Refrigeration Increased the Demand for Land in New Zealand

TO many, the simple, unpretentious life on a sheep station had a strong attraction for its own sake. Even that perfect English gentlewoman, Lady Barker, occasionally forgot that she was ' roughing it' and frankly enjoyed the hardships as well as the pleasures of pastoral existence. The squatters, even if brought up in a very much more cultivated atmosphere, drew a certain lively strength from their sheep-tending life in the wide, empty landscape.

The squatters were the dominant political group as late as the eighties. This was in part due in the early years to their being the men of most capital, in part to the electoral value of the country quota, and later, to the rising value of land. At first they nearly all had hopes of making enough money to return early to England. In the middle years they had to carry on through slumps, snow storms, and varying prices, not knowing whether they would ever overcome their difficulties. But the invention of refrigeration greatly increased the certainty of farming profits and saved both cockies and squat­ters from hard times. In fact, after the breaking up of the large estates, it created a whole class of men made wealthy by the rise in the value of their holdings, who were in a sense new recruits to the ranks of the squatters. A bad effect of this was that farmers took too great an interest in land speculation and not enough in the actual capacity of their farms to produce.

The cockatoo, the small holder, who had bought a few freehold acres out of the immense territory of some squatter, was not yet very prosperous. Squatters' wives sometimes treated his family to charitable endeavours. The cocky himself had to rely on casual work on larger farms, and, even when he produced much of his own food, had a fairly low standard of living