By Roselyn Fauth
Todays blog, is inspired by a information sign... The Rise and Fall Peeress Town...
If you stand on the grassy reserve above Patiti Point today it feels like one of those calm places that has always been a wide open space. The tussock, the surf and the coastline give no hint of the many human stories held in this headland. Most people have no idea that a whole village once stood here, let alone that people lived on this land for centuries before that. Peeress Town lasted barely nine years, but the history beneath it stretches much further.
In Ngāi Tahu traditions, Pātītī is not simply a name. It is a person. Pātītī was one of the passengers on the ancestral waka Ārai te uru, which travelled down this coastline before capsizing near Matakaea in North Otago. Those who could not return to the waka before daylight were turned into the landforms we see today. Pātītī Point is one of them, part of a landscape shaped by whakapapa long before streets and survey pegs appeared.
Archaeology adds its own evidence. Moa bones and a moa-hunter’s necklace found at Pātītī Point are thought to be more than 800 years old. The wider Timaru coastline shows signs of early occupation too, with ancient ovens, adzes and food-gathering sites stretching from Patiti Point to Waitarakao. Generations of Waitaha, Rapuwai, Kāti Māmoe and then Ngāi Tahu people lived, travelled, fished and gathered kai along this coast. Later, Arowhenua became the principal settlement for the district.
By the time European settlers arrived, this coastline was already a working place. The Weller Brothers operated a whaling station nearby in the 1830s, and Māori from Arowhenua were the first surfboat crews guiding ships through the breakers at Caroline Bay and Patiti Point. It was only later that the English Deal boatmen were brought out to join them. So when the migrants of the Peeress eventually landed here in 1874, they were stepping into a landscape with a long human history, both practical and spiritual.
Peeress Town was one more chapter on this hillside, and a short one.
The Peeress, a three masted iron hulled barque, left Gravesend in March 1874 with 300 migrants and arrived in Lyttelton nearly four months later after a difficult crossing. Storms tore at the sails, damaged the tops and shook the ship so badly that six people died and four babies were born along the way. When she reached the Timaru coast the surf at Patiti Point was too dangerous, so the families were redirected back to Lyttelton and ferried down again by steamer. They arrived on the beach with hardly anything except determination.
South Canterbury needed workers. Big sheep runs needed breaking up. Roads, farms and early townships needed building. Immigration officer Francis Le Cren arranged barrack accommodation and gave grants to twenty four families to build simple cob or sod cottages on the sunny slope above Patiti Point. With tussock, clay and plenty of willing hands, the cottages went up quickly. Soon a cluster of huts dotted the hillside. They called it Peeress Town, and by the late 1870s about one hundred people lived here.
Life was basic but full of hope. Children chased each other through the tussock. Families dug gardens into sandy soil. People found work across the district and many later moved inland to Temuka, Geraldine, Orari and The Levels. The Coles and Payne families, well known in the district today, both began their South Canterbury story on this very slope.
But the land that gave these families their first foothold also carried a risk they did not see coming. A shared well had been dug in the gully below the cottages. Over time, household wastewater from the sod houses seeped down the same slope. Gradually the well became contaminated. The effects were devastating. Typhoid and other diseases swept through the tightly packed settlement. What began as a hopeful foothold for new arrivals turned into a public health crisis.
In August 1883, just nine years after the Peeress families built their first homes, the Government issued an order that seems almost unbelievable now: Peeress Town was to be razed. Every cottage was to be destroyed. The entire hillside was to be cleared and sown in grass to prevent anyone living there again. Within months the homes were gone. What had been a small but lively village returned to silence.
Standing here today, it takes effort to imagine the cluster of cob cottages, the families who lived in them and the tragedy that unfolded in those last years. The reserve looks peaceful now, but it holds many stories. Māori stories of whakapapa and early occupation. Stories of whaling days and surfboat crews. Stories of immigrants who built homes with their own hands, only to watch their village vanish in the face of disease.
While New Zealand might feel young... it does have its layers. Peeress Town is just one of them. I think remembering this, helps to bring the landscape to life.
