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Updated: May 15, 2025
He drives the coach, carries the mails, and bosses the bullock-drays that convey goods between Riverhead and Helensville. And he is rapidly becoming the most horsey man in the whole of the North, being especially active and prominent in every possible capacity on the local race-courses. Dinner is over very soon, and a very good one it was, well worth the shilling each of us pays for it.
Put up with discomforts and hardships, as pioneers should!" The furniture and internal arrangements of our shanty are more simple in construction than elegant in appearance. We go in for utility, and not for show. As a central feature is the table. It is our pride and glory, that table, for it was made in Auckland, and imported by us from Helensville.
Two thousand and twenty-one acres, two roods and a half!" "Right," said we; and proceeded to the next business. A Land Court was held by the Crown official at Helensville. Thither proceed the Ngatewhatua chiefs, with the surveys and maps of the section we had chosen. They make out their claim to the land, according to established usage, and receive a Crown grant as a legal title.
And then we are treated to a dissertation on the wonderful advantages and prospects of Helensville, some day to be a city and seaport, a manufacturing centre and emporium of the vast trade of the great fertile tracts of the Kaipara districts. We are assured that there is no place in all New Zealand where it could be more advantageous to our future to settle in than here.
The road, from the hill-top where we are, winds in a long descent of about two miles down to the township. It is scarcely needful to say that Dandy Jack considers it incumbent on him to make his entrance into Helensville with as much flourish and éclat as possible.
One day, a member of our party had been down Helensville way. There had been an auction of the effects of a settler, who was moving off to the South Island. Our chum had not been able to resist the temptation, and had invested all he was worth in an assortment of goods. It was night when he returned, and we were all in the shanty.
When it comes out that we have advented to join Old Colonial, we are admitted as chums at once, and formally accepted as free citizens of the soon-to-be prosperous and thriving town of Te Pahi. By-and-by the Mayor gets back; and the Lily steams off again on her way to Matakohe, where she will anchor for the night, returning to Helensville next day.
There is a covert threat in this, and as no one cares to quarrel with the speaker, his eccentricities are allowed to develop themselves without further interference. Then we resume our drive on to Helensville. For the most part the road passes through open country, but we now more frequently see scrub and bush in various directions.
Then we take leave of Dobbs and his wife, whose future boss has arrived in a rude cart drawn by two horses, in which to drive them and their traps over to his place in Ararimu. We ourselves are going on to Helensville in the coach, a distance of about eighteen miles. The coach partakes of the crudity which seems impressed upon everything in this new locality.
Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what have we to do with sentimental rubbish? This is Progress! Bless it! Of course we did not expect to get to our destination all in a minute, for Te Pahi is more than forty miles from Helensville, in a straight line.
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