Although harking to British urban ideals, Hawke's Bay's settler-age towns looked distinctly frontier American, in part a function of available building materials. Where stone was available - such as Oamaru - New Zealand's settlers emulated Britain. Where it was not, meaning virtually every other frontier town in New Zealand, the style of the age was usually Wild West. Common build materials lent force to common social values: Napier, Hastings, Wairoa, Waipukurau or Waipawa could have done double duty as Dodge City. All shared the same rows of clap-board buildings, limed, dusty roads, the sense of newness with untamed verges and a landscape where trees had yet to grow, and the piles of detritus dumped higgledy-piggledy in empty sections. Even the hitching-posts outside the saloons were much the same; and inside them, men on both sides of the Pacific did 'full justice' - as the period term usually put it - to whiskey, cards and billiards.
Provincial life swirled around these towns, a complex, sophisticated whirl of events suffused with the values of the time, particularly self-betterment - financially, socially and intellectually. This was pushed along in Napier with the help of the Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, a library opened in 1863. As McLean remarked, the 'want of such a place' had been felt for 'a very long time'. By 1877 the Athenaeum, solidly housed in in Browning Street premises, owned some 1500 books. Education sometimes doubled as entertainment; one Napier visitor in the 1880s attended a 'free lecture on spiritualism in the Hoadley salerooms' and thought the 'larrikins were so noisy that I almost thought there would be ructions'.
Much evolved around local hotels. Despite the hopes for town halls and athenaeums, social life in New Zealand's rugged colonial frontier inevitably focused on hotels and their public bars. These were the public centres of their towns in practise, offering not just accommodation but spaces for townsfolk to gather and socialise. Business deals were often made in them - and in Havelock North, hotels even provided a public space for inquests. They were, in short, gathering places for their communities, the 'hub of the countryside', as one settler put it. Dozens flourished across Hawke's Bay. In Napier, there were four in Shakespeare Road alone. Others around the district included Wairoa's Clyde Hotel, the Duke of Edinburgh in Porangahau, Waipawa's Empire Hotel, the London Hotel on Napier's spit, the Tavistock in Waipukurau, the Sawyer's Arms in Hampden (Tikokino), and the Patangata Hotel.
- Matthew Wright, The History of Hawke's Bay, Wellington, 2017, p.108.
