Q1: When did you first come across this remarkable map, with its detailed drawings of verandahs, sheds, street lights, street levels, construction materials and so much more?
I somehow found a copy of a couple of sheets showing part of the central city while I was at university, and I wrote a paper about them. At that time I think I mistakenly thought they were the only fragments left, but actually the full set of map sheets is safely stored at Wellington City Council Archives, as are later iterations of the maps.
But more recently, in my work writing about heritage buildings and sites in Wellington, I have used the maps all the time, as they reflect the exact layout of the city and its buildings at a particular date. And not just me — the map is used by the city’s archaeologists, architects, historians and heritage professionals every day. They are particularly useful as the council now provides the map as a ‘overlay’ over modern satellite images of the city, as part of their suite of GIS maps. And the later versions of the map made over the decades mean that you can track change in the city over those decades — the perfect tool for any historian!
Q2: Was it the work of an obsessive, or did it simply deliver what Wellington City Council needed to make planning and infrastructure decisions in the 1890s?
I think probably the former. It was drawn by Thomas Ward, an engineer and surveyor, on behalf the city council. The map was made up of 88 sheets, each one of which is roughly A1 in size. If it was all laid out on the floor (which I am sure it never has been) in accordance with the city’s geography, it would be roughly the size of my house. What Ward originally offered to do for the council was much simpler than what he ended up doing. It was his idea to add every building and its footprint, to chart the material of the walls and roof every building was made of, to draw every verandah and bay window, every street light and fire hydrant. It would definitely have been very useful for the council, but I’m not sure they needed that level of detail. But it only took him two and half years, which I hope when people will remember when they see the maps and see what he did — it really is remarkable.
Q3: The lives of Wellingtonians lie in its details: the wealthy up in Thorndon and the often benighted poor on Te Aro flat. It was a pretty rough and tumble place, with plenty of crime, prejudice, larrikinism and filth. But it was also coming into its prime. How so?
Ah yes, there was plenty of larrikinism and filth, that’s for sure. The city’s population increased massively in the 1890s, way more than any other city in the country, and much more than even the best planned city could cope with — and Wellington certainly wasn’t that. But in this period, the city was the capital, and housed Parliament and the home of the governor, the Supreme Court and the headquarters of all the banks and insurance companies, and had the busiest wharf in the country by far, which supported a huge number of importing and exporting companies and other businesses. It was a very busy place. It was gradually building new parks, there were people planting up the Town Belt, trying to beautify the city and to build sports fields, and there were some great entertainment venues. The city was also steadily replacing its wooden buildings with brick and masonry buildings along its main shopping streets in this era, so it was slowly losing its ‘wild west’ feeling from its early colonial days. I was really pleased to find great stories of people enjoying the cultural life of the city.
Something that was really striking to me was the vibrant part in the city that women held. In the book you will find heaps of women running businesses and working in factories, being artists, leading political discussions, pushing politicians to do better, provided the social glue in neighbourhoods, spending time shopping at Kirks and going on hunting parties, as well as plenty of criminal women (some of them, at least, seemingly having a good time) and women just fighting to get by. Any view of Victorian women locked away in their homes doing nothing will hopefully be dispelled. I also really enjoyed charting the different cultural groups rubbing alongside each other — it was a much more culturally vibrant place than your idea of a Victorian colonial city might be.
Q4: There seem to have been a legion of concerned citizens intent on improving the lot of the downtrodden or those they thought had taken the wrong path. Can you tell us about those?
I spent so much time getting to know these people, but some of them certainly provided me with some conflicting feelings. There were a small but powerful group of wealthy women, for example, who funded a number of charitable works around the city. These wealthy women weren’t just figureheads, they really did actively run the day-to-day work of some of these charitable efforts. But the power this charity gave wealthy individuals, and the judgement they meted out on the people they helped, or didn’t help, was pretty unpleasant at times. Ideas of locking up children and young women until they were taught to be humble and obedient were pretty common, as was refusing to help those who were deemed to be ‘undeserving’. The book was certainly a testament to the need for a state-funded safety net!
Other groups that helped huge numbers of people were groups like the Salvation Army. Their work with the poverty-stricken comes up all the time in the book, as did the work of a number of other churches. This was the value of telling the story via the maps, as it could show the footprint of the churches and their work, on the city streets.
Q5: Many were genuine humanitarians, outstandingly generous individuals. Can you tell us about a couple of them?
I was particularly struck by William Hort Levin. He and his wife Amy FitzGerald were extraordinarily wealthy and William was the leading contributor to every single major charity in Wellington, and his contributions to the city can be seen across the landscape of the city and in the maps, including the city’s first public library. William died at the age of only 48. The retelling of his burial at the Bolton Street Cemetery, attended by thousands of Wellingtonians, was very affecting.
Rabbi Herman van Staveren was another who was involved in helping to run every charitable organisation in the city, including the charitable aid board, the hospital and the Benevolent Institution, as well as caring for and teaching his congregation at the synagogue, and his 13 children. He was a striking presence in the city, tall and well-dressed with an impressive beard, and he was well-loved among the people of Wellington for his hard work of their behalf.
Q6: The city was in many ways a chaotic place. Tell us about the strange little private streets.
There were lots of tiny and narrow private streets and rights-of-way all over the city that had been built illegally by developers, who took their profit and then walked away. The council was not legally able to care for these private streets and their condition got worse and worse. They were filled with tiny little slum houses, many very overcrowded. The situation infuriated the Premier Richard Seddon, who pressured the council to do something about these slums. That’s the problem with being the capital city — the politicians were in the city for months at the time, watching how the city was being run. The council had various schemes to tidy up some of these streets, including rapidly pulling down insanitary buildings, but these were the exceptions – most of these slum streets in the city remained throughout the time period covered by the book.
I particularly liked the letter to the editor from someone who lived in one of these streets complaining about the Salvation Army band turning up in his street every Sunday, and making a noise that bounced off the walls of his tiny cramped street — ‘the drumming, shouting, and howling (I can’t call it singing) is something fearful to listen to’ he wrote. Go and bother the grand people living up on the Terrace, he suggested — the wealthy needed to be ‘saved’ more than the poor.
Q7: And the drainage and sanitation! Appalling! What was going on here?
The area of Te Aro Flat, where thousands of people lived and worked, was particular filthy as the city had built no drainage system except for drains going directly into the harbour. There were plenty of stories and photos of children playing in the harbour next to the drain outlets — horrible. But even worse, since the area of Te Aro was virtually flat the land actually did not drain at all, leaving damp backyards full of sewage and water. As a result, in the 1890s there was a terrible typhoid epidemic killing adults and children, and the city was afflicted by many other infectious diseases. The book tells the story of the scientific study that finally proved that building a drainage system was necessary. That finally fixed the problem, although there were also plenty of stories of landlords who refused to connect their houses to the new drainage system, and so cleaning up the city took a lot longer than it should have.
Q8: There are so many sad stories. Can you choose just one?
One of the many hotels shown in the map was Clyde Quay Hotel, on the corner of Clyde Quay and Oriental Parade, close to where the central fire station is today. In 1900 the hotel was the venue for the inquest into the death of Winnie Luke, an unmarried 17 year old who died after an abortion given to her by herbalist Mary Henderson when she was four months pregnant. Two weeks after Mary performed some sort of operation, Winnie had died of sepsis. The details of her internal injuries were given in horrifying detail in the newspapers. After Mary was arrested, she told the police that she assisted pregnant women fairly regularly. She said girls would often arrive at her shop ‘for relief’ with substances they had acquired from chemists. The jury severely censured Winnie’s grieving mother for taking the girl to Mary and concluded that a murder charge against her was necessary, and the case was moved to the Supreme Court.
With very limited exceptions when a woman’s life was in danger, it was illegal to attempt to cause a miscarriage in New Zealand until the 1970s. Women had fairly easy access to medicines that ended unwanted pregnancies, but if this failed some desperate women attempted to abort their own pregnancies, or to obtain an extremely dangerous backstreet abortion. During Mary Henderson’s murder trial in the Supreme Court a number of the city’s top medical men gave evidence about the prevalence of abortion in Wellington, and the number of deaths and severe illness they had observed as a result.
Winnie’s mother told the court that Mary Henderson had always treated her daughter with kindness, and that she had just been trying to help. Mary’s lawyer reminded the court that although she stood in the dock alone, ‘Without willing individuals, there would not be any crime of this kind. Without women who sought and pleaded for relief from what the world called shame, such crimes would not be committed’. (No mention of the men who had got poor Winnie and girls like her pregnant in the first place). The jury convicted Henderson of manslaughter, rather than murder, ‘with a recommendation of mercy’. The Chief Justice, Robert Stout, gave her a sentence of seven years’ hard labour. So in terms of sad stories — this story is tragic for Winnie and her grieving mother, and also for Mary.
Q9: And so many odd events, often of a sporting nature. Can you describe a couple of those?
Wellingtonians loved a boisterous parade, a large concert and other big entertainments. There was nothing of the ‘stuffy Victorian’ in many of these events. I use one of my favourites in the introduction: the craze for tug-of-war competitions in 1892. Match-ups such as the Welsh residents of Wellington versus the Chinese residents, Māori versus English and the ‘Colonials’ (ie the New Zealand-born residents of the city) versus the Irish occurred over a series of nights. Rowdy crowds of as many as 1500, both men and women, gathered to watch the teams compete in three of the largest public spaces in the city — the skating rink on Ingrestre Street (now Vivian Street), the Opera House on Manners Street and the Theatre Royal on Johnston Street. If the teams were well-matched the ‘pulls’ could last up to an hour. The teams wore appropriate colours and uniforms (the Scots were embarrassed that they had turned up the first night in normal clothes, but having seen the other teams, turned up to the subsequent night’s competition resplendent in kilts and sashes).
As on so many Wellington occasions, entertainment was provided by the Garrison Brass Band, which played an appropriate piece of music as each team arrived on stage. One of the most raucous matches in this series was the Scots versus the Irish; a policeman had to keep the excited crowd back. At this event, we also get to meet one of the recurring characters in the book, James Doyle, captain of the Irish team, who worked as the city council’s ‘inspector of nuisances’, inspecting filthy drains, insanitary homes and leaking crypts in the cemetery.
The Basin Reserve and Newtown Park were also the venue for lots of large events, including a huge Māori carnival organised by Taare Rakatauhake (Charles) Parata and his wife Katherine Te Rongokahira, who lived in Wellington at the time, to raise funds for the South African War in 1900. Hundreds of visitors arrived in the city, mostly from Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Toa and Ngāti Kauwhata, including two brass bands, set up camp at the Basin and organised events and displays. Thousands of Wellingtonians attended; on one evening, the Basin was lit up with an electric spotlight and a crowd of 10,000 watched a massive haka demonstration and staging of some of the battles of the war.
Q10: The book reads a little like a love letter to a lost city. Would you agree?
At the time the maps were drawn, almost every ‘Wellingtonian’, their schools, churches, businesses and factories, lived crowded within the boundaries of the Town Belt, as there was very limited public transport. The city changed almost immediately after the maps were drawn because electric trams were added to the city soon after. Likewise, the motor car just arrived in the city at the end of the period. The city had to be altered to make space for these innovations, changing its layout, and the suburban areas of the city really took off, spreading the population outwards.
I spent so much time studying old photographs and maps from this period — so much time! — that I now have two cities in my head, the modern one and an overlay of the older (black and white) one. Now, although there have been heaps of changes in the city since the 1890s, I think I’d be pretty good at navigating my way around. I am going to miss inhabiting that city now that I have finished writing.
