Burke Manuscript

Burke Manuscript: Page 283

Transcript

Ah, just so! That is a full and satisfactory explanation. And since we are on the subject of grain agents and buyers and middlemen and farmers, a little retrospective glance will not be amiss. In the dark ages, for the world, even the Canterbury world, travels fast, when reaping machines were in their Colonial infancy and Binders were unknown, when many a paddock was reaped, good old time style, with a sickle, and threshed with the flail, and while on the flail subject, some 26 or 27 years ago, the writer remembers the high fun the Māoris, men, women and children, used to have at harvest time at the old pah at Kaiapoi. Standing in long rows, with the short end of the flail in hand, at the word of some graphically scarred old veteran, the row of flails, long end up, would go flying through the air and come down, a, ugh! on the unfortunate wheat. How they managed not to whisk off a Māori head or two now and then, was a mystery. Perhaps Isaac Wilson, M.H.R., could explain all about that, for he was running about amongst them a boy hail fellow well met. Well that interruption is over. When some years later, cockies were spreading out, and those farmers’ friends Harman & Stevens and others, were leasing land, bought at two pound per acre from the State, with conditions, at five shillings per acre annual rent, and a purchasing clause at 5 and two pounds per acre for five years, and under which operation cocky after cocky, of the old Springs, Shands and Middle Tracks went to the wall, crushed and in despair (reckon it out ye mathematical and arithmetical students) the great grain buyer was Mr W. Hannibal Lane.

This gentleman found his way hither from some part of Australia, where, doubtless he had experience. Old Mr Inwood, the parent of Winchester Township and who had managed somehow or other to get the freehold of that Island in Hereford Street upon which stands

First wheat exported – G. Gould

Berliner store Ashburton

1^st Manager Union Bank (or Spowers) came from Adelaide 1856