Behold the Moon: the European Occupation of the Dunedin District 1770-1848 by Peter Entwisle

Author:Peter Entwisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

European advance around the harbour

The arrival of the New Zealand Company party with its surveyors had already expanded the numbers and sites of European occupation around the harbour. On June the 9th there were two whares on the beach at Koputai and a pile of bricks and timber, the materials for Tuckett’s house - the beginnings of modern Port Chalmers.626 There were also people who weren’t surveyors. A Mr and Mrs Lethbridge from Taranaki and David Scott, a flax trader from the North Island, had arrived early in 1844 and were living at Koputai and apparently there were three or four others.627

At the head of the harbour, now New Edinburgh, near the site of the present John Wickliffe House in the Exchange, near a stream called Toitu, by June the 22nd there was a weatherboard cottage.628 Presumably the whalers’ pig hunting lodge in the bush behind this site already existed and no doubt it was discovered by the surveyors about this time. Also in 1844 a traveller noted that two runaway sailors were living at the mouth of another stream, Kaituna, near the junction of modern Anderson’s Bay Road and MacBride Street.629

And, on the 30th of July 1844, another of the surveyors, Richard Nicholson, started building a whare somewhere on the site of Dunedin.630 Soon after this time, with the conclusion of the sale, Tuckett’s brick house at Port Chalmers would have been completed.

The sale attracted more comers. A Mr Andrew Rowand, partner of Archibald Anderson of Wellington, arrived later in the year on the Hannah with a cargo of sheep and cattle which he ‘grazed on the open land at the head of the harbour’.631 But then there was a setback. The New Zealand Company encountered what would be a protracted crisis. In December Tuckett resigned and left and many of the surveying staff were let go.

William Davison was appointed to replace him. He came with a skeleton staff and took up residence in Tuckett’s house. He had work to do, but the future of the large plan was in doubt.

Despite the Company’s embarassments the harbour had other attractions. On the 30th of December Davison was joined by Alexander and Janet McKay who established a tavern, the Surveyor’s Arms’, on the site of the present Port Chalmers Hotel.632 This brought the number of public houses on the harbour to three and Harwood was also selling liquor at his big store at the Heads.

The McKays were accompanied by another family; Janet’s sister Isabella, her husband John Anderson and his father James. They made their home at the head of the harbour on the inlet now named after them, Anderson’s Bay.633 And about this time too a coloured man called Black Jack was living on the opposite side of the harbour near Ravensbourne at the point which still bears his name.634 Dunedin was not even a village, but after sixty years of desertion its central, upper harbour site was occupied again.

Even so the lower harbour was still much more populous. At

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