Upper Takaka history retold
History buff Mac Harwood holds up his latest history collection - Upper Takaka Pioneers. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Irrepressible Upper Takaka history buff Mac Harwood has done it again.
His latest work is a 58-page self-published booklet entitled Upper Takaka Pioneers. He describes it as the stories of the first pakeha pioneers and second-generation settlers, Maori and pakeha goldminers, plus track- and road-makers in the original, more expanded Upper Takaka area.
Mac has spent years ferreting out information from local families and old council records, and says he concentrated on keeping it all as fact-based as possible.
“I wanted to put together a historical resource, any info I could get about how Upper Takaka got settled, before it all gets lost.”
The Crown had been keen to get people on the land there, but realising that few potential settlers had any money, instead offered 20-to-30-hectare lots as crown grants to entice settlers onto the land. The condition was that they had to make a serious go of it, and in two or three years show that they were on the way to establishing a viable farm, at least clearing the bush and removing the stumps off the access road.
Settlers who did little or nothing quickly forfeited their land, while successful farmers were rewarded with adjoining lots to increase their farm size. It was a challenge for families to live in tents at first, possibly with no income until they could milk a few cows and sell some surplus. Of the four original couples who settled there, Mac says one of the wives died after two years and one of the husbands at year nine, both miles from any medical assistance.
This booklet tells the separate family stories of the early comers: John Vittle, the Bate and Beardmore families and the Galeys, Harwoods, Sparrows and Barnetts, just to name a few. Also featured is a unique map accurately marked with descriptions of all the old pathways, tracks, bridle tracks and old roads in the Upper Takaka area, including Barrons Flat Track, Bates Bridle Track, Kill Devil, even the Maori Pathway, which used to exist between Motupipi and Riwaka, crossing a dip in the Pikikiruna Range over from Hamama.
Local history has long fascinated 77-year-old Mac, who has in another project meticulously recorded his own early memories of living at Upper Takaka. In the course of his overall research, he has collected over 14,000 names that are connected to his family or those of other Upper Takaka settlers, many attached to family trees. The detail obviously fascinates him. A treatise he wrote about the original Sparrow family farm at Dry Creek near Hailes Knob (titled Eric and Lucy Sparrow and Section 1) was reprinted in an issue of the Nelson Historical Society Journal. Mac has also written a small book all about his great-grandfather, Octavius Harwood, who immigrated to New Zealand from England over 150 years ago, settling first at Otakau on the Otago Peninsula. It was his son, James Septimus Harwood, who got a job in 1887 as assistant lighthouse keeper at Farewell Spit, before later moving to Upper Takaka with his wife Robina (nee Winton).
The author has given two copies of his latest work to the Takaka Memorial Library, plus more than a few others to all the families involved.
“So many people helped me,” he says. “Local histories like this are a collaborative effort.”
Mac still has a few spare copies, for $10 each.
Gerard Hindmarsh
