3
Colonisation and conflict
1852–1870
‘AS FIGHTING CONTINUED IN THE NORTH ISLAND, a lack of conflict and the discovery of gold in Otago in 1861 and on the West Coast in 1864 meant that the South Island grew more rapidly in this period. Wellington received a boost when the capital was transferred there in 1865. In 1852 New Zealand had been divided into six provinces, each with its own government; there was also, from 1854, a central representative government, the General Assembly, in Auckland. Although this arrangement recognised that some decentralisation of administration made sense in a country with a widely scattered population and limited infrastructure, the smaller provincial governments were often financially constrained, and there was ongoing tension between them and the General Assembly. The provinces were abolished in 1876.
Through most of the nineteenth century, hospitals in New Zealand were charitable institutions intended for the indigent, those unable to pay and those without family support. Early European settlers were typically young and fit, and, if not affluent, aspired to be. Hospitals were considered to offer little in the way of effective treatment, were often too far away from those living in rural areas and were regarded as a place of last resort by the self-respecting. Most preferred to be cared for at home, where there was less risk of infection. The 1846 Ordinance for the Support of Destitute Families and Illegitimate Children reinforced this focus: the first responsibility lay with the family.
Finances for public institutions could be severely constrained. In his history of Christchurch Hospital, F. O. Bennett notes that in 1864 the governors issued a decree denying admission to those with a wide range of conditions: ‘no woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, or child under six years (except in cases of sudden accident), no person disordered in their senses or subject to epileptic fits . . . or those apprehended to be in a dying condition’.
Because many parts of New Zealand were sparsely populated, and geography hindered movement and communication, hospital services were generally the result of the efforts of isolated groups acting on their own initiative, sometimes more as a demonstration of a district’s progress and status than from need. The colonial government had taken responsibility for public health services from 1840 to 1854, but then devolved much of this to the provinces until their abolition, and although central government provided some financial support, hospitals were initially largely funded from local contributions. As a result, and as settler numbers increased from the 1860s, an increasing number of hospitals and hospital districts were managed by small local bodies and community groups. Some served very small populations, or large geographical areas, or both.
In the Far North there was an attempt to set up a public hospital at Mangōnui in 1859, but this was short-lived due to the inability to retain suitably qualified staff. For more than half a century after it was established, Auckland’s was the only hospital of any significance serving Northland and much of the Waikato, as well as Auckland city itself. A second building at the hospital was erected further down the hill in 1851, to serve as what was then known as a lunatic asylum. It was repurposed as an obstetrics ward for destitute women when a new asylum opened in Avondale in 1867, and later became a home for the aged and infirm poor.
Thatcher’s original 1847 building was extended in 1860 with a plainer weatherboard wing that housed a new ward and a day room; further additions in 1865 added male and female wards, a larger kitchen and a new dead house. This much-modified building was eventually burned down deliberately in 1890 to make way for the Costley wards. Between the original building and the asylum, several single-storey cottages were added for patients with infectious diseases, including a wooden building erected beside the original Thatcher building in just 14 days to deal with a typhoid epidemic in 1887.
As fighting intensified and spread to New Plymouth by 1860, to Waikato after an 1863 invasion by government troops, and to the Bay of Plenty, British soldiers were stationed in these areas and the first hospitals were generally military facilities. Hamilton’s, established around 1855, was relocated in 1864 to the site of today’s central police station, then closed in 1867 as troops were withdrawn. Tauranga’s hospital opened in 1864 on the site of the old government building in Willow Street. The execution of the missionary Carl Völkner in Ōpōtiki in 1865 led to the establishment of a garrison there, and a small corrugated-iron hospital followed in 1868. In 1865 a military hospital was set up on the beach at Pātea, between New Plymouth and Whanganui, and a more permanent facility opened in 1869.
By 1860 the military had taken over New Plymouth’s colonial hospital as a defence outpost and the ousted medical services occupied a variety of sites for short periods. In 1864 what was then known as the Provincial Military Hospital moved into the Militia Office building, a relocated and extended farmhouse on the corner of Gill and Kawau streets. The hospital returned briefly to the old Thatcher building in Te Henui, which also served as an old men’s home from 1890 to 1903.
In Hawke’s Bay, also a site of tension and fighting, the port of Napier had been established in 1855 at Ahuriri, on the north side of Mataruahou, or Scinde Island, now known as Napier Hill, which was then connected to the mainland by only a narrow strip of land. Its two highest points were later distinguished as Bluff Hill and Hospital Hill.
In 1858 the 65th Regiment set up an army field hospital in the Barrack Reserve in the Onepoto Gully, on what was later the Hospital Hill side, and shortly afterwards a house in Emerson Street was rented for military and civilian patients. The 1855 plan for the town had designated a hospital reserve on an elevated site on the Bluff Hill side, and the new single-storey, weatherboard Hawke’s Bay Provincial Hospital was built there on what is now the corner of Harvey and Sealy roads in 1860. Designed by Thomas Shepherd, this 12- by 9-metre single-storey weatherboard building had a male ward and a female ward, each with five beds, a surgery, and a kitchen and sleeping apartment for the master and matron. There was also a detached washhouse and dead house.
By the 1850s it was clear that Wellington needed a larger hospital. Thomas Fitzgerald is said to have been involved with designing the replacement for the earthquake-damaged original building, but he appears to have been superseded as its architect by Edward Roberts in 1851, when plans for the building were drawn up. Built on the same site as its predecessor, the 40-bed single-storey Elizabethan domestic-style hospital opened in 1852. The central portion accommodated a female ward, plus surgery, dining room, ablutions and vapour bath rooms. There were four male wards in the two wings, with a kitchen and a morgue in separate buildings at the rear, connected by a covered walkway. Built of wood, as so many buildings in the town were after the 1848 earthquake, this building served Wellington for the next three decades.
As Christchurch grew, it took some time to settle on a site for a hospital, let alone build one. The provincial government had allocated land on the corner of Durham and Armagh streets for this purpose, and set aside £1500 for construction, but in 1858 political expediency led to the Provincial Council Chambers being built there instead. Eventually, the current site in Riccarton Avenue was carved off the eastern edge of Hagley Park, despite vocal protests by some citizens.
When Canterbury Provincial Council member John Ollivier introduced the Public Hospital Bill in October 1859, he noted that he was asking to use only what was an ‘isolated and otherwise nearly useless corner’ and pointed out that a hospital ‘should be so placed as to have sufficient ground to allow of free air and some exercise within its precincts for convalescents’. He argued, too, that ‘the only hospital in the settlement now was that wretched building so designated in Lyttelton, which he had felt to be a cause for shame to the Province’.
For the design of the new building, the Christchurch Hospital governors engaged provincial government architects and Gothic Revival advocates, Birmingham-born Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort and his brother-in-law, Isaac Luck, and the hospital finally opened in 1862. Constructed with timber weatherboards on a stone base, the two-storey building was Tudor in manner with projecting gables, an ornate porch and dormer windows. F. O. Bennett considered it ‘an ugly building in a barren setting’: Hagley Park, created in 1855, was then still quite a desolate place. The Lyttelton Times described it as ‘a strange-looking building, with excrescences like feelers stretching towards the road’. (Nothing of this original building has survived; the last component was removed in 1917.) In 1867 a wing with an operating theatre and consulting rooms on the lower floor and a male ward above was added to the eastern end. By the time a wing for 20 patients was built two years later, Christchurch Hospital had grown, by a series of small extensions, to house a total of 67 beds.
When the hospital in Lyttelton was moved into the customs house building in 1854, those classed as lunatics were relocated into the older hospital, but because of the damage they caused they were moved to the Lyttelton Gaol, where they remained until Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum in Christchurch opened in 1864. After land for a new hospital was purchased in Governors Bay, at the head of Lyttelton Harbour, Mountfort & Luck was commissioned to design a purpose-built facility that opened in 1863. By 1865, after being extended, it housed 24 male and two female patients. With Christchurch’s public hospital completed, the Governors Bay facility was closed in 1869, apart from its casualty ward, and repurposed as the Canterbury Orphanage.
From the 1860s settlers moved rapidly to develop the flat hinterland south of Christchurch, and the port of Timaru was established at the southern end of the Canterbury Bight. In 1862 a four-room cob house became the town’s temporary public hospital until it was replaced by a six-bed wooden building two years later. But the swampy gully site at the corner of North Street and West Belt (now Craigie Avenue) proved unsuitable for a hospital, and in 1868, on land that had been reserved for a park, the building of a new facility began where today’s hospital stands, in the north-eastern corner of what is now the Botanic Gardens. The architect was William Williamson.’
