Church Bay/Kaioruru #3: The Hunter family

The Hunter family home high above Church Bay/Kaioruru. Sketch by Mabel Hunter.
Hunter archive, Mary Harrison

The lives of the intrepid Hunter family were shaped by the sea and access to their property high on the hill above Church Bay. Arthur and Eliza Hunter came from Weisdale in the Shetland Islands, via the Victorian goldfields. Living somewhat unhappily in 'Monkeytown', Lyttelton in 1874, Eliza heard that a cottage and 47 acres could be leased from John Stinson at Church Bay. Stinson had finished making the stock route from Charteris Bay to Purau (now Bay View Road) and no longer needed his property. Eliza and Arthur hired a ballast craft “from which we and our belongings were dumped on the [Church Bay] beach. We carried up what we could that night and found that a dried-up landslide was covering most of the back of the house.”[1]

Arthur took any job going, including working as a ballast man at the Church Bay quarries. The couple needed to fence their small farm. According to Eliza, “a small sailing vessel brought 200 posts from Okain’s bay and landed them on the beach. Most of these posts were carried up in the moonlight. Arthur took three at a time and I took two.”[2] Eliza was indefatigable. “Half a ton of potatoes had been landed at the beach and I did not want Arthur to have to carry them up when he came home from work, so I brought them up one afternoon … I carried up the half-ton in seven loads.”[3]

This view of Church Bay, before any baches were built below the road, shows the uphill distance Eliza and Arthur had to carry materials and provisions from the beach on the left to the Hunter house above the road on the right. Hunter archive, Mary Harrison.

The Hunter house, originally built for John Stinson.
Oliver Hunter, The Magnostic Philosopher of Church Bay, Friends of Diamond Harbour Library, 2006, 15

Eliza Hunter, Church Bay, 12 December 1911. Hunter archive, Mary Harrsion

Arthur Hunter, Church Bay, 12 December 1911. Hunter Archive, Mary Harrison

The condition of the stock route meant that access was almost entirely by sea. The Lyttelton doctor would have to cross the harbour in any available vessel to attend a woman in labour. Supplies purchased at the Lyttelton Saturday market often arrived in the bay wet through. The Press reported on a watersiders’ strike in November 1913 that impacted on the locals. 

The small farmers living at Church Bay and Charteris Bay on the south side of the harbour rely on two small oil launches to get their stores from Lyttelton, and to ship their garden and dairy produce to the Port where it is mostly used for local consumption. Mr Andrew Anderson, owner of the launch Matariki, running from Charteris Bay, brought a supply of cream across, and was met at the jetty by pickets who would not allow the cream to be landed. The little launch from Church Bay with garden produce, was similarly held up. The settlers had ordered coal and other household stores, and the pickets refused to allow these to be loaded on to the launches.[4]

Eliza and Arthur raised seven children in their small Church Bay cottage. From an early age son Oliver was interested in the natural world, particularly native flora. Having purchased his parents' farm he painstakingly fenced off the Church Bay gully and, over decades, with the help of his partner Marion (and, much later in life, his second wife Mabel), planted it in natives. In 1966 Oliver Hunter was awarded the Loader Cup for his significant contributions to plant conservation work in New Zealand. "The area is a tribute to a man whose great love of the bush transformed a barren gully into a treasured reserve of New Zealand trees and plants for posterity."[5]

An early view of Hunter's Gully. Oliver Hunter, The Magnostic Philosopher of Church Bay, Friends of Diamond Harbour Library, 2006, 40

Part of Church Bay gully visible, upper centre of photo. Jane Robertson, 2011

Oliver was also responsible for scattering flower seed along the roadways through the southern bays, adding to the profusion of spring and summer colour for which Diamond Harbour, Church and Charteris Bays are well-known. 

In 1922 when she was 10, Oliver and Marion's daughter Florence Violet wrote this striking account for a children’s column in the Sun newspaper.

I live on the south side of Lyttelton Harbour and my Father pays for the oil launch to call as there is no school nearer home. With my sister Phyllis I get aboard the Matariki [operated by Andrew Anderson] at half past seven. We go to Quail Island, where two more children come aboard, and sometimes the doctor goes ashore to visit the leper colony. Some mornings we call at Charteris Bay, so we have quite a long trip. It is nice in fine weather, but in a gale the waves might be too high for us to see land over the top; still we do not get sick like the new passengers do. There are other launches and fishing boats, and big steamers passing the breakwater. When we get out at Lyttelton we have to go round or through the crowd of men waiting to be hired to unload the ships. The foreman stevedore stands up high and picks out the men he wants. The others have to go home. Engines and trucks are rushing to and fro and passengers on the station are waiting to go to the city.[6]

Nothing captures the dependence on sea transport better than Florence Violet's description. What a long day it must have been for the children. 

While some of the quarries most certainly had trolley wharves to convey heavy rock to the ballast boats, Church Bay did not get a public jetty until 1907. The next, and final, Church Bay post traces the fortunes of this jetty.

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[1] Oliver Hunter, The Magnostic Philosopher of Church Bay, Friends of Diamond Harbour Library, 2006, 7. It was not until 1907 that a public jetty was built in the bay. 

[2] Ibid, 8

[3] Ibid, 8

[4] Press, 3 November 1913. Late morning, the picketers did allow the produce to be landed and stores loaded. 

[5] Loader Cup winners, Department of Conservation https://www.doc.govt.nz/news/events/awards/loder-cup-award/all-winners-from-1929/

[6] Mary Stapylton-Smith, From Adderley to Bradley, Friends of the Diamond Harbour Library, 2009, 263