In museums around New Zealand are stunning paintings of Māori, portraits done by one of the country's leading artists, Goldie. But his amazing work also contributed to his death.
Charles Frederick Goldie was born to David and Maria in on October 20, 1870 in Auckland. David was a timber merchant, later mayor of Auckland and a strict primitive methodist who resigned as mayor rather than toast the visiting Duke and Duchess of Cornwall with alcohol. Maria was herself an amateur artist who encouraged Charles and while at school he won several prizes from the Auckland Society of Arts. After leaving school Goldie studied with Louis Jon Steele, an English born New Zealand artist and surgeon while working for his father. His first exhibition impressed Governor of New Zealand Sir George Grey with his still life paintings. After a trip to Paris to study Academie Julian for a grounding in drawing and painting he returned to New Zealand in 1898. He began sharing a studio with Steele and they collaborated on a large painting. After parting ways Goldie set up his own studio and he began to make field trips to sketch and photograph Māori and paid some to sit for him in Auckland. Most of his subjects were elderly Māori with Ta Moko. He dedicated his life to painting Māori chiefs and leaders, and began living on marae and spoke fluent Te Reo. Goldie wanted to preserve the heritage of Māori i people. In 1920 he married Olive Ethelwyn Cooper during a trip to Sydney. They never had any children. Ironically his health began to deteriorate due to lead poisoning, a common complaint with artists, from the use of lead white used to prepare canvases. It was common for him to lick the ends of paint brushes to get a fine point. At the time he was not producing much work and was encouraged by resume painting in about 1930 and by 1934 and 35 he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in France. He stopped painting in 1941 and died on July 11, 1947, and is buried in Purewa Cemetery. Goldie is considered one of the most important New Zealand artists and most of his paintings have topped half a million in sales while several have been over $1 million. Picture from Te Papa’s collection.
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In Wellington gaol in 1867 an unprecedented event took place. Prisoner Fanny Glover became the first woman to give birth in prison.
It prompted a petition for her release even though she had pleaded guilty to her crime. Bigamy. Fanny had married William Glover in June 1861 in Christchurch. He was a farm labourer in good financial condition. She had three children to him in only a handful of years. Only one survived. Fanny, who had been Fanny Craythorne, complained many times of “ill-use,” a polite term used in courts for several different kinds of abuse. Her sister Mary Ann Manning heard these complaints often but never saw any signs of it. She had been at Fanny’s wedding ceremony. But by 1867, Fanny was living in the Wairarapa with Robert Gibbs as his housekeeper and calling herself Fanny Gordon. Gibbs, a publican in Greytown, knew about Fanny’s other husband but on May 15, 1867, they both went into the registrar of births, deaths and marriage office and were married. Fanny signed the register with the surname Gordon and said she was a widow. By the time all the evidence was produced to the Supreme Court in Wellington, she changed her plea to guilty but by then the jury was considering the case. They quickly returned a guilty verdict. At the time Fanny was more than seven months pregnant. The judge sentenced her to nine months hard labour on September 1897. In December newspapers reported she had delivered a healthy daughter in prison. In January a petition was forwarded to the Colonial Secretary’s office asking for clemency but a report from the surgeon who looked after prisoners said there was nothing in her surroundings that posed a danger to her or her child. Fanny served her time and was released. Fanny had been born Frances Craythorne in Leicestershire, England in 1843 to William and Mary Craythorne. The whole family came to New Zealand in 1857. After her release from jail, Fanny remained with Robert and had four children by him, three daughters and a son. She died aged 90 in Upper Hutt and on March 25, 1934 and is buried at Karori Cemetery. Picture by Micheile Henderson. Once in a while we come across a story and then just stare at each other in disbelief. So when we found out about New Zealand’s exploding trousers epidemic it was sort of stunned silence.
But yes, New Zealand did have an epidemic of exploding trousers, it was a real thing. In the 1930’s farmers began complaining about their trousers bursting into flames. It turned out there was a very specific cause and it had to do with ragwort. Ragwort is a common weed that grows all over the place. It was also poisonous to livestock. So the Government recommended that a particular weedkiller was used - sodium chlorate. As the farmers were spraying around their land, the weedkiller was getting on their clothes. With most trousers being wool or cotton - it was reacting with the organic fibres. Exposed to heat - like bright sunlight - or naked flames the trousers were seen smoking and even actually burning. At least one person ended up needing treatment for burns from their trousers. A Mr Charles Price from Oakura ended up in hospital suffering burns to his legs and hands. It prompted the chief chemist of the department of agriculture to write a report that ended up in the Journal of Agriculture warning about it and saying waterproof clothing should be worn if using the weedkiller. Hard as it is to believe, it was taken seriously and Massey University’s James Watson wrote an article entitled The Significance of Mr Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers in 2004. Richard Buckley, a farmer in the Taranaki had been drying his trousers before a fire when they loudly exploded. He was able to grab them and hurl them from the house preventing any further damage. Now, for those who say oh come on, this can’t be real, well Mythbusters took on the challenge - and confirmed that cotton overalls could indeed ignite given various factors! As for Richard Buckley - he went on to farm for many more years and died at the age of 79 on February 19, 1947, and was buried in Hawera Cemetery. Kiwi shoe polish has been part of our homes for over 100 years. Men would take out their work shoes once a week and give them a good shine.
But now, Kiwi polish is gone. No longer being made. And the irony is, it's not even a New Zealand product. Australian William Ramsey developed the polish in 1906 in a two room factory in Melbourne. William was born in Glasgow on June 6, 1868, to Margaret and John Ramsey. The family (William had several brothers) emigrated to Australia in 1878 where John became a real estate agent and did very well. In 1901, William set up a factory in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne with business partner Hamilton McKellar and began producing disinfectants, polishes and creams. Three years later the factory moved to Elizabeth Street and it was there they began producing a shoe polish that William called Kiwi shoe polish. It was made using both traditional recipes but William and Hamilton improved it. William began promoting it by loading it in a cart and hawking it to farmers around the region. And the reason he called it Kiwi? He had spent some time in New Zealand where he met and married his wife Annie Elizabeth Meek in Oamaru in 1901. He called it Kiwi in honour of Annie’s New Zealand heritage. Over time Kiwi became the dominant shoe polish in many countries and was used by US and British soldiers in World War One. It was considered a major improvement on other brands as it preserved shoe leather, promoted shine and restored colour. The word and the use of a kiwi logo travelling round the world helped promote the use of the word to mean New Zealanders. The company was owned by various corporations over the last few decades, including Sara Lee and then S C Johnson. For most of its product life it was estimated Kiwi shoe polish held 53 percent of the world’s market. Then in December 2022 S C Johnson left the shoe polish market citing changes in society - the trend toward softer and more casual shoes and the work from home trend during the COVID pandemic meant traditional work shoes, especially for men, were not so prevalent. William died on September 14, 1914 at his home. His wife took over as chair of the company until 1933. Both are buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. We don’t think much about street lights - unless something is wrong with them. They are just there when we need them.
But for Bobby Ellis it was a problem to be solved. With chickens. Bobby was a bit eccentric who liked to tinker with electronics and was interested in emerging technologies including electricity. Born in England on July 24, 1862, he and his brothers came to New Zealand in the 1880’s settling in the Upper Motueka Valley at a farm. Bobby built a water powered flax mill and tried to supplement his income from the mill, including using the water race for wool scouring which failed, making mud bricks for housing, and inventing new uses for flax fibre, such as hardwearing trousers. He did produce a high pressure turbine to provide electricity to his home. In 1911 he bought a flour mill in Brightwater looking to harness the power of the Wairoa river to power the mill by day and provide power to nearby homes. He had trouble getting permission to do it but by 1913 he had the infrastructure in place and was powering five streetlights along with a few homes. His vision continued to expand and shortly he was powering a fair portion of the surrounding district. Bobby wanted a way to turn the streetlights on at night and off in the morning. His solution was chickens. Each night as the chickens went into their coop and hopped up on a perch which sank under their weight and triggered a switch that turned on the street lights. In the morning as the chicken left, The spring loaded perch rose and the lights switched off. Bobby had married Kate Evans in 1889. She would have been the first woman to have an electric stove and they even had an electric piano. They had five children, one of which Henry was killed during the First World War and another son was injured not long after. Kate died in 1917 and Bobby in 1924 donated an electric street light to the Brightwater War Memorial Committee and in 1991 one of the old street lights was put near the memorial gates. Bobby died on March 4,1935 and is buried in St Paul’s Anglican Church cemetery. Picture by Ben Moreland. Margaret Cashmere was newly married and calmly living her life in Wellington when she suddenly became embroiled in an international murder mystery.
It was a strange set of coincidences that led to her being involved in what would be a decade long case that baffled Australian police, In 1934, the badly burned body of a woman was found on the side of a road partially in a ditch in Albury, New South Wales, Australia with a bullet in her neck. No one knew who she was. She would come to be known as the pyjama girl because she had been wearing silk pyjamas. Headlines in newspapers said it was thought she might have been a Kiwi and suddenly a small group in Christchurch came forward saying it might be Beryl Cashmore who they had not seen for a few years. That didn’t help - there was no Beryl Cashmore. Her friends seemed to remember she had been educated at a convent and some had seen silk pyjamas in a suitcase of hers. It took a quick witted reporter to find Margaret instead. Margaret was 26 at the time and had been born in Christchurch where she attended St Mary’s Convent until she was 11 before moving away. She went into domestic service for a while, came to Wellington and married Norman Watt. It fitted but there was one problem: Margaret was very much alive. Police were satisfied that it was a case of mistaken identity and New Zealand bowed out of the murder investigation, which was becoming stranger by the day. As the police failed to identify her, the poor woman’s body was taken to Sydney where it was (gruesomely) put on display to try and help identification. She was preserved formalin by the medical school until 1942 when she was transferred to police headquarters. There were any number of theories and suspects. In 1935, a vagrant called Robert Henderson Rae claimed he was the murderer, saying they had arrived from New Zealand together and that he had strangled her. Then police became concerned that the body might be an Austrian sculptor Countess Coudenhove-Kalgeri - Anita Carola Neuber - who had been in Australia with a man she married there before they went on their honeymoon. That led to police from France and Vienna getting involved but it wasn’t her either. In 1944, a woman took a court case to prove the body was that of her daughter Philomena Morgan which resulted in police ordering forensic testing of the body. Dental analysis said it was Linda Agostini. Her husband Tony admitted to her murder. He said he had accidentally shot and killed her in Melbourne then driven the body over state lines to dump it. He had also poured petrol over her and set fire to her. At trial he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years but only served three before being deported to Italy where he died. A couple of films were made of the case and at least one book written. However it is not quite over. A recent book by historian Richard Evans pointed out there were physical differences between Linda and the body and that the police had had a list of many missing women that they had not been able to eliminate. Agostini might have murdered his wife, but it was not clear that the body found was definitely Linda. The body - listed as Linda Agostini - was finally buried in Preston General Cemetery in Bundoora, Bunyule City, Victoria. The fear of airships - blimps or zeppelins invading was very real. There was even a
name for it Teutonphobia. Airships must have seemed like extraordinary technology to people just coming out of the 1800s. Huge ships capable of flying large distances. Newspapers in England began reporting sightings - often called phantom airships and it was near hysteria peak in 1909. It was mostly reports of lights in the sky. Then, in late July 1909 a report from Dunedin scared people. Moving lights in the sky. Residents stood and watched the unmoving lights in shock, until they suddenly shot away. It was also seen by Mosgiel residents. As newspapers began picking up the story more and more people who had seen it came forward. And the story began to grow that it was an airship. People were also saying they heard something like a motorcar - like an engine. Others said there was a number of lights, It was so unsettling that police were called in to search. The phenomenon began to move northwards and the story began to grow - and it became a German spy airship, ready to drop bombs. Perhaps the most spectacular incident took place on Friday July 23rd in broad daylight at Kelso, where 23 schoolchildren and an adult described a Zeppelin-type airship swooping low over the township, of which several detailed sketches were produced by witnesses. Another described it as a huge illuminated object moving about in the air. Still more said it was a cigar shaped balloon with a carriage beneath it. By August whatever it was was being seen in Hawke’s Bay then further and further up the country. Then in September, the sightings stopped. In later years the potential for it to be an airship has changed. Could it have been UFOs? There has certainly been speculation over the years. One of the first to see it was John Boyd who had been born in Otago on May 4, 1877 to Edward and Jane Boyd who were settlers in Otago. They had come from Scotland in 1858. John was one of 11 children and 32 at the time he saw the possible airship. He was considered literate, sociable, musical, and of above-average intelligence and progressive, being in charge of a herd of cows and trialing new milking methods. He would be considered a credible witness. John was a founding member and Secretary for the local ‘Glee Club’ – a social group organising musical entertainments, and of him chairing a session of the Benhar Debating Club. He married Florence Hilda Turner. So what was it he saw? Was it just mass hysteria? Actual airships? Or UFOs? John never got an answer to his questions about what he saw. He died on January 29, 1964 in Levin and was returned to the South Island and buried in the Balclutha Old Cemetery. Picture by Biblioteca Valenciana Nicolau Primitiu. Who remembers going to the movies for the first time? Seeing the huge screen, the lollies, the blasting sound.
What was once a huge part of our society has waned a bit with streaming services available but most of us still remember seeing a movie on the big screen. The first New Zealand feature film shown was at the Lyric theatre in Auckland during the first week of the first World War. Titled Hinemoa, it was a silent movie with an all Māori cast that told the love story of Hinemoa who swam across Lake Rotorua toTūtānekai after hearing his music and falling in love. Hinemoa was played by Hera Tawhai Rogers and Tūtāneka iby Rua Tawhai both members of a Māori choir. It was produced by George Hermann Tarr for £50. George was born in Sydney, Australia on September 22, 1881, the son of Agnes Herrmann and William Tarr. He was something of a child star, making his debut on the stage aged five and toured with theatrical companies most of his childhood. He came to New Zealand in 1902 appearing in vaudeville acts. George married Alice Mary Blackburn in Melbourne in 1905. At the time he was working as a signwriter. In New Zealand theatres were being set up for cinema and George helped Henry Hayward - a pioneer of the movie industry here - in setting up and managing several. He was the manager of the Empire Theatre in Napier and the Opera House in Gisborne. In 1914, George moved into film production, writing and producing Hinemoa which was shown throughout the country. Any movie career was interrupted by the war and in 1917, George enlisted in the army and served with the machine gun corps in France. He produced one other major work, Ten thousand miles in the Southern Cross, which he filmed in late 1921 during the mission steamer's annual trip to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and the Solomon Islands. Although the film screened widely in New Zealand and was sold overseas, Tarr did not feel encouraged to continue as a film-maker. He continued his career in theatre as an actor, producer and scenic artist including designing stage effects at various Auckland theatres. George was also a life member of the Light Opera club and in many ventures worked alongside his wife Alice - called Darcie - who was a skilled costume designer. He died at Milford in Auckland on January 7, 1965 and was cremated at Purewa Cemetery. And Hinemoa the film was lost to history with only a still from publicity now available. Picture by Immo Wegmann. It was a hot dry day in a summer of hot dry days. Water tanks were empty and stream beds were dry.
Raetihi residents could smell smoke off and on throughout March 18, 1918. That by itself wasn’t unusual. With farms being established all around the region, bush was cut back and left to dry to be burned off later. But during the evening the wind picked up, reaching 140kmh. And a fire began to rage out of control. The wind began carrying ash and sparks far and wide. Houses and farms began burning and the fire raced toward Raetihi and residents hurried to leave. Some spent hours huddling under a bridge. Families hurried to save themselves. One hid in an empty water tower while others headed for streams. On Mangaeturoa South Road, Joseph Akersten abandoned his home along with Edith Harle and a six month old baby girl Edna. With them was their farm worker Sydney Scott. They ran, but the smoke and heat left them exhausted. Scott opted to climb a tree while the small family decided to keep going. The smoke was so thick it spread across the North Island, disrupting ferries and closing schools and factories after darkening the sky. Mid-morning the next day it began to rain. It was just enough to stop the fire spreading further but people found trees and stumps still burning days later. By the time it was over the full destruction could be seen . Over 100 homes destroyed, 11 mills - the life blood of the area - gone, along with shops, churches, the County Council chambers and a nursing home. So much stock had died that bulldozers had to be brought in to bury them. And in the burned remains, the bodies of Joseph, Edith and Edna were found. Scott had survived. Joseph Michael Akersten had been born in Kaikoura in October 1892 to father Laurence and mother Sarah. Edith - who had been married to another man Alfred Harle and had three children with him, was living with Joseph by 1918 - Edna had the last name Harle and it is unclear who her father was. The fire was closely followed by one of the hardest winters ever and then, by November, the start of the influenza epidemic. While cleared brush might have been responsible, it was also considered that a spark from a train on the newly developed North Island Main Trunk line might have started the fire. Joseph, Edith and Edna were buried together in the Raetihi Cemetery. |
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