A ferry, Stewart Island and a large plough
Lloyd Esler
The Foveaux Strait ferry Wairua was the heaviest New Zealand built vessel when she was launched in 1961 by Mason Brothers in Auckland for the Marine Department. She weighed 626 tons and measured 42.9m and had a speed of eleven knots. The Earnslaw, built in 1912, is longer but lighter (50.2m and 329 tons). As well as servicing Stewart Island, Wairua was used for reprovisioning the weather station at Campbell Island and for servicing the lighthouses in the south. She made her last trip to Stewart Island on September 9, 1985 and was sold to Interport Shipping Corp. of Suva, retaining her name. The circumstances of the sale were murky and Rakiura was left without a ferry service, with the role being filled by various charter vessels. Wairua ran aground and was lost on Namalata Reefs in Fiji on August 8, 1993. One of the complaints by the crew was that she was hard to steer on her Foveaux Strait crossings with the rudder sitting in dead water between the two propellers. To a layman, the photo, taken just before her launch, seems to show a rather inadequate rudder.
Stewart Island
On November 10, 1863 the Stewart Island Annexation Act extended the mandate of the Southland Provincial Council to Rakiura. (Southland having split from Otago in the interim.) This meant that although it was Māori land it was subject to the laws of the Southland Provincial Council. There was some opposition to the move but growing concern about lawlessness and lack of government on the island, then still Māori land, convinced the government to act. Otago Province, still sniffy about the loss of what became Southland in 1861, thought Stewart Island should be governed directly by parliament and not by a province as it was suitable for granite mining, a penal colony and not much more. “The nature of the island forbids the idea of its ever being made available for the purposes of ordinary settlement. But it is admirably adapted as a site for a penal institution, and there can be no doubt that some central establishment of the kind will have to be founded at no very distant period. For this purpose no locality could offer greater advantages. It is easy of access, and by employing the prisoners in the improvement of the harbors; the quarrying of the granite, with which the island abounds; and the cutting and sawing of the splendid timber which clothes almost the whole surface of the island, it might as a penal establishment be made selfsupporting.” The government purchased Stewart Island – except for nine reserves, some of the Muttonbird Islands and Ruapuke – for £6000. The sale was finalised at Bluff on June 29, 1864 in the care of Commissioner Henry Tacy Clarke.
A big plough
Southland’s largest plough was built in Invercargill by Reid and Gray Ltd in 1939 for Alex Wilcox. The Wilcox Special is said to be the largest single-furrow plough in the southern hemisphere. It is 8.5m long and cuts a furrow 76cm deep and 1.17m wide. It weighs 3.5 tonnes and is pulled by a crawler tractor. The plough can be admired in the Geraldine Vintage Car and Machinery Museum by those who wish to pay their respects to the monster.