wire-fence. Long
before the foundation of New Zealand, Macarthur had taught the
Australians to acclimatize the merino sheep. Squatters and shepherds
from New South Wales and Tasmania were quick to discover that the
South Island of New Zealand was a well-nigh ideal land for pastoral
enterprise, with a climate where the fleece of a well-bred merino
sheep would yield 4 lbs. of wool as against 21/2 lbs. in New South
Wales. Coming to Canterbury, Otago, and Nelson, they taught the new
settlers to look to wool and meat, rather than to oats and wheat,
for profit and progress. The Australian _coo-ee_, the Australian
buck-jumping horse, the Australian stockwhip and wide-awake hat came
into New Zealand pastoral life, together with much cunning in dodging
land-laws, and a sovereign contempt for small areas. In a few
years the whole of the east and centre of the island, except a few
insignificant cultivated patches, was leased in great "runs" of from
10,000 to 100,000 acres to grazing tenants. The Australian term
"squatter" was applied to and accepted good-humouredly by these.
Socially and politically, however, they were the magnates of the
colony; sometimes financially also, but not always. For the price of
sheep and wool could go down by leaps and bounds, as well as up; the
progeny of the ewes bought for 30s. each in 1862 might have to go at
5s. each in 1868, and greasy wool might fluctuate in value as much as
6d. a lb. Two or three bad years would deliver over the poor squatter
as bond-slave to some bank, mortgage company or merchant, to whom he
had been paying at least 10 per cent. interest, _plus_ 21/2 per cent.
commission exacted twice a year, on advances. In the end, maybe, his
mortgagee stepped in; he and his children saw their homestead, with
its garden and clumps of planted eucalypts, willows, and poplars--an
oasis in the grassy wilderness--no more. Sometimes a new squatter
reigned in his stead, sometimes for years the mortgagee left the place
in charge of a shepherd--a new and dreary form of absentee ownership.
Meanwhile, in the earlier years the squatters were merry monarchs,
reigning as supreme in the Provincial Councils as in the jockey clubs.
They made very wise and excessively severe laws to safeguard their
stock from infection, and other laws, by no means so wise, to
safeguard their runs from selection, laws which undoubtedly hampered
agricultural progress. The peasant cultivator, or "cockatoo" (another
Australian w