Getting around in a land without roads


These days, heading north over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that when the SHALIMAR arrived in the Waitemata in December 1859, the North Shore was very sparsely populated and beyond that the map was practically blank. There were no real roads and certainly no bridges: Maori were familiar with a network of foot tracks and the very early Pakeha settlers had used these tracks as bridle paths. However, they were often impassable in winter and seldom wide enough for pulling a cart, let alone a dray laden with of a settler family’s precious belongings. The most practical way north then was by sea, often combined with a great deal of walking. For settlement on the east coast north of Auckland, the most practical routes where by sea to Mahurangi, Mangawhai, Russell and Whangaroa. The SHALIMAR passengers who settled in the Taraire Valley near Kaeo bought their land sight unseen in Auckland after perusing Charles Heaphy’s drawings in the Land Office. They took the schooner Kiwi from Auckland to Whangaroa: in those days it was a bustling settlement where the settlers would have found a guide to accompany them through the bush to their land. Settlers heading to the Kaipara Harbour had three options for getting there. The first was to take the schooner to Mahurangi for the lower reaches of the harbour, or to Mangawhai for the more northern inlets of the Kaipara. From Mangawhai there was a well-defined portage trail that Maori had used for generations, crossing over to Kaiwaka and the sliver of water that is one of the most easterly reaches of the Kaipara. Water transport in these narrow upper reaches was largely tide-dependent, and reduced to craft not much bigger than a canoe, but it provided access to places like Pati, Matakohe and Albertville. A second option, for destinations in the south of the Kaipara Harbour, was to travel by boat to the westernmost reach of the Waitemata, to Riverhead. From here there was a roughly 20 kilometre track through to the navigable stretch of the Kaipara River at Helensville. By far the most hazardous way of reaching the Kaipara Harbour was to travel south from Auckland to Onehunga and embark there for a voyage out over the Manukau bar, up the west coast and into the Kaipara Harbour over its equally treacherous bar. Even when steam took over from sailing vessels, the voyage was still so dangerous that by the late 1860s the settlers were demanding proper roads to link them, and more critically their produce, to the markets in Auckland.
However the settlers chose to travel north, the land was so sparsely populated that they can only be admired for their grit and determination. After living in relatively busy towns and villages in Britain and probably fairly close to their families, and then having been packed in close proximity to their fellow passengers for over three months on the ship, moving to complete isolation must have been extremely daunting, no matter how great their sense of adventure. A highlight of their rural life would have been the arrival of letters from ‘Home’. Around the Kaipara Harbour letters were delivered by boat thanks to a monthly postal service. Shalimar passenger Andrew BONAR had settled in Kaukapakapa with his wife Elizabeth, son William and brother John. Seeing a need to keep the various isolated settlements somehow in touch with each other, he and a handful of other enterprising settlers began a cutter service around the more north-easterly reaches of the Kaipara Harbour as early as 1862 – just two years after his arrival in New Zealand. Further north, the post was delivered in a similar way. It arrived at for example Mangawhai or Whangaroa by boat from Auckland and was delivered out to the settlers by a postman who covered vast distances on foot or horseback if he was lucky.
Further reading:
Non-fiction:        Tall Spars, Steamers and Gum - the Kaipara 1854-1947 by Wayne RYBURN
                            Seven Lives on Salt River by Dick SCOTT
                            The Rock and the Sky – the story of Rodney County by H MABBETT
                            In Praise of our Post Office – Kaeo and Whangaroa’s nerve centres since 1857
by Fiona CRAIG
Fiction:                 The Story of a New Zealand River by Jane MANDER 
(Jane mander wasthe daughter of Shalimar passenger Janet KERR and her husband Francis Mander)
                              Yates' Landing by Kate STIRLING

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