My Account
Matakana identity Errol Jones started using a computer to record her memoirs at the behest of her grandchildren, who complained they couldn’t read her old-fashioned cursive handwriting. She was 85 at the time. Now, 11 years later and with only peripheral vision remaining in one eye, Errol has completed a 231-page book on the pioneering families of Matakana – Matthew, Anderson, Meiklejohn, Carrie, Duncan, Matheson, Campbell, Dunning, Jones, MacLeod, Day and Owen – as well as four volumes of original poetry. At her Warkworth home, the author shared a few of her reminiscences with Mahurangi Matters editor Jannette Thompson …
Although I worked all my life on farms – first for my father Duncan Matthew and then my husband Ross – I only ever received a wage for short time when I was as a cadet nurse in Auckland. That was the way it was for women – in return for our labour, we were given a roof over our heads, food to eat and clothes to wear. On Saturday nights Dad used to give me one shilling and sixpence to go to the dance or pictures. I remember one day he gave me an extra sixpence because he didn’t have change. It was the first money I could call my own and I couldn’t wait to spend it on a packet of smokes. It was about 1973, when Ross and I retired from farming and moved to Warkworth, and that was also about the time I realised I was the matriarch of a family whose history I knew damn little about. When Ross passed away in 1985, I decided it was time to take on the task.
Brothers James and Charles Matthew arrived in Matakana in 1854, making them among the first settlers here. Originally from Carse of Gowie, Scotland, they were the sons of Patrick Matthew, Laird of Gourdie Manor. The nearest town to the Manor was Errol, which of course explains my name. The Errol Estate was said to have held 10,000 fruit trees in its 43-acres and Patrick Matthew experimented with hybridising. He wrote articles for gardening magazines and, in 1831, published a book Naval Timber and Arboriculture which outlined the process of evolution by natural selection and a theory of inheritance, known today as deoxyribonucleic or DNA. These radical ideas, which were published nearly 30 years before Darwin published Origin of Species, saw his book banned by the Perth Library and the family ostracised. Although Darwin did eventually recognise Matthew as “the first enunciator of Natural Selection”, the damage of Darwin’s plagiarism had already been done. While Charles Darwin lies at Westminster Abby in an honoured position, no-one knows for sure where Patrick Matthew is buried.
On the advice of Logan Campbell, the Matthews brothers took up a large block of forest and swamp called Waiwhata (encompassing an area around Pukematakeo/Sugar Loaf and Takatu Road to the Omaha River). They were delighted with their purchase as it was similar in topography to their Scottish home – high land, swampy flats and the glistening Tay (Omaha) River – an ideal site for an exotic nursery. Their Waiwhata cottage, made of pit sawn timber, became the first timber residence inland in the Lower North area. The planks were at least four centimetres thick as I saw for myself when finding a couple at the site of the cottage, where puriri blocks were still embedded. The brothers grew many different specimen trees such as oaks, osiers and poplars, aspens, sycamore, laurel, laburnum and wattles. There were even cuttings of willow planted along the river bank, brought from Napoleon’s tomb site at St Helena. The first orchard trees were all cordon-pruned (trained to grow as a single stem) and the nine orchards, mostly of apples and pears, were separated by colonnades of shelter trees. This became the first extensive commercial nursery in Australasia, from which fruit trees and shrubs were sent to all parts of the country and Australia.
James’s youngest son Duncan was my father. His marriage to my mother Malinda Meiklejohn joined two of the early pioneering clans, but that wasn’t an unfamiliar scenario. When I was a child there was no such thing as “trespassing”. You could walk across anyone’s land and go into their homes, whether they were there or not, because so many of us were related through a web of blood and marital ties. We all knew one another’s business – what sort of mortgage they had, when a baby was due and so on. People put up fences to keep stock in, not people out. We thought nothing of the fact that at times whole families would be squatting on our land by the river. Sometime they would be there for months.
I grew up at Bonnie Brae, on the corner of Takatu Road and Leigh Road, and used to sail my flax stick boat with its salt bag rag sail, where the olive trees now grow. School was first at Matakana and then Warkworth District High School. Lionel Meiklejohn was teaching at Warkworth so he used to borrow Ellis Jones’ Essex and that’s how we got to school. After school I became the district’s first land girl. It didn’t go down well in the local community and Mum and I got hell over it. Older people just hadn’t seen girls sowing manure and harrowing land. Ten years later when World War II came around, well, that was a different story. But the fact was that Dad didn’t have sons and I loved working on the farm. My sister Audrey had spina bifida and was on crutches all her life, and my other sister Velma wasn’t born until I was 17.
Ross and I met when he was six and I was nine. He was just a fat little boy that I didn’t want anything to do with, plus our mothers were cousins. It wasn’t until he returned from the NZ kiwi rugby league tour of England, cut short by the outbreak of WWII, that my opinion of him changed. I remember him walking through our gate, a huge man dressed in Harris tweed, plus fours and woolly stockings, and me in a dirty old frock and hair unbrushed. I just rushed into his arms and that was that. We married without the prescribed year-long engagement, which set the tongues wagging, but it was calving time and we had his farm on the Omaha Flats moorland to look after. Our first son Murray was born two years after the wedding so that put an end to any gossip. After Murray came Roderick and Ivor. Jones Road was remote in those days – we had to harness three draught horses each morning just to take the cream cans to the road. We didn’t get electricity until 1948 – a lot has changed since then.
The book seems to have been a long time in the writing, but I’m glad it’s done. It’s only a shame it wasn’t written by my parents generation, as I only knew the pioneers children. I hope it will also remind people that things as they are now aren’t necessarily the way they have always been. For instance, what is now called Omaha was once known as Sandspit and the Sandspit of today was known as Lower Matakana. Ward Road was Anderson
