Lake Hāwea researcher Kathryn Bennie talks with Wānaka Sun editor Marjorie Cook about her long labour of love, investigating the people buried in a 150-year-old pioneer cemetery at Jackson Bay, South Westland.
The pioneers of Jackson Bay lived a gruelling life by the sea, in a remote corner (and it is still a remote corner) of Southern New Zealand.
The place was not and is still not for wusses, although comforts have improved out of sight since the first European pioneers landed there in 1875.
Many of the settlers, from Poland, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, Scandinavia and other places, had left hostile homelands looking for a better life.
Their dreams and aspirations turned into nightmares.
They would have had no idea they would be dropped far from civilisation and would need to contend with the most atrocious of rainforest environments. They quickly discovered the government of the time was not following through on promises of payment and had pretty much abandoned them to their own devices.
Poverty stricken and ill-equipped for the task of building a settlement in a swamp, some resorted to dressing in sugar bags, starvation was common, and healthcare did not exist.
Settlers drowned in the sea and rivers, died at birth or giving birth, or were felled by all manner of disasters and illnesses.
Survival depended not just on each individual’s physical and mental strengths, but their ability to understand multiple languages and cultural differences so they could communicate.
Many moved away to other settlements, others were buried in the bush, beside beaches, on in the pioneer cemetery near the Arawhata River.
Just a few hardy survivors remained.
One hundred and fifty years later, who lies in Jackson Bay’s graves and what were their stories?
About 14 years ago, Kathryn Bennie, a Jackson Bay holiday house owner and former Southland Department of Conservation staff member, became bugged by the absence of headstones on some of the graves and decided to investigate.
She had previously worked on the Waikaia Forest gold mining history for Doc and that gave her the incentive to dig deeper.
"We bought a place in Jackson Bay a while back and I was always drawn to the Arawhata Pioneer Cemetery and the stories of hardship and stamina that went with those brave people that came to Jackson Bay as part of the government-driven Special Settlement.
She laughs. "I became a fox terrier with a bone".
"I needed to find out who was there so I have spent the last decade or more researching.
"No official cemetery records had survived following post office fires."
"While researching, it became obvious I needed to actually go back to the start and identify everyone that was in Jackson Bay at that time.
"This has opened a whole can of worms. Finding accurate information that has survived the past 150 years has been a huge challenge."
She talked to Haast locals and spent a lot of time reading books and newspaper archives and following leads at the Hocken Library while going through radiation therapy in Dunedin for breast cancer.Facebook sites, such as West Coast Recollect, also provided leads to chase down.
"It was like opening a spaghetti tin," she recalled.
"But I now have family files on each of the settler families as a lovely big product of my initial plan of researching the settlement deaths," she said.
"Knowledge is wasted unless it is shared. I want to make everything available to everyone who wants it."
While she has not been able to gather every last detail for all the pioneer burials, the names of the men, women and children she has identified will be recorded on a plaque to be unveiled during the cemetery’s 150th celebrations on January 18, 2025.
She believes there are many more people buried there — including babies and young children mentioned in her conversations with descendants of the original families, who still live at Haast today.
Among those said to be buried there is James Teer, a Scotsman who survived the wreck of the General Grant in the Auckland Islands in 1866 and led the small group of 15 survivors for 18 months before they were rescued. After that, he worked on the West Coast until he died in 1887.
Mrs Bennie said a second plaque would record the names of those who had beachside burials at Jackson Bay, although only one grave, for Charles Robinson, is visible.
Charles, a child, was buried in the huge landslip at Jackson Bay in 1896.
He was the Royal Hotel publican’s son and descendants of that family will be taking part in the sesquicentennial celebrations in January.
