At age 20 Robert McCarroll had already built himself something of a life in Ireland. When he left in 1885 he was playing goal keeper for the Irish International team, and he was an Irish 440 yards champion as well.
If he was a high achiever back home, like his brothers he did remarkable things in the new country.
Willie, was only 13, maybe 14, when they arrived in New Zealand, and while most of the boys worked in the bush and on the McCarroll property before they branched out on their own careers, it was Robert and Willie who stayed long term.
Those early days must have been a rough and ready pioneer experience for the family, both parents and all the children, when they came together at Mareretu on land only two years won from virgin bush. And the children were young. If the third son, Willie, seems young at 13, Hugh, the seventh, was just a toddler. And two children weren’t yet born.
The property expanded dramatically past the original 375 acres. According to Robert, he, or the family, bought between eight and ten thousand acres of land (3-4,000 hectares) from absentee owners. The area became known as McCarroll’s Gap, and in 1953 Robert reckoned he still owned about 3,000 acres (1200 hectares).
The first job was to clear the bush — fell the kauri, get the timber to market and ready the land for pasture. Robert shared the honour of being one of the the oldest members of the pre-World War One Kauri Bushmen’s Association. In his time he claims to have delivered the staggering amount of 100,000,000 feet of Kauri logs to the mills. From the immediate vicinity of the home farm he felled something like 10,000,000 feet. The biggest tree he ever felled was 33 feet (10m) in girth. It had to be side-scarfed because there were no saws big enough to do the job in the ordinary way.
Robert’s younger brother Hugh — my grandfather — also worked in the bush, as did some of the other brothers. Hugh gave a series of vivid talks on the local radio station about life as a Kauri Bushman before 1914.
Hugh also wrote an explanation of how to convert logs into “super feet”, the standard measurement that Robert was using. On that basis, depending on the size of the trees, the hundred million super feet mentioned would convert to anywhere between 2-1/2 and 10 thousand trees, a tenth of that from the McCarroll property.
Think of the magnitude of that task. Then add the work of removing unwanted scrub and trees, eliminating stumps, establishing pastures, gardens and orchards, and rearing stock. And raising kids and building schools for them…
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Robert retired from active farming about 1940, and claimed he needed a doctor only once in his life — when he broke a leg in the bush.
He married Rachel Fitness in 1896. Their three children were Rachel (Ray), a maternity nurse, Reginald (Reg) who farmed at Mareretu, and Ethel, who lived at Mareretu. Another son, Edgar, was killed in 1923 in the Kauri bush. Four other children died in infancy.
Those are very familiar faces. I remember meeting Ray and Ethel in Whangarei, when they were retired and, I think, living together.
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A brief obituary in the Herald (14/7/45) describes Willie as born in Belfast and coming to New Zealand in 1885 with his family, who “pioneered a block of virgin country called McCarroll’s Gap at Mareretu, North of Maungaturoto. He joined an Auckland engineering firm in 1917 and in 1924 he entered business as a contractor at Te Awamutu, where he served several terms on the borough council.” It’s not clear whether that conflicts with Robert’s account. There’s almost 30 years between the family coming to New Zealand and Willie moving to Auckland in 1917. He was survived by his wife, Emma, two sons and three daughters.