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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781988531588 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Otago University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Mainly about the Campbells and the Browns
Asmall boy is standing on the verandah of a little wooden house at the ends of the earth. He is wearing a sailor collar and a large straw hat, though the sun may not be shining. His face is too small for me to tell whether he is smiling. I don't think he is. He has been told by the photographer to stand very still, not to move, and he has tried to do what he was told.
The photograph was given to the boy in a lavish album, filled with scenes of his father out and about on his job as a surveyor on the West Coast of New Zealand. We can see this recognisable man among tree ferns above Lake Brunner, with a dog on the rocks in the bed of the Hohonu River, trudging along the road at Barrytown. The album has the boys name on the front page in fancy lettering: Angus John Neville Harrop. Below it are the place and the date: Hokitika, 1907. It is his seventh birthday and he is alone on the verandah of the house in Fitzherbert Street. Less than two months earlier, his mother has died after childbirth. Somewhere in the house, I suppose, beyond the open door, are the other children named on the death certificate: May Celia, aged four and three quarters, Frederick, two, and the baby Eva, who survived long enough to learn to smile but who would die a month after her older brother's birthday.
That boy was my father, the woman who died my grandmother, the mother he never mentioned. May became an aunt living in Australia – the only sibling we knew my father had. There is a photo of them, the two of them, a studio photo, very different from the one of the boy on the verandah, though it could be the same hat. They are lovely children, beautifully dressed.
The impetus to write not another biography but my own family's story certainly came from looking at that photo in my father's album, a photo of a small boy on a verandah in Hokitika, a photo I never remember seeing when my parents were alive. Their generation (born in 1900) have all gone now; there is no one left to answer any questions. But the cupboards are stuffed with things they left behind. I realised looking at the photo how little I knew about my own family. I had spent the last thirty-five years immersed in other people's lives. I knew much less about my own background than I did about the backgrounds of Frances Hodgson Burnett and A.A. Milne, the Gosses (Philip Henry and Edmund, father and son), the Tennysons and the Sellwoods (Emily Tennyson's family).
I knew very little about my family history beyond the fact that all four of my grandparents had been born in New Zealand. I assumed – how could it not be so? – that all my great-grandparents had travelled there at some point in the nineteenth century, looking for a better life. That was what emigrants did, and in New Zealand everyone is an immigrant of one sort or another. Michael King, that much lamented historian (who died not long before I was expecting to meet him), summed up 'the basic need driving human history' as 'the search lor secure places in which to live'. To live means 'to eat, shelter, reproduce and practise cultural or spiritual values'. It is easy enough to know that my ancestors, arriving in New Zealand, ate, found shelter and reproduced. There is an abundant family to prove it. What is much more difficult is to find evidence of those cultural and spiritual values.
'The search for secure places in which to live' interests me, that search which drove my ancestors to make that long journey to the other side of the world. In Britain one looks at human history in a different way. In the part of England where I live – south Norfolk – there are many people who see history not as a search for anything (for they have always been in 'a secure place'), but as something that has happened both elsewhere and around them. They, like their ancestors before them, are not going anywhere. Many of my neighbours' families have 'always lived in Norfolk' just as my husband's family had 'always lived in Yorkshire'.
But no one has 'always lived in New Zealand'. Only the birds – the tuis, the fantails, the bell-birds – might make that claim. (There is that singular lack of any native land mammals – except a couple of bats, which – along with the insects hardly count.) In New Zealand today we can listen to the surviving descendants of the birds who woke Joseph Banks with the 'most melodious wild musick he had ever heard, as he lay on his bunk in Captain Cook's Endeavour, a quartet of a mile offshore in 1770. We can know the birds sang those songs when there was no one there to hear them.
Historians assume that there had been early visitors: Polynesian travellers who did not survive and left no trace. James Belich suggests the earliest continuous settlements were in 'the Far North and Coromandel', perhaps in the eleventh century, but Michael King insisted no evidence exists of a human occupation of New Zealand earlier than the thirteenth century, and evidence of those early days is limited. Famous for their carving on wood, bone, ivory and greenstone, these Polynesian settlers made no pottery, though there was abundant clay, and found no metal, though 600 years later it would be gold that would bring a flood of new adventurers.
'Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, New Zealand was probably about the last of such lands occupied by the human race', William Pember Reeves wrote in his history published in 1898. The Maori, and indeed the Moriori, shared with their European fellow settlers that search over many miles of sea for a secure place to live. In one of his own books, my father quoted Te Rangi Hiroa, the anthropologist (otherwise known as Peter Buck), as drawing the parallel. All 'migrations of peoples are caused by a push from behind or an alluring prospect in front.' The push could be poverty, over-population, combined with a sense of adventure. The prospect ahead was a land (though not yet, at that period, flowing with milk and honey) that was rich in possibility and extraordinarily beautiful.
If the land was perhaps 680 million years in the making (the estimate is, of course, not mine), the human arrivals were remarkably close together. It is this feeling of a shared land – a once-uninhabited potential Paradise – that has at different times encouraged both Maori and Pakeha to imagine New Zealand could escape the racial problems that beset other once colonial countries.
My parents at school in New Zealand in the early years of the twentieth century were brought up on what has been called 'the great New Zealand myth'. They were told stories of the arrival of Kupe and his family, straining their eyes after many long days at sea, until they saw in the distance what appeared to be at first a long white cloud, a cloud that turned out to be the land of their dreams and that they were said to have called Aotearoa. The land of 'the Long White Cloud' gained wide currency as the title of Pember Reeves' history I quoted from. Fifty years after it was written, my father was given the rather daunting task of bringing it up to date with additional chapters.
We were told Kupe's story too and another one – more obviously a myth – of Maui fishing up New Zealand from the depths of the sea, his hook Cape Kidnappers, known in Maori as Matau-a-Maui. There were other stories of the 'coming of the Fleet', of the seven canoes, in what could have been the fourteenth century. These stories became lodged in the imaginations of both Maori and Pakeha. As King put it, the story of the arrival of the canoe was a happy metaphor for Kotahitanga, the fundamental unity of Maori origins and aspirations, over and above the tribal divisions we hear so much about.
In the later part of the twentieth century there was a good deal of debunking of these Stories we had all enjoyed. 'Alas and again', King wrote, 'as in the case of Kupe's deeds, the Great Fleet story proved to be without verifiable Maori foundations.' But he came round to seeing, as others had done before him, that though Kupe and the Fleet may never have existed, their stories have indeed played a part in the history of the country.
Certainly the boy on the Hokitika verandah had those stories in his head and they helped to turn Angus Harrop into the writer he became. Story, history, became something that took him away from the harsh reality of daily life. I hat Ins situation was harsh after his mother's death there is no doubt, but it is also clear from what he wrote that all his life he looked back to the West Coast with deep affection. My brother David, who must also play a major part later in this book, remembers how proud Angus Harrop was of his roots in Hokitika, how he would amuse us with his own version of the haka. How well its strange name lent itself to the chant: 'Hokitika – he! Hokitika – ha!' with the appropriately menacing grimace.
But I think that our father always knew he had to get away from Hokitika if he were to make anything of his life. I think he felt, even as a small boy in Fitzherbert Street, that everything that mattered was on the other side of the mountains or across the sea. Hokitika had sprung up in the 1860s on a plain between the mountains and the Tasman Sea on that West Coast of the South Island. 'As we walked to school', he once wrote, 'we walked towards the long range of the Southern Alps and learned gradually the names of the main peaks which stood out so boldly on the clear, bright mornings which follow night rain on the Coast.' He early learnt the height of Mt Cook, 12,349 feet, and taught it to us when we were small. If only it had been four feet shorter! How neat that would have been. He must also have learnt in those early days that England, from which Captain Cook had sailed, was as many miles away on the other side of the world.
When young Angus walked in the other direction, with the mountains behind him, the river to his left, he would come to the beach beyond Revell Street, black sand littered with driftwood, bleached like bones. The sea was often so rough that the children were forbidden to swim in it and had to make do with the river. Looking out to sea, did he know that his mother's family, the Campbells, had made a remarkable journey beginning in 1820 from Rogart in Sutherland in the far north of Scotland to Nova Scotia, then on to Melbourne and eventually across the Tasman Sea to Greymouth, not far north of Hokitika? Both Greymouth and Hokitika were in the 1860s major ports for arrivals from Australia, though it is difficult to believe that now. Greymouth is still a fishing port, but in Hokitika only a mural on the side of a warehouse bears witness to the time at the height of the gold rush when fifty ships might be lined up along the quay. You have to go into the museum to get any idea of Hokitika's vivid past.
Angus Harrop carried his Campbell grandfathers Christian name and must have known, I think, that his mother's ancestry was entirely Scottish, hough his Campbell great-grandparents (John and Johanna nee MacKay) were buried in Melbourne and the generation before that lie at Pictou in Nova Scotia. My father's maternal grandmother, Bethia Jane, was born a Brown, not : very distinguished name, but it was her father, Adam Brown (also buried in Melbourne), born at Edmonston near Biggar in Lanarkshire in 1811, who was he only one of my great-great-grandparents who claimed to be a 'gentleman'.
The estate there and the fortified farm house, known as Edmonston Castle, were in the Brown family for over 150 years. Little of the castle still stands but, ouring Scotland recently, we were entertained to sherry by the present owner, Harold Whitson, in the house (baronial, castellated, built in 1812) where my reat-great-grandfather grew up. Both Harold Whitson and the local historian, Brian Lambie, were well aware of these ancestors of ours. Lambie spoke of Adam Brown's departure from Edmonston as if it had happened only a few years ago, suggesting it was for his health rather than merely to seek his fortune that Adam left for Australia.
He arrived with his family at Port Philip in 1853. One of the few things his granddaughter, Bertha Campbell Harrop, left to her first-born, my father, was an impressive document, apparently drawn up in 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne, which traces Adam Brown's ancestry (and therefore also my own) on separate lines back to James II of Scotland, to Sir William Wallace, to a large number of 'Sir William Baillies of Hoprig and Lamington', to the Sempils of Cathcart Castle and the Lawsons of Cairnmuir and Sir John Clerk of Pennycuik. 'There are altogether, often following the female line, a remarkable number of titles: knights and baronets litter the page and even the odd Duke and Earl, a long time back. Then with Adam Brown, born a fourth surviving son, it is downhill all the way.
What is remarkable about that curious piece of boasting (similar trees, I believe, were concocted for many nineteenth-century families) is that the present John Campbell of Melbourne, the grandson of my grandmother Bertha's brother, had no such family trees passed on to him, but was recently found to have tracked down exactly the same genealogy through hundreds of hours of independent research. I saw his huge family tree when I was in Australia not long ago and was amazed.
James Belich characterises immigrants as consisting of 'two insecure groups': 'those who hoped to rise and those who feared to fall.' In my family the great majority of my ancestors travelled to the other side of the world hoping to rise and most of them certainly did. I'm not even sure they were 'insecure'; they might rather have been confident in their optimism, based on tales of a land of opportunity without the class distinctions that so oppressed them in Britain. Almost all these early emigrants found and made for themselves worlds which were preferable to those they left behind. To some extent they brought 'Home' with them, in the sense of their race, nationality and religion. All their lives my ancestors went on thinking of themselves as British.
In my family only the Browns of Edmonston were in the category of those who 'feared to fall'. When Adam Brown's daughter, Bethia, my great-grandmother, married Angus Campbell in her father's house in 'Bouverie Street, North Melbourne' in 1859, Adam described himself no longer as a 'gentleman', but as a 'merchant'. Bethia herself was a 'dressmaker', not a young lady of fashion. The bridegroom, Angus Campbell, described as a 'painter', was undoubtedly one of those who hoped to rise.
It was Angus Campbell, my father's grandfather, who travelled ahead of his family to New Zealand in 1866, hoping to find gold. He makes two fleeting appearances in letters from his first wife's brother, Angus MacKay. The MacKays and the Campbells had travelled from Nova Scotia together. Jane, the first wife, had died soon after their arrival in Melbourne – it was said to have been from an infection caught while helping others who were sick on the voyage. If she had survived, I would not exist, at least in the form I know myself today. This is the sort of sobering reflection that often strikes people as they work on family history. How easily things might have been otherwise than the way they are.
I mentioned Angus MacKay's letters. He was writing to his brother back in Nova Scotia. As a biographer I love letters; I have always relied on them to help me tell my stories – and there will be plenty of them in the later chapters of this book. But it was painful to realise how very few survive in my family from the nineteenth century. The lack is partly because my people were often on the move and when they were static were likely to be short of space and inclined (as I have never been) to throw things out; and partly perhaps because they were not – as many of their descendants became – compulsive writers. They were nearly all literate. I have come across, on all the certificates I've seen, only two Xs instead of a signature, one the mark of one of my mother's great-grandmothers, Hannah Jefcoate, and the other merely the mark of a witness at another family marriage in England in 1840.
Angus MacKay wrote on 15 March 1873: Angus Campbell and his family are still residing at Reefton West Coast. Margaret Jane, his daughter and our niece, got married twelve months ago to a Mr Perry, a storekeeper.' Margaret Jane was the daughter of Angus Campbell's first wife Jane and so was the half-sister of my grandmother and really of no significance in this story. But any evidence relating to my father's side of the family in the nineteenth century (apart from certificates of birth, marriage and death) is so rare that I received from John Campbell copies of MacKay's two letters with what I can only describe as joy.
MacKay's letters to Nova Scotia emphasise how much more equable the climate of New Zealand was and make it obvious that Canadian weather was one reason the families had left on that five-month voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, initially to Australia. There is also a definite suggestion, though no actual evidence, that gold had something to do with it. As John Campbell wrote to my brother: After Jane's death Angus became hard to trace. I fancy he probably went to the gold digging as did jolly nearly all the young males in the colony at that time.' Angus Campbell eventually turned up at the Rose, Shamrock and Thistle Hotel (the proprietor obviously wanting to have a wide appeal) at 176 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. At 174, next door, was Miss Healey's dressmaking establishment where young Bethia Jane Brown worked.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Passageways"
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Copyright © 2009 Ann Thwaite.
Excerpted by permission of Otago University Press.
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Table of Contents
Family passages,
Acknowledgements,
Family tree showing descent from my great-grandparents,
Introduction: The jigsaw puzzle of the past,
Part One: Discovering Our Roots,
Family tree: my father's mother's family,
1 Mainly about the Campbells and the Browns,
Family tree: my father's father's family,
2 Mainly about the Harrops,
3 Despair and hope in Hokitika and Waitaki,
Family tree: my mother's mother's family,
4 Mainly about the Hoggs, the Olivers and the Jefcoates,
Family tree: my mother's father's family,
5 Mainly about the Valentines and the Maxwells,
Family tree: my mother's own family,
6 The headmaster's daughter,
7 Choosing partners,
Part Two: Together, Apart, Together,
8 Remembering, not forgetting, New Zealand,
9 A strenuous pair,
10 Out of harm's way,
11 The last lap,
Afternote,
Notes,
Bibliography,
List of Illustrations,
Index,