The Progress was a steamer bound for Wellington from Lyttelton when it wrecked on the rocks on Owhiro Bay in 1931.
The night before, while crossing Cook Strait, the ship lost its tailshaft, which caused the propeller to fall off.
Once off the Pencarrow lighthouse, the ship called for help asking for a tug. No tug was sent through a series of miscommunications. The ship kept drifting and off Lyall Bay the anchors were used to try and stop it.
About 10pm the lighthouse advised the tug was on its way but it had not arrived by 11pm.
With the sea getting rougher, the ship signalled again and was now told the tug would arrive around midnight.
The Toia arrived and managed to get a line to the Progress but the rope parted. In the rough seas, the tug stood off until about 5.30am when it headed back in and a new tug took its place.
For a while the anchors held. But eventually they failed and an attempt was made to bring the Progress into a sheltered bay.
Instead she ran onto rocks about lunchtime. A sudden swell lifted the ship and brought her down sharply on the rocks, breaking her apart.
From the shore men could be seen clinging to the ship and debris. Many of the crew began to swim to shore and many made it but were brought in bruised and bloodied from the rough seas and the rocks.
Constable Fred Baker in charge of the Island Bay police commandeered a boat and headed into the rough water, trying to get to the men still holding on to the sinking ship. He had to be dragged ashore himself when the boat was upset. Another police officer also tried but was unable to get to them.
Four men died, unable to make it to shore in the rough weather.
Frederick Arthur Horace Baker was born on November 24, 1884, in Kaiapoi, to James and Martha Baker.
He became a police officer and served in Wellington mainly in Island Bay for 14 years, leaving in 1936 to go to Levin.
During the rescue of the men of the Progress he had managed to help ship fireman John Metcalfe who later died.
During his attempts Baker himself received broken ribs and cuts and bruises to his back.
He received the Kings Medal and the Royal Humane Society Medal for his attempts to rescue the men off the Progress.
Baker died on March 22, 1962 in New Plymouth and is buried in Karori Cemetery.​

Daylight savings is just about over for another year. It would have made George Vernon Hudson sad.
George loved bugs. He loved them so much that all he wanted to do was collect them. George had been born in England on April 20, 1867, to Emily and Charles and by the time he was 14 he already had a large collection of bugs and had already published a paper.
He was bullied at school for his interests.
In 1881 he and his father moved to New Zealand where there was a whole new set of bugs to hunt for.
After a short stint on a farm he went to work at the Post Office where he became a chief clerk for the whole of his working life.
He published his first books on insects aged only 19 - the first of seven he would write.
But he really wanted more bugs.
In 1907, he went on the Sub-Antarctic Islands Scientific Expedition to extend the magnetic survey of New Zealand by investigating the Auckland and Campbell islands but botanical, biological, and zoological surveys were also conducted.
Back at home he wanted more and more time and while he had time while he was shift working, he wanted more in the evenings.
In 1895, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two hour extension to daylight hours. It wasn’t immediately taken up but he kept trying.
New Zealand finally introduced Daylights Savings in 1927 with the Summer-Time Act.
In 1933, George was the first recipient (together with Ernest Rutherford) of the T. K. Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
With all his new daylight hours George went on to collect so many bugs that it became the biggest collection in the country, now housed in Te Papa.
Among them are moths, butterflies, beetles, cicadas, grasshoppers and wētā, flies, wasps, and aquatic insects.
Originally he intended to leave his collection - which his wife and daughter had helped him collect - to the British Museum, however an entomologist from the then Dominion Museum persuaded him to bequeath it to the national museum.
The collection is still in use today by scientists.
Bugs weren’t his only interest though. He also built and installed a telescope in an observatory at the back of his property in Wellington.
George had married Florence Gillon, a teacher, in 1893 and had one daughter.
He died on April 5, 1946 and is buried in the Saint Mary’s Anglican Churchyard in Karori.​

One of Australia’s best landscape artists is actually a Kiwi.
Elioth Lauritz Leganyer Gruner was born in Gisborne on December 16, 1882 to Norwegian bailiff Elliott and his Irish wife Mary Ann.
But it’s unlikely he remembered the rural life of Gisborne in the late part of the 1800’s. His family moved to Sydney before he was a year old.
But the rural life turned into the mainstay of his art.
He began drawing early and by the age of 12 his mother took him to train with Julian Ashton, an art teacher and artist.
He had to work, so at 14 took a position in a shop as a draper’s assistant to bring in money for his family after his father and older brother died.
He kept painting on weekends and in 1901 he began exhibiting to the Society of Artists in Sydney and from 1907 began to get recognition.
When a shop opened in 1911 on Bligh St to sell works of art from Australian artists Gruner took charge of it. He was continuing to work with Ashton and when Ashton became ill Gruner took over teaching, only to discover he hated teaching.
He won the Wynne Prize (for painting or sculpture) in 1916 for a painting showing a farm at Emu Plains. He won again in 1919 for Spring Frost (the painting we show).
The Valley of the Tweed was considered one of his best works and was a very large piece but his last - he rarely again painted anything big.
In 1918 he, like so many others, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 4 June, went into Liverpool camp and was discharged on 31 December.
A trip to Europe in 1923 extended for two years and allowed his painting style to mature and his attention to light - one of the things he was noted for - shifted.
A one man show in 1917 allowed him to sell nearly everything he had painted. He then turned his attention back to the depiction of light and went on to create works that were considered his best.
Gruner, a fair man with a square face was slow moving and slow spoken, was desperately unhappy and drank heavily especially in his later years.
He never married, was shy and quiet and very sensitive to criticism about his work which led him to destroy pictures when he was unhappy with them, but also did not like to receive too much praise.
He spent long periods in almost isolation to get his paintings done but in the city lived a stylish social life. Despite never marrying he had several children to several women.
Throughout his life he suffered from inflammation of the kidneys and died at his home on october 17, 1939, and was cremated with a memorial at the Rookwood Memorial Gardens in New South Wales.​

New Zealand has a phoenix - although it’s not the brilliant fiery bird most imagine.
It’s a moth - called the frosted phoenix - or Titanomis sisyrota - and it was only photographed for the first time last year by a living person.
Called New Zealand’s most enigmatic moth, only 10 specimens have ever been collected and none since 1959. It is considered a large moth (although not as big as our largest, the pūriri moth with it’s bright green wings.)
It was first described by entomologist Edward Meyrick in 1888. It was large, with white edges to its wings - possibly indicating it liked forest habitats where it could hide against mottled bark.
While it was originally found all over New Zealand, the last time it was collected was in the Waikato in 1959.
Until last year a Swedish tourist saw one on Stewart Island. A bird watching group had sent up a UV light before going kiwi watching. When they came back one noticed the large moth beneath one of the seats and snapped a picture of it. Once home he uploaded the picture to a website where it was identified as the frosted phoenix - seen for the first time in 65 years.
Mayrick was born on November 25, 1854, in Ramsbury, Wiltshire and educated at Trinity College in Cambridge and spent all his spare time hunting moths, although he never saw the frosted phoenix alive himself since he never came to New Zealand.
He published papers and ended up getting a post at The King’s School in Parramatta, New South Wales in 1877.
He stayed in Australia until 1886 before returning to England to teach at Marlborough College.
He was the author of the Handbook of British Lepidoptera (1895) and of Exotic Microlepidoptera (March 1912 – November 1937), the latter consisting of four complete volumes and part of a fifth.
He was a fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of London and a fellow of the Royal Society.
Meyrick became the man who described more than 20,000 species of lepidoptera - butterflies and moths. His own collection of over 100,000 specimens is at the Natural History Museum in London and is believed to have collected more than anyone else.
Meyrick had received the specimen of the frosted phoenix but initially thought it had been caught in Nelson when in fact it had been caught in Wellington.
Meyrick died after a brief illness on 31 March 31, 1938, in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and is buried in the churchyard at Ramsbury, Wiltshire.​

The print shows the view across Thorndon beach out to the harbour with sailing ships coming in, even showing waka in the water.
The date, July 1845, was before two big earthquakes that rearranged Wellington’s landscape.
The pretty watercolour is in stark contrast to the tragic story of the family behind it.
John Howard Wallace was born in Scotland on December 14, 1816, but his family moved to England when he was young living in Liverpool and Birmingham.
In 1841 he came to New Zealand on the Aurora, wading ashore at Petone.
The early settler established a home and business, working as a merchant, auctioneer, land agent and stock and share broker and valuer and was successful.
He did well and in November 1848 he married Sarah Ann Denham, a widow (that was common, people often died young and got remarried young) at St Peter’s church in Te Aro.
John went on to build one of the first wharves, held office on the town board, then the city council and on to the provincial council.
He was considered a leading citizen and three streets hold his name - John, Howard and Wallace Streets. He returned to England at least once, and brought out his parents - it was his father John Wallce who painted the Thorndon beach scene before he died in 1880 and was considered a well known watercolourist.
But death doesn’t stop for the prominent.
John and Sarah had ten children, six boys and four girls.
In 1865 there were several outbreaks of scarlet fever. It was a killer disease, associated with overcrowded conditions and poor sanitation.
Five of the Wallace children died of it in the space of nineteen days while one died a couple of months later. (One of their children had died in 1854). The youngest baby had been born at that time and so Sarah was unable to care for the sick children leaving them in the care of her oldest daughter Harriet.
That left only three children alive out of the whole family, with Harriet being the only daughter.
Even then once the family had settled John’s brother James, who had come out to New Zealand to join them, drowned in the Wellington harbour in 1888.
John died in 1891 and Sarah in 1898 and nearly the whole family is buried in the Bolton St Cemetery.​

Once in a while you come across something in an op shop that takes your breath away.
For Deb, that day was the sight of two prints by very early settlers of early scenes of Wellington and she couldn’t resist them.
Both originals were done in the 1840s and the prints themselves are 50 years old.
So we are going to bring you the story of each one.
The first print is of the Petone foreshore about 1842, with two men bringing ashore a boat while a Māori man and a child watch on. There are no buildings, just the shore and the view across the harbour.
It was done by a man who wasn’t intended to be an artist.
Samuel Charles Brees was born about 1809 and little is known about his parentage or his early life.
By the mid 1820’s he was an apprentice to an architect in London then later trained as a civil engineer and moved on to being a railway engineer.
He painted and drew constantly and between 1832 and 1837 he had several landscapes exhibited.
In 1841 he signed on with the New Zealand Company for three years as a surveyor and civil engineer.
He, his wife Ann (nee Taylor) and their three children boarded the Brougham to New Zealand.
They settled in Wellington and Brees began surveying, laying out the Karori Rd and the hills around Wellington harbour.
He travelled a lot - there was no way to survey without going out and looking. In 1843 he led an exploratory trip through Upper Hutt and the Remutakas. He laid out preliminary suburbs in both areas.
Many of the sketches he did on his trips were the first European pictures of the areas.
But by 1844 the New Zealand Company was no longer able to pay him and he had more and more spare time to paint.
Eventually he and his family headed back to England and he took with him a portfolio of the scenes he had done.
He published Pictorial Illustrations of New Zealand in 1847, all of North Island scenes. His pretty scenes did much to attract people to New Zealand.
Brees died on a voyage to London on board La Hogue from Sydney.​

Surgeons rushed to save the life of Edith Emma Keels who had been brought into the hospital with a bullet in her head in 1915. Worst still, her five week old infant son was missing.
Edith was the wife of sheep farmer Leslie Keels at Onewhero in rural Waikato. In rough country, the nearest neighbour was over a mile away.
On February 10, 1915, Leslie left early to go droving, intending to be gone all day and all the next night.
With Edith was her three children and a woman who helped her.
When Edith did not appear that morning, Miss Hunter went to get her.
She was met with an horrific sight, Edith was unconscious on her bed surrounded by blood.
She had a bullet wound to the head and evidence of being hit heavily.
Two of the children were playing in another room,. But the baby boy, who slept with Edith was nowhere to be seen.
A messenger was sent to Leslie while Edith was taken to hospital.
Edith often slept with the windows open and there was speculation someone had got into the house. But not a soul had heard anything.
The next day it was reported Edith had died without ever regaining consciousness.
By now the area was in an uproar and people were desperate to find the tiny baby.
And now police suspicion had fallen on Leslie’s brother Norman who had left his home in Papakura before the attack and had not been seen since.
A day later he was spotted near an old whare near the Keals home. Police had staked it out and when Norman was sighted but got away.
Astonishingly he then headed back to the house where he had shot Edith and managed to evade the police to leave two letters on the doorstep.
One indicated he could take his own life and the other, addressed to his brother, said to put out a white flag if they wanted him to turn himself in.
White flags were hung from both sides of the house, but Norman never showed.
Norman was well known to police. Bizarrely he had been electrocuted during a storm and had been mentally unwell since.
Two days later Norman was found hiding up a tree by police. When asked about the baby he told the police the body was near the Opuatia Creek.
Norman said he had strangled the baby because it was crying only minutes after he had shot Edith.
He later told police he was intending to kill his brother after his interest in the farm was taken away from him while he was imprisoned in Australia.
In May Norman was found guilty and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to imprisonment.
Edith and her infant son were buried in Paterangi Cemetery in Waipu.
Photo by Danilo Alvesd.​

William Appleton was a very popular Wellington mayor.
Friendly, approachable and with a sense of humour, he was enthusiastic and considered direct and honest.
He became mayor of Wellington in 1944 by nearly 10,000 votes and retired undefeated in 1950, the year he was knighted.
So it’s perhaps not a surprise that a park is named after him.
Appleton Park in Chaytor St, Karori was not always a park and it supposedly hides a big secret.
Pretty as it is now, it used to be a landfill.
It had been the lower part of the Kaiwharawhara stream which was later diverted and the landfill used.
It became the landfill in 1885 and used for many years.
Which leads to a secret.
Wellington Zoo’s first elephant was called Nellikutha and had been captured in the wild at only a few weeks old and was about six when she was shipped to New Zealand, gifted by the Madras Government. She was named after the area she was caught in.
She received training here and spent a good deal of her life carrying visitors around the zoo and was well loved.
But she died young of intestinal ulcers in 1944. She was sick for several days, lying on her side, covered in blankets and refusing to eat. Her keeper slept with her throughout her illness.
Despite appearing to recover a little, she died several days after falling ill. She weighed about 9000 pounds at the time she died.
After a post mortem a problem remained. How do you dispose of a massive elephant’s body?
The zoo and the local council opted for the landfill. An excavator was used to dig a deep grave and, Nellie as she was called, was put on a heavy transporter and taken to the landfill to be buried there.
William Appleton became mayor the same year Nellikutha died. He had been born on September 3, 1889 to Edwin and Margaret in central Otago.
After doing well at school he worked a number of jobs, like being a telegraph messenger and became a cadet at the Post office.
He took the civil service exams while working as an accounting student in Wellington.
He married Mary Helen Munro in 1913 and they had two sons but tragedy struck when Mary died during the influenza epidemic.
William gained a seat on the Wellington City Council and in 1919 he remarried to Rose Hellewell.
As the chair of the Works Committee he oversaw the introduction of a system of refuse disposal that converted gullies into sports grounds.
He was popular as a city councillor and was heavily involved in the harbour board.
After his mayoralty he was on the board of inquiry over the Tangiwai disaster.
He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1950 and received several further honours in the years following.
He died from cancer on October 22, 1958 and was cremated at Karori Cemetery. The park in Karori, which came out of his work on the council’s works committee was named after him in 1950.
And over time, fewer and fewer people remembered that the park was also the grave of Nellikutha the elephant from the zoo.​

The brig Delaware was new and had 11 people on board when it left Nelson heading to Napier on September 3, 1863.
It was a windy day but initially the weather was good enough.
It didn’t last. As night fell the weather picked up and the American built ship was in trouble.
The captain, Robert Baldwi,n headed the ship for Pepin Island off the South Island and dropped the anchor hoping to ride it out but had to drop the second anchor, neither of which held.
The ship was driven on to rocks about 200m from shore. One of the sailors tried to swim ashore to fix a rope but was injured and died.
On the nearby shore stood a group of Māori. One was Hūria Mātenga. She and her husband and two others knew that something had to be done.
She and one of the others headed into the steep seas, swimming out in appalling conditions to get hold of a rope to secure the ship.
They managed to fasten it but the storm was getting worse and she and the others plunged back into the surf to help each of the crew of the ship back to shore. They only just made it, the rope broke at the last man got to shore.
The captain later said that but for their actions, he did not think anyone would have survived the wreck.
Hūria was celebrated as a heroine, praised for her bravery and beauty. She was presented with a gold watch, portraits were painted of her and is celebrated even now, a Nelson Harbour Board tug was named for her in 1983.
Hūria was born in 1842 in Wakapuaka, Nelson, the daughter of Wikitōria Te Amohau Te Keha (Ngāti Te Whiti) and Wīremu Kātane Te Pūoho. She inherited land rights from them to over 17,000 acres of land around Wakapuaka.
She was also known by her European name of Julia Martin.
She entered an arranged marriage to Hēmi Mātenga Wai-Punahau (also known as James Martin) in 1858.
While they had no biological children, they did have an adopted daughter.
Hūria, along with being considered a woman of great mana and business acumen, was a weaver and two of her woven items are in the collection at Te Papa.
She died on April 24, 1909, in the Old Maori cemetery in Nelson.​

Our towns and cities would look very different if the original plans for them had been followed.
Many of the original settlers and town fathers had amazing ideas, many brought from the old European capitals that had been settled for thousands of years.
New Zealand, however, was a very new country and it could be anything.
Wellington, originally called Port Nicholson, was favoured because of its easy harbour. It was simple to get ships filled with goods to the growing city.
The land was hilly in places, with decent beaches and there was a lagoon fed by a stream where the Basin Reserve is now.
In 1840, Surveyor General, Captain William Mein Smith, wanted Wellington to shine.
He had bright ideas for how it was to look and one idea was a canal through the centre of the city that would lead ships to the Basin where they would be able to harbour.
Smith drew up plans for it and the concept was on the verge of being created.
Before it would be put into action though, an earthquake changed everything.
On January 23, 1855 a 8.2 magnitude earthquake hit along the Wairarapa faultline. It was felt throughout the country and is still considered the biggest felt since European colonisation began.
Several people were killed in the Wairarapa and a bridge over the Hutt river was destroyed. But in Wellington, after a rebuild after the 1848 earthquake, damage was limited.
However the land around the harbour rose and previously used jetties were badly damaged.
A lot of land around the foreshore was able to be reclaimed and much of what is Wellington central business district now is built on it.
One of the biggest changes however was that the Basin drained and turned into a swamp.
Two years later citizens began asking the Provincial Council about a permanent cricket ground.
They were given the swamp.
Determined to make it work, with free prison labour, the land was drained and flattened and what would become the famous Basin Reserve cricket ground - still in use today - was created.
Smith was born on September 7, 179,9 in Cape Town in South Africa, the eldest son of William Proctor Smith and his wife Mary Mein.
He went into the army at the age of 14, then obtained a commission in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of Captain.
In 1839 the New Zealand company took him on as its first surveyor general. He arrived on the Cuba in 1840.
He immediately got to work and began laying out Wellington, Petone and Thorndon. By 1841 he and his staff had surveyed a number of country sections from Pencarrow to Porirua.
He went on to map the harbours on the South Island’s east coast and climbed the Port Hills.
Smith often sketched what he saw and his books are now in the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Early in 1845 Smith and his family moved to Huangarua, between Greytown and Martinborough, in Wairarapa, where in partnership with Samuel Revans he became a successful runholder.
He did a survey of the Wairarapa, did a coastal survey of Castle Point, explored Manawatu and laid out plans for Featherston.
In 1865 he retired to Woodside, near Greytown and died at Woodside January 3, 1869.
He is buried in Greytown Cemetery.​