The MCAA concert

The concert on Saturday afternoon was great. The massed choir, which included a contingent from Wellington, was conducted by Guy Jansen, also a New Zealander, and one of the accompanists was Bev Glover, originally from New Plymouth and a great friend of Margie and her sister.

Also on the programme was the Band of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, (which is a suburb of Canberra) and an operatic soprano won sang like a lark.

I was most impressed by the precision of the choir's performance, their cohesion and above all their great dynamic range. 400 voices canbe expected to belt out a huge sound on the fortissimos, which they did, but in contrast they were able to produce a very moving pianissimo in some of the passages of, for example "My lord, what a morning" or "the Anvil Chorus" from Il Trovatore.

When they were joined by the full band and the 1300-strong audience, in the Australian National Anthem or the finale, Cwm Rhondda, the rafters shook mightily!

The concert was held in the stadium of the Australian Institute of Sport, the only venue large enough.

 

Read more at http://www.malechoirsassociation.org.au/read/388/let-all-men-sing-they-did.html

 

Sunday afternoon and again this morning we have been getting to know two people who may be our distant cousins, April Gaze and her brother Ian. They hail originally from Auckland, but have both lived in Canberra for some years. It will be our United project in the next months to try to establish any links. Both families emigrated from London between 1850 and 1900. It was great getting to know them; we have lots in common.

This morning April took us to the National War Memorial, a most impressive memorial and museum.

Here it is in the distance, seen from the Parliament House side of the lake.

An exciting city

This weekend we have been in Canberra, which is unlike any other city we have visited.

Yesterday we did the "hop on hop off" bus tour of the important sights, places like the parliament, the war memorial and the national museum. We didn't stop at any, we just took photos.

In the afternoon we went to a concert of the men's choir association of Australia. Members from over a dozen choirs from all over the country made up the 400-voice chorale. And they were brilliant!

Family History 4.39

Robinson story

adapted from Robinsons of Rotherhithe by Joanne Robinson

The Morgan Family

It was during this period also that William was involved as a founder of the Baptist Church, helping to compile its constitution and regulations. He would walk to Onehunga to take services and took on the job of Superintendent of the Baptist Sunday School, when it opened in March 1858.

 

His work as a printer, particularly at night, did not allow any improvement in his eyesight and he speculated on the idea of becoming a farmer. Joshua's plans must have helped and he joined in the move to Pukekohe East, again in 1858. The family stayed in Freemans Bay till the whare was built and the town house kept them going with the rent until the farm started producing.

 

When the war came and the family moved back to Auckland in 1863, William stayed on in Drury as War Correspondent for the Southern Cross. But by 1865 he was back setting type for the paper again.

 

When they returned to a new wooden house at Pukekohe East, William was appointed teacher of the school there. However the government stopped teachers' pay in  1867 and he had to give up and turn to other work.

 

In 1870 Jane became ill and died. William remarried later in the year. He eventually died in 1903.

 

Joshua Morgan

Joshua is the most famous of the next generation of Morgans.

 

He was married to Annie Dent in 1888 and in 1892 they had a daughter, Edith Leila.

 

Joshua was a surveyor, and a true pioneer, venturing into bush-clad areas where no white man had been and in some cases no Maori either, paving the way for future roads to remote areas. He could speak and write Maori and his journal is now in the Alexander Turnbull Library.

 

He was working as a Government Surveyor in 1893, with a party engaged in pegging out the route between Taumarunui and New Plymouth through the dense bush of the Ohura and Tangarakau Gorges. According to his diary on 10th January 'he was still suffering from influenza' and on the 1st February 'had wricked his back'. Next day he had 'to lie down all morning with a pain between his shoulders'. On 4 February he was 'still suffering from a pain in the back of the neck.'

 

There was just one entry on 5 February: 'Stayed in camp all day'. The last entry, 24 February,, 'the wind NE showery. Blowing hard. The men split about 90 pegs.' The following day Joshua was desperately ill. Urgent medical care was needed, but he could not be moved. Fred Willison, one of the party, set off for help, walking in record time through dense bush twenty miles along Maori tracks and crossing swollen rivers, then by horseback to Waitara. He took a doctor back tom Tongaporutu and pushed on to the bush camp, only to find that Joshua had died.

 

His mates buried him on the hillside above the river a few metres from where the highway now runs. His grave and the memorial have become a landmark in the Tangarakau Gorge and the Automobile Association have erected a sign near the river bridge carrying the details of his history and death.

 

Annie and her daughter were waiting in Kaimata; they later moved to Murrays Bay, and when she died her ashes were placed on Joshua's grave sixty years after his death.

 

My sketch of the grave site. I have visited it several times. If you are travelling along the "Forgotten Highway" between Stratford and Taumarunui it is very close to the road at the Tangarakau River Bridge.

 

Sketching Again

 

 

 

From Life

 

This time I managed to do a few sketches "on site". This one is done outside the Post Office in New Plymouth looking across the street to the buildings, including an Art Deco one on the corner of Devon Street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During our week at Hurworth Cottage for the Garden Festival, I took advantage of the odd lull in visitors to sketch the cottage in its garden and bush setting as it was over the weekend.

 

 

A few years ago we acquired a lovely set of table mats with original sketches of Paris cafes on them. Here is my attempt at one of them. The cafe's name would be, in English, something like "Cherry Ripe".

 

 

 

 

 

And finally another of those travel photos, this time of afternoon tea at a London café on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, a few steps from where our ancestors lived on the edge of Bloomsbury near St Giles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doing your bit for the real world

Community matters

Not History this time

Yesterday we had breakfast at church. Not just any church, but the Taranaki Cathedral.

The Cathedral people are serving breakfast on Tuesday mornings. We normally have Spencer on Tuesday mornings, so the three of us dropped in at the Cathedral and had breakfast there. They are doing it to raise money, to help Medecins sans Frontieres, one of the voluntary organisations sending medical aid to the West African countries affected by Ebola.

Margaret had pancakes with maple syrup, Spencer and I had porridge. Spencer had orange juice, Margaret and I had coffee.

I felt a bit hypocritical, sitting there in comfort, with well-fed people all around me, all enjoying rich food while we glowed in the self-satisfaction of "doing something" about the Ebola tragedy.

Still, in the present state of the world, we can do nothing else that may help. Thank goodness someone is at least making an effort to raise some funds to send to help!

BUT, and I have some buts, this is only a drop in the bucket. As we all know there are many other helping projects that need to be planned, put into operation and supported.

I am a passionate believer in democracy, and I am increasingly worried about the numbers of important jobs around our community and around our world that are being left to the voluntary organisations and their whimsical efforts.

The kind of democracy I believe in means that some jobs, the essential ones, like seeing that children do not die of diseases like Ebola, are the responsibility of us all, not just the soft-hearted or the conscience-stricken affluent like us. 

That means that to say we really live in a democratic nation or world, everyone must contribute through a government system that ensures that everyone pays a fair share of tax. If not, our elections may be democratic but our society does not live in a democratic way.

If people can opt out of helping the dying and the ill, if people can neglect their starving and homeless neighbours, if people can renege on "it takes a whole village to raise a child", their democracy is a sham. Bob Geldof made a similar point in his TV interview yesterday.

If you want to see how this plays out on a world scale, plug yourself in to the UN Development Programme that Helen Clark runs, at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home.html

Yesterday I wrote about Hurworth Cottage and the need for volunteers there. I have set up a Facebook Group to start people thinking about the possibility they might like to help. If this is you, then how about joining the group, and we will contact you next year with more details.

Doing your bit for history

Taranaki Garden Festival 2014

Hurworth Cottage this week

One of the fun activities we occasionally get mixed up with is helping at Hurworth Cottage.

This is a Historic Places property a few kilometres south of New Plymouth. The cottage, built in 1856, is set in a small clump of bush and garden which appears out of a wide expanse of Taranaki farmland. Cows graze contentedly on all sides, and one can catch a distant glimpse of sea and blue horizon on most sunny days.

Like most Historic Places properties, there is never enough cash to do the job properly, so we are working with shoe-string resources when we volunteer to help with the Garden Festival programme at this time of the year.

The garden, which is being restored to something resembling a nineteenth-century cottage garden, is done by an enthusiastic gardener paid for about 'half an hour' a week, whose wife was formerly the "Property Host". The operation is now managed by a Property Host on about the same rate. Another guy mows the lawns when necessary.

There are a handful of volunteers who help at any working-bee, mainly weeding, two or three times a year, and man the operation with the Property Host during the week-long Festival, when visitors from far and wide pour through the gates rain or shine.

Volunteers help with three main jobs: welcoming and informing visitors, and answering their questions, operating a basic café under a gazebo, and selling merchandise from the display tables on the verandah.

Welcoming visitors involves helping them find their way around, explaining the bare bones of the history of the place, and sorting change and things like that.

The refreshment tent has home-made cakes and slices, cool drinks and tea and coffee. Volunteers need to keep the water boiled, pour the drinks and sell the eats.

The display tables have a few locally home-made lines like preserves, ceramics, lavender products, and so on, as well as a few higher priced items from further afield marketed by the Trust.

The people who visit are touring a selection of outstanding gardens, chosen for their quality. So many of them are more interested in the vintage plants such as the roses rather than in the history of the cottage and its original owners. Others, however, have special interests in history or the local ramifications of the story of the property.

Reactions vary. Most folks admire the cottage and its setting, and all are impressed with the garden and its development. The story of Harry Atkinson and his family, however, raises some different comments. Some who have really learned about the events of the 1860s and the decades following find attitudes of those days unpalatable, and you can understand that.

Many settlers who had emigrated from the United Kingdom saw Maori as uncivilised, and less worthy than themselves. Some who got to know Maori neighbours well realised that human beings are much the same everywhere. But the others were keen to see the race die out and the land fall into the hands of the better-qualified Europeans. It is this attitude that is condemned by the thoughtful visitors, as it was by the more aware of the nineteenth century arrivals.

So there are plenty of interesting discussions to be had and people to meet. We hope the Historic Places administration will be able to install a kitchen to enable us to run the café more efficiently.

And that more volunteers will be interested in joining our team.

Rush hour at Hurworth during the Garden Festival

 

Family History 4.38

Robinson story

From Robinsons of Rotherhithe by Joanne Robinson

 

 

The Morgan Connection

It must have seemed an exciting adventure for Jane as an eight year old to leave her home and sail with her parents, brother and two sisters to the other side of the world. Jane was born in the same area of London as her father, Paradise Street in Rotherhithe, on the 8th of December 1834, and probably had some form of schooling. Although it was still not common for girls to receive instruction in anything other than domestic duties, Joshua valued education and all of his children were literate.

 

As she grew older Jane would have been needed to help with the cooking, cleaning and the care of the little ones, especially when her mother was engaged in extra work at Government House. Jane would have already gained an appreciation of the work and hardship of pioneer life when she met her husband to be, William Morgan.

 

William Morgan had only been in the country seven months when he married Jane, at St Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Auckland on the 27th of December 1853, she at the age of nineteen and he twenty-seven.

 

William came originally from Leeds in Yorkshire, being born on the 3rd of December 1826, with his adult occupation being that of compositor (type-setter in a printing works). He set sail for the Victorian goldfields in June 1852 on the Tippo Saib, not with any ideas of instant wealth, but on doctor's orders to improve his general state of health. Neither his health nor his finances improved there and in disgust after eight months he sailed to Auckland on the William Woolley arriving on the 23rd of May 1853 with the express idea of catching a ship back to England.

 

We do not know why he elected to stay in New Zealand. Maybe he did not have the funds to pay for a fare back to the homeland immediately. He found employment as a schoolmaster and later on the local press, first with the New Zealander and then the Southern Cross (later the New Zealand Herald).

 

William would have met his future wife at Church. Although the Baptists worshipped with the Presbyterians, as they had no church of their own at this stage, they probably tended to congregate together socially. This would have been the only way for young ladies to meet eligible young gentlemen. Joshua no doubt thought that a young, industrious, teetotal Baptist would make a suitable husband for his eldest daughter and as she was a minor, his approval was required.

 

They made their home in Wellesley Street in Freemans Bay. William described it as 'a rum-looking estate'. During the first five years of their marriage, William worked for the Southern Cross as a compositor. Four children were born to them during these years: Thomas (1854), Nellie (1856), Joshua (1857) and Eliza (1859).

 

As William himself said in his journal, Jane was kept busy 'with gowns to make , and baby's frocks, and shirts, and napkins to make and many other domestic affairs to attend to.' He initially seems to have had an unrealistic view of marriage as he says:

 

I had notions before I was married - how I would read to my wife and talk to her - and how she would read and talk to me - how I would endeavour to instruct her in matters in which I was conversant and she was not - how we would take evening strolls together and attend evening meetings. But I have found most of these things knocked on the head. Not that we are unhappy or discontented. The reverse. But the thing is there is no time for these things.

 

(In 1963, William's Journal was published by the Auckland City Council Libraries Department, edited by N M Morris, under the title of The Journal of William Morgan.)