Abraham Wells, Lodge Keeper. The house stood on Wensley Road, on site of R. B. Wilkes House in the 1900's. A cob cottage with a much repaired shingle roof which could be wood or slate. The walls have been constructed from mud or cob, with wooden construction for the attic. Around the cottage there are fruit trees and berry bushes and a garden with cabbages. There are large trees in the background and around the edges of the cottage. Abraham is holding a long gun. He is accompanied by a dog.
Exactly as I remember the coracle the first time I saw it, at age 17, before it was displayed behind glass. It felt more real then than it does now - perfectly protected, yet somehow remote. Back then it was so immediate you could almost touch it, not that I did....
From 'House of Treasures - Canterbury Museum 150th Anniversary'
Did I ever show you this?… Prompted by your childhood remembrances through smell… I must have done this when I was fifteen yet the wonderful leathery smell lingers even now.
So many memories are conjured up just in this one little old painting…. The corner where my saddle hangs is in my Grandmother’s ‘Potting Shed’. In later years at the farm, she had a pottery wheel there… and big sacks of clay from which I made numerous horses!
But before that this was known as the ‘Food shed’, because besides my saddle and bridle, there were sacks of wheat, and mash for the chooks. That was where the wonderful ‘Dipper’ sat- nestled into the grains of wheat… filled with their breakfast every day , then brought back full of fresh laid eggs.
Click to enlarge
Remember that dipper? I think you showed me a photo you had found… And of course it is that very same dipper that features in the final pages of Bantam and the Soldier.
I loved it that my father chose this, my ’schoolgirl' painting to hang in his study after they left the farm.
And another precious memory is of my Grandmother… I saw her almost every day for all those seventeen years of my childhood… And those memories are of her in an active life- gardening, feeding chooks, cooking meals, preserving plums, preserving copper beech leaves from the big tree in her garden.. hatching ducklings, picking lemons - and -getting her hair tangled in the lemon tree !
Picking tiny bunches of fragrant violets that grew so profusely under that lemon tree…. Reading aloud to us when we were very young- we could hardly wait for the next chapter of Wind in the Willows! Remembrances to savour.
Tourist souvenir oyster shell
Click to enlarge all images
Images from Te Papa
You know my Gt Gt Aunt Georgie Anderson came to NZ to visit her brothers in Whanganui. She was in her twenties I think… And she painted and sketched the Pink and White terraces!
Alas, these paintings were taken from her at the time. The very next year Mt Tarawera erupted. Incredible to think of it! She wrote a wonderful record of her visit... which I have.
There is a sense in which all topographical paintings document lost places. Charles Blomfield’s trademark Pink and White Terraces paintings are a vivid case in point - records of a touristic mecca destroyed in the Tarawera eruption of 1886. Tourism was the context for Blomfield’s tireless production line, and critical disparagement was heard long before the eruption itself.
This last week has been a bit overwhelming. Several unexpected things happened...
I'll tell you the good things; Anthony Ritchie, (notable Composer) has a CD being made of his work - a new Symphony on the theme of childhood - and he asked for one of my images for its cover.
He’s chosen the one from the poetry anthology - I’ll send it to you...
Roger Belton, Managing Director of Southern Clams Ltd. is shown in a boat named Tuangi that flies a skull and crossbones flag and is holding a handful of little-neck clams known locally as cockles.
The cartoon refers to Roger's attempt to gain a permit that could allow Dunedin to become the clam capital of New Zealand. The permit is likely to be superseded by a mataitai proposal, which would effectively prevent any commercial fishing operation in the Otago Harbour.
Cartoon by Murray Webb archived in National Library, Wellington
