Family History 4.33

Robinson story

Joshua's account

A New Farm

Runciman's farm, where our goods were stored, was partly cleared and near the house a fine orchard had been planted. Father had had fifteen acres of bush felled, but when we arrived we felled a small area of light bush that grew on the top of a hill. Here we built our first house of the stems of fern trees or punga, placed upright in the ground. Along their tops we placed pole plates, roof beams and rafters fashioned from small saplings, and thatched the roof with the leaves of the nikau palm.

At one end of the house was a big wooden chimney, the lower part and the hearth lined with stones, and the fireplace would hold a log of generous proportions. There was no stove but we had camp ovens. At first the house floor was of earth, but as Mother did not like it, Father split palings and put a floor down and also lined Mother's room. There were three rooms in all, with two nikau whares as store rooms.

One of the first jobs we had was to make a garden. It was hard work getting out the green stumps and roots, but at last a small patch was cleared and thoroughly cultivated with spade and hoe. Father split more palings with which we completely fenced the garden to keep wild pigs and other animals out. We sowed potatoes and other vegetables suitable to the climate and ground, and on the new soil grew some excellent crops. We planned an orchard too, and I have never tasted such luscious peaches as those we eventually obtained from our peach trees.

About March of that first year on the farm we burnt the fifteen acres felled by the bushmen before our arrival. When most of it had gone up in smoke and flames, all members of the family who could be spared for outside work, had to busy themselves in logging up and making fresh fires of half burned wood, until everything except the stumps was cleared up. Father who was a very strong man excelled at this work, using a sapling about fifteen feet long (4.5 m) in logging up. Before leaving town he was of generous proportions, but the strenuous work on the farm soon took away flabbiness and he looked what he was, a strong healthy man.

The bushmen who had felled our bush, had known that Father was a Baptist and a religious man, so they carved what I suppose were to them humorous verses on the trunks of several prominent trees. One I can remember was:

"Stop, sinner, stop! Before you go.

Else you will fall into eternal woe."

And another:

"The way to Jordan."

We sowed wheat and oats and grass on the bush burn and got good results. The wheat and oats we threshed with flails, and ground the wheat into flour in a steel hand mill. From this flour we made our own bread in  a camp oven.

As we had a goat and two kids we were able to have milk. There was such an abundance of food in the bush that the goat would come home groaning at every step, with sides so distended as to appear on the point of exploding. We imagined our garden safe from prowling animals, but one morning we saw the goat followed by her two kids walking serenely along the top of the fence. They certainly looked ornamental, but the sight was displeasing as it showed the garden was not as secure as we believed.