It echoes the formation, 118 years ago, of the Dunedin Ratepayers’ and Householders Association, which played a decisive role in city affairs.
Bruce Munro recounts the jubilant formation and turbulent early days of that first association, including its victory over a plan to siphon the city’s sewage out to sea at Smaill’s Beach via an aqueduct.
In 1903, Dunedin was in a stink over sewage. Something needed to be done. But there was a feeling elected representatives and paid officials were not going about it the right way. Discontent was brewing.
Diseases such as typhoid and cholera had plagued the early days of the colonial settlement, especially on the flat, because of a lack of drainage and clean water.
An 1864 report in the Otago Witness said of central-city Maclaggan St, "However bad might be the state of the city in other parts from want of drainage, this was certainly the worst of all. It was simply a large open cesspool in which drainage and filth of all conceivable kinds accumulated".
These pipes emptied sewage and stormwater into the upper harbour in the vain hope that tides would flush the problem away. In warm weather the mudflats, and therefore the city, stank. In 1889, Dunedin was described in one political cartoon as "Stinkapool".
Several reports were commissioned by the Dunedin City Council but little happened until a dispute with the Harbour Board prompted the council to set up a largely independent Drainage Board charged with developing a city-wide scheme.
That board, elected in 1901, was given the power to levy rates of up to eight pence per pound for sewered properties, four pence for unsewered and tupence for outlying areas that would get drainage but not sewerage. This was in addition to council rates.
Noble Anderson was hired as the board’s engineer. He was soon at odds with his board.
Anderson proposed a sewerage scheme similar to one mooted more than 20 years earlier — piping the sewage to Musselburgh and then pumping it out to sea. His idea was that the outfall should be at the rocks known as Bird Islands, about 200m off Smaills Beach, Ocean Grove. To get the sewage out to the rocks, Anderson favoured a wooden or concrete trestle aqueduct supported by a suspension wire. Surprisingly, what most worried the board was not the overhead sewerage but the cost — estimated at £317,838 and then revised down to just inside the board’s borrowing limit of £200,000.
The board appointed three engineers to report on Anderson’s plan. They suggested an alternative that had been proposed to the council four years prior. It would cost £219,000, with £14,000 in annual running costs.
The board rejected the three engineers’ recommendation and, strongly divided, reverted to Anderson’s plan.
Next, community objections to the Bird Islands outfall saw the proposal first condemned by an engineer working for the government’s Minister of Marine and then favoured by a magistrate commissioned to assess the outfall idea.
In the meantime, there was a growing feeling among some city residents that accountability was sorely needed.
Mark Cohen, editor of the Evening Star, seems to have played a facilitating role in what came next.
On March 14, 1903, someone using the nom de plume "Don’t delay" wrote a letter to the editor of the Star.
"Sir, You have on several occasions called the ratepayers’ attention lately to the advisability of protecting themselves by forming a committee, or, as I think would be better, a citizens’ reform association," the letter writer stated.
"It is not necessary for me to give reasons for the formation of a society of this kind, for every week lately we read about the extravagant way our money is being squandered. The latest instance is the Frederick St sewer ..."
"Now, Mr Editor, we want your assistance. Some time ago you published an article on an Association that was in existence in Sydney ... Can you give the ratepayers any particulars? ... I shall wait your reply, and in the meantime I would ask ratepayers to consider the subject seriously and decide whether they will become members of an association, if asked to do so, for the purpose of protecting their own interests."
Tagged on the end of the published letter was the editor’s reply: "The ratepayers of Dunedin should be up and doing, ‘ere it is too late. A ratepayers’ protection association can be formed without going to Sydney for a constitution. If it is promptly organised it may do good service in view of the early approach of the City Council biennial elections".
"After reading your statements re Drainage Board last evening, it seems to me to be about time that a vigilant committee were appointed to look after the interests of the ratepayers. Could you not inaugurate something of this kind?" someone signing themselves "Drainage" implored of the editor.
The Otago Daily Times reported that the next month an association of ratepayers began to coalesce.
"Another meeting was held last evening in the Leviathan Motel, when there was a good attendance, Mr Milne being in the chair," the newspaper stated.
"After considerable discussion the following circular submitted by the committee appointed at a previous meeting was adopted: ‘At no previous period in the history of Dunedin and the suburbs has the existence of a Ratepayers’ Association been so urgently required. A very large amount of public money is in course of being spent by various public bodies, but more particularly by the Drainage Board, who have entered upon a scheme the carrying out of which will involve the expenditure of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. Their actions and administration therefore require the strictest watching, which can only be accomplished by an Association such as is now proposed to be formed’."
In late December, the ODT reported the names of the new group’s key figures, all male. They were Captain James Stewart, Henry F. Hardy, Joseph Milnes, J. White, E. B. Hayward, Henry Spears, Richard Brinsley, S. A. Scott, J. Small and Association president Joseph Milnes.
The Cyclopedia of New Zealand, Otago and Southland edition, published in 1905, gives flesh to most of those names.
Milnes was a building contractor based in Cumberland St, Dunedin. Born in Yorkshire, he came to Dunedin in 1879 and six years later had his own building firm. Projects Milnes oversaw included alterations to the Evening Star box factory, in Crawford St, the Loan and Mercantile buildings, in Lower Rattray St, and the DIC warehouse.
Captain James Stewart was a veteran and intrepid sailor. His obituary in the Otago Witness, August 2, 1911, described him as a devout Christian, fearless, sharp-witted and generous. He came to New Zealand in 1857, but later returned to Scotland for a few years before bringing his family back on a schooner that he then used to trade between Auckland and Bluff. In 1881, he was sent back to Scotland by the Otago Harbour Board to oversee the construction of a dredge, which he then sailed to Dunedin.
"The task was hazardous in the extreme," the obituary read, "justifying somewhat the remark made afterwards by an old salt, ‘I believe if the Harbour Board stuck a mast in a locomotive engine old Stewart ‘ud try to sail her’."
Richard Brinsley was a range manufacturer who moved from Victoria, Australia to Dunedin in 1880, at the age of 20. He patented the celebrated Champion stoves that were built at a factory on a quarter-acre section in Cumberland St and sold throughout New Zealand.
An obituary in the Star, in 1907, reveals Henry Spears was 75 when he joined the Ratepayers. He had been a well known contractor and was a prominent member of the Foresters and the Sons of Temperance. At the time of his death he was a member of the Drainage Board.
The Dunedin Ratepayers’ and Householders’ Association had its critics.
On March 12, 1904, a letter to the editor of the Star, by "X", stated, "We are getting quite accustomed to the phrase that the Dunedin Drainage and Sewerage Board ‘as at present constituted’ will soon be no more.
"Twelve persons, self-appointed on the Jones-proposes-Smith-and-Smith-proposes-Jones principle, have met in solemn conclave and drafted a petition praying the Governor-in-Council to dissolve the Board. Why? Because the Drainage Board suppress information that the public have a right to obtain.
"Let the president of the so-called Ratepayers’ Association tell us this: Does his Association ever suppress any information? Who paid for the touts to stand around the polling booths on the day of the last election? Did the money come out of the funds of the Association or is it not a fact that, after a dispute, a certain section of this wonderful Executive were compelled to put their hands into their pockets and find the amount, which, if, it had not been for the firmness of Captain Stewart, would have been charged to the Association?"
The letter then outlined arguments among Drainage Board members. One of the squabblers, the writer said, was claiming elements of the sewer project were being constructed in the wrong order.
"Of course the Ratepayers’ Association took up this cry because they knew no better," X wrote.
But the Association also had its firm supporters. And neither were Association members slow to defend their own record.
In response to a critique penned by "Observant Citizen" and published in the ODT, a letter by Capt Stewart, the Association’s vice-president, was published on October 3, 1904. In his stinging response, Capt Stewart questioned his critic’s integrity and outlined the achievements of the Association during its first year.
"How any observant citizen could have any doubts about the genuineness of an association that has been brought into existence in Dunedin within the past 12 months with the utmost publicity ... is a puzzler, unless it is to be explained by the proverb that, ‘There are none so blind as those who winna see’," he wrote.
The Ratepayers Association had fulfilled its role admirably, highlighting the failings of the city council, he said. Those transgressions, Capt Stewart said, included the council valuing the old horse trams at twice their real value, the mayor making an illegal contract with a city firm, importing £100,000-worth of tramway material before it had the legal right to lay the tram tracks, and "certain other members" breaking an unspecified law "that should have been rigidly kept".
"I forgot to mention among other gross mistakes they have made that while they could have purchased the Waipori rights for £500, now it looks as if it would cost them anywhere from £5000 to £50,000."
In Capt Stewart’s mind, however, the crowning achievement of the association during its first 12 months was blocking the Bird Islands sewage outfall plan.
The association made the council’s drainage board its chief target for attack, historian K.C. McDonald wrote in his definitive, century-marking civic history, City of Dunedin.
It petitioned Parliament to dissolve the board, which the association said was building the city’s sewerage scheme in a haphazard way, was making too little progress and was not keeping the public informed.
In the meantime, in January, 1904, construction began of a timber, trestle aqueduct to Bird Islands.
Two months later, the government ordered work to halt until plans had been submitted for approval.
In June, the Marine Department formally ruled the Bird Islands outfall a non-starter.
It would be another three and a-half years before Dunedin got a sewerage system that did not dump everything into the harbour. On May 25, 1908, the city’s first discharge of sewage to sea took place, at the base of the cliff at Lawyers Head. This remained the outfall for a century, until replaced by a 1.1km pipe off the St Kilda coast, in January, 2009.
Stopping the Bird Islands outfall, Capt Stewart said in his 1904 letter, was entirely due to the efforts of the Ratepayers’ Association.
"The president Mr Milnes and vice-president Mr Small recently went to Wellington, at their own cost, in order to prevent the Drainage Board from throwing the ratepayers’ money into the sea, and were, after a great deal of trouble, at last successful.
"These, we submit, are more than sufficient reasons for a Ratepayers’ Association, and we beg earnestly of the ratepayers of the city and suburbs to roll up in large numbers to the next annual meeting, and do their very best to elect men to the executive that will do their utmost to intelligently, fearlessly, and conscientiously safeguard their interests."
