APPET I SER
The Town of Dunedin This watercolour of Dunedin from Bell Hill, painted by George Shaw in 1851, was described by the Otago Witness as ‘an exact representation of the Town of Dunedin’. Ian Dougherty discusses the challenges faced by early Dunedin settlers in his article Home Away from Home on page 30.
14,420a, Hocken Collections
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E D I TORIAL
Dear Readers, European settlement, at opposite ends of the country, is the focus of two key articles published in this issue. Kaye Dragicevich, after meticulous consultation and research, shares her knowledge of the Dalmatian gum digger. Work was arduous and conditions in Northland almost unbearable for these unwelcome migrants; they experienced prejudice in many forms from British diggers and were restricted by government policy in the form of the Kauri Gum Industry Act of 1898. Several decades earlier settlers to Dunedin arrived to equally bleak conditions, unless from the privileged classes of course, as described by Ian Dougherty in his outstanding contribution. Have you ever considered how such a large influx was housed and fed? Ian tackles the topics in detail. I was interested to read, “Maori from the nearby harbour settlement of Otakou supplied the Dunedin market with fish, pork, potatoes, turnips, corn and melon”. With the marking of both the First and Second World Wars, New Zealand Memories has featured a significant war-related article in each issue. Robin McElrea offers the sad account of her Uncle Clifford Pearsall, a story that unfolds into a very real tragedy when the horrors of war are released upon a group of unsuspecting young men. Recognition of their bravery remained unrecognized for almost seventy years. The 1968 storm and shipwreck of the Wahine – is it really fifty years ago since I saw the story unfold on our black and white television set – is told by Beverley Teague. Fred Teague, a Wellington District Engineer at the time, was directly involved in measures relating to that dreadful day. For those into genealogy, Robert Wynn-Williams presents a challenge to “dig deeper”. Beware though, an in-depth analysis may well reveal more than your curiosity bargained for, as is the case with Robert’s family tree. Once again, warm wishes to all our readers both in New Zealand and overseas.
Wendy Rhodes, Editor
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C ON T EN TS
Editor Wendy Rhodes Graphic Design Icon Design Administration David Rhodes Distributed by Gordon and Gotch Subscriptions & Enquiries Phone tollfree: 0800 696 366 Mail: Freepost 91641, PO Box 17288, Green Lane, Auckland 1546 email: admin@memories.co.nz www.memories.co.nz Annual Subscription $79 for 6 issues (Price includes postage within NZ) For overseas postage: Add $49.00 for Australia Add $69.00 for Rest of the World Contributors Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. Batistich, Amelia Blackman, Judith Central Hawke’s Bay Settlers Museum Central Stories Museum & Art Gallery Couch, Cliff Dalziel, Walter Davis, Eva Dougherty, Ian Dragicevich, Kaye Fletcher Family Freeman, V Grant, John Hawke’s Bay Museum Hill, David Hocken Library, Uare Taoka o Hakena Holroyd, Carol Jones Family Lealand, Geoff McElrea, Robin Museums Wellington National Archives, Wellington Nelson Provincial Museum, Pupuri Taonga o Te Tai Ao Owaka Museum Sneddon, M Subritzky, Mike Sweetman, Joyce Teague, Beverley Toitu Otago Settlers Museum Whittaker, Martin Wynn-Williams, Robert
Contents Dalmatian Settlement in the North
Kaye Dragicevich reflects on the kauri gum diggers.
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Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow
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The Wahine Storm Remembered
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Martin Whittaker documents a part of Nelson’s history.
Beverley Teague marks the tragedy fifty years on.
Waiata Poi
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The early days of New Zealand popular music by Geoff Lealand.
Spirit of Anzac
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A Tribute to My Mother
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A poignant poem by Mike Subritzky. Coral Holroyd remembers family life on ‘the Barrier’.
From the Regions: Otago
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Centrefold: Easter Holidays
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“I’ll be back before you know it.”
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School Days in the 1920s
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Who Were They Really?
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My First Jobs in New Zealand
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From the Regions: Hawke’s Bay
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Big Norm
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From the Nelson Provincial Museum collection. The heartbreak of war is reflected in Robin McElrea’s true story. A written gem gifted by Amelia Batistich. Robert Wynn-Williams explores his fascinating family tree. John Grant arrived on the ‘Oronsay’ in 1955 ready for work.
Norman Kirk: from stationary engine driver to Prime Minister.
Mailbox
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The ‘Barnes’ Dance
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Opinions: Expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of New Zealand Memories.
Index and Genealogy List
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Accuracy: While every effort has been made to present accurate information, the publishers take no responsibility for errors or omissions.
Editor’s Choice: Better Safe than Sorry
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New Zealand’s curious street-crossing system.
Copyright: All material as presented in New Zealand Memories is copyright to the publishers or the individual contributors as credited.
ISSN 1173-4159 April/May 2018
Customer at Newtown’s Self Help store in Wellington.
Cover image: Gum washing machine on the Ahipara gumfield, 1933. Article on page 4.
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F E AT U RE
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F EAT U R E
Dalmatian Settlement in the North Kaye Dragicevich
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rom early times Croatia’s history has suffered under tyrannical regimes of continuous foreign control. Venetian rule had almost complete control from 1420 until 1797. They exploited Dalmatia’s forests on a large scale. Vast quantities of timber were exported to the Venetian dockyards for shipbuilding, far in excess of what was actually used or required. Steep mountainsides along the coastline were stripped of forest and the ground cover devastated. Rainfall swept what little soil remained down the barren slopes, destroying the traditional agricultural habitat. Austrian rule regained power over several periods and they controlled industrial development and the fishing industry, leaving the inhabitants little else but subsistence farming, growing olives, tobacco, grapes and making wine. In 1870, the expansion of vineyards appeared to be an opportunity for peasant farmers to do well as the ‘Great French Wine Blight’ ravaged grapevines in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. But in 1881 Dalmatia became one of the last wine producers to be struck by phylloxera, devastating its wine production and ending a short period of prosperity. Towards the end of the 19th century, a chain of migration began from Dalmatia to the United States, South America, Australia and to New Zealand. Advertisements in newspapers suggested that it was possible to make good money on the northern gumfields of New Zealand. This was overwhelmingly attractive to the poverty-stricken inhabitants. Phylloxera and the threat of conscription into the Austrian army compounded the exodus. Young and middle-aged men came out with the intention to work hard, and to send money home regularly. Some were as young as 13, barely out of their childhood. The chain of migration increased significantly during the years of 1894 through to 1899 from villages in Central Dalmatia. Census records of 1891 and 1896 show that the greatest concentration of Dalmatians was in Hobson and Rodney Counties. By 1901, numbers had moved to work in the Hobson and Mangonui Counties digging for kauri gum. Gum camps were all over the North from Parengarenga to Wellsford, Coromandel and Auckland. For their first years in New Zealand, Dalmatians were mainly involved in gum digging, requiring minimal set-up costs, skills and knowledge of English. They worked in groups, industriously in many respects, quite unlike the British diggers. Working together, they extracted far more gum than an individual British digger. Importantly, unlike many British diggers, they paid their debts to storekeepers and, as a result, they were welcomed as reliable
Top clockwise: A picturesque Dalmatian village along the coastline; village of Vrgorac 1913; Zaostrog Franciscan Monastery below the rocky mountain; Vrgorac tobacco warehouse 1913. Left: Kotezi in 1951 showing a typical stone house similar to where the five Radich brothers and their families lived. Courtesy: Eva Davis
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F E AT U RE
customers. It was intended to be a transitory occupation, short term for perhaps two or three years before returning home. A high number did. But the ‘English’ money did not last long, some made the long, double voyage two and three times. As the years passed they grew accustomed to New Zealand and its freedoms and with the arrival of women folk, settlement began in earnest. Unfortunately, Dalmatians were labelled by many colonists as ‘Austrians’, the very name of their oppressors, a name that was most distasteful to them. Once they were established and earning, they remitted money home to repay loans for their passage out and to support their family left behind. This aroused considerable antagonism on the gumfields, based on ignorance, ethnic prejudice and a reluctance to consider issues objectively. British diggers were intolerant to the large influx of ‘Austrians’, overwhelmed by their numbers and how they worked in groups so effectively. Concerns were raised at the amounts of money they remitted back to their home country, rather than assisting in the development of the colony. They were seen as a major economic threat to the British diggers, blaming them for exhausting the gumfields, glutting the markets and lowering the prices paid for gum.
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F EAT U R E
By 1898, with prejudice and suspicion mounting, the government reacted to pressure by forming a government commission to investigate. They found the ‘Austrians’ to be hardy, sober, industrious and law-abiding people – all qualities that made admirable settlers. However, convinced the supply of gum was exhaustible, the commission unilaterally legislated making restrictions to prevent the spread of further immigration. The Kauri Gum Industry Act of 1898 created kauri gum reserves. These areas covered around 100,000 hectares and were exclusive for British subjects including Mãori. A gum digging licensing system was introduced aimed at restricting Dalmatian diggers. For many, this restriction drove them to apply for naturalisation. However, applications were only accepted once the applicant had proven himself to be a worthy citizen and having resided in the Dominion for a minimum of three years. Lengthy delays in granting naturalisation papers was another tactic used to discourage Dalmatian settlement. Life on the gumfields was a test of endurance; they dug in isolated areas, miles from commercial centres, and were sustained with poor diets. They slept in the most basic of shanties with smoky, dark sacking walls, a sack bunk to sleep in and a bush blanket to keep warm. How the young men regretted coming to this barren
Parengarenga camp in about 1909. Hundreds of diggers - Dalmatians, Mãoris and others - worked on Yates Parengarenga fields. Andrija Kleskovich, who is seated on the left, is thought to be the first Dalmatian to marry a Mãori woman in New Zealand. Reverend Joseph Matthews performed the marriage ceremony between married Andrija and Erina Kaka in 1892. Source: Northwood Bros.
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F E AT U RE
Waiata Poi
The Early Days of New Zealand Popular Music Geoff Lealand
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t is not just Lorde, Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams; moments when New Zealand-made popular music has made an international splash go back a hundred years or more. As we have grown more confident as a nation, a process has been underway to retrieve earlier half-forgotten or under-appreciated musical treasures from the past. Digital technology has greatly assisted these endeavours, enabling the re-mastering and re-release of local music from past decades. Most of this activity has been about retrieving commercial, and often innovative, recordings by local songwriters, singers, groups and instrumentalists, especially those who were in vogue during the 1950s to the 1980s. Old formats (shellac 78s, vinyl 45s and LPs) have been cleaned-up and re-issued, to be played again, to fuel nostalgia or to find new listeners. Online sites have also sprung up, to help preserve this back catalogue, with the very best site being AudioCulture (“The Noisy Library of New Zealand Music”).1 But there was considerable New Zealand-made popular music being heard live or through recordings in the decades before the 1950s. The history of these early years is wonderfully recorded in Chris Bourke’s Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918-1964 2 and in his more recent Good-bye Maoriland: The Songs and Sounds of New Zealand’s Great War.3 A recent discovery has prompted my own investigation of these early years of New Zealand music, and one song in particular: Waiata Poi (A Poi Song). Rummaging around in a dusty box filled with old 78s in a bric-a-brac store in Waipawa last year, I discovered a rare1927 Australian-pressed copy of this song, recorded on the Parlophone label in 1927, by Maori songstress Ana Hato, with piano accompaniment. By a happy coincidence, venturing a little further into the dark recesses of this store, I found a copy (first published in 1904) of the sheet music of the song, written and composed by A.H. (Alfred) Hill, and dedicated to portrait painter C.F. Goldie. These two discoveries were added to my 1947 Decca recording (on 78rpm) of the same song by British and international singing star Gracie Fields (in this case, pressed and released in New Zealand by His Master’s Voice NZ Ltd). They both add to my collection of 78s sitting beside my portable HMV windup gramophone (pictured), which I bought in order to play a magnificent set of boxed jazz recordings from the 1930s and 1940s; another find at a church fair. I sometimes cart the gramophone to university, and incorporate it into a lecture on the history of recorded music, with the directive “look, no electricity required!” With these discoveries, I began to make connections. Alfred Hill has a hallowed position in New Zealand musical history, hailed as one of our very earliest composers, founder of New Zealand’s first professional orchestra, and 1 www.audioculture.co.nz. 2 Auckland University Press, 2010 3 Auckland University Press, 2017
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Smiling youngsters make the most of the late summer sunshine. Nelson Provincial Museum has identified the location as the Rocks Road sidewalk which spans the shoreline; the distinctive chain link barrier behind the children apparently gives an obvious clue. Although there is no specific date, this photograph labelled “Easter Holidays� is probably from the 1930s. Upon close examination, the bathing costumes seem to be of the knitted variety. In the days before Lycra and polyester, woollen garments did the trick and swimwear knitting patterns for all ages were plentiful. I imagine the garments were a sight to behold once wet. Nelson Provincial Museum, Pupuri Taonga o Te Tai Ao Ref: 256 163285/6
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Easter Holidays
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STO RY
My First Jobs in New Zealand
John Grant
I
was born in Cheshire in 1935 and, in 1953, sailed with my father and uncle to Canada where the firm we all worked for - Cementation Construction - had contracted to excavate the tunnels for the Niagara power scheme. They were engineers. I was an apprentice mechanic. Two years later I accompanied my uncle out to New Zealand to another contract. These are a few memories of my first years in New Zealand. My uncle Frank came out first to get things organised while Aunt Minnie was selling their house in Toronto. He was flying out on a Pan Am Constellation – a four-engined propeller plane. All went well until they were nearing Hawaii when one engine lost oil pressure and had to be shut down. The plane made it to Hawaii on three engines but had to wait there for several days waiting for a replacement engine and service staff to arrive from the mainland. When they finally continued their flight, the plane got just over the half way mark to Fiji and another engine played up. As there would be far more difficulty in replacing an engine there, they turned around and returned to Hawaii. On the return flight a second engine started playing up; it proved to be third time lucky for Frank. The Pan Am flight finally made it back to Fiji and from there to Whenuapai. I followed, less dramatically, on the Oronsay with the rest of my uncle’s family. We set up our workshop in the railway yard in Auckland’s Newmarket, using the basement of the BNZ in Broadway which backed onto the yard. Some of our machinery was too tall to go in under the stone archway over the door. We eventually broke up the concrete floor to make two wheel ruts about five inches deep to provide clearance. This must have puzzled subsequent tenants. Once set up, there were two of us working on the machinery and we had to repair and deliver equipment all over the country. We were working on compressors, concrete breakers, air tools, concrete mixers, grout pumps and a small portable E1000 drilling rig which could go down to one thousand feet; bigger stuff still was stored in a yard below the Station Hotel. It was my
job to pick up equipment when a job was finished and overhaul it before delivering it to the next job. If there was a breakdown, I might be summoned anywhere around the country to deal with it. Sometimes I was ‘on site’ for months. Occasionally it was a real culture shock – like the time we were prospecting for uranium. This was somewhere between Karamea and Golden Bay and my first encounter with real New Zealand bush. Not second growth, but the genuine primeval thing. There were no roads and virtually no helicopters in New Zealand at that time. Our drilling rig had to be taken in on pack horses along bush tracks. Yes, we did find uranium, but it was of poor quality and the access problems made it uneconomic to develop. At one time I ended up staying at Atiamuri for about a year because we had so much gear there. The Ministry of Works huts were very small one-man huts. There was a big canteen with excellent food, but it was very cold in the winter - though not as bad as Canada. It was a much wetter cold. We also worked on the Whakamaru Dam from the same base camp. The firm was doing soil stabilisation. At Atiamuri, after construction had actually started, engineers found a stream running diagonally under the dam wall. We had to sheet pile down into bedrock right across the whole dam site using a unique technique. Instead of driving solid piles down, we used 19” hollow casings. The casing was driven down five or six feet then we would sludge it out, screw on another length of casing and repeat the procedure. We had a one-ton weight, hollow at the bottom and a bar slotted across it to drive onto a special sleeve on the top of the casing. There was an upward hinged trapdoor in the bottom of the weight. The bar would be removed allowing the hollow weight to be dropped free inside the casing. It would fill up with sludge which would then close the trap door under its own weight. We then pulled the sludge filled weight up, emptied it out and dropped it back for another load. In this way we were always aware of the exact composition of the ground we were drilling through. We would drill three piles touching each other, put a
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STORY
few barrow-loads of concrete in each and then winch the casings up a few feet, remove a length, add more concrete, hoist another length free and repeat until a solid wall of normally unreinforced concrete had been created. The average depth we sank the piles on this job was 110 feet. There was good solid rock underneath and the main dam was built on top of this again. It took us nearly a year and a half to complete this unanticipated foundation work. At Whakamaru, there was a different problem. They found cracks in the bedrock and it took another year to fill these satisfactorily. This whole area has been subjected to so much volcanic activity over the millennia that the surface gives you very little indication of what you might find underneath. We did foundation test drilling in Broadway too just to find out what the ground was like underneath the old Lucas building. It was dreadful… scoria of all sizes over a basalt foundation. We kept hitting big boulders and thinking it was bedrock. It was necessary to drill quite deeply into rock to make certain it was not just another loose piece. The job was interesting; if the workshop was quiet, I was often sent out to do little drilling jobs taking core samples. The small rig operated by a 10hp Briggs & Stratton engine could be operated singlehanded and drill a one inch hole down a thousand feet in soft ground or a hundred feet in rock. One day I got instructed to take the small rig down to Picton from Atiamuri. The vehicle I was expected to use was a 2-cylinder Bradford van built by Jowetts. It was not that old, but it was a pre-war design with rod-operated brakes and the back axle was much too far forward for carrying a big load. The radiator leaked like a sieve, but I fixed that successfully by shaving up
two or three cakes of soap, softening it to mush and plastering over the leaks. When it got hot, it dried and did a remarkable job. A piece of No 8 fencing wire served as a new brake rod. I adjusted the brakes, got the thing registered and took off down country. When I reached Wellington I put the van on a freighter as the small car ferry was booked out. I flew over and met the driller who had come up from Christchurch. We waited and waited. There was a storm in Cook Strait and the ship was unable to leave port. The weather in Nelson was superb so I hired a rental car and toured the northern part of the South Island. For the next five days, I phoned the shipping agents in Wellington every morning, and then spent the rest of the day acting like a tourist - Golden Bay, Marlborough Sounds, Christchurch - my first look at the South Island and I thought it was very nice indeed. When the rig finally arrived, we were based at the Essen Valley Motor Camp outside Picton. We were drilling to check out a projected alternative route for a new railway viaduct which would give a more gradual gradient. The existing wooden viaduct was over 80 years old and was so steep that it needed two or even three engines to drag a train up it. The whole structure shook alarmingly when the engines lost traction. The modern diesel locomotives were heavier and meant that the whole track needed to be upgraded.
“I got instructed to take the small rig down to Picton from Atiamuri. The vehicle I was expected to use was a 2-cylinder Bradford van built by Jowetts.”
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E D I TOR’ S
CHOICE
Pahia
tua &
Distric
ts Mu
seum
Socie
Better Safe Than Sorry
ty Inc
- Don
ated
by M
rs B C
osfor
d
This lad is taking no chances with his home-made trolley; it’s propped up on two parcels inside the Self Help Co-op Grocery Store as the boy passes the shopping list to the shopkeeper. The photographer was Ken Niven and the image is dated in the early 1930s although, judging by the clothes, it looks a decade later. The location of the Wellington Self Help branch is Rintoul Street, Newtown and the manager serving the young customer is John Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, NZ. Ref: F-015554-1/1 Jenkins. The boy is unidentified. Does anyone recognise him? 72
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