A pioneering town planner
John Stewart was responsible for the planning of Manawatū’s towns. The town squares of Palmerston North, Feilding, Halcombe and Rongotea are all his doing.
When driving, cycling or walking the roads and streets of Palmerston North, Feilding, Rongotea and Halcombe, it’s easy to forget that the routes by which we travel weren’t always there.
Palmerston North and its environs were once bush and swampland, and moa walked on what is now Albert St.
A moa footprint found there can still be seen in a plaster-cast taken of it in 1912 and now held at Te Manawa.
Somebody planned and laid out the towns and thoroughfares of Manawatū , and that somebody was John Tiffin Stewart. His name lives on in Mt Stewart (Whakaari), thousands of kilometres from his birthplace of Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, Scotland.
Born in 1827, Stewart was the son of Agnes Oliphant and John Stewart, commander of a fisheries cutter. He studied engineering in Glasgow before following his brothers to the Australian goldfields. Three years later he emigrated to New Zealand, where he became a surveyor for the Government. Stewart mapped the Manawatū River and surveyed roads in the Wairarapa region before moving to Foxton in 1864.
The following year he married Frances Ann Carkeek. The couple lived in Foxton for 24 years, and had 10 children.
Frances was apparently concerned for her safety and that of their children as her husband was constantly away on surveying trips, so he gave her a pistol. It wasn’t until many years later that she learnt the pistol was not loaded.
In the 1860s the Government was buying land in Waitotara and Manawatū for European settlement, and Stewart, who had learnt to speak te reo Mā ori fluently, was involved with the negotiations.
He kept notes of these negotiations, records of which are held in the Ian Matheson City Archives. A talented watercolourist, he supplemented these notes with lively illustrations.
Stewart recorded in his notebook that Te Hiriwanu, the principal chief at Raukawa Pā , told him, ‘‘You are keeping to the rivers in your survey and you will tell the Govt. that there are only water and shingle in our Block. Now I will shew [show] you something better.’’
Te Hiriwanu led him to ‘‘a fine clear space in the bush northward of the upper part of the river, between Maraetarata and Te Wi. This opening is called Papaioea and would form a good site for a township.’’
And so, the idea of Palmerston – later, Palmerston North, to avoid confusion with the town down south – was born.
Stewart enjoyed the respect of Mā ori, a respect he returned: ‘‘In surveying this large block [Ahuaturanga] I also laid out the native reserves and had no disputes with the Mā ories [sic], and I must bear testimony to their honourable conduct all through the time I was among them.’’
Stewart’s notes are not the dry, impersonal accounts of officialdom: He incorporated observations, impressions, sketches and jokes at his own expense.
In this anecdote, for example, he mocks his own self-importance, his dignity undone by a bird: ‘‘I had been addressing a large meeting of natives in the wharerunga or council house on a matter of considerable political importance, and had been urging my views with all the earnestness the subject demanded; immediately on conclusion of my speech, and before the old chief, to whom my arguments were chiefly addressed, had time to reply, a tui whose netted cage hung to a rafter overhead, responded in a clear emphatic way: ‘Tito! False!’
‘‘The circumstance naturally caused much merriment among my audience, and quite upset the gravity of the venerable old chief Nepia Taratoa. ‘Friend,’ said he, laughing, ‘your arguments are very good, but my mokai is a very wise bird, and he is not yet convinced.’ ’’
Sometimes it’s what Stewart doesn’t say that is most revealing. For example, he dryly records that, ‘‘When we were camped near Te Awa Huri Pa in 1859 I remember Major Biggs who was afterwards killed in the Poverty Bay massacre was there. So much for 1859.’’
Stewart was responsible for the planning and subdivision of the region’s towns. The town squares of Palmerston
North, Feilding, Halcombe and Rongotea are all his doing. He designed road and rail bridges throughout Manawatū and Rangitīkei, and the road through Te Ā piti, the Manawatū Gorge.
His energy and resourcefulness were legendary. His plans were too valuable to be trusted to the unreliable mail service, and he would often walk from Palmerston North to Wellington to deliver them to the Government – and then walk back again.
Between 1868 and 1871 Stewart worked on the design of the Whanganui town bridge, contributing a wooden extension as the original design was too short. He moved with his family to Whanganui in 1885, where he quickly became involved in local affairs. He was elected that year to the borough council, and served as the Government’s representative on the Whanganui River Trust. Together with his daughter and son-in-law, Stewart submitted a plan, successfully adopted, for the development of Virginia Lake.
He was keenly interested in music, meteorology, and astronomy, and he also embraced philanthropic and charitable causes such as the Whanganui Orphanage.
The Stewarts’ home was bequeathed in their will as a Karitane hospital for newborn babies, and it was later used to care for patients during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Stewart House, a grand two-storey villa in Campbell St, Whanganui, still stands today. Indeed Whanganui has as much claim to John Tiffin Stewart as Manawatū does.
He died there in 1913 and is buried with his wife and eldest son in the Heads Rd Cemetery.