mangapu¯ rua with virtually nothing. ‘‘There was a gap of 23 years of heavy work over long hours, on the part of my wife and myself, that never was and never can be filled,’’ he told Arthur Bates.
Mrs Bettjeman left the valley the same way she had come in all those years before, on horseback. But Fred wasn’t done with farming. He was assisted in buying a new farm near Te Kuiti, where he eventually retired. He died in 1987, aged 102.
After the settlers left, the bush and the pigs quickly reclaimed the valley. Mangapu¯ rua was largely forgotten, then mythologised as the place of the pioneers’ last true battle to tame nature and evidence of how the country failed its war heroes.
But more recently, historians have taken a more nuanced view on the settlement programme, which for much of the 20th century was written off as a failure to honour that debt to the soldiers.
‘‘There’s this image of the people in the upper reaches of the river,’’ says Professor Michael Roche, who has a research focus on historical geography at Massey University. ‘‘But it wasn’t by any means all pioneer farming.’’
Roche has examined the land records and accounts of about 100 ex-soldiers who took up land under the scheme on plots spread from Northland and Auckland to Wellington and Canterbury.
Some of them managed to develop successful farms that were passed through subsequent generations and form an important, if overlooked, part of our rural history. Others were amalgamated or sold to buyers with no wartime service history.
The ‘‘section 2’’ provision of the scheme saw millions in government loans taken up by 5000 ex-soldiers to allow them to buy land and houses in urban areas, though it caused widespread resentment as it was seen as the reason for soaring land prices.
Many ex-soldiers did leave the farms, often within a year or two of taking them up. ‘‘Looking at their accounts, you can see why they left,’’ says Roche.
The collapse in agricultural prices made farming smallholdings on marginal land uneconomical. From the start, the scheme suffered through a shortage of quality Crown land for distribution.
‘‘Some men might be dismissed as failures for leaving quickly, but they were just cutting their losses. It wasn’t worth hanging in for another year, you’d just incur more and more debt trying to get to the next season.’’
Some ex-soldiers just weren’t cut out for farming. Agricultural experience was a prerequisite for the scheme, but a desire to do right by the veterans, including at least 61 Ma¯ ori ex-soldiers and a handful of nurses, saw a lot of leeway given.
Former farm labourers found themselves having to make important pasture management or cropping decisions.
Others weren’t capable of the heavy labour required, because of their war wounds – physical and mental. Roche has sifted through reports from Crown Lands rangers sent out to monitor the progress of the farmers.
There are references to drunkenness, erratic behaviour, a reluctance to do a hard day’s work, and poor stock management.
Little support was offered for those debilitated by the trauma of war. ‘‘There was no real appreciation for what they would call shell shock at the time. It was that generation that couldn’t talk about it to anyone else,’’ says Roche.
The real failure was the inability to understand that the scheme wasn’t working, he argues.
By 1925, when Massey died, the government was scrambling to keep the settlement scheme from collapsing. ‘‘They actually went to great lengths, in terms of debt restructuring, to try and keep people on the land.’’
The revaluation of land plots lowered rents for leaseholders. Debts were written off or deferred. It helped avoid disaster. But records suggest that about twothirds of both the land allocated as part of the scheme, and the number of settlers who entered the scheme, had departed within 18 years.
‘‘In some ways it was the last pulse of the pioneering phase where we pushed the margins out as far as we could,’’ says Roche.
Asimilar, smaller scheme was offered to returning soldiers after World War II and fared better, the government having learned the painful lessons of the 1920s and 30s. By then, Massey’s vision of New Zealand as a closely settled rural society had given way to larger farms and more sophisticated land management practices.
Dan Steele knew he’d found his place in the world when he investigated buying land in the upper valleys of the Whanganui in the mid-1990s.
‘‘When I came out here I just felt like I was coming home,’’ he says.
Some of the few remaining settler huts are on Steele’s land, where he is also engaged in conservation efforts to boost numbers of kiwi and the native whio, after which the station is named.
He remembers talking to the old timers who grew up on farms in Mangapu¯ rua and Kaiwhakauka, ex-soldiers’ children who still lived in the area when he began farming there.
‘‘They didn’t speak so much of extreme hardship. They spoke of the friendships, how their parents had been given an opportunity after the war. It is fantastic history, naive as the whole thing was.
‘‘They didn’t know then what we know now. We can’t make those mistakes again.’’
Locked down with his wife and their four kids, Steele waits to reopen Blue Duck Lodge and welcome more visitors on to the station.
He is eager to get back to business. The proceeds from tourism help him fund the conservation efforts on the station, such as reverting some of his flatland to wetlands.
‘‘Unfortunately, people are now saying tourism is no good and never was any good, it’s all about production,’’ says Steele.
‘‘I see it already being printed in the farming papers now, let’s drop the regulations and produce more on our land. That’s a race to the bottom.’’
The fallout of the Covid-19 crisis will hit the region financially, but Steele says it’s even more reason to focus on efforts to balance the ecology and the economy.
Down the empty river, the Bridge to Nowhere stands resolute in its misty valley, fat eels swimming in the stream 40 metres below. It has weathered many crises before. It will withstand this one too.