Matariki 2025
The conversation our country has been having about Te Tiriti O Waitangi is making me think harder about my own whakapapa – about when and why different branches of my family came here, and what kind of people they were.
I grew up knowing the story of my mother’s family – great-grandparents who sailed here in 1914 with three children to find something brighter than life in Oldham, and to continue their work with the Salvation Army. The Captains Edith and John Rogers were good people by all accounts, believers in social justice and community. We have photos and stories that make them real for me.
Now I’m learning about my paternal side, thanks to our late Aunt Beryl who did sterling work on researching the A’Court family tree, and current sleuthing by my second cousin Fiona (we share great-grandparents).
Fiona has introduced me to an amazing cast of characters through photos, letters and official records galore. Sometimes it feels like trying to make sense of a novel with too many people in it, so I’ve been letting my mind settle on two.
First of my whānau to set foot on this land was Zaccheus A’Court in 1866. Sixteen-year-old Zaccheus had left Dorset alone in 1849 in search of gold, first stop California.
It’s already an extraordinary image to me – a teenage boy sailing to a country he’d heard about in stories. You must really want a different future to leave everyone and everything you know behind.
After California, Zaccheus moved on to Melbourne goldfields where he met and married Mary Crosley from Manchester. They lost a baby daughter, but arrived on our West Coast (gold again) in 1866 with their 4-year-old son, Stephen, and settled in Ross.
Just two years later, 35-year-old Zaccheus drowned in a fishing accident. The family stayed on the West Coast, and I still have distant cousins there.
If anyone in the family deserves a movie, it’s my great-great-grandmother on my father’s mother’s side. Seabee Adelaide Tomkins was given her name because she was born at sea on the ship, the “Bee”, off the coast of Adelaide. The Tomkins family were from the Potteries of London, and landed in Geelong in 1857.
But by the time Seabee was arrested in 1874 for stealing a rose bush from the Hokitika Cemetery, aged almost 17, she had reinvented herself as Florence Tennant. ‘Tennant’ she’d borrowed from her stepfather in Australia. No-one knows where “Florence” came from, but she was clearly happy with it, keeping it through several other reinventions over the years.
Like Zaccheus (no relation yet) Florence had arrived in New Zealand without family, sailing from Australia sometime between 1872 and 1874. According to family legend, the teenager travelled with a “dance troupe”. We don’t know more than that, but given they were coming to a mining town, not a city with a theatre, it probably wouldn’t have been ballet.
There are riveting tales of Florence, her parents, her nine children and their families - the kind of sagas cousin Fiona suggests you read with a glass of wine. Mysteries, missing years, and official records that suggest the toughest of times and the need for courage, particularly amongst the women.
This Matariki, as well as remembering the people we’ve lost this year, I will be grateful for these new stories about the people who have come before me. I’m also looking forward to planning the next steps on this journey we are on to understand ourselves and each other better.
Mānawatia a Matariki – Happy Māori New Year.