Helping make one of Temuka’s earliest family farms possible
c.1812–1886
Early settlement
Farming
Temuka
Mary Burbage was born at or near Binley in Warwickshire, England, around 1812. A transcribed parish record gives her marriage to William Neal, a widower, at St Bartholomew’s Church, Binley, on 22 December 1835. Mary was recorded as signing the register with her mark. Their known children included Rosanna, Emma and Joseph.
In June 1851, Mary, William and their three children left England aboard the Duke of Portland. The ship arrived at Lyttelton on 26 September 1851, carrying more than 150 passengers in its cabins and steerage accommodation. A fourth known child, Louisa, was born in Canterbury the following year.
The family initially lived in the Christchurch area. In June 1859 they travelled south after William obtained a 50-acre freehold section on the northern side of the Temuka River. Their journey and first months on the land were later described by George Levens, a young farm worker who travelled with them.
Levens remembered that the party first stayed at Giles’s accommodation house at Orari while they tried to locate the section. They apparently camped on the wrong land before discovering the mistake and shifting their belongings to the correct property. At the farm, an old tarpaulin was rigged as a storeroom and sleeping place for the male workers. Mary, William and three children slept in a dray fitted with a protective tilt or cover.
The temporary arrangement was difficult, but it did not last for the three years sometimes repeated in later accounts. Levens said that a wooden house was built for the Neal family after about eighteen months. It was the workers who reportedly continued sleeping beneath the tarpaulin for three years.
Food supplies could also be poor. Levens recalled flour that had been damaged by dampness or seawater during transport. The hardened outer portion had to be broken away with a tomahawk so that the usable flour in the centre could be reached and soaked. His account concentrates on the practical difficulties of beginning the farm, but it also gives us a glimpse of the conditions in which Mary was feeding and caring for her family.
Mary’s daily work was not described in the same detail as the land, horses, crops and machinery associated with the farm. That silence is typical of nineteenth-century accounts. Preparing meals from unreliable supplies, caring for children, washing, mending, maintaining warmth and cleanliness, and turning temporary shelter into a functioning household were all essential parts of establishing a permanent farm.
The Neals have sometimes been called the first farmers in South Canterbury. That claim is too broad. European pastoral runholders and station workers were already operating in the district. It is more accurate to describe William and Mary Neal as members of one of the earliest European families to purchase and work a small freehold farm near Temuka.
William Neal died in 1879, and Mary was granted administration of his estate in April of that year. Compiled family research places Mary’s death in 1886, possibly on 2 June, but the precise date and her place of burial still need confirmation from a primary civil-registration or cemetery record.
Mary’s contribution was not separate from the establishment of the farm. It was part of it. Her story reminds us that settlement depended not only on acquiring land and breaking soil, but on the less frequently recorded work of feeding people, raising children and sustaining a household through uncertainty.
Existing WuHoo Timaru stories: Do you ever catch yourself grumbling, and then stop, remembering how good you’ve got it?
Sources and what they support
Timaru Herald, 11 June 1914, “The First Farm: Roughing It”: George Levens’s retrospective account of the journey south, the incorrect first campsite, the tarpaulin, the family sleeping in the covered dray, the wooden house built after about eighteen months, and the damaged flour.
Lyttelton Times, 27 September 1851, shipping news: confirms the Duke of Portland arrived at Lyttelton on 26 September 1851 and records its passenger totals.
Mhairi Erber, An Inconspicuous Ancestor, National Library catalogue record: identifies William and Mary Neal and their three children as Duke of Portland passengers and describes William as an early purchaser of land in the Temuka area.
Compiled Neal family genealogy: supplies the transcribed marriage date, children’s details, William’s death and Mary’s administration of his estate. These details should ideally be checked against original parish, civil and probate records.
New Zealand historical BDM and Timaru cemetery resources: appropriate next sources for confirming Mary’s exact death date and burial, but I did not locate a conclusive Mary Neal record during this search.