Oamaru’s Victorian scribblers deserve their recognition

FROM tomorrow there’s a feast in store for lovers of literature as the Oamaru Victorian Heritage Celebrations put the spotlight on Victorian literature.

The usual suspects like Charles Dickens and George Elliot will get a mention and there’s a talk on W.H.S. Roberts, who produced a valuable history of Oamaru’s early days. Oamaruborn and raised poet Fiona Farrell will give her take on Victorian literature and a dozen other bookish topics will be covered.

Oamaruconnected Victorian novelists don’t seem to appear in the programme but they are worth noting here.

Oamaru’s Charlotte Evans wrote A Strange Friendship and Over the Hills and Far Away in the 1870s. Both were romances set in New Zealand but could have been set anywhere. Mrs W. Rattray (Lizzie Fenton before her marriage) spent time in Oamaru before moving to Auckland and writing novels and short stories. But my favourite Victorian Oamaru novelist is William Southan. In 1881, he published The Two Lawyers, a widely disregarded novel, which he wrote while running a pub in Oamaru.

Raised in Bendigo, Southan worked at the Bendigo Stock Exchange but pinching some shares led to a threeyear sentence of hard labour. On his release in 1876 he headed to Waimate and set up as an accountant and was the agent for the newly established Evening Mail (now the Oamaru Mail).

His past was probably unknown as he was given the job of auditor for the Waimate District High School, but he was soon in Timaru, where his soft drink business went bankrupt. He moved to the much bigger town of Oamaru, where he leased the North Otago Family and Commercial Hotel at the northern end of Thames St. He announced, ‘‘W. M. SOUTHAN, Having leased the above wellknown Hotel begs to notify to his friends and the public generally that they can depend upon finding therein first class accommodation for Families, Commercial Travellers, Boarders or Visitors to Oamaru in search of health and would state that the Hotel, being a very easy distance from the Railway Station, close to the Baths, but still out of the bustle of the Town, offers advantages not to be surpassed by any other hotel.’’

Southan’s hotel was one of many in a town which had 32 grog shops, 12 houses of ill fame, 20 licensed pubs and a reputation for disorderly conduct and high levels of crime.

Southan became secretary of the newly formed Oamaru Jockey Club and joined in the boisterous life of the sporting men. He backed his black mare, Nelly, for £10 [$1700] in a trotting race from the racecourse gate to his hotel against hairdresser M. Taylor’s bay gelding Tommy. Tommy won, watched by a crowd of 300, whose afterrace drinking at Southan’s hotel no doubt helped defray his £10 bet on Nelly. Like most publicans, Southan was in court from time to time. In March 1880, he had 16 shillings stolen from his pub and a few days later he was fined 20 shillings for selling brandy to a woman on a Sunday. In August, he joined a parade of Oamaru publicans being convicted of watering down their liquor and by the end of the year he was once again declared bankrupt. Bankruptcy was not a business disaster in 19thcentury New Zealand and in Oamaru in the late 1870s there were between 30 and 40 such failures each year, only a few involving fraud. Southan returned to Australia and ran a successful pickle making business in Sydney.

But it is as one of Oamaru’s literary figures he should be remembered. In every spare moment while running the North Otago Hotel he was scribbling away on a melodramatic novel called The Two Lawyers. When it appeared, the North Otago Times did not spare one of Oamaru’s own: ‘‘the only sensible remark made by the author is where he observes, forcibly if not elegantly, that there is a tide in the affairs of men which, if not taken at the flood, leads to the very devil — a destination which probably even the most charitably disposed reader would deem exceedingly suitable for The Two Lawyers.’’

Southan may not get much recognition in Oamaru but I have a soft spot for him, especially when you add his literary lapses when he returned to Australia. Thus, it was a pleasure to be invited to edit a recent new edition of The Two Lawyers for the New Zealand Colonial Text Series published by the English and linguistics department at the University of Otago.

Our worst writers deserve some recognition, even if they have Oamaru connections. Their work makes us appreciate the really good writers, and Oamaru has had plenty of those.

❛ Southan’s hotel was one of many in a town which had 32 grog shops, 12 houses of ill

fame, 20 licensed pubs . . .