Letters from Wetville

The New Zealand Journal of History is online (bar the most recent two issues) and so I don't have to be a student or employee of a university to indulge my history desires.  Today I found this article: ‘I don’t care what it is going to cost, I am prepared to pay’ MEN’S VOICES AND ABORTION IN NEW ZEALAND, 1919–1937 which I found completely fascinating. I also sent off a draft of my review of Susan Upton's book on barmaids to an historian friend.  In and around ineffective attempts to get my daughter to eat her dinner or clean her room, I removed more rubbish to the dump, booked her birthday party venue, weeded more of the garden and sewed more of my hummingbird skirt .  I now have an almost complete skirt - it just needs hemming and a button and buttonhole.  It looks quite nice, very wintry but that will come quite soon enough.  But nothing presses my finished object buttons so much as a dress.  I need some more cardigans or jackets but the fab...

Today is 120 year since women gained the vote in New Zealand.  Twenty years ago I was an enthusiastic history student at a conference celebrating the centenary of women's suffrage in Wellington.  My strongest memory is not of the conference itself (though I remember enjoying that) but of the function at Government House where the first female governor general, Cath Tizard presided.  I was unsure of what I would do after I finished my honours year, just weeks away at the time, and made jokes about growing sheep to make wool and knit jerseys when very kind and well meaning people asked me. Tonight I didn't make it to the function celebrating 120 years of female suffrage in Kumara, fabulous though it sounded.  After a day at work, my two lovely children and I ended up stepping off the whirl of activities which usually settles on kung fu on a Thursday night.  I made them endless toast for their post-dinner hungry tummies and then we read Whacky Wednesday and The L...

Poll the Grogseller by Charles Thatcher c.1860   Big Poll the Grogseller gets up every day And her small rowdy tent sweeps out; She's turning in plenty of tin people say For she knows what she's about. Polly's good-looking, and Polly is young, And Polly's possessed of a smooth oily tongue; She's an innocent face and a good head of hair, And a lot of young fellows will often go there; And they keep dropping in handsome Polly to court, And she smiles and supplies them with brandy and port And the neighbours all say that the whole blessed day, She is grog-selling late and early. She is grog-selling late and early. Two sly-grog detectives have come up from town, And they both roam about in disguise; And several retailers of grog are done brown, And have reason to open their eyes. And have reason to open their eyes. Of her small rowdy crib they are soon on the scent; But Polly's prepared when they enter her tent; They call for some b...

Tonight I pulled out my archives box.   It doesn’t look like anything so formal as the descriptor “archives box” implies.   It’s a plastic box with no surviving lid that is full to overflowing with filing cards.   It’s the size and type which people sometimes used to use to organise their recipes.   The chaos is contained, just, by an ageing, plastic, tattered, pale green Pak’n’Save bag. This box has been with me since 1995.   Back then, it was my workhorse of an organising tool for the details of the lives of women involved in the liquor industry in Central Otago between 1861 and 1901.   After I submitted my thesis in 1997, I moved on and became a secondary school English teacher, first in Auckland and then in London.   It came with me.   I became a parent and the box didn’t suffer for the vomit and mess which babies seem to bring with them, because the box was tucked away in a bookcase, or under a desk, out of my mind and the baby’s gras...

This is what the trees look like in paradise.  First I spent the day reading and finishing Claire Tomalin's Mrs Jordan's Profession .  I loved it.  I found myself thinking about the biographer easily as much as Mrs Jordan.  Mrs Jordan was the mistress of William IV, and bore him ten children, living as his de facto partner for many years before he rudely got rid of her in response to the advice of his royal advisors.  She was also a superb and very famous actress, both before, during and after her relationship with William (the Duke of Clarence while they were living together).  She was born in 1761 and was on the stage from the age of 14.    She worked through all of her pregnancies (13 live children and still more miscarriages) and was back on the stage within a month of giving birth.  Tomalin, herself a very interesting woman, often draws explicit links between modern day parenting and Jordan's effective parenting and caring skills....

We went away.  We saw sun and sunshine and watched some seriously fantastic martial arts practitioners (Chan's Martial Arts - a form of kung fu) and I got hay fever and the kids played at Spencer Park and we had dinner with friends in Christchurch and told them our sad Greymouth stories and then felt ashamed as we learnt of life for so many Christchurch people in post-earthquake limbo hell.  I spent a morning on genealogy with a wonderful and talented relative and it was great to be away from usual life, to find ourselves never talking about work. Today was also wonderful.  I rearranged my work hours so I could be home today with the children as their school has a teacher only day.  We had two extra children for the day, two wonderful children from different families, both of whom will move to Auckland later this month.  I've known these two children since they were two and three years old.  The sound of children playing round the house, watching them run...

It's evening, so my head has been in 19th century Cornwall for the most part. No fabric, patterns or clothing purchases.  I spent the potential fabric purchase money on ordering death certificates. Things which have finished: drum lessons, league practices and games and a reduction in kung fu attendance.  The difference in smoothness of a week is noticeable already, and it is only Tuesday.  There is a five week gap between league finishing and swimming lessons starting.  I'm enjoying it.  This does remind me that I need to sort out a costume for the ballet competitions this holidays though. Ouch ouch ouch on the job cuts in provincial New Zealand already this week. Recent developments in my garden: first iceland poppy (orange) out.  Lovage has re-emerged.  Feverfew and white sage taking off.  One bay tree appears to be flowering.  It's never done that before.  There is a flowerhead emerging from the Chatham Island Forget Me Not a...

Good : the new Cornish project is still fascinating me.  Today I learnt about hedging practices and forced enclosures over the past 300 years and I found information about my great x 4 grandparents who married in 1769 and my great x 3 grandparents who married in 1804 and my great x 2 grandparents who married in 1837.  I want to learn about how my great grandmother learnt to read and write in the period before compulsory schooling and some more about Methodism in their part of Cornwall.  Bad : The housework fairy didn't visit over night. Great : the rugby league season has finished for the year!

In our town, it has never been easier to find a park (except perhaps on certain days in November 2010) and at the supermarket in what is normally the crazy peak just after work hour on pay day night, there were two lanes free.  By day, I do my normal things, like alternately harass and adore my kids (actually the adore bit is usually at night when they are asleep), organise food, go to work, visit Mary K, do loads of laundry, conspicuously not manage any other housekeeping and thus witness the slide into Septemberitis which happens after eight months of busyness each year, chat to my friends, discuss the state of the world with FH, and sneak out into the garden even just to admire the current sea of white and yellow on green formed by the daisies on the unmown lawn, the daffodils and the white and yellow irises and the rocket run to seed. By night I have a new hobby.  I've had this bug before, when I was 19.  My flatmate would warn people at parties: "Watch out! ...

My world is much improved.  I got sleep, I went to work on Saturday and wrapped up an outstanding (as in late) project, I visited the lovely 85 year old Mary K, and the scene was potentially set for me to spend Sunday cleaning the house. Ha ha.  I spent the day in the indolent pursuits of knitting myself a cardigan (30 rows, replete with fancy shaping!!!) and playing genealogist.  Yesterday Mary K showed me a photo of her grandmother (my great grandmother) looking very elegant, and another of her with her sister.  I had never heard of this sister, but it turned out that Honor Ann T. left Cornwall some time after Emma Jane T., my great grandmother.   She went to Australia first, where she had family, and then to New Zealand.  I've found some details relating to her first widowhood, her second marriage and her death.  I also found that both of these Cornish women lost sons in World War One.  Emma Jane T. was also married twice.  She...

I'm still admiring and thinking about Cheryl Buckley's article on sewing, "On the Margins", as per the thoughts I started last night .  Buckley talks about the skill in designing that the women she interviewed exhibited, with nary a pattern in sight.  She notes that women across different classes made clothes (England c.1920s - 1980s), but in that this activity was consistently marginalised. Before we pull out the standard line of women just not having enough time any more, what with paid work and running a household and all, I think it's worth noting that Buckley's women sewists were very busy women, women who put in long days in their paid jobs, raising families and assisting in family businesses, before sitting down of an evening and sewing at the machine which was on the corner of the kitchen table or squashed in the front room.  What is different is that clothes were much more expensive to buy then, relative to making them at home (particularly 1950s an...

Today's new experiment: making herbal teas for my sore throat and headcold using herbs from my garden.  I've planted them all on purpose in recent years, but until now I've only used the culinary herbs.  Today, mindful of the rising price of the various potions I buy to scare away lurgies, I opted for some diy, using and checking the knowledge I already have on the properties of specific herbs. I gathered some thyme, lemon verbena, bergamot bee balm, borage, sage and lemon balm and put it in a tea pot and covered it with recently boiled water.  The resultant brew was quite nice.  Maybe we will survive peak oil after all. I carried on a little with my kelly green scarf.  After I saw this in a recent Press article: I decided that I will make scarves (or at least this one green one) which I will eventually stop using as scarves and sew into a big blanket for our bed.  The picture above is of some yarn bombing which took the form of loads of pieces ...

Christopher, here is the rhubarb cake recipe .  Friday 20 April breakfast : poached eggs.  Favourite Handyman made them.  lunch : variously, across the four of us, salami, hummous, raw carrots, marmite or nutella sandwiches, le snak or snak logs, leftover potato cake from yesterday, salmon and vege wrap.  I prepared it all in advance, except for the salmon and vege wrap which I made fresh for myself when I got home. tea/dinner : turbot, rice and veges (broccoli, carrots, onions, cherry tomatoes).  Favourite Handyman cooked it.  He pan fried the turbot which he had coated in egg and then in a herb and crunched up cornflakes mixture.  It was beautiful.  We used el cheapo ordinary cornflakes, but I expect you could get equally good results with gluten free cornflakes.  I didn't eat all my rice as the children and I went to see Laksmi today.  My joints have been a bit inflamed and I'm not going to wait for them to get worse.  Laks...

Gary Younge has been my favourite Guardian journalist since I first moved to London and discovered the beauty of a liberal newspaper (it's pretty exciting when the Press , then the ODT , then most dismally, the Herald , were what passed for decent newspapers before then) which actually offered analysis of events. Today's Guardian Weekly contained this excellent piece by Younge. As a sample: But beyond Tottenham, those who took to the streets last week failed to advance any cause, embrace any ideal or articulate any agenda. This places them firmly in the context of a weak and ineffectual left that has failed to reinvent and reinvigorate itself in the face of a deep economic crisis. Younge has the analysis and I always love to read it. Those games of who you would like to invite for dinner? I used to fancy having Younge and Nigella Lawson for dinner. Not that I expect they'd have a lot in common with me or each other. I do wish though, that we had some better new...

Kale grows throughout winter. Kale survives storms. It survives thunder and lightning and hail and more rain than anyone who doesn't live near a rainforest can ever hope to experience. Which is why we are still eating it. Tonight: kale and garlic chopped and sauteed in a small amount of olive oil. Then I poured in quite a lot of frozen peas and a little water and put the lid on for the cooking to continue. Meanwhile I was cooking some fettucine because that is the only pasta I could find in the drawer. I added about a third of a container (the 250g kind) of cream cheese to the green veg mix because that's all we had left and blitzed it with my whizzy stick. Then I added the pasta into the sauce and stirred it all up and put finely grated cheddar cheese on top of each bowl of pasta. We ate it all and didn't have enough seconds to go round, so I'm treating that as a success. The addition of peas does definitely take it into the realm of babyfood consistency. Why ...

Six months ago an explosion trapped 29 men in the Pike Rive mine. They are still there. They are still missed. Pike River receivers are still focusing their energies on selling the business. Local men and women are still focusing their energies on getting their men out of the mountain. I offer this post up to those 29 men, their families, and to all the non-family people most affected by this gargantuan loss, especially the mines rescue teams.

"This is not a history of the faith. I have written a biography, but it is not conceived as though there is a single understanding of its subject and his significance." - Judith Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuk i, 1995, p.1. Last night I read online of Judith Binney's death. I read the tribute to Binney's important historical work from Reading the Maps which he wrote when she was in hospital over a year ago after being hit by a vehicle. The news transported me back to 1995. Following the romantic invitation of a handsome young man I'd met in Dunedin a few months earlier, I'd waited tables for the devil at the Christchurch casino in between tutoring and researching for my thesis and thrown the dosh at a ticket to Auckland. He was a nice fellow but the romance was short lived. But what remains in my memory most strongly is a visit into the Ureweras we made on that trip north. We travelled on the train to Mount Maunganui, ...

Steve Austin lives in Wetville. You may recall the six million dollar man but I can tell you that our local Steve is far more useful than that. At least I hope he comes up trumps again this week. Steve fixes electrical appliances and I have a broken washing machine for the zillionth time this century. I suppose it serves me right for washing curtains. Surely there are better things to do with my life. This year I am having some fruit progress in the garden. Other years have been pathetic fruitwise. Brighid and I have been scoffing strawberries and blackcurrants most days. The blackcurrants are so lovely ripened on the bush that no sugar is needed (useful when you eat them standing by the bush). One neighbour, who declined to talk to us for the first four years we lived here, today offered us his glut of lemons and said there would be grapes for us later in the season. I caressed my jaw gently so as not to be too obvious in rescuing it from its floorward descent and thanked him ...

No Fretful Sleepers (subtitled A life of Bill Pearson , by Paul Millar, AUP, 2010) was a surprise and much appreciated gift by a reader of 'Letters from Wetville' called Christopher who was the fortunate owner of two copies. This feature, combined with being on bed rest for a nasty chest infection, meant that I read the book entirely to the end, when I am prone to skipping bits of literary biographies. I am glad I did. There is something satisfying about this book which I would have missed had I foundered on the sections filled with who Pearson had tea with in London and who else wrote him a letter about the price of milk (oops, the price of publishing Coal Flat ). I knew nothing of Paul Millar before I began this book. In the photograph on the back dust jacket, he has his arms folded and his face, neither smiling nor frowning, seems deliberately closed to the reader. I didn't warm to his image, suspecting a writer given towards postmodern theory. If you are still reading ...

chest infection. too much pushing out the boat to get that one more essential thing done. but still. a few things my brain has still been thinking about. This post by Reading the Maps is one I keep going back to. Not because of the main content (though that is good) but because I am so intrigued by the comments section where someone called Giovanni talks about a 1970s survey of NZ freezing workers which found that half of them would like to be self employed. Class solidarity is not a first instinct for much of New Zealand and I find it intriguing. So how about this march in support of Dick Hubbard ? I get the strong sense of lots of ordinary working people out marching for their local millionaire, their scout leader who lived the dream of many and helped others along the way. No one I know marched for Dick Hubbard - I don't have strong links to Timaru - but this dream of independence, a sense that working for someone else is what you do when you have to but not what it really is al...