Anzac Day

The 25th of April is a day when New Zealanders remember the landings at Gallipoli in 1915, and their tragic aftermath. To quote from an official New Zealand Anzac web site,

On this day the people of New Zealand have acknowledged the sacrifice of all those who have died in warfare, and the contribution and suffering of all those who have served.

There are dawn services, often held at war memorials. When I was a child, many veterans of World War 1 marched in the parade (in fact I lived near a veteran of the Boer War, a man who lived to be 100). Now all our WW1 soldiers have passed on, and the survivors of WW2 are elderly. My father-in-law was one of the WW2 veterans; he died late last year, aged 89.

Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Anzac Day is formally recognised in Australia, New Zealand, and Tonga. There are also ceremonies to mark the day in many other countries, including Britain, Canada and the United States. And at Gallipoli itself, every year the day is marked by a dawn service attended by thousands.

I've been fortunate enough to visit Gallipoli, though not on Anzac Day. I'm glad to have had the chance to contemplate this place in silence.

Information on Anzac Day in New Zealand.

Cover story

When I decided I wanted new covers for the three books that make up the "Promises to Keep" series, I spent quite some time trawling through old photographs, looking for an illustration that felt right for my books' setting. I finally found it much closer to home.



This is a small patch of our own native forest. The fronds on the left are from a nikau, New Zealand's only native palm species. The distinctive, spiky-leaved tree with its head just to the right of "Marriage" is a tī kōuka or "cabbage tree". Despite the name, it's a woody plant rather than a true tree, somewhat related to lilies.

The tallest trees in the photograph are mostly rimu and totara, species that were felled for timber before they became too scarce to harvest.

The forest around Amy's home would have looked quite similar to this.

Dueling in downtown Wellington

What's now New Zealand's capital city was a wilder place a century and a half ago. On 25th March 1847, Dr Isaac Featherston and Colonel William Wakefield fought a duel at Te Aro, Wellington.

Dr Featherston was an Edinburgh-educated medical man who became a newspaper editor and later a politician. He arrived in Wellington in May 1841 on a ship owned by the New Zealand Company (a group planning to colonise New Zealand on a so-called systematic basis, creating “a perfect English society”), and was singularly unimpressed by the place, as he expressed in an editorial on 24th March 1847:

“Did those mud hovels scattered along the beach, or those wooden huts which appeared every here and there … represent the City of Wellington? Where were the hundreds of acres of [quoting from the Company's marketing] ‘fine fertile land which shall produce such astounding crops?’ ” His own investment, he said, was no more than “a useless swamp worth nothing”.

Colonel Wakefield, the Company's Principal Agent in New Zealand, took offence at this, seeing it as an implication that he was a thief. The two gentlemen met for honour to be satisfied. Featherston fired first and missed; Wakefield then fired into the air, announcing that he would not shoot a man who had seven daughters. That appears to have been an end to the matter, at least as far as regards pistols.

Dr Featherston lived till 1876, but Colonel Wakefield died the year after the duel, aged only 45, of an apoplexy.

The story of the Wakefields and the New Zealand Company is a complex and contraversial one, but Wakefield's personal history reads like the stuff of melodrama, with an abducted (on behalf of his brother) heiress, a betrothal that ended tragically when his fiancee died while he was in jail (for his role in the abduction), leaving a baby daughter; service as a mercenary in Portugal, and later with the British Auxiliary Legion in Spain (he was knighted by Queen Isabella). With such a history, fighting a duel seems almost inevitable.

A Night at the Theatre

On the 8th of March 1929, for the first time a movie with a soundtrack was shown in New Zealand, at the Paramount Theatre in Wellington. The movie, "Street Angel", wasn't a true "talkie", but a silent movie with a recorded musical soundtrack.

Silent movies had been popular in New Zealand for many years, ever since the first film was screened in 1896 (in Christchurch). In the early years, they were short films usually shown as part of a vaudeville-style performance. In A Second Chance, I have two of my characters attend such a presentation in 1906. I've taken the details from newspaper reports of an actual show in Auckland.

(Note: I've changed character names to avoid spoilers.)

... a performance one evening by a Mr R. G. Knowles offered real novelty. Mr Knowles, a music hall artiste, presented a series of comical talks, interspersed with songs and dancing, accompanied on the piano by Mrs Knowles, who also performed several items on the banjo. The items were amusing enough, but what truly caught Anna’s imagination were the moving pictures, projected by a machine called a Bioscope, with which Mr Knowles illustrated his songs. It was Anna’s first experience of moving pictures, and she was fascinated by the images, which included an exciting trip by motorcar and scenes of the King and Queen walking about.

‘There’s talk of making moving pictures of entire plays eventually,’ Sophie remarked when the two of them were discussing the show late that evening. ‘Though not being able to actually hear the actors speak would be rather limiting.’

Interesting as the moving pictures had been, Anna agreed with Sophie that such entertainments seemed unlikely to displace live performances.

My apologies to any banjo fans reading this, but I'm afraid I find something irresistably comical in the image of this redoubtable Edwardian lady wielding her banjo on stage.

Short stories

I've added a new section to my website for short stories and essays. It can be found here.

Great-grandfather's Diary

Over the years that I've been researching and writing, I've been fortunate enough to have access to extracts from the diaries of several generations of the men who farmed the valley that my Waituhi Valley is based on; portions that have survived, at least in transcript, within the extended family. But recently I was given a great gift: the 1910 diary of my husband's great-grandfather.

This week in New Zealand history: first shipment of frozen export produce

Frozen meat had been successfully exported from Australia in 1879, and a few years later New Zealand had its own first shipment.

On the 15th of February 1882, the Dunedin sailed from Port Chalmers for London. The Dunedin was a sailing ship, but a steam-powered freezing plant had been installed on board, and thousands of sheep carcasses frozen for shipping. The exporters must have been delighted with the outcome; a carcass that would have fetched 13 shillings in New Zealand returned over 22 shillings on the London market.

That first shipment carried butter as well as meat, and marked the beginning of a true export market for New Zealand's dairy produce. No longer were farmers limited to selling what butter they could persuade the local storekeeper to take, often in exchange for goods rather than for cash. Herd numbers expanded, more butter factories opened, and the co-operative system of factory ownership blossomed.

In Mud and Gold, Frank first gets the idea of trying to set up one such co-operative in Ruatane, although he will face some scepticism from the older farmers.