From Empire's Servant to Global Citizen: A history of Massey University

By Michael Belgrave

The vision of two young scientists, Massey University was established in 1928 to bring science to New Zealand's role as Britain's farm. Massey has since become New Zealand's national and a global university, with almost 140,000 alumni spread across 140 different nations. This candid history looks at the university as it weathered war, funding crises, risk-taking expansion and conflict with the government's plans for New Zealand's tertiary sector. Written by distinguished historianProfessor Michael Belgrave, this is a lively look at how an agricultural college grew up to become a leading intellectual centre of excellence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994132581

Michael Belgrave

Michael Belgrave is a professor of history at Massey University, the author of Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland University Press, 2005) and From Empire's Servant to Global Citizen: A History of Massey University (Massey University Press, 2016), co-author of Social policy in Aotearoa New Zealand (Oxford University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Treaty on the Ground: Where We Are Headed, and Why It Matters (Massey University Press, 2017). He was previously research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal and has continued to work on Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements, providing substantial research reports into a wide number of the Waitangi Tribunal's inquiries. He received a Marsden Fund award in 2015 for study into the re-examination of the causes of the New Zealand wars of the 1860s.

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INTRODUCTION

— Writing University Histories —

Histories of universities are often partly autobiographical, written by historians whose memories are both longstanding and affectionate, as much rooted in personal experience as in the universities’ archives. Although they are now increasingly farmed out to professionals as exercises in public relations, they were once the preserve of historians with many decades of institutional memories. Length of service was not necessarily a mark of seniority, but it was acknowledged that young historians had things that interested them more. They had not spent long enough in academic corridors to be puzzled by their present direction and to wonder whether the university of the present was still the same place that had once inspired in them such excitement and enthusiasm.

TODAY’S UNIVERSITY HISTORIES VARY in purpose and style. Some are puff pieces, designed to open the pockets of alumni. Others are sentimental journeys, reunions with dead colleagues, adversaries and allies alike, glorying in the hearsay of even earlier times. Still more are compendiums of the driest details of buildings, disciplines and departments, faculties and fundraising: litanies to bearded founders and bluestocking achievers. This history is an historian’s history; it tries to explain the present from the experience of the past.

Most of the histories that have been written for New Zealand universities were published at a time when the nature and value of university life were uncontested — if we discount the deep-seated anti-intellectualism long rooted in New Zealand’s cultural landscape. None of the early histories questioned their writers’ faith in the value of university education and the continuing importance and increasing relevance of the universities, which many of them had entered as young students decades before.

Since the late twentieth century, however, universities have faced significant challenges from global competition and technological change. Internal revolutions have replaced academic management and governance with regimes more corporate than collegial, and with much higher levels of external and internal competition. Writing a history of a university in 2016 is to confront an uncertain future. Like every other university, Massey as we know it may be threatened by massive changes that will transform the very nature of university teaching and research. In this history the Massey of today can be clearly seen in its past, but for the writer of a later history this may be much more difficult.

Universities remain one of the triumphs of the modern era, and while their independence had been hard-fought, until the end of the 1980s their futures appeared secure. The campaign for recognition from often sceptical politicians and taxpayers seemed the battle of semesters past. Earlier histories did not deny or ignore the existence of fractious parochialism, as the provincial colleges competed for resources and status, but they were cast in an era when the University of New Zealand and then the University Grants Committee managed these disputes, often to the annoyance of university councils and their staff. Above all, competition was dampened, and limited largely to the acquisition of ‘special schools’, the specialist agricultural, veterinary, medical, forestry, engineering and even extramural schools that had a national catchment.

Universities were attached to place. Massey shared the history of Palmerston North, onto which it had been grafted, and the urban and rural élite who populated its councils. This has all changed. University education is now increasingly detached from location. Massey exists in a global marketplace, competing at all levels for undergraduate and graduate students alike, and with private and non-university providers of tertiary education.

In past decades the writing of a university history could be an intimate retrospective, as much reminiscence as history. Keith Sinclair’s history of the University of Auckland was published in 1983 to mark the university’s centenary. This was the year before the dramatic state sector reforms that heralded a new period of government relationships with what became known as the post-compulsory sector.¹ Unbeknown to Sinclair, universities were set to lose their privileged ascendancy. Their exclusive rights to grant degrees were stripped from them in a fee-for-all competitive market where, for better or worse, the universities’ pretensions to exclusivity and élite status were every day challenged.

The mantra was lower cost, increasing the participation rates of New Zealanders in tertiary education, and transforming universities into competitive marketing machines. These dramatic structural transformations have under-mined the value of intimacy as a tool of historical writing. Much of Keith Sinclair’s history of Auckland feels like a common-room peroration at the end of a day’s teaching or writing — or, even more likely, following a conference dinner — a glass in one hand while reminiscences and anecdotes flowed freely, later to emerge polished by footnotes, good rewriting and editing. This intimacy was the history’s charm and its strength.

WRITING A HISTORY of a university in 2016 means focusing on bigger and novel questions, which undermine the ability to build a university history like a Christmas stocking, stuffed with small delights and the occasional dull pair of socks. But this does not mean the history cannot be personal. This history is both individual exploration and explanation.

In 1973 I entered the University of Waikato, a parallel universe to Massey, established at the same time. I was part of the baby-boom generation flooding into New Zealand’s rapidly expanding universities. The Gothic imitations of nineteenth-century New Zealand campuses had given way to the New Brutalism of Massey and Waikato, and many of the buildings were interchangeable.²

There is much that would make Massey distinct, not just from establishments founded in the nineteenth century but also from Waikato, and this book explores many of these differences. But as a history student at Waikato in 1973, what was important was not the distinctive nature of a campus or an independent university; it was the fact that it was a university, that it shared a universal heritage and gave access to international debates about the past and about the nature of society. These debates were occurring as much in the tutorial rooms of Palmerston North and Hamilton as in myriad other similar universities mushrooming worldwide.

Universities were about enquiry, they were about independent research, and in the 1970s they were about critically challenging orthodoxy. Old ideas were to be tossed out; their age and their universality alone qualified them for the scrapheap. The environment that fostered the dramatic growth of university education in the 1960s rejected reverence for the past and often even denied its relevance. I remained uneasy about such political and intellectual radicalism. Worshipping the future seemed as worthy of the critical knife as venerating the past. However, the idea of the university as a place of debate, intellectual exploration and personal transformation has remained with me.

In writing a history of Massey University, I hoped to test deeply held personal assumptions about the nature of the university itself. I wanted to consider whether the university that my generation encountered in the early 1970s was but a transitory and probably imagined community built by and for the baby-boom generation. Or was my idea of a university not too distant from that of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s own ideal university, one open to pluralist and tolerant enquiry among colleagues, and one still relevant today?³ If we do share common values with those academics and other staff who have taught and written at Massey since the 1920s, then is longevity resilience or simply habit?

Beyond these personal aspirations lies a strong belief that the university of today and the challenges it faces can only be understood in the university of the past. The values we have cherished need to be tested before they are defended in the future. A tradition of open and independent (of government, special interests or business) enquiry and debate, applied research and problem-solving supported by a strong foundation of pure, theoretical and serendipitous research has been crucial to our past and should continue to be valued in the future. The same is true of the principles of open and equal access, even if these aspirations have never been fully realised. Ironically, only through these values can Massey be fully responsive to the needs of its students and to local, national and global communities. In the disruptive challenges that face tomorrow’s university, we disregard these liberal values at our peril.

IN AN ERA OF CHANGE, it is important to distinguish between the truly novel and the old dressed in new livery. This history argues that for all the increasing complexity and specialisation experienced by Massey University since 1964, our current commitment to the future, in documents that express both the strategic and the marketing faces of the university, should not disguise the extent to which so many of the problems we confront today were also the everyday challenges of earlier times. Today we just label them differently. We talk about the challenge of internationalisation, forgetting, or unaware, that in 1961 one in six of Massey’s students came from outside New Zealand. We fret about the threats to university autonomy from political interference. So, too, did the university’s founders in the 1920s, George Fowlds, Geoffrey Peren and William Riddet.

After a quarter of a century of being a multi-campus university, we still struggle with the consequential problems, puzzling over whether Massey is an empire or a federation. As restructurings have been layered over restructurings, the extent to which this has been a long-term problem has often been forgotten. Sometimes the same issues have emerged in different guises. In 2013, Massey, in concert with the other universities, opposed attempts to increase government influence on their governing councils, fearing them as an attack on the hallowed principles of the Education Act 1989. In 1989, Massey’s Vice-Chancellor, Neil Waters, regarded the same piece of legislation as a dangerous attack on the university’s autonomy.

Yet this story is not just one of continuity. Much has changed and is changing, but even here this change can have a longer trajectory. In recent decades, Massey, like almost all similar institutions, has faced competition on a global scale. Universities once were ‘the University of’: of Edinburgh, of Auckland, or even Victoria University of Wellington. From the very beginning, Massey was different. Yes, there was local patronage: Palmerston North was proud of, and owned, its agricultural college. But it was not a college for Palmerston North: it was a special school serving the whole of the country (or, if Lincoln had had its way, the North Island).

Other university colleges began with a truly local constituency then campaigned to have the national status of special schools, but Massey went beyond Palmerston North and the Manawatū from the very beginning. This continued after the metamorphosis of the agricultural college into a university in 1964.

For a brief period the university became Massey University of the Manawatu. This name reflected a local campaign to have a university that was focused on a particular place. But the name was soon shortened to Massey University, recognising its broader relationship not only with the country’s agricultural sector but also with its extramural student body and even with a developing world. Massey’s sense of being part of the global scientific community goes back to the 1930s, and was dramatically expanded through its involvement in the Colombo Plan during the 1950s. Attempts to create partnerships within and beyond New Zealand were a defining feature of Massey in the 1980s, when government still regarded international students as a threat rather than as New Zealand universities’ economic salvation.

SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS in Massey’s history have fewer precedents. One of the most significant of these has been the decline of the university run by academics for academics, often despite the best intentions of university councils. Increasing size and complexity, reflecting the very large budgets and assets managed by universities, has led to a greater level of managerialism. Professional managers rather than part-time academics play a much greater role in the university’s management and its governance than they ever did in the past. Although some of this change has been gradual, the dramatic restructuring of Massey University that occurred just prior to the turn of the millennium significantly changed the relationships between the professorial staff and line management. The role of academic governance was weakened, leaving Massey not only more businesslike but also more like a business. This transformation and the challenges associated with it have become the universal experiences of universities.

Precedents in the past may inform present discussions, but they often disguise the extent of change. An academic-led university was not egalitarian, and especially not at Massey. For much of Massey’s history, principals and vice-chancellors have been far more hands-on than was usually the case in New Zealand universities. Geoffrey Peren and Alan Stewart, who steered Massey through its first half-century, had little doubt about their responsibility to make decisions, small and large. Tensions between Massey’s council and the principals and vice-chancellors, academic staff and students even carried with them the ambiguity inherited from a distant monastic past.

Some cherished values of academic life are more recent than often thought, however. The idea of academic freedom, now so closely attached to the rights of individuals to act as the critic and conscience of society, is relatively new. Until the 1960s, academic freedom was almost exclusively found in the freedom of the institution from political interference — not freedom of an individual academic to be ‘critic and conscience of society’, as it would be enshrined in the Education Act 1989.

Academic freedom rested in the university council’s prerogative to determine the institution’s path. Hierarchy and collegiality have always been uneasily intertwined. At Massey, where they were divided, principal and vice-chancellor ruled. Collegiality implied the acceptance of their decisions, with a belief that academic leadership was rooted in academic experience, based on scholarship in a discipline. As university management has become more professional and less academic, new tensions have arisen between management and collegiality.

This history explores these questions and in doing so is very different from the recent histories of Waikato and Victoria, and also of the yet to be published, new history of Otago. This is not a comprehensive, bottom-up or inclusive history. The university’s myriad departments, faculties, research centres and support services do not have their histories told here. It is also, largely for archival reasons, limited to the period prior to 2002. This history is deliberately top-down and big-picture, focusing on the institution as a whole; it is my hope that this history’s absences, which many will see as its failings, will inspire future micro-histories. And although this history was commissioned to celebrate its half-century as a university, Massey’s centenary is little more than a decade away.

Michael Belgrave

Auckland

November 2016

01—

— Massey and Empire —

When Massey was founded in 1927, New Zealand was firmly part of the British Empire, entrenched in its role as Britain’s farm. The founding of universities and colleges is increasingly seen as an essential aspect of the network that maintained and supported the expansion of Britain’s Empire in the century or more before the Second World War. Massey Agricultural College, even more than the other colleges of the University of New Zealand, would play a crucial role in binding that Empire together. It was vital to the transfer of technical knowledge, skills and values that made the New Zealand economy and New Zealand society a specialised component of Britain’s far-flung possessions.⁴ The college would knit itself into a vast network of rapidly expanding agricultural knowledge, built by personal relationships between academic staff and researchers who often shared common values as well as their research, and the knowledge they laid out to their students, across the globe

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GEOFFREY PEREN, MASSEY’S FIRST PRINCIPAL, typified the extent to which agricultural knowledge existed in a global and imperial framework, ensuring that New Zealand’s farms were transformed as much by what was occurring in Canada and Australia as in the Manawatū or North Auckland. Born in England, educated in Canada and coming to New Zealand from Bristol as an agricultural researcher, Peren was acutely aware of being part of a community of academic scientists, educated in the belief that Empire and progress were synonymous. Francis Dry, another member of the foundation staff, had a different experience of imperial service, spending the years between 1917 and 1922 as an entomologist in Kenya.⁶ Peren’s time on the Western Front during the Great War had only enhanced his sense of an imperial citizenship based on the duty of common sacrifice and the brotherhood of soldiers.

Empire was not all about England. It would be a mistake to suggest that Peren’s Empire focused on New Zealand’s singular relationship with Britain as Home, despite the increasing integration of New Zealand agriculture with the British market.⁷ Peren built on his wide range of correspondence from across the Empire, a network focused on Fiji, India, Canada and Australia as much as on the United Kingdom. He would oversee the agricultural college until the late 1950s, into a postcolonial world where Empire had become Commonwealth, made up of newly independent countries.

While these new nation states confidently asserted their own independence, they still faced the same old problems of development, building infrastructure and gaining access to scientific knowledge. As the British departed, newly independent countries sought to develop their own indigenous professionals and administrators, calling on networks of scientific knowledge that had previously supported Empire.

Increasing agricultural production was even more important than it had been half a century earlier, as developing economies sought to shift from subsistence agriculture in areas like dairying to trading surpluses to feed increasingly urban populations. Massey’s extensive involvement in the Colombo Plan, the postwar aid project designed to give students from the developing world first-world educations, responded to these needs. The line between Commonwealth development and neo-colonialism was a fine one.

This imperial network in agriculture of which Massey became a part was not confined to scholars and scientists. It could only work with the participation of farmers, the explosion of newly created newspapers and magazines, and the involvement of engineers and inventors, salesmen, chemists, veterinarians, and agricultural and pastoral (A & P) shows. A & P shows combined competitive production with access to new ideas, technology and techniques. They also created a local forum for promoting agriculture. The innovation of industrial agriculture relied on this network of interests supporting production, transportation, marketing, wholesaling and retailing, connecting farmers and consumers over increasingly vast distances. But the Empire’s dominance in agricultural production was not echoed in agricultural science and technology; American tractors, separators and ploughs were marketed strongly in New Zealand, and Massey scientists were also abreast of the latest continental developments.

This advertisement produced during the Second World War promoted New Zealand as Britain’s farm, idealising its agriculture and celebrating its increased production. Massey was designed from the beginning to enhance this imperial relationship. EPH-E-TRADE-1940S-01, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

Imported knowledge was applied locally. The networks of knowledge and skills generated globally could be applied to the highly specialised needs of individual communities and local economies. But local variations meant that every import, every idea, each crop variety or pesticide had to be useful in New Zealand’s varied agricultural environment. Old world practices and old world thinking, however much they were born of the latest scientific discoveries, could not just be stamped on the new. Understanding local needs and local experience was essential to make the system work.

Massey’s professors and lecturers formed relationships with breeder associations and farmers’ organisations, and brought beekeepers and dairy factory managers into the college for short courses and conferences. Peren and the other Massey staff used newspapers to promote the college’s research and the science of agriculture. The vast majority of its degree graduates went on to have research or academic careers.

As the agricultural college became a university, some of the international focus weakened. The New Zealand-born children of the baby boomers, raised in the prosperous decades following the Second World War, now entered universities on their way to new middle-class professional occupations. The proportion of Massey students from overseas declined, although the university was increasingly staffed by a diverse range of academics, more linked to broader global than imperial networks, and air travel and reasonably generous leave provisions ensured continued participation in the international academic community.

An international network of enterprise

UNDERSTANDING MASSEY’S ROLE as an agricultural college and its place in an expanding network of imperial knowledge requires a review of New Zealand’s significantly changing place in an international agricultural economy. Massey’s beginnings lie in the transformation of agriculture, which occurred both as a driver of the industrial revolution and then as a consequence of it. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a realisation that farming was much more than a craft passed on from generation to generation, and that it now required scientific knowledge and new skills. This was particularly true in the industrialised economies with rising populations and increasing incomes driven by greater competition and declining costs of transportation and refrigeration. Science promised to increase yields, reduce costs, eliminate pests and find new ways of producing foods and fibres for an increasingly urbanised population.

Empire opened British agriculture to new crops, and to British-owned and-run agriculture throughout its expanding number of colonies, and beyond, particularly in South America. British agriculture became part of an international network of enterprise. Innovation was far easier in the newly settled colonies, once indigenous peoples’ own economies had been pushed aside, and new systems of land title made land much more readily available for introduced crops and new agricultural opportunities. In New Zealand from the 1880s, large areas of new land could be opened up to dairying through the acquisition and subdivision of Māori land and the large, bankrupted speculator estates of the Waikato and Thames Valley.

Farming became industrialised and globalised, driven by better worldwide communications and processing systems beyond the farm gate, which were every bit as important as the changes occurring down on the farm.⁸ These innovations transformed much of the world’s grasslands, in what was recognised by the 1920s as a ‘grasslands revolution’.⁹ The grasslands of New Zealand’s South Island and the southern and eastern North Island were turned into pasture for ruminants or turned over to growing grains, as were the vast prairies of the United States and Canada, the backblocks of Australia, the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay, and later the veldt in southern Africa.

Indigenous peoples and their economies were displaced by settler farmers able to meet the increasing demand from distant, highly urbanised markets as the world’s European population exploded. In the days before refrigeration, Australian merinos warmed Londoners’ winters. Texas longhorns became Boston roast beef thanks to cowboys and railways. Europe’s daily bread could begin its life as new world grain. Then refrigeration gave these grassland economies a further massive boost. Until then, Canterbury lamb had been but a byproduct of growing wool, eaten by locals as colonial goose or rendered for making candles. After 1882, it could grace the tables of Britain’s burgeoning middle classes.

Farming in New Zealand grew to complement the economy of the United Kingdom, rather than compete with it. There, agriculture began a dramatic decline following the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, opening up British markets to foreign competition. As Britain became more industrialised and urbanised, it came to rely more heavily on imported wool, grains and then, from the 1880s, refrigerated meat, butter and cheese. British farmers’ losses were New Zealand farmers’ gains. Economically, socially and politically, New Zealand became one of Britain’s farms.

As British farmers attempted to survive, they too saw science as their saviour, calling upon government to invest much more in research and technical advice for farmers.¹⁰ Meanwhile the settler societies of New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States were supplying agricultural products to both internal and external markets. In these countries, farmers’ organisations and governments looked increasingly to science and educational reforms to enhance their economies and promote rural communities, which often felt increasingly threatened by the urban drift that had created the very markets on which their new wealth depended.

Despite the Arcadian image that New Zealand presented to British consumers, New Zealand agriculture was highly industrialised, ensuring that sheep meat, beef, butter and cheese were readily available for British consumers at a uniform standard. 1/1-004794-G, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

New Zealand farming rapidly industrialised. Family-run dairy farms sent their milk to local dairy factories, and freezing works were large-scale enterprises, turning large numbers of animals into semi-processed carcasses to be shipped to the other side of the world. 1/1-008141-G, 1/2-048879-G, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

None of this was achieved without the determined resistance of indigenous peoples. Historians have increasingly depicted colonisation as a biological and environmental invasion. While some indigenous communities, including many Māori, sought to benefit from the rapidly unfolding opportunities of introduced fauna and flora, they were successful only on the margins. Settler societies relied on deeply rooted beliefs in their own cultural superiority and a willingness to use military force to counter indigenous determination to retain their own lands, and even to eliminate indigenous competition. Hunting and gathering economies were marginalised or replaced by commodified farming, while indigenous fauna, such as American buffalo, were all but exterminated to allow for exotic cattle, an act of cultural as much as economic colonisation. As James Belich has argued, new technology and demographic change upset several centuries of balance between indigenous societies and European settlers.¹¹ Europeans were now able to take control of the globe, at least for the time being.

Much attention has been given to the dramatic events of the New Zealand and North American wars, to Orakau and Little Bighorn. But conflict on the frontier was more often endemic, such as the undeclared war in the Australian outback, where cattle-spearing and shootings of Aboriginals were a common feature of rural life, little noticed in Sydney or Melbourne. However, even more important in the displacement of indigenous peoples and their economies was European control over capital and technology — making the transformation of grasslands possible — and demography. The arrival of Europeans brought new diseases that decimated indigenous populations; in contrast, white populations were well into a process of demographic transition, showing high rates of fertility and declining mortality. European numbers flourished.

White populations in industrialising societies rapidly increased and provided waves of settlers into new worlds. At the same time, indigenous populations in North America, New Zealand and Australia all experienced their demographic nadir around the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous societies survived this cultural and economic tidal wave, but their economies and even their landscapes were displaced by their new European neighbours and the agricultural revolution that gave these new communities economic viability.¹²

Invention and innovation were central to this revolution. The general drivers of industrialisation — railways and steamships, limited liability companies and newspapers — all played a role in creating modernised agriculture. Innovation on the farm was just as dramatic. Even during New Zealand’s short colonial history, from 1840 to 1927, wooden ploughs and single-furrow steel ploughs were replaced by four-furrow ploughs, pulled increasingly by tractors.¹³ Sickle and scythe were exchanged for mechanical mowers, reapers and binders. By the end of this period, mechanical harvesters were being imported from Australia and the United States. Where appropriate, shearing machines powered by petrol engines had replaced hand shearing. In dairy farming, the Babcock test allowed assessments of butterfat, milking machines were displacing milking by hand, and separators divided the milk from the cream. In powering all of this innovation, horses were replaced by steam, and steam by the internal combustion engine. The speed of innovation appeared to be increasing exponentially by the 1920s.¹⁴

The introduction of innovative technology created new opportunities, but also significant new problems. While new ideas and new technology were easily transported, they were planted in local economies, local environments and ecosystems, and cultivated in distinct political economies. As much as New Zealand may have felt itself the Britain of the South, its farming was very different and its problems distinct. Intensive grain farming exhausted lands. Rabbits denuded pastures as their numbers skyrocketed following new land-use patterns on large pastoral estates. The burning and felling of timber on steep country increased erosion. Introduced pests and diseases could play havoc with both crops and animals. All of this was new, which in itself suggested that the answers lay in scientific discovery.

Farming experiences in New Zealand varied widely. The challenges facing North Island dairy farmers were very different from those of South Island pastoralists. Grasslands suitable for sheep in the South Island, the Wairarapa and Hawke’s Bay were relatively easily purchased from Māori prior to 1860, and much of the rest was acquired before 1870 in the early years of the Native Land Court.¹⁵ Initially at least, these lands provided quick returns for runholders with sufficient capital to purchase livestock. The problems of rabbits, soil exhaustion and replacing native grasses with exotics occurred later. Runholders in some areas became a colonial aristocracy, employing substantial numbers of labourers and building fine houses for their families.

Developing dairy land was very different. The acquisition of Māori land was more complicated and expensive — despite the limited returns to Māori landowners. Dairy lands were rarely open grasslands. The land was wetter and often needed extensive drainage. Bush needed to be felled or burnt, and farmers relied much more on their own labour to break in the land. In the central North Island, bush sickness made stock raising impossible in some areas.¹⁶ Cow cockies and their families enjoyed few of the graces of rural life commonplace on sheep runs. For most, by comparison with grassland runholders, houses were mean and prosperity rested largely on their labour and that of their immediate families.

Successful farmers aspired to become colonial gentry, emulating British lifestyles. But breaking in the land in New Zealand was very different from the long settled agriculture of Britain. Forests needed to be felled or burnt and swamps drained. 1/1-010662-G, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

Farmers had little reason to link most of the innovation that was occurring with university-based research. Stephen Moulton Babcock’s position at the University of Wisconsin was an exception. In most cases, invention came from farmers and engineers working close to the ground. While the invention of completely new agricultural devices and machinery, such as the milk separator, did occur, most changes were small iterations on existing inventions. Farmers engaged in their own experiments were as likely to be localising existing crops and technology as developing something completely new. H. E. McGowan, a South Canterbury potato grower, produced new selections of potatoes, Northern Star and Gamekeeper, demonstrating that they were resistant to Irish potato blight, which had ravaged local crops and was particularly destructive for Māori potato growers.¹⁷ Other farmers then picked up the varieties.¹⁸

Refrigeration, introduced in 1882, had by 1914 revolutionised New Zealand’s pastoral economy and transformed the social and political fabric of the country’s rural landscape, including the towns that serviced the agricultural community.¹⁹ In 1881 land ownership was very widely spread, with a high proportion of the colony’s males having a freehold title. But the areas they owned were generally very small, little more than subsistence plots to supplement other forms of often seasonal employment. Political power lay with large landowners, runholders with capital who had acquired substantial estates in the South Island, Hawke’s Bay and the Wairarapa from the 1850s.

Then there were the Auckland speculators who had invested in confiscated land in the Waikato or purchased vast tracts of grassland from the Thames valley to east Taupo in the early freewheeling days of the Native Land Court. New Zealand’s rural élite was also its urban oligarchy, many runholders living as much in Auckland and Christchurch as in their large country houses. Most of the Auckland entrepreneur speculators hoped to subdivide for profit, and even faced increasing political demands in the 1880s to do just that and open up the land to small farmers. However, only refrigeration made this viable, and it came too late to save many of these speculators, the companies they had created and their British investors from bankruptcy in the long depression of the 1880s. These élites also controlled the legislature, although universal male suffrage was introduced in 1881. Refrigeration democratised the countryside, increased the political influence of small farmers, transferred the political power of farmers from the south to the north — centred on the Waikato and Taranaki — and enabled dairy cattle to rival sheep as the backbone of the pastoral economy.

By the 1920s, the industrialisation of agriculture had extended to the farm, with innovative new machinery and traction engines, and tractors gradually replacing horses. The hay hoist (top) is being used on the Massey farm. 1/1-019345-G, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

Even milking sheds showed greater levels of industrialised processes, which allowed more cows to be milked more efficiently but relied extensively on the labour of the dairy family. 1/1-022106-G, ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

Many of the old political élites were well educated, not in agriculture but in the liberal arts typical of a nineteenth-century classical education. Not unnaturally, they valued a liberal education. The new North Island dairying generation was very different. Much more likely to have spent minimal time at school, they had little of the social or financial capital of the earlier runholders. They earned their farms through hard graft as shearers or labourers, relying on the Liberal Party’s flagship policies of leasehold title and financial advances to settlers to acquire 40 to 100 acres of land. These farms often needed to be cleared, drained and turned into pasture. These farmers learnt the skills they needed alongside their neighbours, as they learnt theirs. Their labour, that of both men and women and their children, was far too valuable to be squandered on the luxury of all but a primary education.

In the 1890s, would-be farmers and those recently settled on these small holdings voted Liberal. In 1902, farmers were still happy to call their new national organisation a union, but they moved in numbers to the Liberals’ populist alternative, the Reform Party, as many became increasingly opposed to the escalating radicalism of trade union politics under the influence of the Red Federation of Labour. Many of the large landowners retained positions of influence within both the Reform Party and the Farmers’ Union, but they represented a much more egalitarian, if increasingly conservative, industry. While farmers’ organisations opposed state intervention on behalf of industrial workers, they saw state involvement in promoting the pastoral economy as essential to their economic and social wellbeing.

By 1914, farmers were not upper-case Liberals or lower-case liberals. They were increasingly voting Reform, but were still politically determined to ensure the state was there to assist farmers to achieve private profit, and also to promote the more communitarian objectives of farmer cooperatives and rural communities.²⁰ In a country with limited access to capital and where economic units were very small, farmers were happy to have the state ensure that substantial areas of Māori land were made available for closer settlement, and the same went for large estates in European ownership — although the Liberals’ achievements in breaking up the big estates in the 1890s were more spin than real.²¹

Rural communities wanted subsidies for roads and bridges, for drainage schemes, fertilisers and railways. The state made an imperative of putting ‘men on the land’. Where in the early twentieth century it could not provide resources directly, the state created enabling legislation and regulation, which allowed farmers themselves to manage pests, establish drainage boards and form cooperatives.

The Liberals were fond of creating new departments;²² the Department of Agriculture was created in 1892. These new departments expanded the facilitating state. Government was given responsibility for improving New Zealand’s agricultural production, working with farmers as a broker of ideas and skills. The department had experimental farms and provided farm advisors across the whole range of agricultural production.²³ Over time, with a series of demonstration farms, often in partnership with the community, the department extended its links to all areas of the agricultural economy.

After a reorganisation in the early 1920s, the department had a small army of advisors under its Fields Division, divided into dairying, livestock and horticulture.²⁴ The dairying officers worked with dairy factory managers and farmers, and its herd testers helped improve milk production and breeding.²⁵ The work of the livestock officers included providing veterinary advice. Support was provided for apiarists, orchardists, and pig and poultry farmers. The poultry instructors visited plants, gave advice and instruction, and judged eggs and birds at shows, while also supervising the grading of eggs for export. In 1924, the department ran nine schools, attended by 1400 farmers. Some of the lectures given during the year attracted over 200 participants.²⁶

All of this was supported by three laboratories — veterinary, chemical and biological — based in Wellington. Demonstration farms were expected to be profitable. A permanent farm school was established at Ruakura, near Hamilton, in 1923 and soon had over 40 students. After three decades the department had mushroomed into a broadly based administrative, educational and research body. Little of this had been coherently planned, and in 1925 the government was determined to strengthen agricultural research, not just by adding a dairy laboratory or a research centre but also through a substantial reorganisation.

Nonetheless, there can be little doubt what kind of farming the government was promoting. The department and its advisors pushed for greater levels of fertiliser application, supported by subsidies; they led a campaign to eradicate or contain plant diseases. In the 1890s phylloxera decimated grapevines, and pip fruit was also hit by new diseases. A noxious weed act introduced at the turn of the century aimed at the eradication of a number of exotic weeds. Government’s view of agriculture reinforced the belief that scientific progress was fundamental not only to ensuring greater returns but also to maintaining existing levels of production.

Protecting New Zealand’s agricultural economy from unwanted overseas imports was not unrelated to a growing paranoia about undesirable immigrants. Preventing the contamination of what was described as a ‘pure New Zealand stock’ by Asians, paupers and those with intellectual disabilities and radical political opinions was also seen as necessary. Both campaigns were supported by ‘scientific opinion’, although the hope of quarantining New Zealand animal diseases, agricultural pests and noxious weeds rested on sounder and more durable science.

Agricultural and pastoral societies lost some of their political impetus once the Farmers’ Union was established, but they were significant vehicles for introducing innovation, promoting competition between farmers, lobbying government and demonstrating new machinery and agricultural techniques.²⁷ Shows also provided opportunities for farmers to share new ideas among themselves. Competition inspired better stock breeding and management, and was closely connected to the Department of Agriculture’s advisory services.

International networks of information, based on trade in commodities, sharing of ideas and migration, allowed agricultural innovation to take place on a global scale while also bedding down new varieties and breeds, new techniques and inventions in environmentally different locations. Information was passed from farmer to farmer, neighbour to neighbour, farmer to farm advisor or farm advisor to farmer. Newspapers and weekly magazines, linked internationally by the telegraph, allowed new ideas to be carried from continent to continent.²⁸

As New Zealand dairy farming gained maturity, the skills that had been shared among innovators when everyone was new to the game were transferred across generations as farmers handed their holdings over to their sons.²⁹ Despite this, far too many new farmers were still entering the industry between 1890 and 1925 to rely solely on inherited practice. The new farmers would need to be trained some other way; an agricultural college seemed to be the answer. However, establishing an agricultural college to respond to the research and educational challenges created by the scientific revolution in agriculture would be far from straightforward.

Over half a century, debates emerged about whether or not New Zealand needed a college in the North Island. Parochialism, a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism within rural New Zealand and a distrust of towns and their universities would undermine the campaign to promote an agricultural college, particularly one that emphasised research and being part of the University of New Zealand.

02—

— The Long Road to Massey’s Creation —

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the need for agricultural education was being considered in Britain, Australasia and North America. In the South Island of New Zealand, Lincoln Agricultural College had been founded in 1878 as a private college, modelled on the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, England, but it had little success beyond Canterbury. In 1906, in Australia, the state of Victoria extended agricultural education by founding eight agricultural high schools, guaranteeing attendance to 50 students annually.³⁰ The same year, in Sydney, the government proposed an agricultural school for women.³¹ Lord Curzon, as Viceroy of India, donated £10,000 for agricultural education and scientific research in that country.³² New Zealand politicians also debated the issue, and expressed views in favour of promoting agricultural education, but they were divided on just how this should be done.

IN 1907 THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION, George Fowlds, who would play a very significant role in the establishment and early years of Massey, expressed sympathy with ‘any reasonable proposal to extend the benefits of agricultural education’.³³ Just what was a reasonable proposal would generate considerable heat right up to the time Massey Agricultural College opened its doors. Everyone was an expert; everyone had a different view. Consensus was never achieved, but over time the advocates for an agricultural college, of university status, slowly gained the upper hand.³⁴

Teaching boys to be farmers and girls to be farmers’ wives was favoured by those who saw farming as simply a practical exercise, not needing the airy-fairy pretensions of higher education. Even ordinary teachers were, many argued, expected to know something about agriculture. In 1905, the Auckland Education Board spent £400 on an ‘expert’ to train as an educator for its teachers.³⁵ The following year, the Christchurch Board of Education was also looking for educational instructors for its teachers.³⁶ Attempts to make teachers more aware of agriculture and the Dominion’s dependence on it were as much a reflection of political demands for the recognition of rural communities as they were a response to the practical needs of those growing up on farms. Rural advocates wanted rural values inculcated in urban communities, reflecting a sense of cultural threat felt by those on the land.

Such attitudes were far from exclusive to New Zealand. As anglophone communities industrialised, many reformers, both radicals and conservatives, praised rural values as stabilising, as being based on a sounder morality freed from the degeneracy so often associated with urban life. In Ontario, at the end of the First World War, expanding agricultural education for boys and girls throughout schools was considered a way of providing a moral compass, a ‘steadying influence towards a more normal condition’.³⁷ Rural communities would be torn between their own sense of moral worth when compared with ‘city slickers’ and their increasing reliance on towns, especially in education and agricultural research.

Australia outstripped New Zealand in founding colleges. The first in Australasia was established at Roseworthy, 50 kilometres north of Adelaide, in 1883, on an experimental farm of 828 acres.³⁸ The agricultural college at Dookie in Victoria was opened in 1886, on the Cashel Experimental Farm. The school was run by the colony-funded Council for Agricultural Education, and provided courses for male students over the age of 14 who had completed primary