Country Life: Devcich Farm shines a light on Dalmatian pioneers

RNZ News

09-05-2025

The woolshed is among a cluster of farm buildings listed as a place of special significance with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
Old pack horse saddles slung over beams, a sack of ancient kauri gum and a well-thumbed Ready Reckoner on the counter tell just one chapter of the Devcich Farm story.
The items are in the farm's old trading post where, early last century, gum diggers and loggers came to buy stores for their camps up the Kauaeranga Valley on the Coromandel Peninsula.
The old trading post where loggers and gumdiggers could buy stores on credit
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
There's also an old blacksmith's forge, a timber mill with sawpit and a winery complete with antique wine-making tools and a pungent aroma of sherry.
The Devcich family, originally from Dalmatia, now part of Croatia, farmed here last century. Their legacy, the Devcich Farmstead, is listed as a place of special significance with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, for "reflecting significant developments in Dalmatian settlement in early twentieth-century New Zealand".
The sheds, now clustered under a Croatian flag, also reveal their industriousness and range of skills.
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Simun Devcich arrived in New Zealand from Podgora with his two brothers, Marion Anton and Nicola just after the turn of the 20th century. They worked their way up through gum digging and trading and into farming, buying the block, much bigger then, in 1915.
Simun had married another immigrant from Dalmatia, Matija Mercep, in 1913 and eventually took on the farm from his brothers, going from dairy to sheep farming, with his three sons working alongside.
Simun married Matija Mercep in 1913
Photo:
Supplied
Commercial farming has stopped now but Simun's granddaughter, Lorenza Devcich, has restored the buildings and runs a menagerie of coloured sheep, llamas, Highland cattle, emus and assorted exotic birds on the land which remains, with tourists often staying in the old homestead.
Lorenza Devcich feeding her llamas
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
"My grandfather and his two brothers, they came from Yugoslavia to escape the army.
"Even for years after, the young men would leave because as soon as they got of age … they would get thrown into the army."
"My grandfather had about 11 pack horses that he and his boys, my uncles and father, used to pack supplies right up into all the camps at the top end of the valley.
"When they'd first come here, a lot of [the gum diggers followed by loggers] had no money, so a lot of it was on credit.
"He also bought gum and sold it. So, they'd come back here with the gum, and that's how he'd get paid."
A large chunk of kauri gum left over from the early days found in the old store
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
The Devcich brothers used pack horses to supply the gumdiggers working in the kauri forests up the Kauaeranga Valley
Photo:
Supplied
Dalmatian immigrants were among New Zealand's wine making pioneers and the Devcich family was producing wine on a small scale from the late 1920s, under their Golden Valley label.
Lorenza remembers helping her father Ivan in the wine shed which still houses a wooden fermenting vat and other wine-making tools.
The old wine shed where Ivan Devcich made fortified wines under the label Golden Valley
Photo:
Supplied
Lorenza used to help her father in the wine shed. The barrels still retain a pungent aroma
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
"And there's probably the last standing bottle of sherry up there, still with some sherry in it. It hasn't been touched. And maybe it could even be one of the ones that I bottled, because my job here was the dog's body."
Lorenza still tends to the 80-year-old grape vines today, using "the worst talkback radio station" she can find to blare out and scare away the birds.
"The sherry and the wine were all made from grapes grown on the property. All the beautiful, big black Albany Surprise, I think it's called, … is still there producing.
Lorenza Devcich with grapevines thought to have been planted about 80 years ago
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
While the saw mill now stands quiet and the trading post has shut its doors, the farm courtyard is now home to a strutting peacock, brightly coloured pheasants and guinea fowl.
Lorenza stores their feed in a shed once used to stable Simun's beloved racehorses, an interest he took up in later life.
"They got fed all the lovely, cooked barley and everything. You'd go into the house, and you'd smell it cooking on the old coal range ... all the old farm horses, the pack horses and everything else, just lucky if they got thrown some hay."
Lorenza keeps a menagerie of birds and animals on the remnants of the original Devcich farm
Photo:
RNZ/Sally Round
Simun and Matija live at the Devcich Farmstead until their deaths in 1971 and 1977 respectively
Photo:
Supplied
She has somewhat sad memories of Simun.
"He got kicked in the stomach by a racehorse and ruptured his stomach, and he survived that, but then not long after, he had a stroke.
"I used to love sitting down talking to him, but when I'd start talking to him, get him to tell me the history, he'd get upset and start crying."
He died in 1971, once a strong active man and very much the "boss" in his day, and one of the pioneers of the valley, Lorenza said.
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