21/07/2025
A great article written on one of our early settlers
I was working on something for a client today... and spied an interesting article, so here is tonight's wee blog... by me, Roselyn Fauth
THE FIRST FARM Timaru Herald June 1914 P12 Supplement
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THD19140611.2.64.40
I had one of those moments recently. The kind where the Wi-Fi drops out mid-message, or the groceries feel like they cost more than they should, and I feel the frustration bubble up. Then, while doing some browsing on Papers Past, I came across an old article from the Timaru Herald, dated 11 June 1914.
The story was shared by an older man named George Levens, who had come to South Canterbury in 1859 with a pioneering farming family named Neal. His memories painted a vivid picture of early settler life near Temuka. He described hauling supplies, chipping sea-damaged flour out of barrels with a tomahawk, and the challenges of building a farm from nothing. This one line made me pause... “Mr and Mrs Neal and three children slept in a dray with a tilt over it.”
For three years, that was their home. A wooden cart, with a canvas covering, was parked on the edge of a rough paddock. No walls. No kitchen. No insulation. Just a mother and father, doing their best to raise a young family while breaking in the land.
The article didn’t name her. Just “Mrs Neal.” But I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Who was this woman sleeping in a dray with her children night after night? What brought her here? And why didn’t we know more about her? So I went looking tonight...
Finding Mary
Her name was Mary Neal. She was born Mary Burbage around 1812 in the village of Binley, Warwickshire, England. Her parents were John Burbage and Elizabeth Rathbone, who married in 1809. In 1835, Mary married William Neal, a widower, at the parish church in her hometown. Over the following years, they had several children together, including Rosanna, Emma, and Joseph.
In 1851, the family boarded the Duke of Portland and left London. They arrived in Lyttelton in September of that year, among a group of early settlers coming to Canterbury. Just one year later, Mary gave birth to their daughter, Louisa in New Zealand.
By 1859, the Neal family had made their way south to Temuka. William had purchased a 50-acre freehold section near the Temuka River. They camped for a while at Giles’s accommodation house in Orari before moving onto their land. But there was no house. So they lived in a covered dray. A tarpaulin was set up as a storeroom and sleeping space for the men, and Mary, with her children, slept in the back of the cart. That was home for three years!
Mouldy flour, frosty nights in a dray, raising four children through storms and summer nor westers. Sounds like a pretty good definition of roughing it, hey?
But Were They Really the First?
As I read more, I started to wonder about the claim that the Neals were the first European farmers in South Canterbury. After all, the Rhodes brothers were already at The Levels in the early 1850s, and Frederick Hornbrook had a run at Arowhenua. So how does this add up?
It turns out, there is a difference in what kind of “first” is being described.
The Rhodes and Hornbrook families were pastoral runholders. They leased large areas of land from the Crown and grazed sheep on a wide scale. These were big operations managed by shepherds and station hands. They were definitely the first European landholders in the region, but they weren’t small-scale farmers living on the land with their families.
The Neals were different. William and Mary purchased their section as freehold land and moved onto it with their children. They worked it themselves, lived on it full time, and brought the first horse-powered threshing machine to the district. Mary raised her children there, sleeping in the open, and doing the hard, daily work that made the land livable. So while the runholders came first in terms of land occupation, the Neals were likely the first to live and work as a family-run settler farm in Temuka.
That distinction matters. Especially when it comes to recognising the labour of women like Mary, who I find are often left out of the records.
Emma’s Story
As I followed Mary’s story, another name kept surfacing. Her daughter Emma. She was born in December 1842 in the village of Wolston, Warwickshire, and was baptised on Christmas Day. At eight years old she boarded the Duke of Portland with her family and made the long journey to New Zealand. She would have been a teenager during those three years sleeping in the dray. That experience would have shaped her deeply.
At 15, Emma married David Pollard, a shepherd, in Christchurch. They had two children before David passed away. Just a few years later, she married again, this time to James Lumsden. The wedding took place at her father’s home in Arowhenua Bush, near Temuka.
Emma went on to have a large family. Eleven children in total. She and James lived in Arowhenua, Timaru, Waimate and later in the Catlins, where they eventually settled. After James’s death, Emma moved to Owaka. She died in 1918 at Dunedin Hospital and was buried in Waimate.
Her life tells us what it meant to grow up on the frontier, to endure loss, to move often, and to carry forward the legacy of resilience her mother had shown before her.
Reflecting on the Present
Right now, many of us are feeling the weight of rising costs. I am not trying to compare those pressures to what people faced in the past, but I do find that stories like Mary’s help me reflect and gain some perspective.
Mary had to soften bricks of flour soaked in sea water and full of mites. She had to keep her children warm on frosty nights in a wagon and find food with whatever means she had. She did not have much, but was able to build something out of almost nothing.
These women helped shape the communities we live in now, often without leaving behind anything more than a mention in a newspaper, a mark on a marriage certificate or a tribute of information in a family history archive.
Learning about Mary and Emma Neal has reminded me that history is not only made in grand buildings or major events. It can be made in wagons. These women did not set out to make history headline, but they made our future.
Their stories invite us to reflect on our own lives. How do we respond to difficulty? What do we build for those who come after us? How do we carry on when things feel tough?
They also remind me that so much of the strength in our communities has come from people who simply kept going. If we can recognise that, perhaps we can make more generous choices too... for each other, for our families, and for the future we are shaping now.
I also remind my self that before the Neals arrived, this land already had a long human history. Their story has threads that includes mana whenua and many others whose presence and contributions shaped this place long before it was called Temuka.
Mary and Emma built their lives on resilience, hard work, and love. I think they gave more than they took. Perhaps that is the lesson I have learned from todays history reflection... to live in a way that leaves something better for the future.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the many sources that helped me piece together Mary and Emma’s lives. Much of this came from publicly available records and archives, including Papers Past, the Timaru Herald, cemetery databases, the New Zealand Births, Deaths & Marriages Historical Records, and the Warwickshire parish records. I also drew on compiled genealogies and local histories shared through community-driven platforms like WikiTree and the Macdonald Dictionary of Canterbury Biographies, housed at Canterbury Museum.
Without the work of archivists, researchers, librarians, family historians, and volunteers who digitise and preserve these records, stories like Mary and Emma’s would be nearly impossible to recover. So thank you for keeping the threads of the past connected, and for helping bring women's stories back into the light where they belong.
https://www.wuhootimaru.co.nz/blog
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THD19140611.2.64.40
