From Heritage New Zealand, Summer 2008

by Peter Wells

It may not be a classic necropolis, but this cemetery has a typically urban, representative population, and its own neighbourhoods

Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself from time to time at a very strange address. This is the Napier Hill Cemetery, situated on the summit of Napier Hill, just a saunter away from where the 65th Regiment’s military fort was positioned in 1858.

I’ve been lurking there not for any nefarious reason. I’ve often been accompanied by Gail Pope, the archivist of the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum. What we’ve been doing is chronicling the stories associated with this very old graveyard (1855-1917). We’ve actually tried to visit every grave in the cemetery. This includes the obvious grandees, provincial superintendent Sir Donald McLean (a towering Celtic cross) and William Colenso (a more modest Celtic cross).

But we’ve also paused before the expensive tombs of the well-to-do draper, an enigmatic baronet’s wife buried in seeming obscurity, and the really deliciously intriguing tombstones, with stories engraved on them, calling out to be told. These might be “killed accidentally by a train” or “braved noxious chemical vapours”. The number of drownings, as in any colonial graveyard, is astonishing. It tends to point to how the sea was the most-used form of transport for a long time, especially for a coastal town like Napier. Perhaps it also points to the surprising fact that not many colonists could swim.

Inscriptions can be very poignant. A lad, John Vautier, drowned in February 1880, aged 17. He has his age engraved on his tombstone, down to the number of days (17 years, nine months and 28 days). Gail, an ace researcher, found reports of how the entire town shut down for his funeral as a massive cortege made its way up the steep hill to the cemetery. Vautier’s tombstone is out of all proportion to the slimness of his age. It’s as if his grief-stricken parents wanted to monumentalise their sense of loss. Today, it sits green with moss, unvisited, I would say, just one of the number of stories waiting to be told.

One of the things we’ve been working towards is putting on an exhibition at the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum about these wonderful stories. But how exactly do you get a contemporary audience interested in something as dark as death, as static as tombstones, as forgotten as colonial graveyards? This was our challenge.

We were fortunate in that the Dunedin City Council and Southern Heritage Trust had preceded us in creating well-researched guide pamphlets to their extensive cemetery. Broken pithily down into titles such as the “Angel Walk”, “Gentlemen of Fortune”, “Tragedy Trail”, “Anzacs at Gallipoli”, “Nine Portraits” and “Maids, Mistresses and Murderesses”, it gave us a model of how to produce a guide that people could pick up and take with them to the cemetery. The fact is our history as Pakeha is literally buried in these cemeteries. If you know how to “read” the encrypted language on the tombs, you get a very good idea of the life some of our ancestors lived.

To start with, there is the fascinating language of symbol. Victorians, who lived so closely with death, could read these symbols as easily as we read cellphone symbols. For example, a broken pillar meant a life that had not had its normal span. The laurel pointed to achievement, rose to love, primrose to melancholy.

Visiting each tombstone, Gail and I became aware of the social nuances of death. The wealthy wish to have the best real estate, with prominent positions, well to the fore. But they also want to monumentalise their own importance. Vast columns, a lot of engraving, encaustic tiles. An angel, eyes swept heavenwards. There are a lot of family plots in Napier’s graveyard. One thing that interested me was the poignant ones that had a plot as large as a king-sized bed. Yet within each lay a single person, often a woman or a child. I pondered this and came to the conclusion that, in the 19th century, colonists as immigrants were a highly mobile workforce. Where the work was, they went. Maybe they thought they would spend all their lives in Napier and bought the plot. But then, in the seemingly never-ending series of depressions in New Zealand in the 1880s and 1890s, a family lacking work had only one option: to up sticks, move on. People probably always thought they’d get back. But life is full of turns and blank walls. So many people didn’t get back, and their “loved one” lies buried alone in a vast family plot.

I came to another conclusion or understanding while we worked in the cemetery. So many of the colonists’ gravestones are so very specific about where they came from originally. It wasn’t generic, like “England” or “Ireland”, it was “Ballynonoana, Tipperary” or “Kintail, Ross-shire, Scotland”. I pondered this, and realised the simple truth that nearly everyone in the Napier Cemetery was, in fact, an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. They had all the migrant’s haunted sense of the world left behind, a world most of them obviously never got back to. Yet, when they died, they were so very specific about their origins. It was as if they wanted to mark a point on the compass, or rather to mark the vast circumference they had travelled until that final spot.

I talked earlier of grand real estate. Yet some of the more interesting tombstones are the more modest. For a start, you have to understand that the Napier Cemetery was divided into religious “suburbs”. And, since Anglicanism at that time was top dog, part of the establishment (or as it used to be called “the governing classes at prayer”), it had the best real estate position. The “main drag”, as Gail and I called the dominant carriageway into the cemetery, was solidly Anglican. It’s all on flat ground, the very top shoulder of the hill. To the left, and slightly lower, are the Presbyterians. The Catholics start on a definite slope downwards. By the time you reach “the Jews”, as the original map coldly called them, you are right on the perimeter of the graveyard, on an extremely steep slope. They also nestle in beside the unwanted, the unmarked: the paupers, the suicides.

This socioeconomic geography is quite distinct, just as is the fact that Maori chose to bury their own quite separately, at urupa (burial places) near their marae. This highlights how graveyards are such an exact litmus of our past. Yet how many people know the stories? How many people even know where their own ancestors are buried? We don’t have the customs of Europeans who regard All Souls Day, 2 November, as a time when you go to the graveyard, have a picnic near the ancestor’s grave and tidy up the gravesite while you commune with the person who has died.

I well remember going to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris (where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison of The Doors, among others, are buried). There was a French housewife, apron on, looking stern as she tidied the tombstone with a small hearth brush. She looked at me like I was the lunatic.

Pakeha don’t have this relationship with the dead. In fact, I would go so far as to say Pakeha have a problematic relationship with the past itself.

It is the nature of migrants to want to push the past behind them. Most people who came to New Zealand came from what Wakefield called “the anxious classes”, lower-middle-class, upper-working-class people who left behind harsh conditions, grinding poverty and a fierce class system. Probably, there wasn’t a great deal to look back to. But also their lives were given over to extremely hard work. While racism and land confiscations from Maori are foregrounded today, it is almost forgotten the degree of backbreaking labour, tear-inducing work that went into creating an infrastructure of a society that we all – Pakeha, new migrants, old migrants and Maori – enjoy. The reality of colonial life, the harshness, comes through clearly when you delve into the lives of most people buried in the Napier graveyard.

Let’s take one instance. An Italian workman by the name of Bartollo Tabernard died on Breakneck, a very steep street by the cemetery. Earth was being tunnelled when it collapsed, smothering him. When people died, there was no social welfare system. If the main wage earner died, the family was plunged into crisis. Hence, children went to work very early. But Tabernard’s workmate and fellow countryman Francesco Tyso contributed funds for and erected a modest, yet heartbreaking tombstone. It registers the calamity and also the fact his friend gave money for the tombstone.

This form of contribution was by no means unusual. If there was a disaster, people seemed to gather together and put money in to create the important “document”, if you will, of a tombstone. It was as if for someone not to have a tombstone meant they had not existed.

Let’s look at a tombstone that has been snapped in half but carries the legend “necessitated his descending the ship’s hold where he quenched a fire caused by nitric acid, the deadly fumes of which occasioned his death”. On a beautiful calm day in 1886, a ship left Auckland. As it neared the East Cape, a woman on board decided she wanted something out of her box in the hold. First mate Alec Morris went to get it. But, when he opened the hold, a dismaying sight greeted him. The hold was so full of smoke, he couldn’t see the bottom. For a ship to catch fire at sea is one of the worst of all crises.

The captain was alerted. Morris volunteered to go down to have a look, to see what the problem was. A bowline was tied round him, and he was lowered into the dark, fuming clouds. He went down repeatedly before he found the source. It was a single box, which had caught fire. All the hatches on the ship were opened to allow the noxious fumes to disperse. Morris said simply, “It is horrid stuff.”

It was only later that the source of the smoke was discovered to be nitric acid. It had been mistakenly put in the hold. (All dangerous goods were normally stacked on deck so they could be thrown into the sea if need be.)

During the evening, Morris began to get ill. He frothed at the mouth, suffered convulsions. He had a severe pain in the region of his heart. The captain put up a flag as they neared Gisborne for a doctor to come aboard. But already on board was a young medical student, Jennison Lyons. He gave the “strictly sober” Morris three doses of 40 millilitres of brandy. He also administered liquid ammonia, basically a form of smelling salts. Little comfort for a man dying.

Before the doctor could come on board, Morris had died. He was aged 31. “The accident caused little commotion on board, the vessel continuing on her way without interruption,” according to a report in The Evening Post, of 1 March 1886.

In Napier, an inquest was held, and Alec Morris was buried in Napier Cemetery. His shipmates thought so highly of his valour that they engraved his tombstone with the narrative of his selflessness. This was important to them. It was as if his life had been writ in marble, made significant. In its own way, it was a Victorian industrial accident; yet there was no compensation. The only “comfort” he got was the determination of his shipmates to mark his bravery, dangling down into a smoking hold attached only on a bowline.

The Napier Cemetery, like all colonial cemeteries, is full of such paeans to stoicism. Sometimes you get a sense of the riotously drunken lives of the immigrants. After all, life was so harsh, it is understandable that people took to the bottle. But, once again, the economic ramifications of this on a family were enormous. People were plunged into poverty.

One such story is that of Mary Mansfield, a girl who, at the age of four, had been burnt badly in a domestic fire. She was taken away, as recorded in the Napier Children’s Home Register for 17 August 1892, by some “charitable ladies” from a father who was described as “living in scandalous circumstances” (a brothel?). Mary was put into a charitable home for children where she learnt to sew. But then she developed a bad headache. The matron didn’t take too much notice of it. She was given some bread and told to be quiet. Mary lay in her bed. A girl in the room asked her how she was. Mary told her to leave her alone. But then Mary died on her own, unattended. She was aged 13 and three quarters.

There is no tombstone for Mary Mansfield. How could there be? Who would pay for it? So, she was buried in the paupers’ section of the graveyard, unmarked. We do not even know precisely where she is buried.

Most migrants lived extremely tough hardscrabble lives in colonial New Zealand. It might help people to understand the bad decisions – the land confiscations – if you narrow the aperture down, away from our contemporary lives, and more into the desperate conditions of life in the 19th century.

There are stories of love, of faith. There are also an astonishing number of bachelors of all ages, indicating the gender imbalance of colonial life. A Napier operatic singer, a bachelor, has an extremely tasteful tomb paid for by his contemporaries, with quite feminine encaustic tiles, probably of the latest fashion, emblazoning it.

Napier Cemetery, like all cemeteries in New Zealand, is dense with stories if you look just slightly below the surface. Scale of tombstone, words written on them, symbols, placement: there are many ways to read social history into what otherwise seems an inert, dead space.

We have called our exhibition Somebody’s Darling after a tombstone in the South Island. Somebody’s Darling was somebody who died without a name. Like most people, we hope, he was somebody’s darling. And this is perhaps the warmest way to regard what many people would otherwise regard as a cold zone of death: here lie the darlings of our world.

Peter Wells is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. His most recent book is the novel Lucky Bastard.