SECRET LIFE
Tarja’s wild west family history
HOW A LONGGONE RELATIVE HAS GIVEN TARJA PEACE
Growing up, Tarja Walter only ever knew her great-grandmother as the rather fierce looking woman in a photograph.
There were whispers, as happens in many families, about “skeletons in the closet”, but otherwise there was little mention of her. So Nelsonbased Tarja set out to discover what she could about her relative, Josephine Macdonald (née Liardet).
At the time, she had no idea that across the Tasman, Whanganui-born historian Catherine Bishop was also digging into Josephine’s background for her now newly published book Women Mean Business, which showcases entrepreneurial businesswomen of colonial New Zealand.
Tarja’s interest came after years of feeling disconnected to family which was exacerbated by grief − in 1992, her six-yearold daughter Sophia was hit by a car outside the family home. Then, just eight years ago, her granddaughter Melissa also tragically died in a car accident.
“All of it changed my life,” she tells. “I was gutted. I felt like I’d lost my future and I had no idea of my past.”
She knew her grandfather Evelyn had been born in Greymouth, so she headed south and began researching her family history, discovering that Josephine’s parents, Wilbraham and Carolina Liardet, and their nine children, were apparently Melbourne’s first colonial settlers.
That discovery led to a visit to the family homestead Ballam Park, on Australia’s Mornington Peninsula, earlier this year. Tarja, accompanied by her eldest daughter Brianna, as well as Brianna’s two children, also visited the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society, who opened up “a dusty old box of archives” in a bid to help.
The records showed that Josephine’s ancestry could be traced all the way back to King Edward III and Cerdic, the first King of Wessex, via William the Conqueror’s Saxon wife Matilda.
Josephine herself was a trailblazer, following her first husband Captain John Venables, “against all advice”, to China, where she wrote about rebels who practised atrocities… “de-capitation was a favourite method”.
After John died in 1864, Josephine, with her four
young children in tow, turned up in Auckland, where she opened a “servant’s registry office”.
She eventually remarried and moved to Hokitika, where she carried on her business, offering “male and female servants in every capacity” for a payment of five shillings.
While in Hokitika, Josephine was convicted of striking a young girl being piggy-backed down to the beach by her mother. The girl was the illegitimate child of Josephine’s second husband John Macdonald, who had been ordered to pay maintenance for her five days before the assault.
Tarja’s formidable relative intrigues her, and she’s still not sure the recruitment agency wasn’t just a cover for a brothel. But the 62-year-old definitely feels a connection with Josephine, whose own grandmother, according to family legend, was a lady-inwaiting to Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France.
“I’m a bereaved parent and so was she – one of her children with her first husband died early on, and her son Sylva, my grandfather’s younger brother, was killed in a cycling accident.
“I think Josephine may have been the black sheep of the family,” declares Tarja.
“I’ve definitely got her wandering gene, but looking into my background has been really positive. I now feel anchored in my past and content in my present, and now that I have more grandchildren [Brianna’s two children], I feel hope for the future.”
Tarja and author Catherine
(52) met in person for the first time recently, walking through the same Hokitika streets Josephine did more than 150 years ago.
Catherine, who is on a 31-day speaking circuit for her book, says the women she spent four years researching show that the Kiwi can-do attitude isn’t just a modern phenomenon.
“When I first started the project, I thought, ‘Oh, this is so great they’re all striking a blow for women’s rights.’
“Well, most of them were just trying to survive. Like it is today, working was essential. And there weren’t a lot of jobs available for women back then, so starting a small business was often the only option.
“The other thing that really struck me,”
Catherine continues,
“is that women were often running these businesses at the same time they were having a baby every
18 months to three years.
“So being pregnant for 20 years and also trying to run a successful business as well, that is quite extraordinary!”
Boarding houses were common back then – “all you needed were a couple of spare rooms” – as were dressmakers and milliners. The West Coast was also renowned for its female publicans.
“The West Coast women really were quite a breed,” Catherine exclaims.
“They were not meek and mild. They had to be tough because the testosterone levels around then – these were the gold rush years – would have been extreme!”