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Waste land

Anna McMartin

19 Oct 2025 — 13 min read

What is not handed down must be found some other way; and so my mum, who is retired in Invercargill, spends her days uncovering our whakapapa from libraries and archives and genealogical sites.

Mum grew up some thirty kilometres from Invercargill in a place called Winton - somewhere you probably haven’t heard of unless you know of Minnie Dean, the notorious baby-killer. Dean was the first and only woman to be executed in Aotearoa. Even in my day, Southland children were still raised with gruesome folk stories about the manner in which Dean murdered the infants, and a superstition that grass wouldn’t grow on her grave.

But the truth of it was nothing supernatural. In a colonial society not designed for women or children, Dean had taken in the babies of desperate unwed mothers for a fee, then dosed the little ones with laudanum. Those whose small bodies did not survive the drug she buried in her garden. In 1895, Dean was taken to be hanged at Invercargill prison, a walking distance from my parents’ first home, where I spent my own babyhood, and she is buried in Winton cemetery, where lie my descendants on my mother’s side.

Like any place, Southland has its stories. I can’t say as much as I’d like about who I’m from, but I can tell you where - a story that will set the scene for what will come.

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Southland has primordial Fiordland to the west, carved by glacial shifts in the ice age, and mountains in the north, formed from the same mass of schist as central Otago. The Catlins, with its petrified ancient forest some 180 million years old, lies in the southeast, and Rakiura (Stewart Island) is a boat ride to the south, from Bluff on the mainland across Foveaux Strait, with its volatile weather, rocky outcrops and rips. In the middle of Southland are its plains, where you will find Winton.

Even before the fossilised trees of the Catlins, as long as 230 million years ago, the sea flowed inland from the east to form a wide and shallow lake spreading over the low-lying expanse that would become the Southland plains - as far west as what are now the towns of Ohai and Nightcaps, where land-locked lagoons collected the trees that in aeons’ time became coal mined by men. Later, between 22 and 33 million years ago, the shelled invertebrate creatures that flourished in the lake began to form limestone, creating a network of underground caves near the town of Clifden, and the deposits that would later be quarried by men near my mother’s childhood home. All in all, over epochs, the wash of alluvium and glacial till, the trapping of organic matter in the soil, made the plains one of the most fertile parts of the motu.

Still, when tāngata whenua arrived in Southland, sometime between the years 1250 and 1300, they found an uncompromising place, too cold even to grow kūmara. The landscape was densely forested, and so the first people burnt off much of the bush, except where it was too wet to ignite. Harakeke, red tussock and scrub encroached where the bush had been. Later, when European settlers came, they bought the land from tāngata whenua, although they never followed through with their promises in return: never set aside the reserves, never built the hospitals or schools, that were part of the deal. The settlers milled much of the remaining forest for houses and fences and railway sleepers; and now, with the forest gone, there was land for them to farm.

I am Anna, and my mother is Barbara. Her father was Jim. Jim’s mother was Jessie, and Jessie’s father was James. It was James, my great-great-grandfather, who immigrated to Aotearoa, and who made his life near Winton, on the Southland plains.

My mum is uncovering James. She was still a kid when Jessie, her grandmother, died. Jessie, the daughter of James, had suffered with dementia for years, and she didn’t or couldn’t speak of the past, so my mother never found out what she saw the day of the calamity; but Jessie was afraid until she died. Whenever a storm came, the old woman would tear the metal pins out of her hair, imagining it might make her safe.

James Fraser was born in 1836 in Inverness, Scotland, and raised to farmwork. It must have inculcated a toughness in him, or just a want to flee, because records show that in January of 1860 he set out for Aotearoa. More than three hundred others travelled with him. They brought with them the longings and belongings of immigrants: clothes and dry foods and tools, heirlooms and money, and a thin-lipped but orderly God who assured them there was a hierarchy to things, and that other lands were meant for the taking, for draining and fencing, for sowing and reaping. During their voyage across the globe were two births and four deaths, lives begun or ended in suffering, no doubt, and far from home. Most of the souls who departed at sea were scarcely older than the tiny arrivals, taken by bronchitis or diarrhoea or ship fever, a form of typhus.

James was no one in particular. He’d travelled in steerage, below the main deck with the everyday folk who made up most of the travellers; and indeed, the records of the voyage listed passengers by their quarters, steerage or cabin, according to these markers of class. Their trades marked the passengers’ class too: many were ploughmen or labourers or domestic servants, although with a minister, a confectioner and a candlemaker for good measure. When the ship reached Port Chalmers and The Otago Witness published the newcomers, the men were named, as were the handful of single women; but the married women and children were given only descriptors, wife or son or daughter. James Fraser had no wife or son or daughter, only his name. He was as alone as he surely felt.

The ship that brought James to Aotearoa was called the Storm Cloud. It was a portent he probably didn’t notice.

From Port Chalmers James walked south, some 65 miles, to Inchclutha. There he found work on the farm of a man named Mr Bowler. The discovery of gold inland lured him, like so many other men alone, to the diggings in Tuapeka and Dunstan, where it seems he did well enough; but he returned to Mr Bowler’s farm in time. He must have been canny, and a careful saver of his modest wages, because in 1865, only five years after arriving in Aotearoa, he realised the settler’s promise, moving south to Winton and purchasing 240 acres.

He was now a farmer, a man, in his own right.

James wanted a wife, but there was a shortage of women in the colony - or, presumably, a shortage of the type of women he thought were suitable. According to family lore, told with a certain wry laughter, he arranged for a lady to emigrate to Aotearoa to be his bride; but when her ship arrived at Port Chalmers, where he meant to meet her, James learned his intended had found romance with another man during her voyage. Alone again, and probably peeved, James made the long walk back home.

But if James could not purchase a wife, he continued to acquire land.

The local newspapers recorded the small details of James’ life as a farmer and a mostly upright man of his community. He advertised a tender for men to build him fences; although perhaps his fences did not hold, because he was fined when his sheep strayed onto Crown land. He nominated a candidate for the county council and was made a trustee for the nearby cemetery. As a man with land he was given the right to vote, and so appeared on the electoral roll.

He married a local woman named Anne McConachie, who would become my great-great-grandmother. They had five children. After James’ death, his sons worked the farm.

In a small and curious note from 1873, a line in The Southland Times, James was awarded a tract of land by the Waste Land Board of Southland. It was the job of the board to take this land deemed unused and unowned, although tāngata whenua had never been fully paid for it, and give it to settlers who might bring order to it. James was apportioned 50 acres of waste land; more than enough to increase his holdings to the point of a quiet respectability.

Were it not for the calamity, he would have lived and died almost unremarked, almost unmarked.

In Aotearoa in the spring, the weather is unstable. Humid air moves downwards from the tropics, and cold, dry air moves upwards from Antartica; but instead of merging, the two flows jostle and twist, brewing our thundery storms. The Roaring Forties, winds named by sailors centuries ago for their latitude, sweep over the Pacific to seek us out. When they make landfall, our mountains shape them into greater potency.

On 13 November 1883, as the newspapers told it, the weather was excessively warm. The barometer, already low, dropped further. A disconcerting calm held in the morning as heavy clouds rolled in. At noon came the thunder.

Then began the rain, and the hailstones an astonishing inch wide. In Waitati, a field of crops was washed away entirely, the ground scoured so that only untillable shingle remained. In Palmerston, the fences were strewn and the animals lost, so that the bloated carcasses of cattle and sheep laid all over the ground. In Maheno, a stone bridge was swept away altogether, with nothing left to show where it had been.

And now the rain began to come for the people. In North East Valley, Dunedin, the low-lying buildings were flooded throughout. In Palmerston, travellers were stranded by landslips on the railway line; too many for the hotels to offer beds, so some slept in railway carriages.

And as the rain came for the people it began to claim them. At the Pleasant River, a man and his horse screamed as they drowned, their buggy tipped over an embankment and onto a deeply flooded road beyond a bridge. Although the man’s companion survived the accident and was able to be dragged to rescue, he could not be saved, living for only days after.

But it was the lightning that terrorised the people: the lightning, burning and breaking the sky and everything below it.

In Bankside and Marton, it struck the telegraph poles, splintering them and hurling the wires to the ground.

In Wellington, it travelled through the wires, making the telephones ring; but when people picked up they received shocks that hummed in their ears and numbed their faces. Some said that fire shot out from their telephones and into the rooms of their homes.

It all seems so improbable; but these stories were only the terror’s beginnings.

In Invercargill, at the edge of the Southland plains, men named Messrs Crisp and Stone were waiting for a train when the lightning struck the shelter they stood in. When Mr Stone revived, his hands discoloured and tingling, he made his way to Mr Crisp, who lay on the ground. ‘Stone, I’m a dead man’, Crisp said. He was taken to hospital but was gone before he arrived.

Further inland, near Winton, a boy named Alexander McGregor was struck and killed instantly. Perhaps with a child’s curiosity for the storm, as he was only fourteen, Alexander stood at the door and looked out. He was holding a hammer in his hand, and it was believed that the hammer attracted the lightning to him.

And also near Winton, James Fraser was at work on his farm, much as any other day might have found him, when the storm set in. It was late afternoon, and children were making their way home from school. A neighbour by the name of Mr Kilpatrick and his two daughters were passing by. The group of them ran to James’ barn, but it offered no refuge from the lightning: all were struck as they tried to hide. James, Jessie’s father, was left paralysed in the lower part of his body. One Kilpatrick girl lived, but the other, twelve years old, did not. Neither girl was named. A dog and a horse were killed. All lay together on the ground.

The calamity was so extraordinary, so without precedent, it was reported overseas. The Maryborough Chronicle in Queensland, in its column about the goings-on in New Zealand, offered the story two lines and a headcount of the dead. Then, beneath, the column moved to man-made matters, telling how Messrs Whittaker and Aitkinson had set sail to Sydney to represent New Zealand at the Intercolonial Conference, an event to discuss how the colonies might manage fisheries and ports and land purchases in the Pacific, and whether Fiji should become a part of New Zealand. And the column recounted a lecture by an aging George Grey, not long retired as Premier of New Zealand, in which Grey made arguments on federation and annexation, but expressed the view that whatever the case, New Zealand should not admit coloured labour.

There the newspaper column ended. All this apportioning of the world, the ordering of it into hierarchies, was the business of men, and important ones; but Jessie was just a little girl.

None of the newspapers recorded that she was there that day, said what she saw or if she was hurt. No one could know whether she smelled the burning of flesh, heard the moans of her father, or heard nothing at all from the dead unnamed girl who lay beside him. Perhaps, as happens with children, Jessie’s memory mixed with the story she was later told, such that she couldn’t decipher where one ended and the other began. Perhaps, as the dementia took hold, she could decipher still less, even as her granddaughter Barbara, my mother, hoped to be told a story she might one day pass on.

Perhaps in her later life Jessie stood paralysed herself, within her own mind, forever a little girl with metal pins in her hair - looking on as in a nightmare, when you cannot tell if the screams you hear are from the living or the dead or are your own.

While I don’t have many stories myself, I treasure other people’s, uncover them - not always skilfully, but with the same immersion as if I were a kid. Here is one such story. Before people came to the Southland plains, or even to Aotearoa, before the draining and the fencing, the sowing and the reaping, there were atua.

In the beginning, Ranginui and Papatūānuku, sky father and earth mother, lay so close they left almost no space for their children between them. The children could barely move and light couldn’t enter. When they could no longer tolerate the closeness and the dark, the children resolved to force their parents’ embrace apart: all of the siblings in agreement but for one of the sons, Tāwhirimātea.

Tāne Mahuta, another of the sons, did the separating. He lay on his back, and with his legs, he pushed. At first, nothing happened; so he regathered himself and he pushed again. At last, his mother and father began to part. As they did, Ranginui and Papatūānuku began to weep, their tears flowing as mist and rain through the unfurling space between earth and sky.

Tāwhirimātea could not bear to see his parents harmed. He was enraged with his siblings and so tore out his own eyes, crushing them and hurling them above, where they became the stars of Matariki. He retreated into the sky, making his home alongside his father, and there he became the god of storms. He is calm sometimes, or pensive; but other times, he recalls his anguish and his anger at the injury done to his mother and father. In moods like these he sends rain and hail, thunder and lightning, sometimes destruction.

This story isn’t my own, and I’m not historian enough to understand it well; but Tāwhirimātea seems unlike the God my great-great-grandfather brought to Aotearoa. He is the kind of atua that stirs mortal feelings: mercurial, caught up in his own pain, bound forever to his family and the land and the sky, his hands bloodied from tearing at his own face. I imagine his caring not so much for the day-to-day doings of people, our provocations and our pettiness, or the order and hierarchies that some of us still expect our gods to hand us.

And I imagine he does not suffer fools or like to be crossed. Try me, he seems to say, when a mood comes over him and he causes clouds to gather. Try me.

The thing that awes me about the Southland plains is the limitlessness of both the land and sky, the clarity of the air between them.

Out in the country, where I grew up, you can just stand there by yourself on the unbroken quiet of the earth, in that space prised from Ranginui and Papatūānuku’s grief, and you feel like you can see almost forever. That’s what I did, sometimes, as a little girl myself: just stood there, with muddy boots and without stories, looking as far as I could to the hills, dark green and purplish, or topped with a little snow. I had a kid’s imagination, and I convinced myself that somehow the hills could not be reached, were beyond humans; but I knew with the instinct of a child that the hills held stories, because all places do, even if I might never know them.

I haven’t been back a long while. Things have changed. You can’t swim in the rivers anymore, and the weather is more and more erratic, sometimes wetter and sometimes drier, as it is everywhere. For all that people have tried to order things, draining and fencing, sowing and reaping, calling our self-defeat our progress, calamity comes. People invite it.

James Fraser completed his place in the world - and helped make mine, you could say - with that acquisition of waste land, 50 acres of it.

But there is no such thing as waste land.

There is no land that is not forged in stories; no land that gods do not covet.

There is no land to which people are unconnected. And there are no people who do not yearn for connection to land - only people who’ve forgotten how it feels to yearn.

You wonder if, were we to uncover our stories, that yearning, that connection to the land, might come again.

What is not handed down can still be found.