Our tribute to the original Greytown Six – pioneering men and women who beat staggering odds to establish New Zealand’s first planned inland European settlement.
Late in the summer of 1854, six sturdy citizens of colonial Wellington shook hands on an audacious mission.
They’d heeded a call from the Small Farms Association for volunteers to blaze a trail to the hinterland. It sounded too good to be true – just the kind of adventure they’d crossed oceans from Mother England to find. “Aye sir,” they declared. “Reckon we’ll take that on.”
The fledgling colony needed land. Not the cliff face kind of land found in Wellington’s blustery hills, but real acreage. Space for livestock to fatten, produce to take root, and hardworking folk to earn their keep filling the nation’s belly.
The explorers hitched meagre supplies to four strong bullocks and began walking. They trudged along the treacherous harbour edge, up the swamp-ridden Hutt Valley, and onwards.
On the fourth day, an obstacle filled the horizon. A hill. More than a hill. A whopping, windswept, primordially forested wall.
Flimsier folk might’ve turned tail and retreated to O’Flaherty’s wood-fired steam baths back in Thorndon. Not these heroes. They saw a steep incline as a pathway to fresher air. Aches and pains were metrics of a day lived well. Blisters were nothing but a self-generated emergency water supply.
They pushed on, bushwhacking, brow-wiping and bullock-coaxing their way to the summit. And the vista that greeted them there dropped human and bovine jaws alike.
Below, in the distance, lay a broad, flat, sun-baked, river-washed frontier of possibility and promise.
They hacked their way downwards. When they reached the chuckling waters of the Waiohine River as it cut across the valley floor, they stopped, exchanged silent glances of agreement, and set to work. They began clearing bush and surveying ground in the name of the colony’s popular Governor, Sir George Grey.
