Tempestuous tale of city’s first settler
The torrid, redemptive backstory of Invercargill’s first settler has emerged afresh as a factualised historical novel, writes Michael Fallow.
His name was famous in Southland. His story should have been. Except nobody knew. It’s true that even the most indolent students of the city’s history tended to know that an Irishman called John
Kelly – it turns out he was Jimmy, to his mates – lived in Invercargill before it existed as a town.
Some might also have been able to tell you that he was a seaman who’d earlier been on Ruapuke Island and in 1856 had moored his boat in the Otepuni creek, put up a whare for his wife and family (out back of where Reading Cinemas now stands) and was a respected boatman and trader, ferrying settlers up the estuary and into the hinterland.
His little patch, not that there was much of it, was even getting called Inverkelly.
That was until the powers that be had decided Southland should have an official port – Bluff, not Riverton – and a town to boot.
It was they, not the southerners, who decided, hurrumph, that this soons-to-be town would be named after Otago Superintendent William Cargill.
Surveyor John Turnbull Thomson arrived to confirm a site and map out a town, which he did. Around Kelly’s place.
So there you go – enough for a few sketchy pen portraits in local history books. Beyond that, Kelly’s deeper background was a mystery even to his descendants.
The missing bits were filled out in a startling 2006 biography by Kelly’s great-grandson Robert.
Turns out the missing bits were ripe with drama.
Robert Kelly’s research breakthrough came when he found a single notation: ‘‘Free by Certificate No 134/2142’’.
That was a convict number, written alongside John Kelly’s name in the muster of the schooner Samuel, which left Port Jackson on April 24, 1824, bound for Foveaux Strait.
So began the refocused detective work that led Robert to the records of the Old Bailey courthouse in London where, in 1815, a 15-yearold John Kelly appeared in the dock charged with stealing a roll of printed cotton from a shop in Algate, London’s East End.
The hearing record shows that after the Kelly had been caught and hauled back into the shop, a mob formed outside wanting to free him. Added Constable John Ray, grumpily ‘‘I got most violently abused . . .’’
Nevertheless, justice took its majestic course and young Kelly was convicted of stealing 13 yards of printed cotton, value 13 shillings.
‘‘Delving into a person’s past can reveal hints that evolve into possibilities, and even probabilities. And these form the basis for the fictionalised sections.’’
The very next case before the court that day, was of William Smith, who had stolen 16 yards of cotton, value 30 shillings, and was 18.
Smith was sentenced to one month’s confinement and a whipping.
The younger Kelly – and here we might pause to consider his Irish surname – was sentenced a tad more harshly. Seven years’ transportation.
Picture, then, a 15-year-old in leg irons. He spent the next six months until may 1816 in the Retribution, one of the notoriously vile floating hulks where prisoners languished until transport was available.
Of the 146 convicts, including 28 teenagers, who sailed on the Mariner for Sydney, John and two others were the youngest and were unlikely to have been high up the pecking order.
Surgeon John Haslam kept notes of the voyage and his battered diary, when Robert Kelly found it in his research, proved ‘‘an absolute treasure’’.
Dr Haslam acknowledged ‘‘with infinite regret’’ that he had been unable to bring the criminals to life-changing penance, even when they were all fearing for their lives during a storm around the Cape of Good Hope.
Amid the tempest the good doctor suggested they devote their short time remaining to prayer and repentance. They responded with ‘‘a roar of blasphemy’’ and a rather impious song.
In Australia, Kelly’s time at Newcastle was under the dread command of the famously cruel Major Morrissett. In August 1820, he received 25 lashes for disobedience.
In February 1823, 25 lashes for ‘‘absenting himself from church’’.
He served, in the end, not seven but nine years.
The 1824 voyage to New Zealand that would later reveal his convict number proved ill-starred.
Many of the crew were massacred on the coast near the northern end of D’Urville Island, reportedly after a sailor emptied slush over the ship’s side, covering the head and person of Waihaere, a Ngatikuia chief.
The seven victims, including the captain were later enticed ashore to their doom. The survivors headed back to Sydney.
But Kelly returned on the Samuel that October and set up residence on Codfish Island (Whenua Hou), then Ruapuke, settling with Kai Tahu iwi and gradually relinquishing life as a sealer for the more secure occupation of a trader.
Ruapuke was also base to the much-admired Johanne Freidrich Heinrich Wohlers from the North German Missionary Society, to whom Kelly confessed years of constant drinking and revelry.
He had three Maori wives at various times to 1843, first Kuikui, then Hine Tuhawaiki and a third Kai Tahu wife whose details are unknown.
His fourth wife, Christian Niven, and an extended family, were with him in the nascent Invercargill. (Christian’s niece would later find a different sort of fame – she was Minnie Dean.)
Such was the story told in Robert Kelly’s biography, In The Wake of a Sealer, completed in 2005. So why, now, a novelised version?
For Robert Kelly, an Invercargill-born former principal of Auckland schools, now living in Waiwera, north of Auckland, this book was 21 years in the researching. But even as each discovery filled gaps in the factual record, the notion of updating the biography seemed inadequate.
Compiling a biography about anyone based on official records and what their contemporaries had written at the time ‘‘often lacked something of their humanity . . . I wanted to flesh out the known facts with a feeling for each character, turning a factual account into a human story.’’
Robert estimates 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the story is factual detail. That doesn’t mean the rest is an unfettered flight of fantasy.
Surviving documents, family anecdotes and a knowledge of likely outcomes ‘‘based on what we know of their characters’’ gives a good basis for developing the story along likely lines, he says.
‘‘Delving into a person’s past can reveal hints that evolve into possibilities, and even probabilities. And these form the basis for the fictionalised sections.’’
New material from old files and records later brought into the public domain include court files from trials in Australia.
A happy discovery indeed, revealing an alliance with an Irish lass. The court records the pair had gone to Sydney together and had committed a felony.
‘‘He had just received his Freedom Certificate,’’ says Robert, ‘‘but she was still in servitude. It wasn’t hard to conclude that she was a runaway and Jimmy was her protector – the stuff of a good true story.’’
The story has themes of endurance and redemption, but also assimilation and adaptation. In New Zealand, Kai Tahu had been very accommodating and tolerant, but Kelly had to be equally adaptable to survive. ‘‘His early life was moulded by his tempestuous and often harsh background, which probably made him cynical, wary and opportunistic.’’
His long time with the Kai Tahu people largely reshaped his personality and contemporary Europeans tended to indicate he was reserved but reliable. An able trader and boatman.
Missionary Wohlers’ reports vary between him being a helpful and trusted neighbour to being a freebooter when he demanded his payment for services.
Disowning his younger daughter Mary-Anne Jane, indicated a firmness of resolve but this hard streak was not evident in his relationship with his older daughter Kitty Kelly, Robert says.
Early notes from celebrated southern researcher Herries Beattie (1881-1972) indicated a soured relationship wit his first Ma¯ ori wife, but his marriage to Hine Tuawaiki was enduring and loving. Then, for seven years, he and Christian Niven were ‘‘a settled, companionable couple’’.
A pitfall for the project would have been to portray Kelly as a rather heroic figure.
‘‘But his flaws and foibles regularly surfaced through the research and kept his story honest.’’
Also to be resisted was any inclination to indulge concern for descendants of some of the Southland pioneers mentioned in the story – ‘‘including our own’’.
‘‘It would have been easy to gloss over the exploitative practices of some of these new settlers, but again, the truth had to be paramount.’’
Limited copies of the book Southern Jimmy are available from Browse Around Books at 234 Yarrow St, Invercargill. SOUTHERN JIMMY Written by Robert Kelly Reviewed by Margaret Cook