Megan Hutching - Over the Wide and Trackless Sea: The Pioneer Women and Girls of New Zealand

With the exception of Juliette Daniell and Jensine Thomsen, all of the eleven women whose stories appear in this book were immigrants to New Zealand. Most remained here after they had made the long and difficult voyage by ship over the wide and trackless sea, as Eliza White put it. OneLady Barker, or Mary Anne Broome as she more properly wasleft after three years. Juliette Daniell lived here only until she was thirteen years old before going to live in England, where she remained except for a short return visit after her marriage.

Eliza, who had married Wesleyan missionary William White after a brief courtship, was the first of these women to arrive. She sailed with William on a whaling ship which arrived off the Bay of Islands at the end of January 1830, after a four-month voyage. The most recent arrival was Jerolima Erceg. Just over a hundred years ago, she left the small mountain village of Raane in Dalmatia to travel to Auckland to meet her husband, Andrija. It was still a long voyage by sea, but steam ships meant that it was now a journey of six or eight weeks rather than the sixteen weeks which Eliza endured.

I chose these eleven women because together their stories illuminate some of the many strands that have gone into weaving the fabric of this countrys history. There are few people now who would argue against the notion that the women who emigrated to this country were as much pioneers as the men whose lives we know far more about. In early histories of Pakeha settlement, these women tended to be silent or, at best, shadowy presences, and few were known by name. In more recent years, the balance has been redressed and there is much more information available about women who were pioneers.

I wanted to give a good range of experiences in this book. I began with Eliza White who arrived here before the place was declared a British colony and when most permanent Pakeha settlers were missionaries or traders. Elizas journals, written at the time, give a rich picture of her life at the mission station at Mangungu in the Hokianga Harbour. Her account of her first meeting with a Maori person is very vivid. She evinced an interest tinged with the sort of values that one would expect from such a woman at such a time. Her use of words such as savages, heathen and native rings unharmoniously to modern ears, but they were words in general use at the time, especially amongst those who had come with the mission to bring the Word of God to people who had not heard it, and along the way to civilize the uncivilized. Elizas self-conscious exploration of her behaviour and motives seems quite a modern thing, except that it is done in the context of her evangelistic Christianity, which, for many of us, makes it rather alien. There are significant gaps in her journals, and events that she does not mention except in a glancing way. She wrote her journals for her parents in England, so it is understandable why she did not record some of the unhappier experiences which were caused by her husband, William. Fortunately, there is enough information recorded in other sources that the most obvious gaps can be filled.

Betty Guard came to New Zealand with her husband Jacky from New South Wales at around the same time as Eliza. Their backgrounds and experiences could not have been more different, however. Betty was probably the only Pakeha woman at the shore whaling stations where she lived, in Te Awaiti and Kakapo Bay. Whaling stations were uncomfortable, smelly and wild places, and Bettys life here was on the real frontier of Pakeha settlement in this country. Her capture by Ngati Ruanui after a shipwreck in 1834 led to the first engagement between British troops and Maori in New Zealand. She left no records, so it is difficult to get any sense of her personality (although Fiona Kidman has attempted this in her novel, The Captive Wife), but we have brief accounts of her from travellers who met her later in life.

The next story is that of Juliette Daniell, who was born in Wellington in 1842. While she was still a child when she left New Zealand, her experiences are included because they give a rare account of an early colonial childhoodin Juliettes case, someone who grew up amongst the upper set of Wellington society at the time. Her experiences were most definitely pioneering. She gives us an eyewitness account of the huge Wellington earthquake of 1855, as well as a glimpse into the everyday life of those early settlers.

Amey Daldy arrived in Auckland in 1860, at a time when the place was in an uproar because it looked as though there was going to be war between the settler government and the Waikato Maori. I have had to use secondary sources to piece together Ameys story, and have placed it in the context of the development of Auckland township and the struggle for the extension of womens rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Amey was at the forefront of the womens suffrage movement in New Zealand, and was a pioneer member of a number of organizations which sought social reform in this country.

Lady Barker has left us two lively accounts of her three years in New Zealand. Her baby son died soon after arrival at Broomielaw, which, along with a terrible snow storm and a destructive flood, cast a shadow over her time here. Her character was such, however, that she was able to rise above these misfortunes and leave us a fine illustration of the life of the Canterbury sheep-station owner. Her three years were a combination of hard physical work and opportunities for entertainment and visiting. Her story is in great contrast to the harsher lives of Catherine Ralfe and the Danish women, Christine Nielsen, Jensine Thomsen, Nielsine Paget and Kirstine Nielsen.

Catherine Ralfe arrived in Christchurch in 1866, a year after Mary Anne Barker, and, although they must have known the same people through their association with the Church of England, their experiences were very different. With her sister-in-law, Catherine shared the responsibility of maintaining the family of her brother Henry. It was a large family, and their existence often teetered on the brink of disaster as a result of Henrys inability to provide for them successfully. Catherine lived for a few months in Christchurch before moving over to the West Coast goldfield town of Okarito. After some time there, she lived briefly in another mining town, Ross; then Hokitika; and ended her days in Taranaki, after moving there to be close to another of her brothers. Catherines memoirs, written at the end of her life, are matter-of-fact about her difficult life, but the accounts of frequent headaches and attacks of breathlessness, along with her temporary loss of Christian faith soon after she arrived, hint that she found her life here very stressful. The fact that her health improved in her happy and secure old age tends to underline that conclusion.

With the exception of Kirstine Nielsen, who arrived a little after the others, the lives of the four Danish women covered in Chapter Seven were ones of unremitting hard work as they helped to turn dense virgin totara bush into farmland, and, at the same time, carry out all the domestic duties that women were expected to do. They each raised large families. The life of Christine Nielsen is particularly poignant, because her husband became an invalid soon after their arrival and so she was single-handedly responsible for the familys fortunes. Her years of relentless hard work took their toll, and she died aged forty-six, her body worn out. The story of her familys life in their new land does not end there, however, but is continued by that of her daughter, Jensine Thomsen, who died of old age rather than from overwork.

The experiences of Jerolima Erceg are similar in some ways to those of the Danish women. She, too, came from a non-British background and was unable to speak English when she arrived in 1907. As a result, she, like the Danish women, relied on her children to intercede for her in her dealings with New Zealanders. Her life digging gum in North Auckland, and then developing a fine dairy farm and herd, also relied on her capacity for hard work. All through her life in New Zealand, she maintained the Dalmatian ways of life she had known in her youth, and part of her legacy is that many of them are still practised by her descendants.