The mayor and the elephant

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.​