'Cos I'm ringing out, I'm ringing for you

Thursday music corner: New Zealand music stalwart Sir Dave Dobbyn was born in Auckland in 1957. He is famed for both his band career - with Th' Dudes from 1975 to 1980 and DD Smash from 1980 to 1986 - and as a solo artist since 1986. With Th' Dudes he had three New Zealand top 40 singles, plus the classic Walking In Light. With DD Smash he scored a New Zealand chart-topping album, 1982's Cool Bananas, the platinum-certified The Optimist from 1984, and three New Zealand top 10 singles: Outlook for Thursday, Whaling and Magic (What She Do). All nine of his solo albums have reached the New Zealand top 20, with 1998's The Islander hitting number one and 2005's Available Light being certified double platinum. He has achieved three New Zealand chart-topping singles, and his first, Slice of Heaven, also topped the charts in Australia driven by the success of the Footrot Flats animated movie soundtrack. He was knighted in 2021.

Lament for the Numb (1993) was Dobbyn's third solo album, and was credited to Dave Dobbyn and the Stone People. The band consisted of Crowded House producer (and, much later, band-member) Mitchell Froom, plus two members of Elvis Costello's band, and the album was recorded and mixed in Hollywood by Tchad Blake, also a frequent Crowded House collaborator. In 2009 he discussed the album with Simon Sweetman:

I went to Hollywood to record the Lament for the Numb album; I was on a label that had connected me with Elvis Costello's great rhythm section [Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas] so I couldn't help but want to pay tribute to him; and I was offering nods to Randy Newman and all of these heroes. I delivered an album that I thought was edgy. The record label called it 'un-releasable' and they shelved it. It sat for a year before being released."

The sparse romanticism of Belltower was a Lament for the Numb album track. Dobbyn performed it solo last year for RNZ Music.

Dave Dobbyn - Belltower (live, 2025; orig. 1993)

See also:

Music: Dave Dobbyn - Lipstick Power (1981)

Music: Dave Dobbyn - Whaling (live at the Gluepot, 1994)

Music: Dave Dobbyn - Beside You (1999)

The Wild West character of Hawke's Bay settler towns

Although harking to British urban ideals, Hawke's Bay's settler-age towns looked distinctly frontier American, in part a function of available building materials. Where stone was available - such as Oamaru - New Zealand's settlers emulated Britain. Where it was not, meaning virtually every other frontier town in New Zealand, the style of the age was usually Wild West. Common build materials lent force to common social values: Napier, Hastings, Wairoa, Waipukurau or Waipawa could have done double duty as Dodge City. All shared the same rows of clap-board buildings, limed, dusty roads, the sense of newness with untamed verges and a landscape where trees had yet to grow, and the piles of detritus dumped higgledy-piggledy in empty sections. Even the hitching-posts outside the saloons were much the same; and inside them, men on both sides of the Pacific did 'full justice' - as the period term usually put it - to whiskey, cards and billiards.

Provincial life swirled around these towns, a complex, sophisticated whirl of events suffused with the values of the time, particularly self-betterment - financially, socially and intellectually. This was pushed along in Napier with the help of the Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, a library opened in 1863. As McLean remarked, the 'want of such a place' had been felt for 'a very long time'. By 1877 the Athenaeum, solidly housed in in Browning Street premises, owned some 1500 books. Education sometimes doubled as entertainment; one Napier visitor in the 1880s attended a 'free lecture on spiritualism in the Hoadley salerooms' and thought the 'larrikins were so noisy that I almost thought there would be ructions'.

Much evolved around local hotels. Despite the hopes for town halls and athenaeums, social life in New Zealand's rugged colonial frontier inevitably focused on hotels and their public bars. These were the public centres of their towns in practise, offering not just accommodation but spaces for townsfolk to gather and socialise. Business deals were often made in them - and in Havelock North, hotels even provided a public space for inquests. They were, in short, gathering places for their communities, the 'hub of the countryside', as one settler put it. Dozens flourished across Hawke's Bay. In Napier, there were four in Shakespeare Road alone. Others around the district included Wairoa's Clyde Hotel, the Duke of Edinburgh in Porangahau, Waipawa's Empire Hotel, the London Hotel on Napier's spit, the Tavistock in Waipukurau, the Sawyer's Arms in Hampden (Tikokino), and the Patangata Hotel.

- Matthew Wright, The History of Hawke's Bay, Wellington, 2017, p.108.

The NZ Rowing team's trip to the 1975 World Rowing Champs in Nottingham

This is a special guest post from former senior Beehive official, 1976 Montreal Olympics rowing eights bronze medallist (and my former landlord) Alec McLean, on the 1975 World Rowing Championships in Nottingham. Reposted here, lightly edited, from Facebook with Alec's permission:   

===

Fifty years ago yesterday! The 1975 World Rowing Champs, Nottingham. It was a funny old trip. From memory, Rowing NZ had very ambitious plans for that tour. In preparation for the Montreal Olympic Games, a lengthy North American tour was planned, even some talk of the team getting jobs while away (all amateurs in those days). The squad assembled in Christchurch quite early, anticipating a departure for North America before going on to the UK.

As it turned out NZ Rowing had absolutely no funds - the North American plans fell by the wayside, we would continue training in Christchurch, and fly straight to UK for a very short build up to the World Champs at Nottingham.

So began a very long training period through a Christchurch winter (NZ Rowing didn't move to Karapiro until 1976). We would occasionally turn up for training at 3pm, frost still on the ground, and very occasionally you would see snow building up on the ears of the guy in front of you as we plied the river at Kerrs Reach.

We also had some health issues with the guys, one having to pull out, plus some crew changes, making it hard to get some consistency going. After flying to the UK we settled in, accommodated at Pangbourne Nautical College in Berkshire.

 
We again had some crew changes through illness. The stretch of water on the Thames by the Pangbourne College sheds was not long enough for eights training, so the eight moved up the river to Hobb's boat-yard. It proved to be a great venue, and I have since been back to Hobb's boat-yard twice on visits to England. Despite all our setbacks, we had an amazing black Empacher carbon fibre boat, extremely fast, and great looking. It also hummed! Some sort of harmonic resonating in the aluminium riggers maybe. It was a bit surreal rowing up the Thames on a beautiful English summers day, just the sound of the oars going kachunk, kachunk, then at a certain speed the boat would start humming - unique. But we were running out of time. Rusty had said a couple of times, 'I think there is a better way of rowing this boat', but time was against us, and we were into the Champs at Nottingham in no time. 

We had a perfect row in winning the heat, going straight through to the final. I don't really recall the final - I see from the clippings that stroke Grant McCauley says we got a slightly shaky start, but we ended up with a bronze behind East Germany and Russia. Second bronze for me! I should emphasise that our three crews had travelled from NZ just four weeks before the finals, with three weeks training in the UK, and having had not a single race until the heats.

I must mention our (unofficial) training shirts. A colleague of mine in Customs had done a bit of a cartoon for me (pinched from one those old Ozzie weekly magazines - it was a cricketer). So I had some t-shirts made up for the guys. Well, what a hit - as soon as the boys saw them I had to get another big batch made up. They were also a hit when it came to swapping shirts at the end of the Champs (an age-old custom). Some crafty bargainers were even getting a three for one swap, or a track suit for a scrappy NZ t-shirt. I managed to trade mine for an East German racing singlet (the East Germans were forbidden from trading their rowing gear). I offered him my racing singlet, but he said 'No, I want the one with the club'. So that was 1975!

 
Final crew - David Simmons cox, Grant McCauley, me, Dave Rodger, Athol Earl, Lindsay Wilson, Ross Collinge, Trevor Coker (dec), Pete Dignan (dec).

AM: 'Departing Pangbourne College for training. No money that year - a clapped out Ford Transit with two wooden benches along each side in the back. Lindsay Wilson, me, Pete Dignan (sadly passed away from cancer and few years ago)'

===

The NZ rowing eights came third at Nottingham (time 5:43.61) behind East Germany (5:39.01) and the Soviet Union (5:41.34). Wikipedia notes that 'Beginning in 1974, doping became a blanket policy imposed by the GDR [East German] sports federation' (source).

Is this a human face in the mirror? It looks just like a piece of the sea

Thursday music corner: The Mutton Birds were a New Zealand rock group founded by former Blam Blam Blam and The Front Lawn artist Don McGlashan and associates in 1991. The band first attained prominence with the second single from their 1992 debut self-titled album, Nature, which was a cover of a much-loved 1969 folk-pop single by the Fourmyula's Wayne Mason. It reached number 4 in the New Zealand charts, and was the first of eight top 20 New Zealand singles for the band. The Heater, the opening single from the band's second album Salty, topped the New Zealand chart in 1994. Four of the band's albums reached the New Zealand top 10, and the band won three Aotearoa Music Awards in 1993 (Album, Group and Single of the Year). 

No Telling When appeared on Salty, the Mutton Birds' second album, released in April 1994.    

The Mutton Birds - No Telling When (1994)

See also:

Music: Mutton Birds - White Valiant (1992)

Music: Mutton Birds - In My Room (1994)

Music: Mutton Birds - Envy of Angels (1996)

"I've never yet had a failure"

Edmonds "Sure to Rise" Baking Powder advertisement, Dominion, 6 April 1925 - via PapersPast

Hobson's many challenges

[New Zealand's first Governor, Captain William] Hobson was experienced neither as a politician nor a diplomat when he arrived in New Zealand in January 1840 to take up his appointment as Lieutenant Governor. A successful but unremarkable naval career had done little to prepare him for this posting and in retrospect, the Colonial Office's selection of Hobson as New Zealand's first Governor was ill-advised, and perhaps even careless.

Had New Zealand been a colony with a negligible European settlement, Hobson may well have been equal to the task, but by 1840 the country had already witnessed two decades of increasing European intervention, with the accompanying emergence of factionalism between the various interest groups that had by then established themselves. Hobson's arrival stirred the ambitions of the missionaries, obstructed the designs of the land speculators, and unsettled the expectations of many of the British immigrants. Moreover, the whole colony was couched in intrigue, which Hobson initially approached as a naive outsider.

To complicate matters even further, Hobson had to contend with the instructions from his political masters in London. The policy he was expected to follow was sometimes vague and frequently impractical in its implementation. The delay of several months for communications between New Zealand and London often left the Governor marooned in an island of opposition and hostility.

- Paul Moon, Hobson: Governor of New Zealand 1840-1842, Auckland, 1998, p.306

See also:

History: Precolonial maritime NZ, 22 February 2025

History: In memory of Captain Williams, 22 September 2019

History: Pre-1840 European visitors to Wellington, 21 February 2016

Photography: a suitable hobby for ladies

In 1924 the Eastman Kodak Company published a small book, At Home with the Kodak, that implored women to record their families and homes in order to 'tell the truth' of change over time (growth of children, ageing of elders) and create 'the most fascinating of all stories the story of us

The notion that making photographs was an acceptable activity for women was not new. In England, women such as Lady Caroline Margaret Kerrison had become full members of the Royal Photographic Society of London in its first year, 1853. From the late 1890s, articles appeared in newspapers detailing the female members of various royal families who enjoyed 'snapping' and collecting photographs, especially of their travel experiences. By 1898, Princess Beatrice, a daughter of Queen Victoria, was said to have 600 photographs on display in her residence and thousands more 'safely stored away'. Queen Victoria had a darkroom made for Beatrice at the royal residence on the Isle of Wight.

Young New Zealand women were just as enthusiastic about the hobby. In 1913 Jack Callan gave his bride, Margaret Mowat, a Kodak camera at their wedding in Dunedin and she took the camera on their honeymoon. A young Dunedin woman, Miss Bunbury, a fashion buyer for the department store Arthur Barnett Ltd, received an Autographic Kodak camera in 1922 as a going-away gift for her trip to Britain, Paris and the United States, so she could document fashion garments for her employer. Of all the 'beautiful and valuable gifts' given to Elsie Gleave of Gisborne for her 'coming of age' party in 1926, only the 'excellent camera' was singled out for mention in the local newspaper. 

The first and second prize winners in the Ladies' Mirror magazine's inaugural snapshot competition in 1923, Miss Ethelwyn Arthur of Auckland and Miss M King of Otago, submitted photographs that won them the latest Kodak cameras - a No.1A Folding Autographic and a Vest Pocket. For Christmas 1928 the Vanity Kodak camera was marketed nationwide in newspapers as the perfect Christmas gift for women. The camera, 'in delightful colours - distinguished, dainty, chic, intensely feminin[e]', was a version of the Vest Pocket Folding camera (but at more than three times the price) and came in a lined case that included a mirror, a combination powder and rouge compact, and a lipstick.

- Lissa Mitchell, Through Shaded Glass: Women & Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960, Wellington, 2023, p.239.

See also:
Photography: Cindy Sherman: chameleon, comedian, 15 January 2017 

Photography: Ans Westra: Wellington 1976, 30 June 2013

Photography: Three photography exhibitions, 22 April 2011

Precolonial maritime New Zealand

That record, since December 1642 when Abel Tasman first sighted 'Clyppygen Hoeck', to December 1840, when colonisation began, had the records of 1758 vessels arriving on the [New Zealand] coast.

They came, first to explore, then to exploit, little schooners and brigs out of the infant seaport of Port Jackson, the whaling barques out of the ancient port of London, the full-riggers from the whaling ports of Maine and Massachusetts, from Lisbon, Copenhagen, Le Havre, Bremen and Hobart Town. Sealers and whalers, spar ships and flax traders, sandalwood schooners on their way home from Fiji, ships laden with tortoise shell and coconut oil from Tahiti, and ships of war from Trincomalee and Toulon.

New Zealand, and many of its precolonial seaports, enjoyed a trade by sea that was truly international, and today, as one sails up the harbours of Akaroa, Port Underwood, Hokianga or the Bay of Islands, with only an occasional fisherman or pleasure boat in sight, it is difficult to imagine those waters thronged with barques, brigs and schooners flying the flags of many nations, of whaleboats, in countless numbers, trafficking between ships and from ship to shore.

They came in their hundreds, seeking grog and girls, pork and potatoes, and the natural products the coast had to offer: oil to light the lamps of Europe and America; whalebone to corset their women; sealskins to robe the Manchus of China or to appear on the streets of London as 'beaver hats'; flax to provide canvas, rope and cordage for their ships; and solid kauri spars for masts and yards. Whatever they sought, they came by sea, stayed a while and went on, about their seafaring business. A few were left behind, seamen from America, France, Australia, England, Scotland and Ireland, ship deserters of many nations, living with their Maori wives and laying the foundations of what was to become a multiracial society.

To some perhaps, the most significant maritime activity of these years will be seen as that occurring in 1840, the arrival in Port Nicholson of the chartered ships of the New Zealand Company, carrying between them close on 2000 intending settlers, to be landed haphazardly on the beach at Petone in the rude collection of tents, shacks and whares they proudly called 'Britannia'.

- Rear-Admiral John O'Connell Ross,* New Zealand Maritime History to 1840: People, Ships, Trade & Settlement, Wellington, 2024, p.146-7.

(* Ross was Royal New Zealand Navy Chief of Naval Staff, 1965-69)

See also:
History: The itinerant life of a tramp steamer, 11 December 2021

History: The lifeblood of a young colony, 12 June 2009

History: Tales to tell back on shore, 21 January 2009

Sex & Agriculture

Thursday music corner: Dance Exponents, founded by vocalist Jordan Luck and guitarist Brian Jones, were the original 1980s incarnation of the truncated Exponents that took the New Zealand music charts by storm in the 1990s. Formed in 1981 and relocating from Timaru to Christchurch, the Dance Exponents released three successful albums: Prayers Be Answered (1983), Expectations (1985) and Amplifier (1986) and had nine New Zealand top 40 singles; the first, 1982's Victoria, being their most popular. 

As the Exponents the band went on to greater success in the 1990s, including three top ten albums and ten more top 40 singles. They attained their peak popularity thanks to the Something Beginning with C album from 1992, which featured twin New Zealand number three-charting singles in 1991, Why Does Love Do This To Me and Who Loves Who The Most.

Sex & Agriculture was a non-album Dance Exponents single from 1984, which followed up the barroom stomper I'll Say Goodbye (Even Though I'm Blue).

Dance Exponents - Sex & Agriculture (1984) 

See also:

Music: Dance Exponents - Airway Spies (1982)

Music: Exponents - Sink Like A Stone (1992)

Music: Jordan Luck Band - Under The Mercury Moon (2017)

For the fashion-forward lady of 1924

Ladies: in case you're feeling fashion-forward - n.b. fine cotton woven bloomers in navy or white, a snip at 1/11 1/2, down from 2/6 (Hugh Wright's of Queen St advertisement, NZ Herald, 13 October 1924, via Papers Past)

Victoria St, Hamilton

 

Overlooking Cable Bay

 

Maybe a life of cheap wine and Bukowski

Thursday music corner: Dead Flowers were a New Zealand indie rock band that released three albums on Murray Cammick's Wildside Records from 1993 to 1998: Skin of a Stone in 1993, Sweetfish in 1994, and their final, self-titled, album Dead Flowers in 1998. All three albums reached the New Zealand top 40 charts, and the band had early successes, being selected to support Guns 'n Roses and Pearl Jam, and playing the first Big Day Out in 1994. 

The acoustic-driven I Don't See Anyone At All was on the band's third and final album, which was recorded in Sydney and Auckland, with the latter sessions involving former Split Enz and Crowded House member, Eddie Rayner. 

Dead Flowers - I Don't See Anyone At All (1998)

See also:

Music: Dead Flowers - I Wanna Know (1998)

Music: Bailterspace - Splat (1995)

Music: HLAH - Spanish Goat Dancer (1994)

Reach across the cold divider, I will warm you

Thursday music corner: Marlon Williams is a New Zealand singer-songwriter with an increasing side-line in acting roles. He tours with backing band The Yarra Benders, and collaborates with fellow Lyttelton resident Delaney Davidson. Having met actor/director Bradley Cooper in Los Angeles, Williams was cast in a small role in Cooper's 2018 hit film remake A Star Is Born. He has also appeared in the 2019 Australian film The True History of the Kelly Gang, Alice Englert's 2023 film Bad Behaviour, and the New Zealand-filmed TV series Sweet Tooth.

Williams has released three solo studio albums, plus four other albums in collaboration with other artists, three of which were with Delaney Davidson. River Rival appeared on Williams' most recent album, My Boy (2022). It was the third single released from the album, after My Boy and Thinking Of Nina.

Marlon Williams - River Rival (2022)

See also:

Music: Marlon Williams & Delaney Davidson - Bloodletter (2012)

Music: Marlon Williams & Brandi Carlile - Oh, Pretty Woman (in A Star Is Born, 2018)

Music: Marlon Williams & Aldous Harding - Nobody Gets What They Want Anymore (2018)

Dapper cat

Dickensian Bookshop, Featherston, 30 March 2024

 

They don't believe that it is sinning when you are winning

Thursday music corner: Lawrence Arabia, the stage name of Christchurch-born, Auckland-based performer James Milne, has released five albums of erudite, well-crafted pop in the mold of Harry Nilsson since 2006. His 2009 single Apple Pie Bed from his second album, Chant Darling, won Milne and co-writer Luke Buda the APRA Silver Scroll for single of the year, sandwiched between OpShop's One Day (2008) and The Naked & Famous' international hit Young Blood (2010). 

A Lake is the opening track from Milne's 2016 album Absolute Truth. Brain Gym, another track from the album, was played by the legendary Iggy Pop on his BBC 6Music radio show.   

Lawrence Arabia - A Lake (2016)

See also:

Music: Lawrence Arabia & the Erotic Threads - Apple Pie Bed (live, 2007)

Music: Lawrence Arabia - Brain Gym (2016)

Music: Lawrence Arabia - The Developed World (2022)

Hamilton Gardens

 

Will Rogers in New Zealand

Legendary American performer and aphorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) became famous through the Ziegfeld Follies and went on to become an enormously popular movie star and opinion columnist, and one of Hollywood's highest paid actors. In his youth he toured the world several times showing off his spectacular cowboy rope skills, and his travels even took him through New Zealand as part of the Wirth Brother's Circus tour in 1904. Known as the Cherokee Kid, Rogers got the following write-up in the Auckland Star:

The Cherokee Kid is a gentleman with a large American accent and a splendid skill with lassoos [sic.]. He demonstrated what could be done with the whirling loop by bringing up a horse and its rider from [an] impossible position, once throwing together two lasoos [sic.] encircling man and horse separately. He also showed the spectators how to throw half-hitches on to objects at a distance, and did other clever work with the ropes. It was a very interesting performance.

- Auckland Star, 20 January 1904

The circus tour must have lasted at least six weeks in the summer of 1903/04 because Rogers was still receiving press attention in March, like these reports from Wellington:

A novel feature was the lasso work of the Cherokee Kid, a cowboy in Mexican circus-costume, who whirls his swift rope round his head and lassos horse and rider in the twinkling of an eye. This rope work is pretty to watch, and altogether a desirable addition to the programme.

- Evening Post, 8 March 1904

The Cherokee Kid is a slim chap, who toddles into the ring with a couple of lassoes, and does anything in the roping line with them, talking all the time. He gets near, fore, or off fore-leg of a galloping horse, or loops the rider — or both — with a lassoo [sic.] thrown with either hand. Also, he afterwards throws a half-hitch over each of a dismounted man's limbs. He is the most expert rope-thrower seen here to date. Moreover, his rough riding, on a grey mustang wearing a Mexican saddle, is very fine.

- Free Lance, 12 March 1904

Rogers returned to the States later in 1904 to perform at the St Louis World Fair, which opened on 30 April 1904.

See also:

History: Stagecoach travel in the Old West, 19 March 2015

America: America's lax firearms laws, 16 December 2012

Music: He's a solid gold cat but a really mellow hip fat, 17 August 2023

Russians in Queen Charlotte Sound

In the 1820s foreign shipping began to frequent Cook Strait in greater numbers. All the vessels known well before 1826 missed Whanganui-a-Tara, but it is hard to accept that all the many visitors to the area, where sealing, whaling or flax trading spanned Cook Strait, learned nothing at all of the existence of this handy safe harbour. Here, as elsewhere, there is no reliable alternative but to present what evidence we have of the near misses, and the probable visits, that preceded the known visits.

Bellingshausen, the leader of a Russian exploring expedition, took his two ships, Vostok and Mirny, into Queen Charlotte Sound for a week in June 1820. His officers wrote extensive reports on the Maori they met near Ship Cove, and the secured many Maori artifacts for Russian museums.

Recently intensive studies of these Russian records by Barratt, O'Regan and Simmonds, show very clearly that the Russians met Maori with very different lifestyles from the people Captain Cook and his men had met there fifty years before. The earlier Maori were mobile food gatherers without agriculture, passing between temporary villages in constant fear of attacking raids by their similarly itinerant neighbours. But the Maori the Russians met in 1820 were cultivators of potatoes, living a relatively settled life centred on defensive hill forts, or pa, but with their livelihoods based firmly on trade and agriculture, not war. The population had fallen between 1770 and 1820 from almost 500 to under 100. Many of the latter were exterminated by Te Rauparaha and his Te Atiawa allies by 1828, and more were killed by 1840. Consequently it is hardly surprising then that they, and their Wellington relatives, many of whom were also killed by Te Atiawa, failed to pass on any collective memory of the early sealers. That unrecorded sealers had been there nevertheless, is confirmed by the Russian observations that some garments were, or were modelled on, 'half coats with sleeves of flax sewn on', like those worn by sealers. Such are the shreds of history!

- Rhys Richards, The First Pakehas Around Wellington & Cook Strait 1803 to 1839, Porirua, 2020, p.27-8.

See also:
History: Wellington's early architecture, 10 March 2023
History: In memory of Captain Williams, 22 September 2019
History: Pre-1840 European visitors to Wellington, 21 February 2016

John Stuart Mill, New Zealand land speculator

John Stuart Mill's Involvement

The land where Pratt once squatted (and poor George Edwards met his death) has a curious additional history which I stumbled upon when researching the 1843 survey map of Riwaka. To my amazement 1 found the name of the famous English economist John Stuart Mill emblazoned across that particular large section labelled number 51. Clearly he was an absentee speculator who had no intention of ever settling in Riwaka. His substantial block of land simply lay idle, roads dug around it by resident landowners developing their own lots without any contribution from its owner. A demonstration, if one were needed, of just how bizarre the company scheme was.

Undeveloped it remained for well over a decade, until Mill finally had to face the consequences of gambling with land. When John Fowler (the father of Henry the seafarer) bought it in 1855, via Mills' attorney, Alfred Fell of Nelson, he paid 175 pounds for the 68 acres "being accommodation section No 51 bounded on the North, South and East by a Public Road and on the West by Sections Nos 50 and 56", with William Pratt witnessing John Fowler's signature. (These accommodation sections, nominally 50 acres, were generally increased in size in the wheeling and dealing when the company was winding up.) Attributing only its nominal 50 acre cost to it, 75 pounds, and compounding the interest on it, and a bit for expenses, it did not return J S Mill much more than 5% over the 14 years he held it. So much for the expected rewards of speculation!

And as an interpolation to the story, but pertinent at this point, the last of the 150 acre lots in Marlborough sold in the 1880s, and brought their owners only ten shillings per acre. This also serves as a reminder of the small pool of capitalist investors who ventured cash for the Nelson settlement. Bearing in mind that less than half of the scrip had sold, and some of that to holders of more than one allotment, the coincidence is not quite so remarkable. But it was remarkable to the author, to find these characters already in the story, connected in this way.

To complete the story, in 1857 John Fowler's son James opened the forerunner to the present Riwaka Hotel on the land. It was called The Travellers Rest, and his bush licence required him to offer two bedrooms and one sitting room, as well as operate a ferry boat over the Riwaka River.

Plan of Riwaka sections from Westrupp (2022)
with Mill's section 51 bottom right 

- Fred Westrupp, Blind Bay Hookers: The little ships of early Nelson, and colonial times, Nelson, 2022, p. 95-97.

See also:

History: A destroyer captain remembers Arctic convoy PQ17, 18 August 2023

History: Probably still not past its best before date, 24 September 2022

History: The lifeblood of a young colony, 12 June 2009