The Six Colonies

AN interesting name has been given to the largest early centres of British settlement in this country — ‘The Six Colonies of New Zealand.’ The title is a reminder of more than their size. It suggests rightly, although the word ‘colonies’ may now seem strange in this connection — six colonies in one colony — several facts: their separate founding, the intervening distances that long kept them apart, and the resulting growth of a strongly local sentiment in all of them, a sentiment still active but likely to be moderated more and more, as the Dominion’s closer settle­ment and the improvement of its internal com­munications go on.

Those intervening distances were a serious handicap in more than sentiment. It was often quicker to send a letter to a faraway New Zealand settlement by way of Sydney than to send it direct. After one early session of Parliament held in Auckland the South Island members went home that way. For coastal shipping was infrequent and irregular, horses were few, and instead of roads were Maori tracks near the shore or through rough bush country, the only relief being afforded by occasional canoe-travel on river or lake.

So men obliged to travel much did a prodigious amount of walking and became hardened to it. Of such were the early missionaries. Later, Bishop Selwyn, arriving in 1842, took kindly to this method of getting about, for he was a good athlete and swimmer. He had a pedometer, by which the distances he walked were registered for proud remembrance. But he once slunk into Auckland to Judge Martin’s home, by a round-about path, in rags and on his last pair of shoes!