John Hardcastle of Timaru (1847-1927): Journalist and Geologist, but mostly Writer

Ian Smalley

They travelled to New Zealand in 1858; from Gravesend to Lyttelton on the Maori, cost £55 for the whole family (there was a subsidy from the provincial government), Thomas and Mary Hardcastle and their seven children. John was the oldest at ten. They were a Yorkshire family; Thomas was described in the shipping documents as ‘labourer and mechanic’ and they went to New Zealand to become something more rewarding and satisfactory. John was born in 1847 and died in Timaru in 1927. His was a proper New Zealand existence and he contributed to life in several ways. He was a journalist; he spent 40 years with the Timaru Herald, becoming editor for a brief period, and he was a geologist, an amateur geologist but a dedicated and expert practitioner. His hammer and hand lenses reside in the South Canterbury Museum, and he is becoming more appreciated as his geological work is examined closely. His geological virtue was in careful and exact description, and of course his descriptions are still valid and valuable. His theories and interpretations may have proved wrong but the descriptions are useful. He was a writer, and it may be that he should be most appreciated as a writer, as a generator of a form of literature, as a real contributor to New Zealand writing. Now his writing might be described as ‘popular science’ and there is a great vogue for it. But there is something more about the Hardcastle writing, it is more than just popular science, there is an air of association, this is the essence of South Canterbury, this is a special look at the Hunters Hills and the other wonders of South Canterbury. JH published long pieces in the Timaru Herald. He was the right person in the right place at the right time with the ideal journal available. But, this special place did not have particularly good connections to the world at large,

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perhaps even to the rest of New Zealand, so the large scale appreciation has been delayed. He was a writer and his writings should be accessible and appreciated.

He wrote steadily while he was with the Herald and he tended to write, as befitted his character, detailed descriptive pieces. They are not humorous pieces but sometimes he displays a nice sense of irony. He described the remarkable geological fortune that had provided Timaru with a harbour and an income for the inhabitants:

“A paper of considerable length might be written on the effect of the existence of lava rocks on the character of the coastline between Pareora and Washdyke, but we must be content with remarking that but for these rocks at sea level, there could be no port of Timaru today, nor any suggestion that an artificial harbour could be made anywhere between Oamaru and Banks’ Peninsula. The reefs in the sea and on the coast are the material foundation of the shipping trade of Timaru, and the artificial moles are but additions and improvements upon the provision made by Nature for the convenience of the import and export trade of South Canterbury.”(Notes on the Geology of South Canterbury 1908).

The family disembarked at Lyttelton on 12 April 1858 and Thomas soon found employment at Longbeach, near the mouth of the Hinds river, where he was in charge of Fitzgerald, Cox & Co’s cattle-grazing station. In 1863, after Longbeach was sold, Thomas bought the property of Castlewood, near Geraldine. Thomas was a man of character and determination, as shown by the decision to move to New Zealand, and he made a considerable impact on the local community. He played a major part in the construction of St Annes churchat Pleasant Valley near Geraldine, one of the oldest extant churches in New Zealand(150th anniversary in 2013).At Castlewood he broke in the land for a dairy farm. John, as a boy of 16, went to Timaru, then a pioneer settlement of about 1000, to run a milk round, and after that he could not settle back on the farm, which, as eldest son he was expected to do. The milk delivery business failed, due to

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competition, and for the next few years John travelled around the South Island doing a variety of jobs and, after another period at Castlewood, went to Christchurch to train as a school teacher. This he completed in Australia on 23 April 1878.

He came back to New Zealand and was appointed teacher at Waihi Bush School near Geraldine. He spent a short period as acting headmaster of the Temuka School and became Chairman of the Pleasant Valley School Committee, and it was while has was acting-headmaster at Temuka School that he ventured into journalism, with the Temuka Leader. In 1879, in his early thirties, he became a junior reporter and proofreader with the Timaru Herald and apart from a period of about three years when his family moved to Napier, his association with the Herald was to continue for nearly forty years- mostly as a reporter, then sub-editor, and on two occasions as editor.

While he was living in Napier he joined the Hawkes Bay branch of the New Zealand Institute. He is on the branch membership list from 1885 to 1888. Also while he was living in Napier Mount Tarawera erupted, the great eruption of 1886 which destroyed the Pink & White terraces and caused much geological excitement. Possibly as a result of this spectacular eruption John published his first scientific paper, his first attempt at scientific writing.The paper was read before a meeting of the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute on the 8th June 1887 and was published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute; it discussed the causes of the Tarawera eruption; this brought him into conflict with Professor Hutton of Christchurch, then one of the eminent people of New Zealand geology. JH was very critical of the Hutton views and this may have been the beginning of lasting enmity. JH and Hutton later disagreed on the formation of the Canterbury Plains, and on the nature and formation of loess deposits. The Hardcastle approach was very direct and uncompromising.

“A report has been published by Professor Hutton FGS on the Tarawera Volcanic District in which he gives the

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conclusions he arrives at, after a visit to the locality and a study of a subdued phase of activity, as to the causes of the eruption in June 1886… The explanation given of the cause of the eruption appears to me so much at variance with the probabilities of the case, as to invite criticism, especially as the general theory of volcanic action is involved.” (Transaction & Proceedings New Zealand Institute 20, 277-282, 1887)

He returned to Timaru to take up the editorship of the South CanterburyTimes, and he joined the Canterbury Branch of the New Zealand Institute in 1889. His name is on the membership list from 1889 to 1898, and he rejoined at the age of 77 in 1924 and remained a member until his death in 1927. In 1889 and 1890 he presented the two papers on loess soils and loess ground which have subsequently become quite well known and are widely recognized as the first recognition that loess deposits contain palaeoclimatic information.

In 1890 he does his best science and thereafter he devotes himself to writing. This transition is observed in the lives of many eminent scientist/writers, for example Steve Jones or Richard Dawkins. JH is perhaps not in their league but the transition is similar. So for about the first twenty years of the twentieth century JH contributed his detailed essays to the Timaru Herald. In 1908 a collection of his geological material was published as a small book ‘Notes on the Geology of South Canterbury’ and he cooperated with Johannes Andersen on the preparation of the ‘Jubilee History of South Canterbury’(published in 1916). The early part of the Jubilee History dealing with geology and related matters is essentially Hardcastle material. He was particularly lucky in his setting; South Canterbury is a region which is outlined by the Rangitata river to the north-east and the Waitaki to the south-west, by the Southern Alps with Aoraki Mount Cook nicely placed in the north-west and the Southern Pacific Ocean to the south-east. He saw mountains and glaciers, rivers and lakes and plains, coast and beach, basalt and loess, shingle and sand.

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“There is an enormous amount of wood on the beach, and for a few miles from Milford southwards, many stumps and sticks are seen in the break of the sea at high tide. The wood is for the most part stumps, though some logs have been washed up in past years, that have given good split posts. They are of totara, black pine, white pine, ribbon wood, and manuka, white pine being most numerous. Some of the trees were of large size, three or four feet in diameter; a short manuka tree not far from Washdyke lagoon is about 2 feet in diameter, quite a large size for manuka. The totara and black pine wood is, in many cases, sound and hard, and the roots frequently include even fine fibres that look as if they had been dead but a year. Yet this forest must have been buried a very long time, measured by years. It is buried under 10 to 12 feet of clay or loam, in two strata separated by a bed of lagoon mud full of drifted sticks, and roots of manuka that grew on the spot. To discover the slips in the deposition of the loam and the subsidence of the land which carried the forest bed down to sea level would be a nice little geological problem.For the rest there is not much to see along the beach. An oak beam full of wooden trenails, suggested the wreck of the Akbar; a very few pieces of rusty iron plate, that of the City of Cashmere. A couple of smashed fenders and a broken pile from the staging belonged to a later order of sea storms.” (Timaru Herald 9 November 1904)

Was JH a ‘Nature writer?’ It is easy enough, when discussing nature writing, to refer to Tolstoy and Thoreau and John Clare and everyone acknowledges their preeminence as nature writers, but the JH writing is of a different type and style. He is more descriptive, less poetical; more local, less general; more practical, less theoretical. Actually of course nature writing has been changing while the writers were writing. In 2008 Granta 102 was devoted to ‘The New Nature Writing’ and it was acknowledged that, for as long as people have been writing, they have been writing about nature, and as our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write about it. There is a historical aspect to be valued, the documentary dimension needs to be

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appreciated. JH arrived in South Canterbury soon after that region started to be settled and developed and he records aspects of a landscape which was in transition. The Port of Timaru, firmly founded on the Mount Horrible basalt, was developed during his lifetime. The Timaru Herald itself came into being and has provided the vehicle for the historical records.

“The most remarkable stream in Canterbury is surely that which claims the Rakaia, Ashburton, Rangitata, Orari, Opihi, Pareora, Otaio, Makikihi, Waihao and Waitaki as its tributaries, that stream of boulders, pebbles and sand which flows along the eastern coast for 140 miles or thereabouts; a stream which has neither bed nor bank; on which one may walk dryshod or be drowned, a boat may lie safely or be swamped or wrecked; which flows, not like water but by water, not by gravitation but against it, by fits and starts, both ways by turns, on the surface, and a part of the surface, and a part of the surface only; whose loss is not by evaporation or percolation but by trituration; -the 140 miles of shingle beach that drifts along, defines, and defends, the coast line from Oamaru to Banks’ Peninsula.Each of the rivers above named, when in flood rolls along its bed into the sea smaller or larger quantities of shingle, that has been gradually brought down from every spur and every gully, ridge, and cliff, in the country drained by its tributaries,- with a reservation in the case of the Waitaki. The Waitaki delivers the largest loads, but only some of its tributaries contribute to them. The glacier streams which go to form the Tekapo, Pukaki and Ohau, the three chief branches of the Waitaki, are ‘silt trapped’ by lakes, and their loads of shingle, enormous ones, do not reach the sea.” (Timaru Herald 23 April 1899)

When articles were commissioned for Granta 102 less interest was shown in what might be called old nature writing- by which was meant the lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer- than in writers who approached their subject in heterodox and experimental ways. The desired contributions should be voice driven narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the

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story. The best new nature writing, it has been suggested, is also an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue; all explored in Granta 102. We might add the list, the catalogue, the notebook. JH satisfies the criteria, he was a nature writer, but of course, being JH he was well ahead of his times.

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