There have been few major changes in the economic pattern of Canterbury over the past 50 years. Since 1911 the rural population of Canterbury as a whole has been stationary and all net growth in the provincial district has occurred in the towns and cities. Almost all new manufacturing industries have been located in the Christchurch urban area and, to a lesser degree, in Timaru. With improvements in transport the large centres have grown bigger while most of the small towns and villages have remained stable or declined.

Standards of grassland farming have greatly improved while the relative importance of grain cropping has diminished, although acreages fluctuate with varying returns from fat-lamb farming. Irrigation schemes constructed in the 1930s have given greater security to farming on the shallow gravelly soils of Ashburton County but as yet have had little effect in promoting closer settlement. However, the introduction of subterranean clover and the use of lime and fertiliser have greatly improved the productivity of “dry” farming on some 850,000 acres of stony plains land.

Early shelterbelts of exotic trees planted by farmers and local bodies have matured and provided a valuable timber supply since about 1940, while extensive State forests have been established in areas where farming had failed, as on the porous gravels at Eyrewell and on sour downland soils at Ashley.

The Canterbury high country has not shared in the growing productivity of the plains. Its farm population is probably less than it was in the 1870s and, although the area suffered less from the depredations of rabbits than did Marlborough and Central Otago, sheep flocks have fallen well below the peak numbers attained about 1890. The introduction of deer, chamois, and thar for sporting purposes has hastened deterioration of higher-altitude vegetation. Advances in agricultural knowledge during the 1950s suggest that considerable improvement of pastures on lower slopes is possible and that the growing of fine wool and breeding stock there is not incompatible with the retirement of the higher lands from grazing. Increasingly, the high country has been utilised for its hydro-electric power resources and scenic and recreational attractions. Considerable areas near the Main Divide have been set aside as national parks, forest parks, and watershed protection forests.

The population of the provincial district was 58,775 in 1874, 173,443 in 1911, 307,513 in 1956 and 336,705 in 1961. Canterbury has long been the province with the highest proportion of females to males in the population. This reflects the early economic maturity of the province and the absence of activities calling for predominantly male workers. Since 1911 there has been a small but consistent inwards migration to Canterbury, a trend which has increased slightly since 1945. The bulk of the population growth, however, has been due to natural increase of the local population.

by Murray McCaskill, M.A., PH.D., Reader in Geography, University of Canterbury.

• Jubilee History of South Canterbury, Andersen, Johannes (1916)
• The Early Canterbury Runs, Acland, L. G. (1951)
• A History of Canterbury, Part 1
• Hight, J. and Straubel, C. R. (Ed.) (1957);Te Waimate, Studholme, E. C. (1954)
• The Evolution of a City, Morrison, J. P. (1948).

The 1870s were years of spectacular change on the Canterbury Plains. The introduction of the double-furrow steel plough speeded up the conversion of the tussock into paddocks of grain, root crops, and English grasses. The construction of water races allowed cultivation and settlement to spread on to higher and drier parts of the gravel plains, while reaping machines and steam threshing machines made possible the large-scale cropping of wheat for export. Much of the Central Government's public works programme was directed to the building of some 400 miles of railway in Canterbury. Settlement spread quickly into the plains land between the Rakaia and Rangitata Rivers. Land sales increased rapidly as runholders, readily supported by banks and credit agencies, purchased the remaining leasehold portions of their runs.

Between 1871 and 1881 the area in cultivation increased from 300,000 acres to 1,307,000 acres and the area in wheat rose from 46,000 acres in 1871 to 249,000 acres in 1883. Between 1870 and 1879 Canterbury received 25,700 assisted immigrants, or 28 per cent of those who came to New Zealand under the scheme initiated by the Vogel Government. Many of these immigrants formed roving labour gangs of navvies, teamsters, and ploughmen; some were established as semi-subsistence farmers on small “village settlement” blocks of two to 10 acres and many others were absorbed into expanding factory industries in the towns. During the seventies a number of farmers, including John Grigg of Longbeach, were building up flocks of specialised mutton breeds of sheep – Shropshires, Leicesters, Lincolns, and Romneys – and Canterbury farming was thus able to take ready advantage of the new markets opened up by the frozen meat trade in the 1880s.

The early settled parts of Canterbury, including Banks Peninsula and the plains area between the Waimakariri and Waipara Rivers, attained their maximum rural population as early as 1886–that is, within one generation of initial settlement. In mid-and South Canterbury, and especially on the downlands, the subdivision of the great estates between 1896 and 1911 caused a later infilling of the settlement pattern. Government purchase of estates under the Lands for Settlement Act was confined mainly to the area south of the Rangitata River, where 348,000 acres were resumed and settled by 1914. The largest purchase was Allan McLean's Waikakahi estate near Waimate, where 48,000 acres were bought in 1899 and subdivided into 162 farms and small grazing runs. In mid-Canterbury, where estate owners saw the logic of rising land values and increasing taxation on large properties, there were many private subdivisions in the first decade of the century, the most notable, perhaps, being the sale of Sir John Hall's Terrace estate at Hororata in 1907 and Duncan Cameron's Springfield estate near Methven in 1909. Cameron had been a pioneer in water-race construction and Hall in the planting of windbreaks – two practices which have been vital to the success of close settlement and mixed farming in Canterbury.

The prosperity of Canterbury in the 1850s owed more to the export of merino wool and to the unexpected development of a market for the products of intensive agriculture on the Victorian goldfields than to colonising theories. Canterbury maintained something of an English class structure and a “landed gentry” because colonists with capital in the 1850s chose to invest it in sheep flocks on distant pastoral leaseholds rather than purchase the freeholds of arable farming estates near Christchurch. In the later 1850s and the 1860s it was the “small men”, including artisans and labourers, who were the purchasers of freehold land in Canterbury.

The “pastoral invasion” of the South Island grasslands had already begun when the Canterbury settlement was founded. Australian graziers with capital and merino sheep were arriving in the district and were occupying lands outside the Canterbury Block at low rentals. Godley and the Canterbury settlers, placing economic gain before theoretical principles, persuaded the Canterbury Association in 1852 to grant cheap pastoral licences on terms comparable to those of the New Zealand Government's Crown Lands Ordinance of 1851. Pastoral occupation surged rapidly across the plains. By 1855 all the plains and downland and the “front country” of the ranges had been taken up in runs of 5,000 to 10,000 acres. The tide paused for two seasons until C. G. Tripp and J. B. Acland proved at Mount Peel that sheep could be wintered successfully in the high country. Then the sheepmen moved rapidly into the alpine valleys and interior basins and by 1860 had established a skeleton occupation of all the grasslands back to the beech forests and snowfields.

Everywhere, stocking was preceded by vast tussock fires, and although necessary at first to clear spiny growth, massive burning became so ingrained in the habits of two generations of pastoralists that widespread and permanent damage to plant and soil cover has resulted. By 1858 Canterbury had surpassed Nelson as the premier sheep farming province, a position it lost to Otago, however, by 1867. Sheep numbers grew fivefold from 500,000 in 1858 to 2,500,000 in 1867 and to a peak of 5,000,000 in 1886. Thereafter Canterbury sheep numbers declined until the late 1920s. Although much attention has been given to the rapid spread of extensive pastoralism after 1852 and the manner in which it disrupted plans for close settlement, most of the population, in fact, continued to live near Christchurch. Of the 16,000 people in Canterbury in 1861, four-fifths lived in a narrow coastal strip between Rangiora, Christchurch, and Lyttelton and on small farms on the shores of the Banks Peninsula bays.

Mixed farming and closer settlement spread out from two points: from the early settled lands near Christchurch, and from Timaru, where the first direct immigrant ship arrived in 1859. Land sales were stimulated after 1856 when the price of rural land in Canterbury was reduced from £3 to 2 per acre and the minimum area from 50 to 20 acres. Near the towns this action helped the settler of limited means to become a landowner, but in more distant areas the large runholders were able to freehold the most desirable parts of their properties and check the spread of closer settlement.

Small farmers occupied the deep, fertile loams of the coastal lands, and with axe, spade, and wooden plough they cleared the flax and tussock, drained the swamps, and enclosed their fields with cob walls capped with gorse hedges. Heavy demands were made on Canterbury's meagre and patchy supplies of timber and many latter-day market towns, including Rangiora, Oxford, Geraldine, Temuka, and Waimate, originated as sawmilling centres in the 1850s and 1860s. Nor'west winds were a grave fire hazard and much of the Banks Peninsula forest and most of the timber patches on the plains and downland were accidentally destroyed before milling was complete.

In provincial New Zealand the strength of provincial sentiment diminished with increasing distance from the provincial capital. In the 1860s the growing community of South Canterbury, separated from the seat of Government in Christchurch by wide unbridged rivers and the sparsely occupied lands of mid-Canterbury, twice made a bid to become a separate province or county. In 1867 the General Assembly responded to Timaru's separatist agitation by creating the Timaru and Gladstone Board of Works – a body endowed with a specific proportion of the Canterbury provincial land revenues and authorised to construct and maintain harbour works and local roads and bridges.

Organised settlement in Canterbury had its genesis in a blending of the ideas and enterprise of two very dissimilar men – Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the colonial theorist and organiser of somewhat tarnished reputation, and John Robert Godley, a young Irish squire of deep religious convictions and with high connections in church and state. In 1848 the Canterbury Association, with an impeccable membership list including two archbishops, five bishops, assorted peers and baronets, members of parliament, and some high business figures, first met in London with the object of founding a Church of England settlement in New Zealand. A surveyor with extensive New Zealand experience, Captain Joseph Thomas was appointed to select a site comprising at least 1 million acres, of which approximately 300,000 were to be easily available for cultivation. The site should have an “almost complete absence of natives”, and, if on a coast, it was to have “a good and commodious harbour”. Few areas in New Zealand away from established settlements met these specifications and, although Thomas intended exploring the Manawatu, the Wairarapa, and the Hawke's Bay plains, his party first examined the country inland from Banks Peninsula. Thomas soon had no hesitation in selecting the Port Cooper plains as the site for Canterbury although a number of shortcomings were recognised in the swampy nature of part of the site for the capital town, the maldistribution of timber supplies, and the difficulty of access between Port Cooper and the plains. In 1850 the Canterbury Association was granted powers to dispose of land within 2,500,000 acres, generally known as the “Canterbury Block”, between the Waipara and Ashburton Rivers and occupying about half the Canterbury Plain.

In keeping with Wakefield's views on the “sufficient price” of land, rural allotments of 50 acres and upwards were to be sold at £3 per acre, 1 to be devoted to the educational and religious needs of the settlement, and another pound to be spent on assisted immigration of labourers. It was believed that the high price of land would prevent undue dispersion of settlement and, by discouraging men of small means from becoming landowners too soon, would ensure an adequate supply of farm labour. Alone among the “Wakefield” settlements the plans for Canterbury gave some recognition to pastoralism although it was accorded a distinctly subordinate and temporary role in the economy. Regulations provided for the leasing of unsold lands under annual licence but at comparatively high rentals and they gave no security of tenure or right of compensation. In contrast to Otago, where the surveyors marked out the 60-acre rural sections before the settlers arrived, in Canterbury rural sections were not surveyed until after the arrival of the settlers and the payments of the purchase money. Colonists were thus free to select land anywhere within the “Canterbury Block” as they saw fit and were not bound by the formal geometry of a prearranged plan.

The settlement was intended to be a transplanted cross section of the best of English society, complete from bishop and gentry to artisans and labourers, and emigrants were to be selected so that as far as possible “none but persons of good character, as well as members of the Church of England, shall form part of the population, at least in its first stage; so that the settlement may begin its existence in a healthy moral atmosphere”. These plans were to be put into effect under Godley's personal leadership and two years were devoted to preparatory work on the site involving surveys, road and wharf building, and the erection of temporary accommodation. The main body of 780 immigrants, 106 of whom were land purchasers, arrived in four ships at Lyttelton in December 1850 and were soon engaged in subduing a wilderness of swamp and tussock. Some 13,000 acres of land were selected, mainly around Lyttelton Harbour and within a four-mile radius of Christchurch, thus achieving, briefly, the concentrated pattern of settlement desired by the founders.

It has sometimes been claimed that Wakefield's colonisation principles more nearly succeeded in Canterbury than in Wellington, Nelson, and Otago. Certainly a more serious attempt was made to apply these principles, and Canterbury attracted a disproportionate share of talented and educated young men, many of whom were to play a leading role in provincial and national affairs in the next 30 years. Of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived on ships chartered by the Canterbury Association, one-third were fare-paying cabin class passengers. Land survey arrangements worked well and the Canterbury settlers escaped the hardships and muddle that afflicted many of the Wellington and Nelson immigrants. Nevertheless, the Canterbury settlers had the advantage of a decade of previous agricultural experiment in their area; they had a supply of acclimatised livestock and could draw on the mistakes of earlier colonising ventures in New Zealand.

There were few serious efforts to attain the rigid denominationalism envisaged by the founders. Canterbury was indeed the most “Anglican” of the provinces for some time: in 1861 sixty-seven per cent of its population professed adherence to the Church of England compared with 45 per cent for New Zealand Europeans as a whole. But Canterbury was soon surpassed in the proportion of Anglicans in the population by the provinces of Hawke's Bay, Taranaki, and Marlborough, none of which was founded with any thought of denominational exclusiveness. As for Canterbury's distinctively “English” character, 73 per cent of the overseas-born population of the province at the census of 1861 were born in England – a proportion slightly less than that of Nelson and Taranaki. In the composition of its original settlers Canterbury was only slightly more “English” than were Wellington, Hawke's Bay, and Marlborough. The English element among later immigrants to the province diminished. Of the 13,700 assisted immigrants brought out by the Canterbury Provincial Government between 1857 and 1870, some 45 per cent were of Irish or Scottish birth.

Because of the great extent of tussock-covered plain and downland in proximity to the forests and harbours of Banks Peninsula, Canterbury should have appeared an attractive site for European colonising ventures in the 1840s. Yet, despite many natural advantages and the small number of Maori inhabitants, organised settlement on the Canterbury Plains did not begin until 1851. Banks Peninsula provided the first foothold for European enterprise. Whaling ships of several nationalities appear to have used Port Cooper (later Port Lyttelton) and Akaroa Harbour from 1835 onwards, and shore whaling stations were established on the southern bays of the peninsula between 1837 and 1840. Whaling stations were also established for brief periods at Motunau Island on the north Canterbury coast and at Timaru, where volcanic rock out-cropping on the coast gave a little shelter and made feasible the landing of small boats. An outcome of French whaling activity in Banks Peninsula was the rather forlorn attempt by the Nanto-Bordelaise Company to found an agricultural and whaling settlement. In 1840 some 65 poverty-stricken French emigrants landed at Akaroa and began clearing five-acre “farmlets”. They made slight progress and of those who remained during the 10 years few did little more than cultivate vegetable gardens.

More successful farming ventures were soon established by a few enterprising British families on the northern side of Banks Peninsula, at Akaroa and at Riccarton on the plains. Of these people, the Deans, Hay, Sinclair, and Greenwood families had been immigrants to the New Zealand Company's first settlement at Wellington but were dissatisfied with the agricultural prospects there. By 1845 all of them were sending cheese and fat cattle to the Wellington market. Cattle and sheep numbers built up steadily, outstations were formed on the fringes of the downland across the Canterbury Plains at Motunau and in the Malvern Hills, and farming experience was acquired which was to be of great value when the Canterbury Association settlers took up their land in 1851. By 1848 in the district that was to become Canterbury, there were 265 Europeans, some 300 acres in wheat and potatoes, and more than 700 cattle and 4,000 sheep grazing on land rented from the Maori.

As constituted in 1853, the Province of Canterbury occupied the central part of the South Island and extended from east to west coasts. East of the Main Divide the province was bounded by the Hurunui River in the north and the Waitaki River in the south. At that time there was virtually no population outside of Banks Peninsula and the seaboard margin of the Canterbury Plain. West of the Southern Alps settlement began with the gold rushes of 1864–65, and originated from Otago, Nelson, and Victoria rather than from the early settled nucleus of Canterbury around Christchurch. In 1868, after three years of uneasy association under the one provincial government, the communities of east and west Canterbury were separated by the establishment of the County of Westland as a distinct local government entity. Henceforth Canterbury's western boundary was the crest-line of the Southern Alps.

The southern boundary of the province was the cause of confusion and dispute with Otago. The course of the upper Waitaki River was unknown when the boundary was proclaimed in rather vague terms in 1853. As pastoralists spread into the back country, the Otago and Canterbury provincial governments, anxious for pasturage rentals, both claimed land in the Mackenzie Country between Lakes Ohau and Pukaki. After three years of negotiation the dispute was settled by the General Assembly and the boundary was fixed along the Ohau River to Lake Ohau, and thence in a straight line to Mount Aspiring.

When European settlement began in Canterbury in the 1840s, there were probably no more than 500 Maori inhabitants. A few decades earlier the number had been substantially greater before civil wars and raids by North Island warriors wrecked havoc with the local Ngai Tahu peoples. Most Maori settlements were located on the bays of Banks Peninsula and on the fringes of bush patches and swamps on the plains – notably at Kaiapohia, Arowhenua (Temuka), and Waimate. Banks Peninsula was apparently the southern limit of kumara cultivation in pre-European New Zealand but, as crop yields were uncertain, the Canterbury Maori depended largely on fish, fern root, and waterfowl for food supply. The pa at Kaiapohia was an important centre for fashioning tools and ornaments from the West Coast “greenstone” (q.v.) or nephrite, and was the base for a profitable barter trade with northern peoples.

From the fragmentary records that have survived from the early days it appears that the touring sport so brilliantly demonstrated by John MacGregor and the Royal Canoe Club was left mainly to individual enthusiasts in New Zealand while clubs contented themselves with short trips close to home, casual racing and base-camp holidays. Sailing sometimes proved more attractive than paddling; the Wakatere Canoe Club of Devonport was changed into a yacht club within a few years of its formation. Designs, too, reflected new trends. Prior to the Second World War the original clinker method of construction gave way to lighter and simpler methods. Later, the Rob Roy design was replaced by forms better suited to river work. Modern lath and canvas cruising kayaks are designed mainly for inland cruising and white water; sailing efficiency has been sacrificed.

Realisation of the new possibilities of the sport did not come in time to save club activity from dying out soon after the war. The revival dates from 1949–50, when two independent groups organised cruises down the Wanganui River, a long-neglected tourist attraction. The first group, Wanganui Boy Scouts, laid the foundations for regular combined scout Christmas cruises while the second group, 23 Aucklanders, mostly university students, followed up their trip by forming in 1950 the New Zealand Canoeing Association with the aim of reviving the sport on the widest possible basis by promoting the formation of branches throughout the country. The NZCA was at first run conjointly with Auckland Canoe Club and Auckland University Canoe Club, D. J. Mason being the foundation president of all three bodies. Folding kayaks became the standard craft for the new movement, which featured long distance and white water cruising. Inflatable rubber dinghies purchased cheaply from war surplus stock enabled large numbers of beginners to get a taste of the sport in safety and at little expense; they also proved useful for pioneering and escorting inexperienced canoeists in remote areas.

As a result of the sport's growing popularity, some half-dozen clubs had been firmly established by 1958, when the Association became incorporated. Combined championships were first organised by the Wanganui Club in 1955, and became an annual event. In 1959, following an unsuccessful bid to secure the affiliation of the new clubs, the officers stood down and the NZCA, hitherto essentially an association of individuals functioning as an extended club similar to the Canoe Camping Club in Britain, was reconstituted as a pure federation. The new constitution came into force in 1961. The NZCA's status as the national governing body for competitive canoeing is recognised by the International Canoe

Federation, to which it is affiliated. Its other activities are conducted by officers and committees distributed among different clubs and meeting formally, together with club delegates, only at annual conferences. The present membership (1964) is 11 clubs with about 300 individual members, all in the North Island.

D. J. Mason formed a new body, New Zealand Lone Canoeists Association (now N.Z. Canoe Touring and Wild Water Club), with the aim of continuing the NZCA's former policy. In 1963 another group of Aucklanders formed the New Zealand Kayak Group with similar general aims but with the more specific object of using folding kayaks, the other club having been depending to a great extent on rubber dinghies. Neither club is yet affiliated to the NZCA. The organised sport has to date made little progress in the South Island.

by Alexander Heslin Carr, M.A., B.SC., Secretary, New Zealand Canoeing Association, Wellington.

New Zealand's first canoe club was Tainui Canoe Club, formed in 1881 in Wellington as a branch of the Royal Canoe Club in Britain founded by Captain John MacGregor, whose touring exploits in the original “Rob Roy” established canoeing as a sport. The use of Maori canoes was declining in New Zealand at that time, and no Maori influence can be detected in the modern sport.

W. FitzGerald, eldest son of James Edward FitzGerald, and a leading figure in Tainui Canoe Club, was the first sporting canoeist to shoot White Horse Rapid in the Manawatu Gorge, a feat considered daring in those days. He used a papier mache canoe, a forerunner of the modern competitive canoes moulded in veneer and fibreglass. Among his longer trips was a pioneering cruise down the Ruamahanga River and across Lake Wairarapa to Palliser Bay, sailing back along the coast to Wellington. Other pioneer canoeists of the same period were G. Mannering and M. J. Dixon who cruised down the Waimakariri River from Bealey to Kaiapoi in canoes hired from the Avon boatsheds, Christchurch, and G. and J. Park, who voyaged up the Taramakau River, across the mountains, and down the Hurunui River to the opposite coast, whereupon G. Park continued by sail to Kaiapoi. The Park brothers were the first sportsmen to canoe Cook Strait, crossing in 1890 from Mana Island to Queen Charlotte Sound and thence down the coast to Dunedin in 14 ft canoes. The first canoeist to cross the Strait solo was a 16-year-old Wellington boy, H. Shearman, who paddled and sailed from Mana Island to Cape Koamaru in 1896 in a tiny craft only 12 ft long. Some of the biggest rivers in New Zealand, including the Clutha and Buller, were pioneered in recent times by G. Hutchinson travelling solo in an inflatable rubber dinghy. He is also one of the few canoeists who have crossed Cook Strait solo. Using a short canoe with auxiliary sail, he took over 24 hours on each leg of his double crossing in 1953–54 from Petone to Tory Channel and back to Mana Island.

To the general public of New Zealand, canoeing is associated with summer afternoon recreation on sheltered beaches and boating lakes. But this activity is an insignificant part of the organised sport. In New Zealand, as in Europe, the sport is made up of three broad classes of activity comparable to tramping, skiing, and rowing. These are:

Touring, or cruising. As a rule all necessary camping equipment, including food, is carried in the canoes, although frequently – especially on short weekends – a chartered bus carries equipment between campsites before finally taking the whole party home. Some clubs feature summer touring holidays of two to three weeks with itineraries totalling several hundred miles of paddling on distant rivers and lakes. Regions such as the Rotorua and Southern Lakes, which offer both exciting rivers and scenic beauty, are popular.

White water sport. White water canoes, on account of their light, resilient construction and responsiveness in skilled hands, can ride fast, boisterous, and rocky torrents in which heavier vessels would founder or break up. New Zealand's geologically immature rivers offer abundant opportunities for this exhilarating sport which, as it calls for skill and general fitness rather than strength, attracts women as well as men. Hydro-electric development has unfortunately deprived canoeists in recent years of some of the country's finest rivers and threatens many of the remaining ones.

National white water championships featuring slalom and torrent racing are organised by the New Zealand Canoeing Association. In slalom a course involving technically difficult manoeuvres both with and against the current is marked out by suspending poles over a short stretch of rough water.

Racing. Flat water and river races are popular in some clubs, notably Palmerston North Canoe Club. The New Zealand Canoeing Association organises annual national championships, with classes for cruising canoes as well as the regular K1 and K2 racing kayaks, slender craft resembling rowing skiffs in form and speed and conforming to the International Canoe Federation's Racing Rules. I.C.F. Canadian (Indian-type) racing canoes have not yet been adopted here, although they are occasionally used for cruising. No interest has been shown in the specialised sailing canoes used overseas for international class racing.

A New Zealand racing canoeist, T. Dooney (Palmerston North), competed in the Australian National Championships in 1960, and two others have since competed in Australian regattas, but none achieved better than minor placings.

(1843–89).

Otago runholder and member of the Legislative Council.

A new biography of Campbell, Robert appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Campbell was born on his father's estate at Buscot Park, Berkshire. After being educated at Eton he came to New Zealand in 1866 to buy up land on behalf of the firm Robert Campbell and Sons. By the 1870s this firm had acquired a number of large properties, including Burwood in Southland, Galloway in Central Otago, Benmore and Otekaieke in the Waitaki Basin, and Oroua Downs near Bulls. At their peak these properties carried about 300,000 sheep, although they subsequently suffered severely from the depredations of rabbits. Campbell built a large house in the Scottish baronial style at Otekaike, near Kurow, and took up residence there in 1876. He was the member for Oamaru in the House of Representatives from 1866 to 1870 and was called to the Legislative Council in 1870. He was also chairman of the Waitaki County Council for some years after 1877 and a member of the University Senate from 1871 to 1879.

In the Legislative Council Campbell did not make many contributions to debate, other than on local issues, but gave general support to the Vogel public works policy. He took little part in the discussions on the abolition of the provinces. He was, however, strongly critical of the attempts of the Otago Provincial Council to make available more better-class land for closer settlement, which could deprive some of the larger runholders of the most fertile parts of their leases. He also spoke strongly on the rabbit menace, some of his own firm's runs having suffered severely. Campbell was called as a witness before the Parliamentary Committee on Waste Lands in 1885, and the evidence placed before this Committee showed that his firm had deliberately evaded the provisions of the Act dealing with land aggregation. From that time until his death in Dunedin on 9 December 1889 he took little part in public affairs.

The contribution made by his firm to the development of the sheep industry was also fairly limited, partly because the carrying capacity of all his runs was steadily reduced by rabbits in the 1880s and 1890s.

by Patrick Russell Stephens, M.A., Economics Section, Department of Agriculture, Wellington.

• History of North Otago, McDonald, K. C. (1940)
• Otago Daily Times, 8 May 1876