3

Freedom and Freehold: Intergenerational Land Ownership by Chinese and Dalmatian Farming Families in New Zealand

Jane McCabe

Introduction

For some decades, in New Zealand and Australia, academic and community historians have promulgated the belief – or at least implicitly worked on the assumption – that one of the benefits of naturalisation was the right to own land. Consequently, it has been understood that the ban on naturalisation for Chinese peoples in New Zealand, from 1908 to 1951, prevented land ownership, unless an individual was already naturalised. This belief has been reinforced by evidence that most Chinese market gardeners leased land, rather than owning it outright. This in turn has been woven into a narrative of resilience, since many of the Chinese families who established successful market gardens arrived in the era of non-naturalisation. These families often went on to purchase land post-1951, once naturalisation was again possible, reinforcing the belief that the two were directly related.

More recently, scholars have suggested that, in terms of legal restriction, only in the years 1942–45 were non-naturalised Chinese peoples in New Zealand barred from purchasing land.¹ While this attenuates the extent of this discriminatory measure, it is notable how late this brief ban was, given that many other restrictions had been removed by this time.² Further, there is much anecdotal evidence that land purchase was restricted in informal ways, such as refusal to sell land to Chinese peoples, and these social mechanisms can be much more difficult to address than legal discrimination.³ A third point related to this corrective about land purchase by non-naturalised peoples is whether individuals and families believed that their ability to own land was negated by their ‘alien’ status, due either to local information or that shared across national boundaries via the transnational family networks that were common in the first half of the twentieth century. In other words, if an individual in Queensland, for example, was prevented from owning land because they were barred from naturalising, it seems plausible that a relative or associate in New Zealand might have assumed the same to be true for them.

James Ng’s third volume of Windows on a Chinese Past (1999) is likely to be the most authoritative source on this complex matter. In this detailed work, Ng cited a list (compiled by Nigel Murphy for the Chinese Association) of all the legal consequences of non-naturalisation – every Act that brought in restrictions during the period of non-naturalisation – for Chinese people in New Zealand.⁴ This myriad of legal restrictions ranged from disallowing ownership of ships or aircraft to voting or serving on local bodies and other boards, through to receiving pensions and other social services. However, uncertainty remained concerning ‘the Chinese purchase of agricultural land’. As Ng explained:

Many of us can vaguely recall our parents saying that Chinese were unable to purchase agricultural land, although they were able to buy shops. The chief benefit of my grandfather being naturalised in 1905 was said to be his legal ability to buy land for his kin who were market gardeners in Gore and Ashburton. A World War 1 regulation barred Chinese aliens from land transactions unless they were first issued with a licence. This regulation was extended in 1922. In World War 2, the Aliens Land Purchase Regulations, 1942, barred Chinese aliens from ownership of land and remained in force until 1945.⁵

In this chapter, I seek to bring further clarity (and, admittedly, further complexity) to this discussion by examining rural land ownership and intergenerational transmission by non-British families in two disparate regions of New Zealand: Chinese market gardeners on the Taieri Plain in the southern province of Otago, and Dalmatian gum diggers turned farmers and wine growers in Hokianga in the Far North. These communities were part of a major research project I conducted on farming families and inheritance.⁶ An important feature of my methodology was to broaden the term ‘farming family’ – which, in New Zealand, is commonly understood to refer to Pākehā agriculturalists – to include families of Māori and non-British ancestry, as well as horticulturalists, since they faced the same issues with family inheritance. ‘Mainstream’ farming families were also included so as to enable analysis across the spectrum of families of different classes, religions, cultures and ethnicities that made up these particular rural communities. The overall argument of the project is that the familial trade in land – buying and selling, leasing and inheriting – is central to rural community formation. During the course of the research it became clear that this trade is one that blurs the boundaries between family, extended family and community. Neighbours, for example, can become more like kin over generations of farming, and marriage between families over many generations has created complex community-wide connections.

It is from this ‘bundle of relationships’ approach to rural communities that I put the spotlight in this chapter on non-British farming families and consider the effect of naturalisation on their efforts to build-up landholdings.⁷ While the pattern of Chinese emigration to places like Australia and New Zealand will be familiar to most readers, the Dalmatian story warrants further introduction. In the late nineteenth century, Dalmatian men from an area south of Split (now part of Croatia), comprising a narrow coastal strip and a number of islands, travelled to the Far North of New Zealand to engage in digging for kauri gum – deposits of resin from ancient forests that experienced a ‘boom’ similar to that of gold.⁸ These men were escaping political and economic hardship, and, like Chinese families, a practice developed whereby some sons sought opportunities overseas. The resulting chain migration saw the establishment of a community that continues to self-identify as ‘Dalmatian’, despite political events that might have dislodged this terminology.⁹ One of the main contrasts to the Chinese experience in New Zealand was a high degree of intermarriage with Māori women in the Far North, leading to the existence of a mixed community known locally as ‘Māori-Dallies’.¹⁰ Marriage to local women can, of course, be connected to geographical divergence too: it would be a much longer journey for Dalmatian men to make regular trips home to wives, as Chinese men often did.

Bringing Dalmatian families into comparison and contrast with Chinese farmers in the south has a number of benefits. In both cases, land ownership in the initial phase was attempted by single men (either unmarried or with wives and children at home). This placed them at a disadvantage in an era in which there was growing concern about the prevalence of single men in rural districts and the need for families to form the moral nucleus of a ‘new’ society. Both also faced the distressing scenario of an initially positive reception followed by a period of strong ‘anti’ rhetoric, based on racist ideas about work habits, competitive and collective behaviour, and fears of an ‘influx’, all of which underpinned the use of naturalisation as a means of restricting opportunity and the desire/ability to settle in New Zealand.¹¹ These demographic and political forces saw Chinese and Dalmatian men forming connections that can be described as kin-based rather than directly familial: working with others from the same home village, for example.¹² This collective activity extended to land ownership, occupation and use, and so adds an important dimension to our understanding of familial inheritance, which, for these non-British communities, was founded on kin-based ‘trading’ within their own communities and was only later followed by integration into wider rural land exchange and transmission down a family line that conformed to the mainstream ideal of the family farm.

Land and the Law: State Regimes, Local Cultures

The aspiration to own freehold land was a key feature of a developing national imaginary in New Zealand from the mid to late nineteenth century. The 1860s–70s were pivotal decades in which Enlightenment ideals about broadening access to civic participation, land ownership and enfranchisement were being negotiated in new imperial spaces. The question facing those intent on implementing ‘reforms’ in the colonies was how far these rights might be extended beyond the British male elite – since there were not only class but also racial and gendered barriers to full participation in political and social life. In New Zealand, land was a particularly contentious issue: the 1860s saw prolonged conflict between the state and iwi (Māori tribe) in various parts of the North Island (known as the New Zealand Wars), which culminated in the punitive confiscation of large swathes of land from Māori deemed to have fought against the Crown. Meanwhile, in the South Island, where almost all Indigenous land was alienated in the 1840s, most land suitable for farming had been tied up by a political, moneyed elite that had seized the opportunity to take up large pastoral runs. Various factions in government debated the ‘land question’ seemingly endlessly based on opposite views about its distribution.

After two decades of debate, the Liberal government of the 1890s gained a mandate to implement a two-pronged strategy for redistributing land into the hands of the small family enterprises: (a) breaking up the large landholdings of early British arrivals and (b) embarking on a long project to acquire the several million acres of the North Island that remained in papatupu (customary) Māori ownership for resale or lease to British families.¹³ A series of legislative measures and schemes were devised to enable family farmers to get onto this land with minimal capital outlay, and to impinge on the ability of the wealthy to accrue large landholdings in the first place. In the process, the ideal of the small ‘yeoman’ farmer took firm root in New Zealand – more so than in any other part of the British Empire – and persisted right through the twentieth century and, arguably, to the present day.¹⁴

Immigration and naturalisation laws, which developed alongside this liberalisation of land law, can be understood as a mechanism to regulate new admissions to the widening middle class – the result of opportunistic individuals rapidly gaining not only wealth but also political influence through land speculation. Immigration was vital to supply the labour to make the land productive (clearing bush, draining swamps, building fences) but there was a persistent shortage of farm labourers and manual workers that could not be filled by British migrants. This meant that any purist rhetoric of excluding non-British peoples was regularly set aside, and workers who may not have been ‘desirable’ but were nonetheless acceptable were allowed to cross the border. However, once across the border, persistent efforts were made to regulate ‘second tier’ immigrants in order to privilege British families (and British values) in forming the nucleus around which rural and urban communities grew.¹⁵

In the early colonial period, naturalisation law was a key mechanism for controlling non-British peoples once inside the borders through its connection to property rights. Prior to 1866, non-British subjects in New Zealand could not own or inherit property; however, they could gain this right by becoming naturalised. Although it required an act of Parliament for each ‘batch’ to achieve this, there were few restrictions on becoming naturalised in this era.¹⁶ In 1866, the Aliens Act formalised a process for applying for naturalisation. At the same time, land ownership and naturalisation became detached, at least in the eyes of the law. One did not have to be naturalised to legally own and transmit or transfer the ownership of land. As naturalisation ceased to be a means of controlling land ownership, land tenure became central to the ‘land question’ and was increasingly used as a means for the government to regulate landholdings. ‘Special settlement’ schemes were devised as a means for getting British families onto land recently acquired from local iwi by the Crown. Land was leased to families who lacked the capital to purchase it outright, freeing up any resources they did have (and often providing additional funds) for ‘breaking in’ the land: clearing scrub, draining swamps, fencing, and developing crops and stock.¹⁷ Those leases ranged in term from 30 years to the so-named ‘perpetual’ leases (999 years) that were effectively freehold.

While there were no stated restrictions as to who could take up land in these schemes, the regulations were, of course, culturally biased towards British families. But the emphasis here needs to be placed on both parts of that phase – ‘British’ and ‘families’. There was a racial/cultural bias and also a class/social one. Settlement schemes stated that preference would be given to married men, and, while families with less means were targeted, values of respectability and hard work were built into the regulations.¹⁸ Officials selected families to take up blocks of land; they were then monitored, their progress and productivity was tracked and the state retained the right to remove the lease.¹⁹ Being awarded a block of land did not come with the future right to freehold nor the right to transfer the lease to the next generation. Thus, the related ideals of freehold land ownership and of keeping the farm in the family were restricted for families of all ancestries and origins.

Having said that, the ground was undoubtedly tilted in favour of British families. My research into these settlement schemes in Northland shows that British families played an active role in pressuring the government to acquire Māori land outright for the purposes of making it available for British families to purchase freehold. Indeed, a key aim of my land/inheritance study was to explore the extent to which colonial families were actors in the process of land alienation (rather than just beneficiaries), and, beyond that, to examine their participation in the rural land trade, within and between families, over generations. What has been surprising is the extent to which leasing has figured in this local trade. Previously, land ownership has been understood as having moved through a clear progression from papatupu, to Crown land, to freehold Pākehā ownership. Once one reconceptualises the almost mythical idea of familial inheritance of the farm as a community land trade, the potential for looking across ethnic and legal boundaries – a genuinely inclusive community study – is opened up. And, by looking at freehold and leasehold land, the intricate relationships that underpin this trade are revealed. It then becomes possible to paint a more accurate picture of everyday life for non-British landholders in rural communities; to consider the subtle workings of discrimination and integration; and to recognise concomitant economic, legal, social and familial dynamics.

To consider the way these state-level policies and laws played out locally, a brief sketch of my two study districts is necessary. Taieri and Hokianga (see Figure 3.1) are not only physically but also socially distant from each other, occupying opposite positions in the national ideal of intergenerational farm ownership. In Hokianga, the achievement of this ideal was hampered by geographical features that made much of the area ill-suited to modern farming, and by the complex historical processes referred to above that saw large areas of papatupu land converted into Māori title, then purchased by the Crown with the desired outcome of moving the land into freehold British ownership. However, much land remained in Māori title or Crown ownership and was subject to various state schemes. As a consequence, land ownership in Hokianga has been fragmentary and land tenure insecure – conditions that work against the aspiration of ‘keeping it in the family’. In contrast, on the Taieri, land alienation from the local Kāi Tahu iwi to the Crown was swift. This largely swampy plain was part of the large Otakou purchase in 1844.²⁰ Apart from a small reserve, it was quickly converted into freehold farms owned by predominantly Scots families.

Figure 3.1: Taieri and Hokianga in an 1876 map of NZ counties.

Source: Rebecca Lenihan, From Alba to Aotearoa (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2015), 12.

Complicating these apparently dichotomous dynamics, however, were the activities of non-British, non-Māori landholding families in both districts. On the Taieri, it was Chinese descendants of goldminers who established the market gardens – and intergenerational family enterprises – that provided food for the growing colonial city of Dunedin. In Hokianga, Dalmatian men who came to New Zealand to labour for a different extractive industry boom, that of kauri gum, also looked to purchase land and set up family businesses once the gum ran out. Like the Chinese, they faced discriminatory measures that aimed to limit their immigration, their working and social lives, and the opportunity to own land. But a closer look reveals much about the processes of socialisation that saw both communities navigate legal restrictions, form binding relationships in their respective rural districts and build landholdings that can be viewed as part of extended/transnational family wealth. The effect of global forces upon these communities in New Zealand must also be acknowledged, as they shaped different trajectories of land ownership and transmission for each. In the sections below, I am mindful of the operation of multiple imaginaries – home/away, local, national, and transnational – that shaped the way non-British families grew their landholdings.

Chinese Land Ownership in Otago

My study of farming families and inheritance examined Chinese ownership of land for market gardening on the Taieri Plain, a rural district 30 kilometres west of the city of Dunedin, where a number of family businesses were established from the 1920s. The origins of the Chinese presence in Otago lies several generations earlier, in 1865, when a small party of Chinese miners was invited by the provincial government to travel from Victoria to work the goldmines gradually being abandoned by European miners. This began a chain migration that would see over 5,000 Chinese arrive in Otago over the next 20 years.²¹ While most of these men travelled through the city of Dunedin and across the Taieri Plain directly to the goldfields of Central Otago, many others stopped on the way, establishing businesses to capitalise on the opportunities that the goldrush and a developing colony offered. As they did elsewhere, Chinese men established laundries, grocers and market gardens in what is now the centre of Dunedin city. The first market garden was set up in 1867, and, by 1880, the Chinese were regarded as having a monopoly on the vegetable trade in Dunedin.²² The missionary Alexander Don’s ‘roll of Chinese’, an extraordinary collection of data relating to the Chinese population in Otago at the turn of the twentieth century, shows that 159 (of 347) Chinese men in Dunedin were employed in market gardening.²³

This was also the era when gold began to run out, and more Chinese sought new avenues for income through market gardening – as labourers for Chinese employers, and by establishing their own gardens. At the same time, Dunedin city was growing, and land used for market gardening in the flat areas in the south of the city was gradually reclaimed for residential and other developments.²⁴ The Ding family story typifies the pattern of movement that saw market gardens incrementally shifting from Dunedin to the Taieri (and areas north of Dunedin) in the 1920s and 1930s.²⁵ Ding Chun arrived in Dunedin in 1908. In 1917, he leased land in Forbury, in South Dunedin, for market gardening. The land was reclaimed as an educational reserve in the 1920s (it would later become the site of Kings High School) and the family took over a plot of land in Kaikorai Valley, on the outskirts of the city, from the Sew Hoys, a well-known family who had established gardens there. By this time, Ding Chun’s son, born in China, had joined his father in New Zealand. They only stayed a short time in Kaikorai Valley, due to the poor soil quality, before taking up land in North Taieri.²⁶ But the soil there was also found to be ill-suited to vegetable growing – very dry, with a shingle base. It was from there that the Ding family made a more permanent shift to Outram, in West Taieri, in the 1930s. The soil and conditions were good. The Dings and a number of other Chinese families established long-term, intergenerational family market gardens in this area that persist to the present day.

These multiple steps towards settlement in Outram suggest regular encounters with legal and social structures in order to occupy and use land, which I will return to shortly. But first it is useful to outline the national and global context within which the Taieri land story occurred – one of increasing social and political anxieties about the growth of a non-British presence in New Zealand, expressed most overtly in restrictive immigration rules that targeted Chinese migrants.²⁷ Quotas, reading tests and a hefty poll tax made Chinese men’s entry and re-entry into New Zealand difficult and ruled out bringing their wives with them. The pattern that developed as a result – for those who did reasonably well – was a highly mobile, transnational one: remitting money to family in China, travelling home to marry but returning to New Zealand without their wives, continuing to build a living and sending money home.²⁸ This transnational life persisted over generations as men took sons who were old enough back with them to New Zealand to assist with small businesses. The pointedly restrictive actions of the New Zealand Government only began to turn a corner in 1939 when the Japanese invasion of China led to a number of wives of Chinese men resident in New Zealand being permitted to cross the border temporarily, and then permanently.²⁹

From their immersed community perspective, Lily Lee and Ruth Lam’s 2012 Sons of the Soil reveals many stories of intergenerational land ownership among Chinese families in New Zealand.³⁰ Joanna Boileau’s more recent monograph enlarges the frame by looking at Chinese market gardeners in Australia and New Zealand, and she too pays specific attention to land tenure.³¹ Both works make some clear claims about patterns and regulations of land ownership, supported by official records and community sources. Boileau, citing Sons of the Soil, affirms that the only time that Chinese were not allowed to buy land in New Zealand was during World War II, between 1942 and 1945.³² But, as she also states, prior to this ban, the majority of Chinese market gardeners had leased their plots anyway. Boileau, and Lee and Lam, attribute the prevalence of leasing to a combination of factors on both sides of this colonial encounter. On the one hand, Chinese were ‘restricted from owning land by a complex web of institutional racism’, and ‘European landowners may have been reluctant to sell their land to Chinese, although they would consider leasing it for short periods’; on the other hand, most market gardeners were ‘single men, mobile, and lacked the capital to invest in land’.³³ Thus, Boileau states, Chinese market gardeners were ‘not part of the agrarian ideal’ that brought British migrants to settler colonies like New Zealand and Australia, and it was not until the postwar era that evidence has been found of Chinese families regarding leasehold land as a stepping stone to purchasing land outright.³⁴

This question of aspirations affects intergenerational land ownership in a number of ways. One of the reasons I undertook a study of farming families was because the family model of ownership is currently under threat in New Zealand. This is not the first time that the rural sector has faced a significant challenge. The difference now is a developing sense among (Pākehā) farming families that the desire to pass land onto the next generation is waning, due to (a) the increasing requirement to take on high levels of debt and (b) the burden of paperwork associated with new environmental regulations. While the desire of offspring to take over the family farm has been waning for many decades, if the aspiration of parents to pass it down also disappears, the family model of farm ownership will face a greater challenge than ever before. Aspiration is also directly tied to land tenure. As already stated, my study has revealed the prevalence of leasehold in Taieri and Hokianga. If one does not have freehold ownership of a property, how can one aspire – let alone achieve – intergenerational ownership? There are, of course, different types of leases, and some of these can be transferred down the generations. But many cannot. As historian James Ng has said about the Chinese community and their local aspirations: ‘the wish follows the capability’.³⁵

To set the Chinese market gardens into this historic set of aspirations, we can gather from Boileau, and Lee and Lam, that because Chinese men were deterred from bringing family to New Zealand, they continued to regard the colony primarily as a place of opportunity – a place to make money to send home.³⁶ Therefore, any profit was invested in the soil, in the production of crops or else sent home. According to Boileau, these priorities not only attenuated the desire to purchase land but also the investment of any extra monies into accommodation, as evidenced by the poor state of their lodgings. These men, intent on working and making a profit, had no wives or elderly parents or young children resident in New Zealand for whom they needed to provide a comfortable home. In addition, any awareness of public opinion and increasingly restrictive immigration rules would understandably make them reticent about spending money on the one thing that could not be taken home: land.

Leasing suited a mobile and uncertain existence; it also enabled the forging of partnerships with other Chinese to work the land together. As exemplified in the Ding case, leases made one vulnerable to being told to leave; however, on the positive side, leases also facilitated the movement to better ground that was necessary as different soils were experimented with. The Ding trajectory away from the garden in South Dunedin initially led to them acquiring a plot of land from another Chinese family. But the move to the Taieri required forging relationships with non-Chinese farmers. It was at this point that broader social forces began to have purchase as a mechanism in the regulation of land ownership. Because Taieri land had been quickly alienated from local Kāi Tahu, control of the land market in this district, especially by the early twentieth century, was entirely in the hands of local families. This was in contrast to Hokianga where the state continued to play a significant role in the rural land trade, to which I will turn in the next section.

The operation of these social forces controlling land ownership and use were apparent from the first phase of Chinese gardening in Dunedin. An article in the Otago Witness in 1878 reported on a visit to several local gardens in order to ascertain ‘the merits of the Mongolian system of growing vegetables’.³⁷ In the course of describing and assessing Chinese methods of gardening – both positive and negative – the author of the article expressed concern about the success of the Chinese gardeners at the expense of opportunities for British enterprise, and hinted at the role that the leasing of land played in this. A visit to Leung Foy’s garden (the only Chinese gardener the author could find who spoke English) revealed that Foy leased five acres of flat land – ‘deep, free loam’ soil with a stream running through it – from a Mr Anderson. After describing in detail the intensive manual labour and watering techniques by which Foy and other Chinese extracted maximum production of vegetables (but not necessarily flavour or nutrients) from the land, the article drew to a close with expressions of anxiety about the potential spread of this monopolising behaviour. The concern was that profits were being sent out of the country, and also that ‘we hear that some of them are now leasing rich flat soil … for countrymen who are yet to arrive’.³⁸ The unstated suggestion or inference was that Chinese efforts should be thwarted by not leasing or selling land to them in the first place. However, the growing city quickly became dependent on the vegetables produced by the Chinese; therefore, presumably, the land taken up by early Chinese gardeners and traded within the community was tolerated – at least until the city’s expansion led to reclaiming it.³⁹

The move to the Taieri again required breaking new ground. As outlined earlier, the Ding family leased land in South Dunedin, Kaikorai Valley and North Taieri, before settling in Outram in the 1930s. I interviewed Charlie Ding, the third and final generation of this family to farm on the Taieri, about the family landholdings. The Dings leased the land – about 60 acres – from the Dows and the Robertsons, both well-known Taieri families. Charlie described their relationship with those families as very good. He and his brothers were the same age as the Robertson’s boys; they all went to school together and remained friends until ‘old, old age’.⁴⁰ The Ding family did well on this Outram property. Despite the land being leased, they built a number of cottages on it to house the workers they employed. This indicates they had rights to make substantial changes to the land and landscape. It also suggests a degree of security over their land tenure. When I suggested this to Charlie, he agreed, but also joked that the cottages could be moved. Regarding landholdings in the pre-Taieri period, Charlie was unsure about the nature of the leases, or whether there were official leases at all. The lack of records due to the prevalence of (a) leasing, which was often not recorded on land titles and (b) informal leasing, which generated no paperwork at all, is a major impediment to a close examination of Chinese land history in New Zealand.⁴¹

The Dings worked this Outram property for almost 20 years before their tenure came to a sudden halt. Right at the moment when they decided they wanted to purchase the land, both the Robertsons and the Dows faced family circumstances that saw them end their arrangements with the Ding family: in one case, the farmer died and his son wanted to sell to a different family; in the other, the farmer wanted to pass the land to his son to run as a dairy farm. So, although those relationships were very good, and their informal method of leasing land had been unproblematic for nearly two decades, the Dings had no claim on the land. They were forced to pack up and fulfil their wish to purchase land by looking elsewhere on the Taieri. This did not prove difficult, no doubt owing to their settled place in the West Taieri farming community. Starting in the early 1950s, they purchased land from Pākehā farmers, beginning with 109 acres and adding another 250 acres in the 1960s – a substantial landholding by local standards.⁴² When I asked Charlie about this new phase of purchasing land, he immediately attributed it to the political situation in China from 1949, and the desire to stay in New Zealand permanently. To his mind, that was the only explanation. When I suggested the resumption of naturalisation as a factor, he did not think this had had any effect, though he did state that it was difficult for Chinese to purchase land, and that the returned soldier settlement schemes had compounded these difficulties.⁴³

While Charlie was, as it turns out, correct that naturalisation was not the only, or the legal reason, that land purchasing began post-1950, the bar on naturalisation certainly affected his family. Because the first generation of the Ding family – Chun Ding – arrived in 1908, he could not be naturalised.⁴⁴ And because his son, Chew Cheung Ding, born in China, arrived in 1920, he was unable to be naturalised either.⁴⁵ Like his father, Chew Cheung married in China and had several sons born there while continuing to work the property in Outram. Chew Cheung returned to China in 1936 to fetch his sons, which, owing to the war, took three years. His wife followed in 1940, and, in 1942, gave birth to another son, Charlie, my interviewee, the first of this Ding family to be born in New Zealand. Around the same time, after more than 30 years living apart, Chun Ding travelled to Hong Kong to look after his wife, returning to Outram with her in 1949. According to James Ng’s account, it was only at this point that Chew Cheung felt able to direct his energy and his money into purchasing land, after supporting several branches of his family for many years and expending much time and travel to see them all reunited in Outram.⁴⁶

In the course of looking for naturalisation and alien registration files for the Ding family at Archives New Zealand, I fortuitously came across a file that sheds further light on the question of land purchase. Mistakenly filed under the name ‘Ding Chung’ was an alien registration file for Ling Chung, a market gardener in Greytown, in the lower North Island, in the 1920s.⁴⁷ It contained a police report filed in 1942 by Constable Andrew McGregor noting that Ling Chung and his two brothers wished to purchase land for market gardening in Greytown. He noted that the land the brothers had been leasing for this purpose had recently been taken over by the government. Constable McGregor was writing in support of their wish to purchase land, noting that he had ‘always found them to be good citizens, honest and hard-working’. A handwritten note stated that the application was granted.

This minor matter is significant for several reasons. First, it further demonstrates the precariousness of leasing (the government could simply take over land that had been leased over a long period). Second, it provides concrete evidence that it was possible for an unnaturalised person to purchase land (although it was probably necessary to have an established place and reputation in the local community). Third, and most usefully, as the transaction occurred in 1942 – in the period agreed upon by scholars as the only time in which Chinese were prohibited from purchasing land, it challenges any claim of blanket exclusion.⁴⁸

Dalmatian Land Ownership in Northland

The pathway to land ownership for Dalmatian migrants in the Far North of New Zealand offers useful comparisons to the Chinese in the south. Dalmatian men arrived in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century in numbers almost equivalent to Chinese migrations to the goldfields: there were approximately 2,000 Dalmatian men in Northland at the turn of the century.⁴⁹ They arrived to take advantage of the gum extracted from the kauri tree, of which there were large forests in Northland.⁵⁰ Some may have arrived via goldrushes overseas and at Otago, but there were various other avenues by which news of the opportunity for gum-digging reached Dalmatia, initiating a chain migration. Over time, the response to these Dalmatian labourers took on a similar character to the Chinese in Otago. Early positive reports about their industriousness were soon replaced by concerns about an influx and fears that their collective behaviour (working together in gangs) and willingness to live in substandard conditions undercut British settlers engaged in the same work. They were labelled ‘white Chinamen’ among a host of other negative terms.⁵¹ Like the Chinese in Otago, in the first wave of migration they were almost all single men. Many remitted money home and lived with others from their home villages, retaining aspects of their language and culture.⁵²

Dalmatians were not directly targeted by immigration restrictions as the Chinese were, but they were subject to legal discrimination via the Kauri Gum Industry Act 1898, which established reserves for British subjects and required all others to have licences. Gradually, legal ‘aliens’ (non-subjects) were excluded from Crown gumfields.⁵³ Unnaturalised Dalmatians had to work on privately owned or Māori land to engage in gum-digging. This could be remedied by naturalisation, and, indeed, the restrictive measures led to a spike in applications: by 1914, half of the Dalmatian population in New Zealand were naturalised.⁵⁴ But delaying strategies were deployed to slow this process.⁵⁵ As a result, from the 1890s, Dalmatian men turned to other sources of making a living in New Zealand; for many, that was winegrowing and/or farming. As Judith Bassett demonstrates, all these activities were disrupted by the treatment of Dalmatians during World War I. Many New Zealanders believed that Dalmatians were Austrians, and thus thought they should be classified as ‘enemy aliens’ and not be allowed to enlist in the New Zealand forces. At the same time, there was concern that not enlisting would give them an advantage in their economic activities (such as farming) while fit British men were overseas serving; the suggested resolution to this problem was that they should be put into camps and/or engaged in public works.⁵⁶

Dalmatian men responded fiercely to allegations that they were enemies of New Zealand and allies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As Bassett outlines, they adopted a number of assertive and inventive means of protest and refusal against what they saw as illegal and unjust action against them.⁵⁷ This response can be read as an expression of their settled place in New Zealand, which was no doubt cemented by a history of marrying local women. In the initial period, when there were no Dalmatian women in New Zealand, rather than returning home and marrying, many Dalmatian men married Māori (and sometimes Pākehā) women. This early intermarriage has left a long legacy in Hokianga, where many locals have British, Māori and Dalmatian ancestry. This phase was followed by the era of so-called letter brides from the 1920s, which saw Dalmatian women entering into relationships by post and agreeing to marry before travelling to New Zealand to fulfil their promise. Together with the formation of cultural clubs and societies, this pre-figured a strengthening of a local Dalmatian identity.⁵⁸ Chain migration to New Zealand continued as political troubles at home stimulated waves of emigration out of what became Yugoslavia. Narratives of the community are structured by early gum-digging, letter brides and winemaking ventures that began in the Far North in the late nineteenth century and led to the establishment of a number of family businesses that persist today.⁵⁹

Dalmatian family wine businesses would be one route into an examination of land ownership and inheritance for that community. However, while early winegrowing ventures did occur in Hokianga, it was further south, in west Auckland, that substantial vineyards and intergenerational enterprises were established. The land story in Hokianga for Dalmatians was a mix of farming, gum-digging and winemaking, usually undertaken by racially mixed families, and often involving land leased from the Crown in the settlement schemes outlined earlier in this chapter.⁶⁰ Hokianga landownership does not feature strongly in the narrative of the Dalmatian community because it does not fit with a separate identity; instead, the Hokianga experience involved immersion in a regional culture, being accepted by Māori – and finding many points of cultural and social connection with local iwi – and being drawn into the ideal of hard work and self-sufficiency that modern family farming was built upon.

One of the first ‘special settlement’ schemes organised by the government in Northland was known as Puhata, at Herekino Harbour, just north of Hokianga, in 1887. Fifty-acre sections were offered for lease, with an initial term of 30 years, and subsequent leases for 21 years, without any right of acquiring freehold. The regulations, like others of the era, specified that the commissioner of Crown lands had absolute discretion over who the land was leased to and who the lessee could transfer it to. The lessee had no right to subdivide or sublet. Married men were preferred, and the land had to be occupied and improved by the lessee.⁶¹ There were 125 applicants for the Puhata leases: 108 were taken up and 99 were occupied. Two years later, 79 farms were still occupied, but, by 1892, this had dropped to 25.⁶² The settlement was regarded as a failure, as many were in the Far North, the landholdings being too small and too remote to sustain families through the required initial phase of clearing land and establishing the infrastructure necessary to connect farms to markets. The British men and families who had taken up the sections simply walked off the land, with little negative financial consequence since no initial outlay had been required.⁶³

It was here in Puhata that Dalmatian men took up land abandoned by the British, pooling their landholdings to make farming more viable, and establishing what was the largest Dalmatian settlement in New Zealand at the time.⁶⁴ While there was no mention of naturalisation determining who was able to take up the leases, it is clear that, in this scenario, the British were favoured in the initial selection, and non-British men (single men, rather than married, as was the stated preference) were allowed to take up land only after the British had rejected it – much like the latter stages of the goldrushes in Otago. Some of the Dalmatian men who took up sections in Puhata began planting vines. A Department of Agriculture report from 1896 stated that:

at the Puhata Settlement, Herekino, a number of Austrian settlers are already beginning to profit by their industry and enterprise. A large area has been planted in vines and small cellars erected, which have been working well during the past year. An excellent wine was produced, and promises well for the future prospects of these useful settlers.⁶⁵

However, the vines were susceptible to disease and the men continued to use gum-digging as a means of making a living. A government report in 1903 complained that the Puhata settlers spent too much time gum-digging rather than improving their sections.⁶⁶ The men responded that the landholdings were too small to make a living. Conditions improved over the next decade with the opening of a sawmill and a dairy factory, but this was the era when World War I saw Dalmatian men subjected to the discrimination and upheaval outlined above.

One of the men who took up land in Puhata was Tony Petrie (born Ante Petric), who arrived in New Zealand around 1900 aged 20.⁶⁷ He travelled to the Far North to join his brother Fabian, who had already been naturalised and taken up land at Puhata in 1898.

Tony and Fabian joined a partnership with two other Dalmatian men to create a landholding of 200 acres – four adjacent sections. Their burgeoning enterprise raised the ire of British settlers concerned about alcohol; this was the height of the temperance movement in New Zealand and there were specific concerns in the Far North about the effects of alcohol on Māori communities.⁶⁸ But, as it turned out, the venture was interrupted by a feud between a number of Dalmatian families that ended in a violent brawl, and resulted in Tony and Fabian being sentenced to several years imprisonment and hard labour. While it was a challenging time, both men took the opportunity to study in prison, and Tony later credited his incarceration with improving his English-language speaking ability. Upon his release, he relocated to Auckland and launched a varied business career, which saw him accrue several parcels of land, each over 1,000 acres, in different parts of the North Island.

A second case study is more deeply nested in the farming communities of Hokianga. Mijo Vujcich was born in Dalmatia in 1887 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1904.⁶⁹ He worked as a gum-digger in Hokianga and was naturalised in 1911. That year he took up land in a settlement scheme very similar to those of the 1880s. This one, known as Te Karae, had similar conditions to the earlier schemes, the main difference being that the lessons of the earlier period had been applied by increasing the section sizes to 300 acres. There was also a more complicated system of land tenure: leases were auctioned by the Crown, but the title had been awarded to (and remained with) local iwi. It seems likely that Vujcich’s naturalisation was related to his application to take up land at Te Karae. He took up land in partnership with his brother; however, due to the land’s unsuitability for farming, they only lasted a few years before purchasing land elsewhere in Hokianga. Mijo served in World War I and, while on leave in 1917, married Keiti Harris and became part of a large extended Māori family in the district. After the war he continued farming and also pursued winemaking and olive- and tobacco-growing.

Mijo’s third daughter, Patricia, married Trevor White, whose English forebears had taken up land in a settlement scheme in Punakitere, south Hokianga. Patricia and Trevor’s son, Paul White, was one of the interviewees for my study of inheritance and farming families. Paul embodies the complexity of family land histories in this district. On his Pākehā side he is descended from two English families who farmed for several generations after taking up land in the Punakitere settlement scheme. On his Dalmatian side he is directly connected to a history of discrimination against non-British settlers, who nevertheless also benefited from land alienated from Māori. He has researched and written separate family publications about these branches of his ancestry. Paul identifies most strongly with his Māori heritage and is an advocate for addressing the injustices of land alienated from local iwi.⁷⁰ His family history, which has seen land alienated from local iwi brought back into the fold through intermarriage, is not an unusual one in Hokianga. As he told me, his grandmother’s Māori whānau were most pleased that she married into a family that had land in Te Karae, as they were part of the hapu (sub-tribe) that originally occupied it.

Conclusion

Hokianga is a complex site to conduct family/land research; however, it is one that brings to the fore questions about the extent to which diverse cultural groups, stitched into communities over time, can later be studied in isolation. In this chapter, I have focused on non-British families in two locations for the purpose of considering the consequences of naturalisation restrictions on intergenerational family farming. In the process, I have attempted to show the value of keeping other variables in the frame – perhaps at the cost of drawing any clear conclusion about naturalisation, but hopefully achieving a fuller understanding of how naturalisation restrictions affected the people they were aimed at.

In these two discrete examples, perhaps the most significant variable relating to family farming and naturalisation was intermarriage. Chinese men routinely had wives and children in China, meaning that when they brought sons to New Zealand to assist with – and eventually take over – the family business, those sons were not naturalised. This was in contrast to Dalmatian men, many of whom found their place in rural communities in the Far North by marrying into Māori and Pākehā families, the children contributing to the ‘mixed’ community, but at birth being ‘natural-born’ British subjects. This meant that any concerns over naturalisation were limited to the first generation of migrants, which was not the case for Chinese families, for whom the ban on naturalisation was an ongoing concern.⁷¹ So, although I cannot say definitively that the ability to naturalise after 1951 explains the increase in land purchasing by Chinese families after that date, I do argue that it was part of the bundle of factors that saw market gardens on the Taieri take on a different character. In both districts, taking a relational, familial approach has usefully complicated and clarified the ways in which naturalisation was experienced and perceived by non-British family landholders.