Polish History New Zealand

Marshland

For thousands of years, the low-lying water inhaled a forest and covered the evidence with flax, reeds, and grasses.

Early Māori respected the swamp’s hunger. They harvested its flora and fauna, but avoided crossing it directly. When they needed to travel along this stretch of Canterbury’s coastal lowlands, they took higher paths.

The Marshland swamp emerged from its specific geographical position within the Canterbury coastline: Banks Peninsula to the south of Christchurch trapped the fine sand and siltstone that the Waimakariri River, about 20 kilometres north of the city, brought down from the eroding Southern Alps.

Floods, currents, and tides rearranged the mountainous sediment along with other detritus it encountered. Tidal flats emerged, while peat-rich bogs resting on clay “stretch[ed] out as tongues into the swamp and sandhill complex.”¹

By the time the first four ships carrying British settlers arrived in Canterbury in 1850, the sand dunes parallel to the Christchurch coast ran higher than the peat-swamps they contained.

Christchurch’s port was Lyttelton, on the northern edge of the Banks Peninsula. Back then, the newcomers who disembarked there had little interest in the swamp—but once the city grew, speculators saw potential in an area close to a ready and growing market.

The swamp, however, resisted being tamed.

Descriptions of Marshland in the 1870s and 1880s paint similar versions of the same story: human beings pitched against an unknown and unrelenting environment.

The first large group of Polish settlers to New Zealand sailed on the friedeburg and arrived in Lyttelton on 30 August 1872. They did not get to Marshland until 1874, when Poles off ships such as the cartvale joined them.

Official spellings of early Polish names were often inventive, but English street names in this suburb sometimes changed completely, and more than once. I have used the Christchurch City Libraries’ list of current street names, and their histories.² Nowadays most have lost the possessive punctuations.

I wrote the first version of this story in 2017. Several new family stories have since joined those in the menu on the left. Those involved with Marshland include WJ Boloski, the Dodunski-Schimanski family, Rosalia Gierszewski, the Grofski (Grochowski) family, the Neustrowski-Watemburg family, Mary Watembach la Vavaseur, Martin Sharlik, and the three extra pieces on the Schimanski family.

A list of the Poles aboard the friedeburg is included in the story polish anchors 1872–1876 and they appear in more detail in the list of early polish settlers under that ship’s name.

Pinning down credible histories from so long ago is tough, and I am grateful for the collaboration of family genealogists. If anyone would like to contribute a family story, or discuss something I have written, please get in touch with me through our home page.

—Barbara Scrivens

THE PLACE WHERE FLAX GROWS PROFUSELY

by Barbara Scrivens

Although Marshland be a swampy place,
And in it stumpy ground,
Men of understanding good,
Are therein to be found.³

“Men of understanding good” understates the mettle of Marshland’s pioneers who, when they first took on leases for the sodden land, did not know about its power to engulf horses, cattle, and sheep—or the occasional unwary human.

The flax and reeds growing through the pools of water hid an underground secret: the drained land exposed buried kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), mataī (Prumnopitys taxifolia), ribbonwood (Plagianthus regius) and an occasional totara (Podocarpus totara). Semi-petrified mānuka (Leptospermum scoparium) lay a metre below the surface.

A Christchurch Teachers Training College student, Hywel Wynn Hughes, wrote in his 1939 thesis, marshland: a social survey of a new zealand rural community, that long before Māori arrival, the area had already become so swampy, “even trees like the white pine [kahikatea] could not maintain themselves in the presence of so much water.”⁴

Hughes postulated that the first European settlers in Canterbury in 1850 would have looked on the “extensive low lying swamp area broken only by an occasional marine dune… [as] an abode fit only for the bittern…⁵

Compared with the fertility of the rolling plains which stretched westwards to the lofty foot hills of the Southern Alps a waste of impenetrable swamp and shifting dunes could have held little attraction… as far as the possibilities of settlement were concerned. The only means of crossing the swamp would be to follow one of the higher sand dunes which lie parallel with the sea and the very nature of those would make transport and in fact any movement at all, laborious if not difficult.⁶

Wilfred John Walter, who was four when his family moved to Marshland in 1882, devoted his life to local politics and wrote a memoir of Marshland’s beginnings:

The early settlers who blazed the trail were men and women of stout heart and great willpower… people of grit and ambition… They endured hardships, lived humble, simple lives… they kept plodding on until the land produced some crop, and as the years passed by, they kept progressing and improving their positions… what a transformation… in the appearance of the district after ten and twenty years of pioneering work.⁷

Walter named 112 families who settled, worked, and moved around the area as they first leased, then bought, land as it became available freehold. His memoir does not seem to be dated but from 1937 to when he died in 1946, he interviewed at least 10 children of the first settlers.

His papers are held at the Christchurch City Archives. They include parts of Hughes’ study, which Walter acknowledged as the work of a “young teacher who started this thesis in the 1930s… killed in World War II.” It is not clear whether the two ever met or collaborated, or whether Hughes’ work encouraged Walter to put a human face to the teacher’s descriptions.

the new zealand gazette April 1940 supplement listed Hughes as holding a primary school teacher’s certificate, A-grade, meaning that he qualified 31 December 1939. He had been assigned to teach at a “Native” school.⁸

Hughes never got the chance to follow up on his work in Marshland. He joined the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy on 18 December 1940 and, aged 22, was shipped out on the ss rimutaka as part of New Zealand’s Scheme B for tertiary-educated men to be trained as officers. Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Hywel Wynn Hughes was declared missing presumed dead after his torpedo boat, mtb308, was sunk in the Mediterranean by Italians on 14 September 1942.⁹

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Walter’s father, Charles Henry, arrived in Lytelton as a 21-year-old off the zambesi in 1863. When his son wrote of the “early settlers” he was was referring to families like his own—those who wrestled with the land—rather than the speculators who first laid claim to the swamp in the 1850s and 1860s but did not work it.

The land was really the remains of a dead forest. So dense were the stumps that it was impossible to plough the soil without first stumping the land, and it was a sight to see the big stacks of timber… used as firewood and for fencing posts. Some logs lying on the surface measured as long as 40 feet.¹⁰

Christchurch’s Chief Engineer, Planning, noted in 1863 that railways and streets had been added to this 1856 map, showing Christchurch’s swamps and vegetation, and originally compiled by Ken Silby for the Christchurch Drainage Board.¹¹

When commissioned by Environment Canterbury in 2007 to analyse Christchurch’s surface features before urbanisation, GNS Science used this 1856 map, which showed that the future city’s “wet features” covered 130 square kilometres, and its “dry features,” 127 square kilometres. Swamp land contributed 54 square kilometres of the “wet.”¹²

A close-up of the large raupō swamp that became Marshland. Marshland Road runs straight through the middle, from an Avon River tributary in Shirley in the south, towards the “Purarekanui [Puharakekenui] Creek” (Styx River) in the north. The beginning of the dogleg on Hill’s Road, then south-west of Marshland Road, eventually extended to form the western boundary of the swamp.

Māori appreciated the Marshland swamp’s flax, wild fowl, eels, and, near the sea, its whitebait.¹³ They used the swamp as a source of food, medication, and useful household items such as bandages, fishing nets, traps, and baskets, but did not settle there, so what made Christchurch’s British forebears decide that colonial settlers could tame the land?

The first Europeans saw Māori camping on the corner of Canal Reserve (now Marshland Road) and Hawken’s (now Hawkins) Road and catching “large hauls of eels” in the Styx River. They left via the old terraced inland track that evolved into the first Hawken’s and Hill’s roads, and avoided the Canal Reserve, at that time “impossible” to negotiate thanks to bogs, springs, and flax.¹⁴

That inland track followed Marshland’s highest contours and its highest point—17 metres above sea level—was on the corner of Hill’s and Preston’s roads.

Marshland lay just 10 kilometres from an expanding central Christchurch. As the families from the 1850s’ first four ships¹⁵ grew, and other immigrants followed, so did the market for food. Ten years later, speculators explored the possibility of draining the swamp and making use of it as agricultural land.

What was that land worth? Who would buy a swamp?

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The 1850 settlers had been specially recruited by the Canterbury Association to establish an Anglican Church in New Zealand. Hughes described their settlement as the “best example of an existing expression of the Wakefield doctrine” that New Zealand coloniser Edward Gibbon Wakefield had crafted for the moneyed elite in Britain. Wakefield did not want the lower classes to buy land, and strove to prevent what he called a “squatting system which permitted the renting of large areas cheaply for grazing stock on native pastures.”¹⁶

Wakefield had been ‘buying’ land from Māori and selling it to colonial settlers since 1840. He developed a notion that immigrants without capital should not become “instant” landowners. “Sufficient price” became the standard he used to decide the value of colonial “waste” land. The strategy was meant to restrict the sale of land and prevent mere labourers from becoming “proprietors”—yet encourage more of those labourers to immigrate to the colony by offering them “free” passage.¹⁷

The Canterbury Association, led by the founder of the Centerbury settlement, John Robert Godley, followed Wakefield’s doctrine and its regulations on the sale of land. Godley believed Canterbury’s 1850 immigrants “ensured” that “men of capital” would “form an aristocracy” while the labourers who worked for those “men of capital” would have to save for years to buy “small parcels” of their own land.¹⁸

Wakefield’s “men of capital” proved, however, to be reluctant to part with their money. After a year, they had contributed only ₤50,000 of the ₤500,000 Godley had expected them to invest, which led directly to a lack of funding for the “most necessary public works” in the region.¹⁹

At first, land cost ₤3 an acre, whether it was in Lyttelton, the Banks Peninsula, the Canterbury foothills—or the coastal swamp.

The sale of swampland inevitably lagged behind land more easily developed, although Canal Reserve between the Avon and Styx rivers became part of the water-logged city’s early plans to develop a canal transport system based on England’s. The idea evaporated with the water.

Before he left New Zealand in December 1853, Godley tried to boost growth in Canterbury by enticing the “men of capital” with an amended land policy—one that allowed Christchurch’s “waste” lands to be presented as “Class III runs” of between 5,000 and 50,000 acres.²⁰

Under the new scheme, a “man of capital” applied for a so-called run at the Land Office. If there was no prior claim, the Land Waste Board allowed him the use of the land for a farthing an acre for two years, a half–penny for the next two years, and three farthings an acre thereafter. Applicants who could stock the property and meet certain conditions within six months retained a pre-emptive right to buy it.²¹

Although its swamp discouraged potential freeholders willing to pay ₤3 an acre in Marshland, the new policy tempted speculators with a clause that permitted the leasehold of five acres of pastoral land for every acre of freehold run land. Hughes wrote how the few who took up the offer and who worked on the swampland itself, did not succeed, and that the first record of one of the runs had across it “a most significant word written in a big hand—ABANDONED.” He said he came to a “natural conclusion” that an architect called Fooks and a doctor called Moore were speculators because they both bought Marshland runs and also acquired “several hundred acres of sound land” closer to or in the city.²² And so Marshland—too labour-hungry to remain in large estates—managed to frustrate some of Godley’s capitalistic aspirations for Canterbury.

In 1852, a “dairy station” established on two runs—between the southern Canal Reserve and the Avon River—started to supply Christchurch with milk. Immediately north of the dairy station, two runs on either side of Canal Reserve Road sold. In 1853 Doctor Moore took up Sand Hills on the eastern seaward side. In January 1854, Charles Fookes took up the western inland side.²³

By 1863, the 600 acres of Fooks’ run that comprised swamp remained in leasehold. Hughes had the impression that although Moore also first set up Sand Hills as a dairy station, neither he nor Fookes had interest in the runs themselves. It was not until the swamp was sub-divided years later that “men who knew how to work the land” were able to see the possibilities and potential benefits of drainage.²⁴

Robert Heaton Rhodes bought much of Fooks’ run in 1869, seven years after Edward Reece had bought the swampiest ground in the Sand Hills from a John McLean, who had bought it from Wakefield’s New Zealand Company in 1860. It is not clear when the latter bought the land from Doctor Moore. The two areas became known as Rhodes’ Swamp and Reece’s Swamp. They were fully sub-divided and leased or on-sold by 1880, the same year that work started on filling the former Canal Road (Marshland Road)—work that proved expensive and continuous, thanks to its inclination to absorb the sand and metal poured onto it.²⁵

At first, Reece intended to farm the Sand Hills land. He built a house on high ground overlooking Bottle Lake and expected to profit from fattening cattle on the rest. He became a well-known businessman and city councillor, but his farming venture failed: the land was wetter than he expected, and his cattle could not cope.

The Drainage Board’s No. 1 Drain in 1939, along what had by then become Marshland Road. The water ran south into Horseshoe Lake. Hughes noted the lack of fencing in the area and that shelter belts, usually poplars, were trimmed for maximum sunlight.²⁶ Could the young man with his back turned to the camera be Hughes? and this his way of leaving something of himself within his thesis?

Open drains along roads are still very much a part of the Marshland landscape, with this one running alongside Mairehau Road (formerly named Cemetery Road, and later Reeves Road).

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Water courses in Christchurch started to be modified from the time that Ken Silby compiled his 1856 map. A Provincial Council project in the early 1860s to build a drain that emptied into Horseshoe Lake provided work for the unemployed, but it did not solve the drainage problem.²⁷ Throughout that decade, and into the next, the Avon Road Board heard grievances about the lack of proper drainage of the land and roads north of the city.²⁸

People who lived on the land soon learnt its foibles. Unable to farm cattle, Reece looked to get a return from his speculative land venture through subdividing his road frontage into 10- and 20-acre lots, and offered 10-year leases at 30 shillings a year.

In 1874, Reece “discovered the whereabouts of a number of immigrants” at Holmes Bay on the Banks Peninsula, where several Polish families were “engaged in seasonal labour.”²⁹ Most of these families arrived in Lyttelton via the friedeburg in August 1872, but families with children had struggled to find jobs.

This image has been touted as that of the friedeburg, but its provenance is not clear. The friedeburg was a three-masted 784-ton barque that sailed from Hamburg on 19 May 1872 and docked at Lyttelton with 241 statute adults on 30 August 1872. (Children younger than 12 were counted as half a statute adult and babies younger than a year were classified as “souls” but not counted.)

The “balance of the immigrants” from the friedeburg had been “moving somewhat slowly,” reported the star on 18 September 1872. The article does not say whether anyone was helping the “5 Norwegians, 6 Danes, 4 Germans, 7 German Poles, and 4 Poles” gain employment, or whether these 26 were breadwinners who had families with them. All but one Norwegian shoemaker were farm and general labourers who seem to have been left to fend for themselves.³⁰

the new zealand herald reported on 4 November 1875:

Some of the foreign immigrants by the Friedeburg have not met with much success in finding employment (says the Hawke's Bay Telegraph). Two men have travelled from Napier to Wairarapa and back again, and failed to get work. If the men were in earnest in their endeavour to get a living we can only attribute their want of success to their ignorance of the English language.³¹

In 1872, Pigeon Bay—a relatively short sea journey south from Lyttelton Harbour to Banks Peninsula—had a few thriving industries, so it is not surprising that some of the friedeburg Poles found jobs in that area, and nearby Holmes Bay. One of the Pigeon Bay pioneers, Ebenezer Hay, introduced cocksfoot grass in 1852. Its seed harvest became almost as lucrative an industry for the area as its wool, frozen meat, and wheat, and the Poles lucky enough to be employed during the short seed harvest earned enough to pay back their families’ sea passages. Like elsewhere, the land needed trees removed before it could be farmed, so the 14 Polish men working at Pigeon Bay in 1874 may have been among the “seasonal labour” to which Reece referred.

We will never know what Reece told the Poles about the state of his land—he would have needed an interpreter and he would not have mentioned his failure as a cattle farmer—or how desperate the Poles were to move on, but whatever they understood of his offer, it led to several Polish families moving north to Reece’s Swamp, and staying. Some of the families made further informal subdivisions between themselves, and settled on five-acre lots.

Did the Poles think—like Reece when he first saw it—that the land was ideal for farming? At first glance, it would have reminded them of the flat, fertile plains of their homeland, but it would not have taken them long to squelch through the veneer.

Despite the challenges the land presented, and its austerity, leasing the 10- and 20-acre sections gave them control over their own lives for the first time in their lives, and permanent places to live. The new Marshland settlers grew to appreciate the abundant flax that they used to give them traction as they slowly worked what land they could. They did not have to remove the visibly growing trees—as they did for their contracts on the dry Banks Peninsula where cocksfoot grass thrived—but as the swampland drained into the Canal Reserve, it dropped to expose drowned trees much harder to remove.

In the early years, the Poles fed their families through contracts such as working on the drains and the roads that always needed more metalling, or clearing the Avon River of weed. The irony was not lost on them later that, after they had paid off the leases and drained the land, they had to pay substantially more to own outright exactly what they had improved. Reports range between £10, £20, and £30 per acre for deals with both Reece and Rhodes.

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Hughes mentions Schimanski (Szymański), Boloski, Rogal and Gearshearski (Gierszewski) as being among the first Poles in Marshland; Gottermeyer and Lange among the first Germans; and Morton, Dunlop and Walter as among the first English.

The Rogal family came off the cartvale, which carried three other Polish families—Borkowski, Roda, and Suchomski—all of whom also travelled on to Christchurch. The Roda and Suchomski families were related to both the Gierszewskis and the Watembachs, who had arrived two years prior off the friedeburg, so it made sense that the new immigrants gravitated to a place, however unknown, that they had a connection with. The Borkowski family would have got to know the other Poles during the 108-day sea voyage, and therefore were unlikely to have been tempted to remain in an English-speaking Wellington without a Polish community when they knew the other Poles were going to Christchurch.

The cartvale sailed into Wellington Harbour early on a balmy Sunday, 11 October 1874. That day another passenger, George Smith senior wrote in his diary:

Nothing more beautiful after a long sea journey than to wake up and find yourself anchored in one of the prettiest bays in the world. Surrounded by rugged hills with as pretty a little town as ever it was my good fortune to see.³²

The 38-year-old Smith’s fifth child had been the first of 10 births during the 108-day voyage from London. Two of his other children had caught and survived the measles and whooping cough that was rife throughout the journey, and he declared that the sight of the yellow quarantine flag was “not as bad as you may think for there is a little island in the bay with a depot for the purposes of emigrants.”³³

A total of 19 infants and children younger than five did not survive the journey aboard the disease-ridden vessel. Five more died at the quarantine barracks on Matiu/Somes Island—the youngest, 12-day-old Clara Lee. Reports by immigration officials rounded down their deaths to 7½ statute adults.

Smith’s writing of a family “with measles… sent ashore” the day the ship sailed on 25 June 1874 suggests it may have left London with infection on board. The extent of measles family’s interaction with other passengers is unclear, but those who did not pay for their own passages and left aboard in the cramped steerage quarters had to in any case cope with the ship’s wretched living quarters and insalubrious rations.

The ship was full. It carried a total of 418 “souls” or 340½ statute adults and those on the upper decks had a more pleasant journey than those farther below.

The high number of deaths led to immigration officials personally inspecting the cartvale after the passengers had disembarked, and before the “fittings” were removed. The inspectors did not have to look far before they realised their “worst anticipations… The Immigration Commissioner’s report to the Superintendent in Wellington continued:

She was indeed in a filthy condition and the stench was abominable. We attributed the cause in a great measure to a water-way in the ‘tween decks, which formed a receptacle for all the filth of the passengers, without allowing it to go overboard, as in the case of the water-way of the upper deck… We are surprised that any person having a knowledge of immigrants and their general ignorance concerning all matters relating to the sea, should have allowed the “Cartvale” to take immigrants on board with every inducement held out to them to deposit their slops and filth in the ‘tween decks, and thus save themselves the trouble of going on the upper deck at night or in bad weather.³⁴

The immigration inspectors noted that the single men’s compartment was “not nearly as clean as it should have been, but owing to the slope of the decks the water in the water-way [in their compartment] found its way to the married compartment and aft.” The married couples and children had to live with the single men’s effluent, as well as their own, because bunks for the steerage passengers had been erected so tightly that it had no way of escaping aboard. The sand that was supposed to help mop up the effluent, slops, and pig muck had run out within three weeks at sea, and “scrapers” had broken on their first use.³⁵

It became clear to the immigration officials in Wellington that the the ship’s captain and surgeon-superintendent had no experience in transporting and feeding large numbers of immigrants. The bread had been sour, and the food and fresh water soon ran out. George Smith wrote in his diary that he refused to take the bread and was allocated flour in its place, so made a “large plum pudding” which suggests that his family did not travel steerage.

The damning reports regarding the cartvale and the douglas, which arrived in Wellington a few days later, led to led to future immigration ships being forced to provide better sleeping arrangements, better hygiene, more water, and more nutritional food. They received a direct order to feed children with preserved rather than salted meat, and to provide infants with milk, special food, and extra rations of water.³⁶

Thomas and Marianna (née Kowalewska) Borkowski embarked in London with five children. Albert, their youngest, was not quite 18 months old when he died of measles on 9 October, two days before the ship arrived in Wellington Harbour. The death certificate of Albert’s four-year-old brother, Stanisław, shows he died of “pneumonia, congestion of the lungs” on 20 October 1874. The older Borkowski daughters—Elizabeth (14), Franciszka (10), and Annie (8)—survived.

Elizabeth Borkaski [sic] married Scot William Forsyth with whom she had 10 children. Their 1886 marriage certificate shows that she was 25 and worked as a servant and that he was 26 and a baker. She remained in Christchurch, lived to 80, and is buried with her husband at Bromley Cemetery.

Frances Borkowski married Henry Kerrison at the Church of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Christchurch in 1881. She was 16, he 21, a farmer from Yaldhurst. They also had 10 children, born in Christchurch, Masterton, Bulls, Feilding and Palmerston North. School records show that the children went to at least five schools in Christchurch and Canterbury, and six in Manawatū, as the family moved, around 1892, from Colombo Street in Christchurch to the North Island. Henry gave the school authorities addresses in Carnarvon, Sanson, Fielding, Bunnythorpe, Woodville and Palmerston North, where school records seemed to stop in 1900.

Newspaper articles after their eldest son—fruit hawker John Henry Kerrison—died of lobar pneumonia in Foxton in 1927, said that he had been living there with his two sons, aged nine and five, who ran for help when their father fell out of the bed they shared—dead; that he had lived around the corner from one sister; he had two brothers and two sisters living in Pahiatua; he had a sister who was a nurse in Gisborne; his father lived in Christchurch; and his mother was in Australia.³⁷

Annie Borkskie [sic] was living with her parents in Marshland when she married bachelor farmer, Irishman George Fuller, at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Manchester Street in 1890. She was 23, he 28. They had 11 children who are all buried in Christchurch cemeteries.

Thomas and Marianna had two more sons in New Zealand, John Thomas (Tom) and Joseph Ignatius. The spelling of their surname changed to Borcoskie. In their later years, the senior Borcoskies lived apart, Marianna with daughter Annie and Thomas with son Joseph. Family story tells how every week Thomas rode his tricycle from Barrington to Marshland to visit his wife. Marianna died of influenza in 1911, aged 77, and Thomas three years later, aged 79.

The two are buried a few metres apart in Linwood Cemetery. Marianna shares her grave with her son-in-law George Fuller, who died of broncho pneumonia two years after her, and and George’s wife, her daughter Annie, who died aged 80 in 1948.

Thomas is buried with his daughter-in-law, Annie née Gierschawski (spelling on marriage certificate), who died as a mother of five aged 30 in 1912, and Annie’s husband, his son, John Thomas Borcoskie, who died aged 81 in 1956.

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The Roda (Rhode-Rohda-Rhock-Rhoda) family consisted of Albert (40) and Marianna, née Szmaglińska (33), and their three children—Julianna (7), Johann (3) and the infant Józef, who died of impetigo and blood poisoning on 23 July 1874—the sixth cartvale death. The unpractised surgeon superintendent, Robert Robinson, wrote that “Jos. Rhock” had been “generally neglected by parents,” a ludicrous and insensitive remark considering that the “great deal of sickness” aboard the ship was later directly attributed to the fact that it was “teeming with filth” and that the “dietary scale” for the children especially was so woefully inadequate.³⁸

On the ship’s manifesto, the family name was misspelt Rhock, and included Albert’s widowed mother, Magdalena, née Gierszewska, who was listed aged 45 rather than 55, his brother Johann (17), and his married sister Marianna Suchomska (28). According to her death certificate, Magdalena died in Papanui on 30 November 1876, aged 57, and was buried as Margaret Rode in an unnamed Christchurch cemetery.³⁹

The cartvale manifesto misspelt the family name Suchomski as Soukonesky. Marianna née Roda and her husband, Johann Suchomski (33), settled in Marshland with three-year-old Carl. Later versions of their name included Suhomski—which they adopted—Sokonieski, Schomski, Schowski and Swamski.

The friedeburg passenger list correctly spelt Albert Watembach’s surname, but used the germanised version of his and his wife’s first names, Albrecht and Catharina. Among Polish friends and family, they were known as Wojciech and Katarzyna, and in New Zealand, Katarzyna was also recorded as Katrina and Catherine. Her maiden name was Roda, and she was Marianna Suhomska’s and Albert Roda’s older sister.

The Gierszewski, Roda, Rogala, Suchomski, and Watembach families all lived in Rytel, in the parish of Czersk in Prussian-partitioned northwestern Poland. They married in Czersk, their children were all born in Rytel, and they were related in various ways. Albert Watembach and Jan Gierszewski, demobbed from the Prussian army after the Prussian victory in the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, were the first to take up the overseas opportunities being offered by immigration agents employed by the New Zealand government. Their emigration may have sparked more serious discussions among those they left behind regarding their own futures as Polish Catholics in an increasing German Lutheran anti-Polish society, because it did not take them long to follow.

Johann and Marianna Suchomski became known as John and Mary Suhomski. Carl became known as Charles, and was 22 when he and his father were naturalised as farmers of Marshland on the same day in August 1893. The same year, Mary Suhomski’s name appeared in the Avon electorate on the world’s first-ever electoral roll for women. She died in 1908, aged 63, which spared her from the ignominy of being placed on New Zealand’s 1917 Enemy Aliens register, where John Suhomski senior appeared twice, as Schomaski and Schomski. Both entries noted that he was 76, that he had lived in New Zealand for 42 years, and that he resided in Waimairi. He died in 1923, aged 81, and was buried with his wife in Linwood Cemetery.

According to the Christchurch diocese records, the Suhomskis had at least four more children, all baptised at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Barbadoes Street under different surnames: Anna Swamski in March 1876; Joseph Sohaomski in September 1879; Mary Schomski in August 1881; and John Suchomski in September 1885.

Anna’s baptism records show that her father was John Swamski, her mother was Mary née Rody, and that her godmother was Catherine Wattemburg. New Zealand’s Te Tari Taiwhenua/ Internal Affairs department recorded her birth name as Annie Suchemoki, and Annie Suhowski when she married John Falska in 1898.

This is believed to be one of the Suhomski houses. The undated photograph comes from the collection of the late Martha Watemburg and shows a wooden addition to an early concrete and sod house. If you recognise the women, girl or address, please contact us through the get in touch option on our home page.

John and Mary Suhomski are among the many Poles interred at Linwood Cemetery in Christchurch.
This headstone reads: In Loving Memory of MARY beloved wife of John Suhomski died 16th March 1908 in her 60th year. Also JOHN beloved husband of the above died 12th June 1923 aged 84 years. R.I.P.

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Mateusz Szymański arrived in New Zealand aboard the friedeburg as Mathias Schimansky, a single man aged 22. The ship’s manifesto showed that he had signed a £5 promissory note for his passage.

He had been born in Słupcina in 1851, in the Warmian-Masurian voivodeship of northern Poland. In New Zealand, his name was anglicised to Matthew (sometimes Mathew) Schimanski. As a single man, he quickly found a job, but his first was in Darfield, about 50 kilometres inland from Christchurch and therefore also 50 kilometres from the Polish families he had been with on the friedeburg—specifically the Burchards, whose eldest daughter was 17-year-old Julia.

Julianna (Julia) Burchard had arrived with her parents Anna (née Kamieńska) and Adam Burchard and her three younger brothers, Johann (11), Theofil (4) and six-month-old Tomasz. It is not clear exactly where the family lived at first but it was in or near Marshland. Whenever he had the chance, Matthew Schimanski made the round trip to visit Julia—on foot, if he could not borrow a bicycle or catch a lift.

Julia and Matthew married in August 1874, their names recorded as Eulalia Juliana Buchart and Matthew Schimeisky. They and had nine children before Julia died in childbirth, aged 40, a few months before their 20th wedding anniversary.

According to family story, Matthew arrived with his pockets full of onion seeds. If he did, it is not clear how he stored them until he was able to use them, but some of the Poles must have brought over vegetable seeds, including garlic, which Poles had learnt to use as a preservative during their frugal times in Prussian-partitioned Poland.

When Mathias arrived in Marshland, Canal Road did not reach Preston’s Road, there was no bridge over the Styx River, and the swamp already had a reputation: Schimanski family story tells how a Mr Blackburn, contracted to build the approach to the Styx, decided to use a team of six horses. The bog trapped, then swallowed all six.

The youngest Schimanski daughters, Rose and Augusta, married Blackburn brothers Charles and John, so no doubt the Schimanski and Blackburn families had shared stories of their early battles with the swamp: there is a good chance that the Mr Blackburn who lost his team of horses was the brothers’ father.

As Mathias settled in Marshland, he wrote letters to encourage his family still in Prussian-partitioned Poland to join him, but when his older brother Christoper arrived in 1883 with his wife and six children, he was furious that he had been duped about what to expect. Like several of the first Poles, Mathias had glossed over the hardships of life in the new colony.

Matthew and Julia Schimanski outside their Marshland home shortly before Julia died. Standing to the right are their eldest daughters, Johanna (Anna), Mary, and Martha. The trio on the left are Frank, Margaret (Magdalena), and John. Seated in front of their mother are Rose, Augusta, and Lil.

The widower Matthew Schimanski and widow Anna Rogal married in 1899. Charles Rogala had simplified his name in New Zealand and died in December 1897 aged 53. He and Anna (née Domachowska) arrived in Marshland with their 20-month-old son, Joseph, and had eight children in New Zealand: John in 1874; Frank in 1880; Mary in 1883; Leonard in 1886; Thomas in 1887; Theodore, who died aged four months in 1888; Helen in 1891; and Anthony in 1893.

The two families were already close. Charles Rogal and Matthew Schimanski were naturalised at Bottle Lake within weeks of each other in 1887, both as farmers, and Matthew was helping the Rogals before and after Charles Rogal died. He had enrolled Helen and Anthony Rogal as five-year-olds into Marshland School in 1896 and 1898.

Anna Rogal Schimanski died aged 76 on 3 May 1925. She is buried at the Linwood cemetery next to her first husband and with two of their children, Mary, who died aged 21 in 1904, and Anthony, who died aged 29 in 1923.

The Christchurch City Council has digitised layout plans of Linwood Cemetery. This snip suggests that the widow Annie Rogal organised her own last resting place next to Charles eight months after he died, and that their daughter Mary was buried on 22 June 1904.

The Rogal headstone at Linwood Cemetery in 2022, the lead lettering faded and torn, but still informative.
It reads: In Loving Memory of CHARLES ROGAL died Dec 10th 1887 aged 53. Also MARY died June 19th 1904 aged 21. Also ANTHONY died 24th Sept 1923 aged 29. Also ANNA loved wife of CHARLES ROGAL 1849–1925. R.I.P.

Matthew died in 1933, and was buried with his first wife, Julia, a few metres from where the Rogals lie. The intact top piece of their headstone, like so many others at Linwood Cemetery, now lies on the ground. The section remaining does not mention their baby, who died the day before Julia.

Much of the leadwork has disappeared from Julia Schimanski’s much-earlier inscription. Pinholes and indentations show that she died aged 40, on 26 April 1894. Below her details were the words, “Thy will be done” and below that, “Mathew Schimanski, beloved husband of the above” who died aged 84, on 17 March 1933.

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Christopher (Christian) Szymański, two years older than Matthew, followed his brother to New Zealand in 1883. With no direct immigration from continental Europe, Christopher and his family embarked on the firth of forth in London.

By then, the journey to Lyttelton was a mere 88 days. the press in Christchurch noted on 6 February 1883 that the barque had arrived into port “in admirable order, creditable to its master and worthy chief officer.”⁴⁰ Compared with the 418 hapless “souls” on the cartvale nine years earlier, the firth of forth carried 19 crew and only 31 passengers, including Christopher’s wife, Louisa, née Nikiel (40), their children Julia (9), Augusta (5), and Mary (3), and Louisa’s sons from her marriage to the late Julian Szaluga—Martin (16) and Michael (13).

The captain knew Louisa well enough to note in his logbook that “Mrs Schimanski” had “been confirmed of a boy” (John) at 5.30pm on 17 January 1883, a Wednesday of wind, rain squalls, and seas that tossed the ship’s human cargo around “like a lot of pieces of soap.”⁴¹ the press mentioned the birth in its 6 February story.

Regardless of how annoyed Christopher Schimanski had been with his brother for glossing over his living conditions, he accepted the situation and settled into the life of a New Zealand market gardener. He and his family lived next door to Marshland School on Marshland Road, and Matthew lived opposite with his own growing family On 30 August 1887, the Schimanski brothers were naturalised together, as farmers, at Bottle Lake. A 1915 map reveals that their extended families lived near one another on the four blocks crossed by Marshland and Preston roads, and near other extended Polish families such as Boloski, Gorinski, Kiesanowski, Rogal, and Rogatski, through which they became linked by marriages. Both Schimanski brothers named a son John and a daughter Augusta, which would have complicated matters for outsiders.

Christopher Schimanski, left, outside his house on Marshland Road with his wife, Louisa, in the apron on the veranda, and some of their family. Next to Christopher are Mary and John. Almost hidden behind the shrubs near his mother is Albert, their only child born in New Zealand. With her mother on the veranda is Julia, holding her sister Augusta’s baby. Augusta is on the far right, and her husband, Jack Boloski, is the man in the middle.

The last rays of a May afternoon catch Christopher and Louisa Schimanski's headstone in Linwood Cemetery, Christchurch. Louisa died in 1906, and Christopher in 1920. They share their grave with their grandson George John, who died in 1909 aged seven.

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Any of the men who were aged between 20 and 39 when they arrived in New Zealand from Prussian-partitioned Poland were supposed to be either serving in the Prussian army, or be available as reservists.

The conscription system responsible for the Prussian victory in the 1871–1872 Prussian-Franco War allowed few men to escape its strict rules—rules borne from a decades-long Prussian strategy of building an army of well-trained and war-ready reservists. At 20, men spent three years in military service, then another two in the reserve force, and a further 14 in a stand-by force.

Brothers Jan and Michał Gierszewski were technically still indentured as reservists when they separately left Prussian-partitioned Poland. They had the added motivation of protecting their sons: in 1872, both had sons aged seven, and Michał also had five-year-old Leo (spelling from Czersk parish records). Polish birth records spelt their surnames Górczewski and Gerszewski.

The overwhelming triumph against the French encouraged German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to pursue his quest to build a great German Empire out of its many states, and to create a population of “good Lutheran Germans.” Life had been harsh for Poles in Prussian-partitioned Poland before that war, but became wretched as Bismarck outlawed their rights, their language, and their Catholicism, and stripped them of their livelihoods to the extent that they often existed on the edge of starvation.

The friedeburg manifesto, spelt Jan Gierzewski’s name Johann Georgewski, but it had his correct age, 34. With him were his wife, Rosalia née Pyszka (36), their son Simon (7) and their daughter Anna (18 months). Jan became known in New Zealand as John, and was soon encouraging Michał, five years his junior, to join him.

The Michał Gierszewskis left their home in Czersk in 1873 with Katarzyna’s brother, Walentyn Cieszanowski (34), and his wife, Anna, née Ebertowska (24). Both men were tailors, trained by Katarzyna’s and Walentyn’s father, Walentyn senior. The Prussians spelt Michał as Michael, Walentyn as Valentin, and Katarzyna as Catharina.

According to the humboldt passenger list, the families left “Hamburgh” on 30 June 1873 and arrived in Maryborough, Queensland, on 29 October 1873. The ship’s manifesto shows Cieszanowski as Czrezanowski, and Gierszewski as Gerschefske. It is not clear why Michał and his family received “free” passage, while Walentyn and Anna were “assisted” or how they arrived in New Zealand from Australia.

The Gierszewski and Cieszanowski entries in the humboldt passenger list.

Instead of being saved, Michał’s and Katarzyna’s boys—named on the passenger list as John and Leonhard—died at sea. Gierszewski descendant, Margaret Copland: “The boat was crowded and dirty. As the ship neared the tropics one family of children became sick with a high fever… The fever passed from child to child. Every few days a child would recover, or a child would die…”⁴²

Officially, one 25-year-old woman, 15 children aged between two and nine, and six babies died. The records show those 22 comprised 8½ statute adults.⁴³ Why the Australian archives holds a card recording the deaths of both Valentin (34) and an Ann (24) Czsezanowaki (their spelling) remains a mystery. The information on the card indicates that they both died aboard the humboldt, but the lack of all but their misspelt names and ages suggests they may have wanted to disappear.

By 1876, Michał Gierszewski and Walentyn Cieszanowski had brought their families to Marshland, but Walentyn (as Valentine Kiesanowski) quickly decided to follow his trade in the then more prosperous Thames.

Wilfred Walter remembered that John “Gearschowski” (Michał’s older brother, the Franco-Prussian War veteran who arrived off the friedeburg) built a “two-roomed dwelling with thatched roof. There was nothing stylish about it. He sank an artesian close to the house and I believe it is still to be found there. Some years later he left for America.” Walter recalled that before the Pole left, he had owned a block on the corner of Hill’s and Lange’s roads, “just past Mr Lange’s” and had erected “a substantial house.”⁴⁴

Michael Gearschawski lived farther along on the opposite side of the road. He “built a modest house and after demolishing it, he erected a two-storey house to meet the demands of his growing family. This house is still to be seen on the property… he farmed a fairly large block of land.”⁴⁵

According to baptism records, Michael and Catherine Gierszewski had at least four more children: Mary, who was baptised at the Catholic Catholic Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Barbadoes Street in 1876; Frances, who was baptised in 1878; Annie, who was baptised in 1880 and whose godmother was Catherine Watemburg; and Joanna, who was baptised in 1881 and whose godparents were Matthew and Julianna Schimanski.

John Gierchwski advertised his land in the lyttelton times on 10 April 1884:

LEASE FOR SALE. —20 Acres of rich Land at Rhodes’ Swamp; House, and other buildings, 3 miles from Christchurch. Splendid land for Root Crop or Grass, with 3 acres carrots. Present owner can give good reasons for selling. Stock and Plant can be taken at valuation.⁴⁶

John and his family seemed to have moved for a short time to Carterton, then by 1886 to the United States. Their son Simon seems to have disappeared. Some stories say that he died aboard the friedeburg, but that ship recorded only one death, an 11-month-old boy.

Michael’s naturalisation records state that he lived in Bottle Lake. In 1904 he advertised his 10-acre property on Preston’s Road for rent with “immediate possession.”⁴⁷ He appeared on the 1917 New Zealand Enemy Alien record as M Gearschawski, aged 74 and born in Germany [sic]. He died at Hill’s Road, Marshland, aged 86.

Catherine Gearschawski appeared on the first electoral roll for women, in 1893. Her address was Canal Reserve and her occupation “domestic duties.” Like her husband, the 1917 Enemy Alien record says she was born in Germany. She died in 1925, also aged 86.

Catharina Cierzanowska and Michael Gierszewski married in the Czersk parish of Prussian-partitioned northwest Poland on 9 May 1864. She was 25 and he was 23. They both lived to 86. Their headstone in Linwood Cemetery fell in the 2011 earthquakes.

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From October 1876 to December 1878, Valentine Kiesanowski placed more than 300 large advertisements in the thames advertiser and the thames star:⁴⁸

They were replaced by one-line lower-case advertisements under “Tailors” then tailed off and completely disappeared for a few years before they returned in block form in December 1884: “V. KIESANOWSKI, TAILOR… ALL KINDS OF WORK executed on the shortest notice, on the most reasonable terms.” His last public message on 31 August 1886 reminded Thames residents that his prices were as “moderate as ever” and that he guaranteed “the best of Workmanship” and that “Suits to Measure” cost from £4 10s.⁴⁹

Valentine did eventually turn to farming in Marshland, according to his letter of naturalisation dated 24 August 1893. His brother-in-law, Michael “Gearschawiski” received his the same day and a week later, his son John, born in Australia, received his, along with father and son John and Charles Suhomski.

Valentine and Annie Kiesanowski had at least four more children in New Zealand: Cissy in 1879; Joseph Francis in 1881; Annie in 1884; and Edward in 1888.

The Kiesanowski headstone is among the few unscathed by the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Valentine Kiesanowski died on 23 September 1902, aged 65. Annie survived him by nearly 30 years and died aged 84. They share their grave with their daughter-in-law, John’s wife, Annie Mary (née Rogatski), who died aged 67 in 1946, and their grandson, Laurence Joseph, who died aged 26 in 1938.

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In adjacent columns on the front page of the lyttelton times on 15 February 1884, Albert Watemburg of Rhodes Swamp appealed to the “charitable public” to help him pay for his wife’s “Board and Nurse” after a major operation, while an RH Rhodes advertised for surveyors “for Land Transfer Act purposes” on 1,000 acres of his Marshland estate.⁵⁰ It is unclear who placed the Rhodes advertisement, as Robert Heaton Rhodes died three and a half months later, aged 69, when his eldest son, also Robert Heaton—who became Sir Heaton Rhodes—was then 23. The senior Rhodes’ full-column obituary in the lyttelton times mentioned that:

At Papanui he devoted himself to increasing the value of what was then known as Rhodes’ Swamp, but is now the Marshland estate on the Canal Reserve, near Horseshoe Lake. In draining this land, he expended, it is believed, something like ₤5,000, besides giving his time, and frequently personal labour, to the work.⁵¹

The obituary did not expand on the nature of the “frequently personal labour” but said that the inhabitants of Christchurch owed the Cathedral tower and eight of its 10 bells to Rhodes’ “munificence.” The other two bells were donated by a Mr Miles of the conveyancing firm Miles & Co, which handled Rhodes’ land affairs. The Miles name continued to appear in transactions involving the Rhodes estate and other Marshland residents.

Ken Silby’s 1856 map for the Christchurch Drainage Board guided successive council authorities as to where to place the city’s main drains, which contractors dug out. Those with properties next to the main drains, dug their own drains towards the bigger ones. Those on leaseholds father away figured out by trial and error where to dig their own drains to let the water flow away, generally north towards the Styx River and the sea. The wet, slow, mucky process took years. The swamp’s ability to swallow the unwary would have it no other way. Family stories tell of many animals lost in unseen waterholes.

The swamp’s leasehold settlers exchanged shovels for axes, saws, and horses to remove the ancient timber that the drained land exposed: horses hauled away sawn branches until just the stumps remained. The men loosened those by chopping or sawing through visible roots, and sometimes resorted to home-made explosives to help lift a stubborn stump so that a horse could pull it out.

The first leaseholders put up first shelters on the highest points, which were not always the easiest places to access, and used multiple layers of flax—for its ability to float—to make paths to cross the swampland that surrounded their damp dwellings.

Albert Watemburg and his family were living at Rhodes Swamp when he placed his 1884 advertisement:

Catherine Watemburg had undergone an operation in 1883 for the removal of an 16lb abdominal tumour within a 105lb mass, which made the editorial columns when the surgeon, a Dr Russell, later sued Albert Wottenburg [sic]. It was Dr Russell who had advised Albert to place the advertisement appealing for help with the non-medical costs.

The court sitting for a “civil case of more than ordinary interest” in March 1885 heard that Dr Russell was claiming £57 9s 6d from Albert.⁵²

A Dr RH Blackwell, who assisted, said that the operation was “almost the gravest that could be performed on a human being… especially so in this case considering the large size of the tumour involved” and that he would not have taken less than the 100 guineas such a procedure would have cost in England. Dr Russell’s medical ally did admit under cross-examination, however, that he had known of medical men taking such cases to gain experience.

Other medical witnesses confirmed hearing from Dr Russell himself—before Dr Blackwell had entered the operating room within Dr Russell’s house—that he had promised to waive his surgical fees if Albert paid for his wife’s board and lodging close by. Jessie Henshaw, one of the Watemburg’s neighbours testified that she heard Dr Russell telling Catherine that she would “have to go to town to be away from the damp swamp and the noise of the children.”

The court heard how Catherine had been unwilling to have the operation, even though she had been suffering for five years, but was convinced to go ahead by Dr Russell, who also convinced Albert not to send his wife to the Christchurch hospital—where Catherine’s operation and stay would have been almost free—as there was “too much quarrelling” among its doctors.

Witnesses for Albert also included his neighbour from Rhodes Swamp Charles Walter, who had visited Dr Russell after the operation to sell him some hay. Dr Russell had told Charles Walter that he was “giving his attendance ‘free gratis’” and Walter had replied that the gesture would no doubt “improve his practice.”

Albert’s lawyer, a Mr Stringer, said that another reason for Dr Russell’s offering his services for free was that the defendant was “a poor man living in a house little better than a hovel” who had paid all the incidental costs charged to him. Mr Stringer also presented Judge Beetham with Catherine’s meticulous accounts ledger, which showed their repayments to Dr Russell—including “two loads of carrots.” ⁵³ Despite Catherine’s signing her eight-month-old son Bernard’s death certificate with an “x” in 1879, she was well-able to count.

Judge Beetham ended proceedings by saying that although he had no doubt that the defendant was grateful to Dr Russell for “relieving his wife” he did not hesitate in his judgement in favour of his patient.

Years later, Wilfred Walter recalled how several of the Poles in his neighbourhood lived in a “close settlement” arrangement on a 20-acre property divided into four blocks:⁵⁴

“The third paddock was occupied by Mr Albert Watemburg, a quiet and unassuming man. He was a most industrious person, and was a noted hand at ‘stumping the land.’ He left here to take a place on Lake Terrace Road… Subsequently he took over thirteen acres of land at the corner of Marshland Road and McSaveney’s Road. He lived in a small house, and he grew crops of onions and carrots… When the place with all the other properties in the district was offered for sale, Mr Watemburg became the owner of it. He then built a very nice house…”

Albert and Catherine Watembach had arrived in Lyttelton in 1872 with Joseph (5), Marianna, later Mary (19 months) and Franciszek, later Frank (eight months). In New Zealand they became known as Watemburg. They had three more children in Christchurch: John Edmund in August 1874; Annie in May 1876; and Bernard in April 1879. John Edmund’s October 1874 baptismal records show his parents as Albert Waterborough and Catharina Rowden, and that the family lived in Papanui. Annie’s surname is spelt Watambarg on New Zealand’s official births index, and Wattemberg on her baptismal record, where her mother’s surname is Ready. Bernard’s surname on his official birth record is Watamberg, and Watemburgh on his death record.

They were living in Papanui when Bernard was born. Less than two weeks before what would have been his first Christmas, he developed diarrhoea, started to have convulsions, and died on 21 December 1879.

Of the family’s time on the five-acre section at Rhodes Swamp, Mary (née Watemburg) le Vavaseur told Wilfred Walter that the land was “full of stumps and my father had a busy time of hard work taking [them] out. The soil was very rich, but was very spongy and wet, and had to be drained… The houses, if they could be called houses, were really only shacks of one room each, with the exception of Albert Rhoda, whose place had two rooms. Bunks were built around the walls and were screened off.”

Bit by bit, like so many of the other Polish families, the senior Watemburgs improved their circumstances. The “very nice” house that Wilfred Walter described must have been the one Albert had built on Marshland Road. Family story is that Albert sold it to their oldest son, Joseph, for his own growing family.

The Watemburg house on Marshland Road. Catharine Watemburg stands on the veranda next to her granddaughters Beatrice and Vera. Their mother, Martha (née Neustrowska) Watemburg, is to the right, with Albert. The flowering onions in the foreground carry the seeds for the next season’s harvest.

The senior Watemburgs retired to Tuam Street in Christchurch city, where Albert died of heart failure on 8 February 1906, aged 65. He was buried at Linwood Cemetery. His widow, known as a “kindly woman always walking around Christchurch with bags of fruit and vegetables for people who did not have enough,” continued to live there, and it was where her only daughter-in-law retreated to give birth to her last four babies.

Joseph Watemburg, like other Marshland market gardeners, took on out-of-season jobs, here scything invasive water weeds on the Avon for the local board. His grandson Ray Watembach, who took on the original name: “The local gentry could then go punting with their lady friends on a clear waterway.”

Late one Saturday in March 1915, Joseph Watemburg collapsed while making a delivery of carrots for the city’s tram horses stabled at Riccarton. His eldest child, Beatrice, had just turned 16, Vera was still 14, and his four sons were aged between three and 12.

During his funeral, his mother threw herself into his open grave and died nine days later.

His widow returned—with Albert, Leo, William and Alfred—to Taranaki, where she had her Neustrowski parents’ and brothers’ support, and left her two daughters in the care of family in Christchurch.

The fallen headstones in Linwood cemetery of Albert and Catherine Watemburg, above, and their son Joseph's, below.
The original inscription on the senior Watemburgs headstone was: “For ever with the Lord. In loving remembrance of Albert beloved husband of Catherine Watemburg died February 8th 1906 aged 65 years. Also Catherine beloved wife of Albert Watemburg died 25th March 1915 aged 73 years.” Records show that they lie with their unmarried son John Edmund, who died in 1935 aged 59.
The inscription on Joseph's headstone: “In loving memory of Olive Agnes beloved daughter of J & M Watemburg died Sept 2 1908 aged 8 months. Also Joseph Watemburg who died 15th March 1915 aged 47 years. Olive died of bronchitis.

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Wilfred Walter’s recollections of the other three Polish families who participated in the “close settlement” arrangement of five acres each:⁵⁵

“Mr J Schomski [sic] lived on the paddock next to [McSaveney’s] road. His dwelling consisted partly of sod and timber… He reared a family of four, two boys and two daughters.” Walter remembered that the family later moved to Marshland Road. A fifth child, John Suchomski junior, was born in 1886.

“The next paddock was held by Mr C. Rogal; he reared a big family, and it is still a wonder to me how he made both ends meet, to feed and clothe so many on only five acres of land. He was a wonderful worker and made the most and best of the place. He afterwards returned to a place on the Marshland Road now owned by Mr J Blackburn.

Albert Rhoda took the “far paddock” in the block and shared a section of that with Jack Rock until the latter moved to Preston’s Road. Albert Watemburg’s daughter Mary, then Mrs le Vavaseur, told Wilfred Walter that Albert and Jack were brothers, and that Jack had changed his name to avoid confusion with his nephew, John Rhoda.

Mary le Vavaseur’s recollections demonstrate the complexity of Polish inter-relationships in Marshland: in 1874, the cartvale carried seven members of the “Rhock” family—but their name was not Rhock. In Rytel, Pomerania, before the germanisation of Polish names in Prussian-partitioned Poland, their surname was Roda. According to parish records in Czersk, Albert Roda (33) and Marianna Szmaglińska (25) married on 27 August 1866. By the time their first children—Julianna, and Johann—were born in nearby Rytel in 1867 and 1870, Prussian authorities had changed their family name. Johann was the germanised spelling of the Polish Jan (the English John).

Ray Watembach—Albert Watemburg’s grandson and Mary le Vavaseur’s nephew—is an authority on the origins of Polish names in New Zealand: “Germans introduced an ‘h’ and changed it to Rohda, then Rhode. In New Zealand, officials followed an English girl’s name fashionable in 1874—a logical mistake for officials interpreting a Polish-accented ‘Roda’—and made it Rhoda.”

Albert accepted the misspelling, although the first two Rhoda births in New Zealand were recorded as Rhode: Anna in 1875; and Frank in 1877. Albert and Marianna’s next two children were officially recorded as Marie Rhoda in 1879, and Rosalyia [sic] Rhoda in 1881.

Wilfred Walter watched the Rhoda family move from the five-acre paddock to Walter’s Road, where Albert erected the first buildings. They then moved to a property on the corner of Hill’s and Kelly’s roads. Mrs Rhoda made an impression on the young Wilfred, but his assessment of her happiness at toiling may have been misinterpreted:

“Mrs Rhoda helped her husband in working the land, cleaning and harvesting the crops, and she was a wonderful worker in every other way. Everybody who knew her… spoke in high praise of what a great worker and settler of the district she was. She was never happier than when she was out in the paddocks working, and it could… be safely said it would be difficult to find another woman in New Zealand to equal her in this kind of work. Almost to her last days she was to be found toiling on the paddocks. She was equally as good as any man in tilling the soil and at harvesting the crops, which were nearly all root crops in those days.”⁵⁶

Albert Rhoda died in 1904. When Albert and Mary enrolled their grandson Joseph at Marshland School in 1898, they said their address was 61 Kelly’s Road, and that address remained on Mary Rhoda’s electoral roll information until she died in 1925, aged 86.

Mary and Albert Rhoda's headstone at Linwood Cemetery. A volunteer for the Friends of Linwood Cemetery took this photograph in June 2010. Months later earthquakes toppled the headstone but the central section with Mary and Albert's details survived.
The inscription reads: “In loving memory of Albert Rhoda died 29th Jan 1904 aged 59. Also his beloved wife Mary Rhoda died 13th Nov 1925 aged 86. And their daughter Annie O'Donnell died 2nd October 1915 aged 36. RIP.

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Three weeks after Rhodes’ death in 1884, Miles & Co ran a series of advertisements in both the press and the lyttelton times that called for five-year leases on two of the Rhodes blocks. Two of the unspecified crops “may be taken off” they said, ready for the land to be “laid down with English grass to the satisfaction of the landlords.”⁵⁷

Wakefield’s and Godley’s “men of capital” had indeed been able to acquire the original land cheaply: a farthing is a quarter of a penny, so 5,000 acres—one of the smallest original Waste Board blocks—would have cost little more than £5 to secure in 1860, the equivalent of one sea passage in 1872. Speculators such as Edward Reece and Robert Rhodes may not have followed Godley’s “men of capital” rule-book in that they did not keep their massive estates intact, but their subdivisions, and subsequent land sales to men without capital increased their wealth exponentially.

By the time Reece met the Poles in Banks Peninsula, he had divided the swampiest part of his land farthest from his homestead into 10- and 20-acre blocks, and offered them as 10-year leases at 30 shillings a year. Hughes remarked in his thesis that “in many cases the Poles bought their sections before the time was up.” Rather than raise a loan during a time when interest rates were high, they paid off their land year by year, at ₤30 an acre—10 times the cost 10 years earlier. Hughes called it “a very high price” considering the state of the land.⁵⁸

It is not clear what exactly those interest rates were. Canterbury newspapers in 1884 show advertisements offering a rate of six percent for lenders, but several firms offering “lowest” rates for borrowers did not state the terms.

Any of the Marshland settlers who had taken up the leases would soon have realised that the longer they worked on draining the land, the more viable and expensive their acreage became, so it was not surprising that they tried to speed up the purchasing process.

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Wilfred John Walter’s father, Charles Henry Walter, farmed 22 acres that stretched alongside a track adjacent to the Rhodes Swamp’s main drain, and then on to Hill’s and McSaveney’s roads.

On the first page of his memoirs, Wilfred Walter described the family’s first thatched-roofed, three-roomed sod house, built by John McSaveney. The floor in the main room was “roughly boarded,” but the others had uncovered, clay floors. Candles “sufficed as lighting and afterwards kerosene lamps were used.”

The house may have been basic, but it was solidly built—as the family discovered in 1888 when a “terrific earthquake almost tossed us out… we thought the house was collapsing. The top of the Christchurch Cathedral Spire fell to the footpath below…”⁵⁹

This image of of the Christchurch cathedral, missing its top 7.8 metres of stone spire after the 1 September 1888 earthquake, comes from te ara the encyclopedia of new zealand. According to the accompanying caption, the spire was repaired, but 1.5 metres fell again in an 1901 earthquake, and was later remodelled in hardwood sheathed in copper.⁶⁰

The drama of the earthquakes faded as the settlers continued to deal with living on the swamp.

Walter: “The half-chain road [in front of the Walter property], now named Walters Road, was well-known in the early days… It was not really a public road then, being meant as a right-of-way for the residents… seven gateways had to be opened and closed before getting to the end of it. This roadway was at best a rough and tumble journey, and in the winter months it was nothing better than a quagmire. Loads of gorse were strewn over it to make it safe and negotiable, but even then, it often had to be abandoned, and resort made to travelling through the adjoining paddocks.”⁶¹

McSaveney’s Road from Hill’s Road to Marshland Road—less than a kilometre long— in 1882 was “a beaten track—sledges being used to bring produce by the settlers living along the road to Hill’s Road, for loading on to carts for the market.”⁶²

“A rightaway, a grass track, extended from McSaveney’s Road along the west side to Mr Albert Rhoda’s place, this being a convenience to all the settlers getting in and out of their respective properties. Being soft soil, it easily cut up with traffic, and many were the tough and boggy trips taking produce out to McSaveney’s Road. In the winter time horses would bog down pulling loads up to their bellies… at this time of the year [it] was like a river of mud.”⁶³

A Marshland team harrowing after autumn ploughing. Most farmers used two horses.⁶⁴ John Blackburn recalled his father-in-law Matthew Schimanski using bullocks rather than horses to plough.⁶⁵

The poor state of the roads in Marshland became a long-standing grievance among its residents. In May 1871, “Swampy” complained to the editor of the press about Marshland’s higher council rates being used for the upkeep of roads in south Christchurch, while theirs farther north were being ignored. He had found out that, after the upgrade of their own roads, a “wealthy and educated” group in south Christchurch had petitioned the council to allow them to be separated from the Marshland area’s roads. “Swampy” said this would:

… leave out all the roads that are costly to keep, those not yet made, the river, the frightfully expensive main drains—about eight miles of the North road—the Sandhills, the Swamps, where the flax still grows on the roads…⁶⁶

Environment Canterbury reported in 2007: “The northern end of Hill’s Rd follows the edge of the old swamp… the only safe route through the area at the time. The construction of roads required extensive and continuous work due to sand and metal fill being swallowed by the bog. By the early 1900s the roads in Marshland were stable enough to become popular travelling routes.”⁶⁷

To take their produce to the Papanui Railway Station, residents from eastern Marshland used Winter’s Road, which then extended from Hill’s Road to Canal Reserve. For many years, Winter’s Road was “just a grass track” but increased demand led to authorities pouring metal from the Styx River shingle pit onto the east end of the road. Even so, “the road was full of deep ruts, and it was heavy and slow pulling for even a good horse to pull a dray with a ton on it.”⁶⁸

Walter: “I remember quite well a track being made by vehicles going through my father’s place. A number of creeks crossed the road, and the bridges over these streams were not considered, and how these settlers day in and day out used this track, which was all that it was, without accident was always a surprise to us.”⁶⁹ He described the Maffey farm nearby as “a wilderness… full of deep springs” that included Balley’s Hole, “so deep it was said to have no bottom to it.”⁷⁰

One cattle drive, by a man called Holmes, made a lasting impression on a young Walter: “They arrived on a Saturday and on Sunday about twenty head were in the drains, several being drowned. Sheep were also tried for grazing on this place but they too fared no better than the cattle, quite a number being drowned in the drains… The job then was to pull the carcasses out and skin them.”⁷¹

A Mr R Gibb reminded Walter during his interview in October 1937 about “a remarkable bullock” called Old Joe, and owned by the Hawken family. He was “a champion puller, especially pulling cattle out of the drains, a very common occurrence in those days. He became cunning in objecting… but this was overcome by blindfolding him and then attaching him to the bullock in the drain.”⁷²

The Walter farm was later divided up and taken over by a Thomas Wilson, who arrived as an infant off one of the first four ships in 1850, the charlotte jane,⁶⁶ and Frank Rogatski (Rogacki) senior, who arrived in Port Chalmers off the palmerston in 1872, aged 26, with his wife, Paulina, aged 21.

Just a few kilometres north of Marshland, the 13-hectacre freshwater wetland, Ōtukaikino, is being restored. Notices remind Visitors not to venture off the tracks and boardwalk.

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By May 1886, the executors of the Rhodes estate started to sell its leased, reclaimed land. Advertisements tended to appear in tandem in the press and the lyttelton times, this one on 8 May.⁷⁴

The advertisement does not name the “good roads” nor the price of the lots, but acknowledged the “depressed state of the Land Market” and confirmed the six percent interest rate.

A week later, in its auctioneer’s report, Miles & Co. disclosed “eager enquiries” that bought nearly 78 acres at an average of £87 7s 64d per acre.⁷⁵

Not all property buyers considered the land as valuable as that. The following week, Miles & Co squeezed in a sentence at the end of their report: “Privately during the week we have sold further portions of the Marshland Estate, amounting to eighty-nine acres, at prices varying £35 to £40 per acre.”⁷⁶

On 27 August 1887, under the heading “Commercial,” the lyttelton times told of another private sale: “Part lot 19, part of the Marshland Estate, 18 acres at £31 an acre.”

On 22 October 1887, the press reported that it was “a pleasing feature in the face of the general cry of depression and scarcity of money, to be able to record a satisfactory sale of land, and we have much pleasure in announcing the sale of two small farms, part of the Marshland Estate, one at £38, and the other at £37 per acre, a very considerable portion of the purchase money being paid in cash.”

The road along the northwest boundary of Marshland, now Hawkins Road, is named after Henry Hawken. According to the Christchurch City Libraries, he arrived with his wife and four children in Lyttelton via the accrington in 1863, leased the first block on Rhodes Swamp—on the corner of now Hawkins and Prestons roads—and built one of the first two sod huts in the district.⁷⁷ Some sections of the road are today divided into quarter-acres; elsewhere huge paddocks predominate.

From December 1887, the Rhodes estate began a concerted newspaper advertising campaign for 240 acres “lately occupied by Messrs A and EJ Hawken,” which it said was the “finest portion of the Marshland estate.” In the same column, the estate offered weekly grazing for cattle.⁷⁸

That December, Hawken’s 240 acres were offered for sale at least 16 times in the two local newspapers. The advertisements tailed off by the end of February but in June, the estate was again offering 200 acres of the Hawken land, calling it “a further portion.” The same wording continued to appear until late December 1888.⁷⁹

Wilfred Walter believed the land represented most of the Rhodes estate north of McSaveney’s Road, plus some immediately south, and that nearly all the settlers bought the places they held under lease at prices that ranged from ₤30 to ₤37 10s an acre:

“This changeover from leasehold tenure to freehold led to a great progressive movement in the district. Old shacks gave way to better habitations, the land was given better attention, and treatment and production of crops considerably increased…”⁸⁰

Hughes captured this image of the only remaining specimen of an old sod house on Reeves Road, made made entirely of sun-dried, sod-plastered clay, and which bore “silent witness to the endeavours of the early settlers to utilise those materials already existing in the district.” It stood high on a sandhill, had two rooms—each with a small window—a front door, and a back door. Hughes discovered a “diminutive rusty stove” in the chimney stack at the eastern end of house, a shattered lamp on its “rude wooden mantel piece,” and “rough floral wallpaper peel[ing] off walls shaking in the wind.”⁸¹ Reeves Road had previously been named Cemetery Road and is now Mairehau Road.

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Hughes described Marshland Poles as “energetic, enduring, patient… Marshland owes its status as a prosperous and thriving community… to the nature of its Polish settlers, their triumph in the face of adversity, and their victory over natural odds perhaps greater than those of any other district in New Zealand.”⁸²

What drove Hughes to come to this conclusion? He admits that “time at our disposal [for interviews and research] was extremely limited, and our knowledge of the district at the outset nil.”⁸³

Hughes focussed on 15 families “whose names show them to be of Polish extraction” and seven German ones—but named few. He wondered what brought them to New Zealand and spoke to an unnamed “old settler.” Hughes wrote about Matthew Schimanski, who “slipped out of his village one night and made his way to London,”⁸⁴ but could not have spoken to him, since he had died in 1933 and would have told the student-teacher that he had boarded the friedeburg in Hamburg, nor to his brother Christopher, who arrived from London in 1883, but died in 1920.

Hughes: “Strange irony of fate that the ‘blood and iron’ of Bismarck should lead to the establishment of a progressive, hard-working community in New Zealand.”⁸⁵

Hughes analysed the adult Marshland community through the “most recent” Kaiapoi electoral roll (1938). He found approximately 500 people in Marshland, with 275 being eligible to vote. The 142 men were made up of 87 farmers, 36 farm labourers, and 19 “trades and professionals.” The 133 women voters had two categories, married women, and widows (114) and spinsters (19).⁸⁶

Within the Kaiapoi electorate in 1938, 76 people shared 21 Polish names. Polish Marshland families included Boloski, Borcoskie, Gdanitz, Gearschawski, Rogal, Schimanski, and Sharlick. An Anthony Gorinski, who attended Yaldhurst School in 1917, lived with his family on Preston’s Road. The Dunicks lived in Ohoka, the Grofskis and Percaskys in Papanui and the Rogatskis in Hornby.⁸⁷

Hughes felt that Marshland residents held a “distinct apathy” towards its local government, but their apparent lack of community consciousness did not surprise him, as it reflected New Zealand at the time.

He blamed the proliferation of counties and local bodies: Originally Canterbury had five counties, but a pound-for-pound government subsidy of up to ₤25,000 per county resulted in districts dividing into smaller and smaller entities—129 counties and 700 local bodies soon overwhelmed New Zealand with “an unnecessary superstructure… a drag on the country’s political and social progress and evolution” that permitted “large control by single families.”⁸⁸

Hughes may have thought he had found in the Marshland Poles a unique community to dissect, because he clearly did not know about other Polish communities of comparable size in Otago or Taranaki. He noted: “There may have been further isolated occurrences of Polish immigration up to 1900, but if such was the case there is no record of it in the NZ Year Book for those years.”

To supplement the “short time” he had to “move among the people,” he asked 55 pupils at Marshland School to fill out a questionnaire.⁸⁹

Marshland School, on the corner of Preston’s and Marshland roads, in 1939.

The school had opened in June 1888 with 34 children who had previously travelled to classes in Papanui and whose families had petitioned the Education Board for a local school. The Rhodes trustees donated the land. The board called for tenders for the construction of the school’s buildings and a master’s house and by May 1888, was advertising for a “Rhodes Swamp—Master. New School. Salary according to scale, probably ₤150.”⁹⁰

According to the school register on 25 June 1888, Mary Rogal, living in Styx, was the first Polish child to be admitted. A day later, Christopher Schimanski enrolled his children Mary and John. On 9 July he did the same for his nieces Margaret, Martha, and Minnie Schimanski.

It is not certain who the pupil Annie Dechjeski was, but her father, recorded as “N Dechjeski” of Canal Road, enrolled her on 23 July. Ray Watembach suggests that Dechjeski could have been a misspelling of Gearschawski—as the Gierszewski family became known—because they were among the first Poles to live on Canal Road, and the first letter of Annie Gearschawski’s father’s first name, Michael, could have been mistranscribed.

Albert Watemburg enrolled his children John and Annie on 25 and 26 September. On 12 November 1888, John Suchomski enrolled his daughter Mary, the last Polish child at the school that first year.

A year later, the roll had grown to 110 pupils with two teachers. David Dunlop told Wilfred Walter about the success of the evening English-language classes that the headmaster, a Mr A Malcolm, conducted during the winters of 1889 and 1890, and of the dinner service that the attendees gave him as a mark of their appreciation.

David Dunlop had arrived with his parents in Lyttelton on the brothers pride in 1863. The family settled in Marshland after David Dunlop senior, described on the passsenger list as a “ploughman,” bought 94 acres on Canal Reserve in “about” 1876. David junior’s mother, Jeanie, planted most of the gorse fences on their property and travellers along the grass road in front had to open and close a gate to gain access to that section of the road. On the coastal, eastern side of Canal Road he was able to see the sand dunes, which people used as tracks rather than cross the marshes. Already as high as their land when they moved into the area, he saw the dunes grow higher over the years.⁹¹

The school soon formed the core of area’s community buildings, which in 1939 included a hall, a general store, a service station, and Anglican, Methodist, and Roman Catholic churches.

The Marshland store in 1939, opposite the school. The service station on the left of the photograph is farther along Marshland Road.⁹²

Mr Reece offered his Bottle Lake grounds to the school for some of its first annual picnics, always well attended by pupils and adults. In 1893, “about 500” attendees used “every vehicle in the district… for their conveyance.” Teacher Miss F Dick was praised for organising the children in concerts and was “sorely missed” when she moved to a headmistress position elsewhere. Mr Malcolm and his staff were credited for the nearly 100 percent attendance and the 74 percent average class mark, although only half the children “passed” in any year.⁹³

In 1895, after schooling stopped for 10 days to allow pupils to help with the local potato harvest, the school board adopted the practice every October for “weeding” holidays.⁹⁴

Hughes’ school survey revealed that in 1939:

—The average household consisted of six people.
—53 of the houses had electricity but only two had exchanged exchanged their wood and coal ranges for an electric stove. (Hughes did not state the total number of houses, but his 500 people in 1938 with an average of six per household suggests 83.)
—49 had bathrooms but only 23 had both hot and cold running water.
—There was no sewerage system, but some modern homes had septic tanks. Outhouses, “in common with many farms in NZ [were] temporary structures constructed of any waste material… rusty sheet metal and rough timber.”
—Despite houses having an “ample number of rooms” the kitchen tended to “serve the purpose of a living room [and was] regarded as the centre of family life.”
—10 homes had telephones.
—52 families took one of the daily newspapers, the press, or the sun, and five took both.
—18 families had pianos, four had accordions, six had ukuleles, three had organs, one had a guitar, and one had a banjo. Hughes did not say whether some families had multiple instruments.
—11 of the music teacher’s 14 pupils came from the Rhodes Swamp School, the children taught “for social purposes.” Before the music teacher became available, the accordion was the most popular musical instrument.⁹⁵

In his thesis, Hughes included the views of an unnamed wife of a “professional man.” She described the Marshland people as “the kitchen type,” a judgement that may have clouded Hughes’ own assessment of the homes he visited. He pronounced the more prosperous dwellings as “bright and cheerful,” whereas most of the Polish homes had “monotonous floral wallpaper. This dreary aspect relieved by an occasional picture.” He wrote of “little artistic appreciation” in the homes, where many mantelpieces had cards bearing religious inscriptions, which Hughes called “symbolic of good intentions” and an “indication of the family’s good Faith… rarely taken notice of.”⁹⁶

The Marshland Poles would have been mortified by the young man’s conclusions, especially those regarding their faith. Polish families prayed together daily, went to Mass on Sundays, and celebrated feast days as a community. Most Poles who settled in New Zealand in the 1870s and 1880s were staunchly Catholic and had learnt religious resilience. One of their reasons for leaving Prussian-partitioned Poland in the 1870s and 1880s was exactly Bismarck’s ban on their religious freedom. Polish priests in Prussian- and Russian-partitioned Poland—those who had not been deported, murdered, or banished to Siberia—practised covertly, so the Poles were used to praying without fanfare.

In New Zealand, Catholic Bishop Redwood, once he realised in 1876 that increased Catholic immigration included a growing number of Poles, invited a French colleague, Father Anthony Halbwachs, to join two other priests and “four Christian brothers” in the new colony.⁹⁷

They arrived on 15 May 1876 on the ss easby. Father Halbwachs and the Poles shared a common understanding of German but the priest also “gave eloquent sermons” in English. Bishop Redwood sent him to the Wairarapa in the south-central North Island, where within three months he had started advertising for builders for a presbytery in Carterton. On 5 May 1878, as Bishop Redwood consecrated the new Catholic church “of architectural beauty” in Carterton, Father Halbwachs was already planning to build churches in Masterton, Greytown and Featherston⁹⁸ and later, Tinui.⁹⁹

A newly arrived Father Grunholz, who “solemnised High Mass” at the consecration of Halbwachs’ Masterton church in June 1879, had been sent to New Zealand on a mission with “special reference to the many Polish families now scattered through the colony.”¹⁰⁰

The Church transferred Father Halbwachs to Reefton in 1884 after he became unable to repay personal loans he had secured for the building projects. Before the introduction of Parish Councils and Finance Committees, money for building churches had to be registered as personal loans to the parish priests. Father Halbwachs took on such personal loans but was unable to repay ₤1,000.¹⁰¹

By September that year, Father Halbwachs had moved to Christchurch, where he spent six years before another transfer, to his last assignment in New Zealand, the Shand’s Track Catholic Mission, near Lincoln.¹⁰²

Twn years earlier, Rosalia Gierszewska walked from where the family lived in Pigeon Bay on Banks Peninsula to the Station of the Assumption church on Shand’s Track after she found out there was a Catholic priest available to baptise her toddler son, Carl, her first child born in New Zealand, in February 1873. Today the shortest route to the Lincoln church is a 63-kilometre trip over Banks Peninsula.

Rosalia’s great-great-grandniece, Margaret Copland: “It was part of the Christchurch parish, which covered the whole of Canterbury. There were two, possibly three, priests, generally French Marist, who did a lot of travelling by boat and on foot.

“When the Poles arrived in Marshland, the only Catholic church in Christchurch was the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. The Polish people went to Mass there whenever they could. There were [also] regular Masses in Papanui, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd had a house in Manchester Street, which was later taken over by the North Christchurch Parish of St Mary’s.”

The Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Barbadoes Street was opened in 1865, enlarged in 1876 and 1877 and replaced by the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, which was badly damaged in the 2010 and 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and demolished in 2020.¹⁰³

Construction for the now-demolished Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament began in 1901, and took four years.¹⁰⁴

Before Marshland School opened, Polish children, including Margaret Copland’s grandfather, John Thomas Borcoskie, attended the school attached to St Joseph’s Catholic chapel in Papanui. His parents were the Thomas and Marianna Borkowski who arrived on the cartvale in 1874 with his three sisters, and settled in Marshland.

Sundays at the larger St Mary’s Church, which opened in 1889 in Manchester St, became the main social event of the week. Drays full of children raced one another to get there, and after Mass, the Polish congregation lingered. A Sr Anglela told Margaret Copland that their conversations often lasted an hour or more:

“Their horses and carts were all lined up together, the men would be in one group, the women in another. Everyone would be talking in Polish.

“The Marshland Catholic Church was built in 1927 and closed in 1974. It never had its own priest and was managed from St Mary’s. The priests tended to be Irish, and one called all the women by the same fake name, something like Mrs Wiskenski.”

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In 1939, Polish wives and mothers in Marshland would have been perplexed if not mortified if they had read Hughes’ conclusions regarding the “state of confusion which presides in many kitchens.”¹⁰⁵ These farmers may not have had the pressures of the first settlers—draining the land, removing stumps, improving the soil, and getting the first crops in and to the market—but they were hard-working farmers, and Hughes admitted that the “wife, when finished with household chores, goes into the field if the season demands it to do her share of manual labour [and] the children are also kept busy in their spare time, weeding the crops.”¹⁰⁶

Hughes seemed to struggle with his discovery that the “overwhelming majority” of boys did not progress to secondary school, but instead provided labour for the family farms, and took on their elders’ “deeply ingrained” work habits.¹⁰⁷

“The general attitude of parents seems [to be] that the child is of more use to them at home. His chances of personal advance into a different sphere have been sacrificed to extract more and more from the soil and increase the production of wealth, to the detriment of culture.”¹⁰⁸

The school’s teachers, however, embraced the fact that boys followed their fathers, and encouraged them to experiment with a view to what would be of use on their farms. An elementary agriculture course included experiments on onion cultivation and local soil samples, and encouraged the pupils to assess the best types of manure and the best variety of onion seed. Boys in pairs were given an area on the school grounds where they conducted their own experiments and calculated their own results, which resulted in lime, for instance, being “widely adopted throughout the district.”¹⁰⁹

Hughes captioned this photograph of boys tending the school’s onion crop: “Education is Living.”¹¹⁰ They are mimicking what happened on their family farms from mid-February, pulling the ready onions by hand and laying them in rows to dry their tops.

Hughes interviewed the wife of the head teacher, but again did not name her, possibly because of her less than complimentary descriptions of people in the community. She said that their speech was “slack”—which she attributed to their not having had the “benefits or the opportunities of secondary school education”—that their homes were “rather stodgy” and that they had become “very conservative in their ways.” She conceded that many “hard-working” women still helped in the fields, and that they were “great supporters of the school,” but saw no leaders among them—although she held hope for the girls, whom she described as “a fine type considering their opportunity and background.”¹¹¹

Hughes’ description Marshland’s Polish settlers as “German Poles,”¹¹² suggests he did not speak to any. If he had, he would have been under no illusion that the Poles left their homeland to escape its Prussian-partitioning and its German language, and were vehemently Polish.

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The swamp’s early speculators correctly predicted that the land held agricultural potential. The peat that the draining exposed promised high yields—if it were not for the hidden forest that emerged at the same time.

Few farmers could afford the ₤40 to ₤50 an acre expense of removing the risen timber, and the surrounding peat prohibited burning the wood, so most farmed around mounds of retrieved logs and stumps.¹¹³ Some of the farmers on the boundaries of the swamp, such as on the higher sections adjoining Hill’s Road, and some with paddocks closer to the sea, decided to turn their land into dairy production rather than the intensive hand-labour involved with onioning, especially during the harvest.

Buoyed by the “steady and growing demand for milk in the city… compared with the constantly fluctuating demand for onions” Marshland developed an extension of the St Albans-Papanui milk-runs.¹¹⁴

Hand-milking prevailed on the Marshland milk runs (sometimes called milk walks), which relied on co-operation between farmers. During the off-season farmers sold their milk to those who needed to supplement their supplies.¹¹⁵

The rich peat soil in central Marshland, however, promised so much that farmers there persevered with the timber and stump removal, turned to market gardening, and developed the first premier onion growing region in New Zealand.¹¹⁶

Before they planted the onions, Marshland farmers “broke the land into cropping” with carrots—then selling for between 10 and 15 shillings a ton—most of which they delivered to equine customers on a “tip dray along whatever roads that existed” at both the tramway stables and the adjoining racecourse at Riccarton. After making a delivery of carrots for the horses, the farmers were allowed to collect the stable manure, which they used to further enrich their fields.¹¹⁷

Onions demanded three ploughings—usually using bullock teams—on fields that were then “grubbed with a tine cultivator.” If the farmers did not spread artificial fertiliser, they ploughed in green crops such as lupins, black barley, or oats, with the stable manure. They hand-cultivated. They did not allow weeds such as Shepherd’s Purse or sorrel to produce seed. They carried weeds like those off the fields and burnt them.¹¹⁸

Even with shelter belts, the north-westerly winds destroyed onions and other seedlings. Joseph Watemburg’s son William, born in 1906, remembered how the winds toyed with his father’s onion crops. They blew away seeds, pulled young onions out of the ground, and banked the soil against the farm fences.¹¹⁹

The earliest onion harvests were dried off, strung, and sold to local hotels and boarding houses. Demand increased through the local city markets. Stringing made way for the “bagging and organised marketing” that extended the onion trade throughout New Zealand.

Onion growers in 1939 surround an onion grading machine in Marshland. Growth of an export trade made men like these “Onion Kings” but when “substantial quantities” still had to be imported, the government introduced regulations and a Marketing Provisory Committee for each island.¹²⁰ Onions were usually bagged in the paddock in 100lb bags such as the one to the left of this photograph.

Farmers grew onions in the same ground for several seasons, and interplanted them with carrots, potatoes, cabbages, and parsnips.

During the Great Depression, from 1929, many of the farm labourers took seasonal jobs between November and June at the Canterbury Frozen Meat Works in neighbouring Belfast.¹²¹

Besides the neglected roads, the winds, the stumps, and the ongoing drainage issues, two diseases emerged in the market gardens: onion smut and yellow dwarf. In 1939, these diseases led to exports from Marshland being forbidden. Farmers co-operated in eradicating the scourges, and many gave parts of their land to the Department of Agriculture for experiments. The introduction of mesh bags preserved the onions and displayed them better.¹²²

Export onions being loaded onto a truck ready for transporting to the Belfast Railway Station.¹²³

By 1939, Marshland supported three types of farming—onion growing, market gardening, and dairying—and one type of family, where all members helped get their product to market.

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Exactly when the the Suchomski, Rogal, Watemburg, and Rhoda families left their sub-leased sections on the 20-acre block is not clear, but the Watemburgs had moved twice by 1888—first to Horseshoe Lake Road, then to a property on McSaveney’s Road where they were living when they hosted the first marriage in the district: that of their daughter Mary to John le Vavaseur.

Mary to Wilfred Watler: “It was a customary thing in those days for uninvited guests, better known as ‘Tin Kettles,’ to roll up in strong force in the evening to add jollification to a wedding. There was a big jolly muster in the evening at my marriage. They sang songs and drank something stronger than water to wish us happiness and prosperity.”

This studio photograph of Mary (née Watemburg) le Vavaseur with her son, John Joseph, and daughter, Kathleen May, was taken around 1906 in Christchurch.

The newlyweds did not move far, to a property farther inland on Hill’s Road, near Winter’s Road, and another Polish family that had been on the friedeburg—the Dunicks.¹²⁴

Józef Zdunek left his Polish homeland aged 39 with his wife, Marianna née Dobeck (35), and three sons, Mikołaj (9), Franciszek (7) and Józef junior (3). Their surname survived the journey on the friedeburg almost intact—it was Zdonek on the passenger list—but New Zealand immigration officials changed it to Dunick when the family arrived in Lyttelton.

School, marriage, and baptism records, show that Joseph and Marianna had three more children in New Zealand, but Te Tari Taiwhenua/ Internal Affairs has no obvious records under the Dunick name in its department of Births, Deaths & Marriages (BDM). Joseph Donick enrolled Joseph junior into Lincoln School in 1881, and Annie and Eustache (probably Anastasia) in 1882. School records state that they left the district, but do not say when.

Parish records have a Joanna Dunach born in Lincoln on 6 August 1877 to Joseph and Marianne née Dobeck, and baptised two weeks later at Shand’s Track. The baby was probably their youngest child, John Dunick, recorded by BDM as being born on the same day, and the mistake was a transcription error over the names Johann and Johanna. The spelling of John Dunick’s name on his certificate of marriage to Mary Schimanski in 1900 is clear, but his surname on other official records still managed to get transcribed as Donech. The marriage certificate shows that the ceremony took place at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Manchester Street—the venue for many Polish Catholic marriages at the time—that he was 22, a farmer, lived in Belfast, and that he had been born in Lincoln. His 21-year-old bride was the daughter of Mathew and Julia (née Burchard) Schmanski, she had been born in Marshland, and was still living at home.

Joseph Dunick senior was naturalised as a labourer in Marshland in 1899. During WW1, despite that naturalisation, and notes that they had lived in New Zealand for 44 years, and that they had both been born in Poland, the government placed Joseph, then 84, and Marianna, then 78, on its 1917 Enemy Alien list. Joseph died in 1923, and Marianna in 1927. They are buried together at the Linwood cemetery.

Joseph Dunick junior married at least five times. His first wife, Julia Schimanski, was the eldest daughter of Christopher and Louisa (née Nikel) Schimanski, and an older cousin to the Mary Schimanski who married Joseph’s younger brother eight years later. The first Dunick-Schimanski marriage ceremony took place at St Mary’s in 1892. Julia was 18, Joseph 22. The first Dunick-Schimanski marriage ceremony took place at St Mary’s in 1892. Julia had been 18, Joseph 22. The bride and Joseph’s sister Annie, who was a witness, signed the certificate for themselves, but the groom and the other witness, Julia’s half-brother Michael, signed with crosses.

When Julia died in childbirth 15 years later, she left eight other children: Julia Elizabeth (14), Andrew (10), David (9), Mary (8), Annie (6), Agnes Lily (4), John Joseph (3), and Alicia Ada (not quite two). Their second child, Albert James, had died in 1895.

The Christchurch City Council’s database of burials records Julia (née Schimanski) Dunick buried with her husband Joseph’s third wife, Mary, née Carey. Julia’s headstone at Linwood Cemetery says she was in fact buried with her six-month-old last-born, Kathleen Margaret, plus her husband Joseph’s second wife, Mary née Boyd—whom he married in 1908 and who died in 1911—and Mary’s baby, Mary Amelda.

Joseph junior, who died aged 79 in 1947 is recorded as being in the adjacent plot with his third wife, another Mary, née Carey, whom he married five months after his second wife died. A list of baptisms from St Mary’s parish shows they had at least two children—Mary Rose in 1912 and Bernard in 1915.

Mary née Carey Dunick died in July 1920, aged 35, and 10 months later, Joseph married Agnese Boland. She died a year later, and Joseph then married Elizabeth Watson, who outlived him by a year. It is not clear where Agnes was buried, but Elizabeth is in the Church of England section of the Linwood cemetery.

A Dunick headstone in the Linwood cemetery brushes over the stories of Joseph Dunick junior's first two wives. Julia (née Schimanski), died aged 33, on 27 August 1906, after the birth of their 10th child, Kathleen Margaret, who died of gastro enteritis six months later. With them are Joseph's second wife, Mary (née Boyd), whom he married in 1908 and who died aged 25 on the day her daughter Mary Amelda was born—22 May 1911. Exactly two months later, the infant died of bronchitis.

Joseph Dunick junior was naturalised as a farmer in Ohoka in 1937. Three months later, his fifth wife, Elizabeth née Watson, was also naturalised. She had lost her original British nationality by marrying Polish Joseph in 1923.

Joseph’s younger sisters Anastasia and Annie married John Stellar and Michael Szaluga-Schimanski, and remained in Christchurch, but his elder brothers moved away completely: Mikołaj first to Taranaki, then to Southland, and Frank directly to Southland.

Mikołaj Zdunek took on his mother’s maiden name. As Michael Dobeck, he married Bertha Bielawski at the Roman Catholic church in Inglewood in January 1895. Their marriage certificate gives no indication of his father’s name. His bride was born at sea on the terpsichore in 1876.

The colonial government had directed the Bielwaski family and several others aboard the terpsichore to Jackson’s Bay, an apparent “special settlement,” which turned out to be neither special nor a settlement, and which they left in 1878. By the time Mikołaj Dobeck was naturalised in Invercargill, where he and Bertha lived the rest of their lives, he had changed his first name to its correct translation: Nicholas. He died in 1941, and his widow in 1947. They are buried at Invercargill’s Eastern cemetery.

Frank Dunick was naturalised as a settler in Stratford in 1890 and married Letitia Reid in 1906. School records show that the family had moved to Invercargill by 1917. Frank and his wife are among at least 14 other Dunicks in the city’s Eastern Cemetery.

_______________

Michał Piekarski arrived in New Zealand with a name at least 456 years old, judging from the street plaques in Warsaw’s Old Town. The name means baker and, yes, there is still a well-supported café-bakery on the street bearing the name since 1416.

Michał Piekarski, his wife, Ewa, née Cieślińska, and their 17-month-old daughter, Anastasia, were among the 92 Polish passengers aboard the friedeburg. Although Michał’s surname was transcribed correctly in the main passenger list, he soon became Michael, and Ewa, Eva.

His surname is spelt Piekarsky on his July 1893 naturalisation record in Marshland, Perkaskie on his November 1916 probate papers, and Percasky on the Linwood cemetery headstone he shares with Eva and their son John. Michael, Eva, and their son Joseph appear as Pickarsky on the 1896 and 1897 Avon electoral rolls, their address, Preston’s Road, Marshland.

Ten of their 14 children born in New Zealand, and who appear on Christchurch Catholic baptismal records, had their surnames transcribed in 10 different ways. Their mother’s maiden name was slighly less challenging for the record takers. Catholic minister Clemens Gruntolez (Grunholtz?), who baptised Rosalia, the fourth Piekarski child born in Canterbury, had the details almost spell-perfect. Her godmother was Maria Zdunkora, leaving one to wonder whether she was Joseph Dunick senior’s wife, Marianna Zdunek.

Baptism records remain elusive for Joseph and John—the first two Piekarski children born in Pigeon Bay in 1874 and 1875—and Francis (Frank), their seventh child, who died at three months and was buried on 22 March 1883 at the Lincoln Cemetery. The marriage certificate of their fourth child, Mary Margaret, shows she was born at Pigeon Bay 1877.

Anastasia’s father called her Stasia when he enrolled her at Pigeon Bay School in 1880. The school record shows that the family then lived in Holmes Bay on Banks Peninsula, and later moved somewhere between Leeston and Springston. Anastasia, Joseph and John attended Springston School. Four of their younger sisters—Annie, Lucy Margaret, Catherine, and Agnes Elizabeth—were christened in Leeston. Catherine’s burial records show she was born in Southbridge, Canterbury on 15 February 1885 and died 15 days later. She is buried at Lincoln Cemetery near her brother Francis.

The family lived in Rolleston in 1884 and 1885, then moved to Horseshoe Lake, New Brighton, where Jane, Martha, Emily, and Michael junior were born between 1888 and 1891. When James Albert was born in 1894, the family was already living at Preston’s Road, Marshland. Martha had died in 1889, at five weeks, and was the first Piekarski buried at Linwood Cemetery. She shares a plot with three other infants who died the same year.

Anastasia Victoria Pickarsky was old enough in 1893 to add her name to her mother’s on the world’s first-ever electoral roll for women. By then, she had moved from the family home in Marshland to Fendalton, where she was still on the electoral roll in 1896.

Earlier, AV Pikcarsky had signed the suffrage petition demanding the right for women in New Zealand to vote, her signature among more than 31,000 on a roll that in 1883 Member of Parliament and suffrage supporter John Hall unfurled on their behalf down the centre of the debating chamber in 1893.¹²⁵

The section of the 1893 suffrage petition bearing AV Piekarsky’s name.

Once Anastasia Victoria Pickarski married Charles August Neilson in 1908 and changed her surname, she lost her recognisable link to her Polish heritage. The couple lived in Mangatainoka in 1911 and Wellington in 1925. They seem to have had no children, and are buried alongside each other at Foxton Cemetery. Anastasia outlived her husband by 25 years, and died in 1970, five months short of her 100th birthday. She lies with no hint of her Polish background on her headstone.

Her father had died in 1913. The funeral notice gave his address as 449 Preston’s Road, Marshland. A year later, this memorial appeared in the lyttelton times:¹²⁶

The new widow Eva Piekarsky had to cope with seeing off three of her sons to WW1 in Europe. Her youngest, James Albert, was still living at home when he joined the Eighth Reinforcements in June 1915.¹²⁷ A notice in the lyttelton times in August 1917 named Private M Percasky, Rifleman J Percasky, and Sergeant J Percasky among the New Zealand soldiers for whom the Marshland Ladies’ Patriotic Guild was raising funds to “send tins of Christmas comforts to Christchurch men on active service.”¹²⁸

The lyttelton times published a letter that Rifleman J Piekarsky, then serving in France, wrote to his mother on 16 July 1916:¹²⁹

IN THE TRENCHES
A MARSHLAND SOLDIER’S LETTER

Rifleman J. Percasky, of Lord Liverpool’s Own, Fourth Battalion, who is serving in France, in a letter written to his mother, at Marshland, dated July 16, says:—“The first day or two that we were in the trenches things were fairly quiet, but after that the enemy began to warm up, and during this last week we have been subject to a hellish fire, which I simply cannot attempt to describe, as things happen here everyday that are too sad and horrible for me to dwell upon. On Friday night last our company made a raid on the German trenches, and it is only a shame how we smacked them up. In fact, we showed them points in every part of it. First of all our artillery knocked spots out of their wire entanglements and front trench, and then we hopped over with bombs and other weapons to finish them off, but they made a very poor stand, and we did not find many survivors to deal with. If ever a battalion went through a furnace of fire, it was ours that night. I will not go into details, but on our return to our own trenches it was like hell let loose. It was raining shells, but all I got was a nasty gash on the knee, so I consider my luck was in.

“We have now been relieved from the front line, and are back in the support trenches, enjoying a slight spell for a couple of days, then into it again. I am on guard at present, and am in the best of health and spirits, and feel quite confident I will come out of this war safely, some time or other. Although we are often so hungry that we could eat a horse out here at times, there is always a pleasant thought with us that some day we will set our foot in good old New Zealand.”

Eva Percasky received news that James had been “severely wounded in the head” in March 1918. By then a sergeant, James had left New Zealand with the New Zealand Rifle Brigade’s 3rd Battalion, and had “taken part in every engagement until the present since the Somme battle without mishap.” James and one other soldier, the report said, were the last remaining from the original 4th Brigade, and James had been recommended for promotion after “the Messines stunt.”¹³⁰

James Albert Percasky died in 1963. Michael Bernard Percasky died in 1946.

Michael and Eva Percasky’s headstone at Linwood Cemetery in Christchurch. The inscription reads “In loving memory of Michael beloved husband of Eva Percasky died Nov 2nd 1913 aged 69 years. Also Eva beloved wife of above died Jan 17th 1926 aged 76. Also their beloved son John died at Singapore May 1924. RIP.”
It is not clear whether John’s remains returned to Christchurch, but his memory lies with his parents.

_______________

Another young Polish family off the friedeburg turned south from Lyttelton in 1872.

Szymon (27) and Franciszka (née Tadajewska, 24) Grochowski arrived with their son, Franciszek Cyril, who was nearly three. Their second son, Joseph Alfonsus, was born in Akaroa in 1873, and Luigi was born in Pigeon Bay in 1874. Next came Mary Anne in 1875, Bernard Joseph in 1877, Michael Alexander (Alexander Robert) in 1881, and Annie Paulina in 1882, by which time the family had moved to Tai Tapu.

Their last two children were baptised together—under the surname Grofskey—at the Catholic cathedral in Barbadoes Street, four months before their father died, aged 38, on 8 May 1883, and disappeared from official records.

The only death record with a similar name is Simon Grafoski, who had died seven years earlier, aged 14 months. That infant turned out to be Szymon and Franciszka’s son Luigi, who had been ill from diarrhoea and convulsions for at least seven days. His mother had carried him to the Catholic pro-cathedral for burial, then went to the registrar’s office in the city to record his death. She signed the paper with a cross. One can only think that the lack of a common language between her, and the record taker and her own illiteracy, led to the mistake on the boy’s death certificate.

After many years’ hunting, Grofski family genealogists unearthed what can only be Szymon’s death certificate—under the anglicised name of Simon and an a version of his wife’s maiden name, Fadeifska.¹³¹ The 1883 certificate states that he was buried at Lincoln Cemetery, but it is unclear where, and gives cancer as an uncertified cause of death, although the family is adamant that he was poisoned by contaminated water on the Tai Tapu farm where he worked.

The mistakes on Simon’s death certificate probably happened for the same reasons as the mistakes on Luigi’s. The fact that the “agent for the wife” turned out to be a young constable suggests that Franciszka went to the local police station to report her husband’s death. The stress of being a newly widowed immigrant with six children—from six-month-old Annie to 13-year-old Franciszek—would have further challenged her ability to make herself understood to Constable James Weatherley, who had been working for the Lincoln police for just two years, and who clearly did not know the family.

Franciszka moved with her children to Marshland after her marriage at the Christchurch Registrar’s office in July 1885 to Henrich Behren, who turned out to be a bit of a scoundrel. They had no children together and at first, Heinrich seemed happy to adopt the role of father to Simon’s—to the extent that he enrolled Mary Anne, Bernard, Alexander, and Annie under his surname at Burwood and Marshland schools.

He abandoned Franciszka and her sons in 1892, after the deaths of both her daughters.

Mary Anne Grochowski’s original surname appears on her marriage certificate to a Heinrich Kemmerley, whom she married in November 1891, a few weeks short of her 16th birthday. He was 10 years her senior and had apparently arrived in the area eight weeks earlier. Aged 16 years and six months “Mrs Kenmerley” died the day after she gave birth to her stillborn baby the following September.

Christchurch City Council’s cemetery records show her baby was buried in Block 0, Plot 0 of Linwood Cemetery, which is an area that does not exist. Practice in those days was to immediately remove a stillborn baby and tuck it into the foot of a grave in the cemetery waiting to be filled in, or—if the birth was in hospital—into the coffin of someone who had recently died, or even among the bushes along the cemetery boundary. Mary Ann was buried three days after she died, so unless she gave birth among people she knew, there is little chance she shares her grave with her baby.

Six months later, 10-year-old Annie “Behrtens” died at the Christchurch hospital, of diphtheria. Her death certificate records her father as Groffolski Behrtens. The sisters lie close together in unmarked graves in what was then “free ground” in the Roman Catholic section of the Linwood cemetery.

It would have been impossible to know exactly where the Grochowski sisters were buried in Linwood Cemetery had it not been for its hand-drawn cemetery plan, which shows that the sisters lie toe-to-toe in the foreground of this photograph. Mary Ann is under the tree and Annie on the opposite side of the path immediately next to the yellow gazania on the right.

Wilfred Walter wrote of Mrs Frances Grofski, who “took over a property” on McSaveney’s Road from a Richard Boshen: “She and her family worked very hard on this place.”¹³² She had the support of her four sons. Francis, 22 when his stepfather left, was naturalised a year later (1893) as a farmer from Marshlands.

Frances Grofski’s 1903 advertisement for the sale of her farm reflects the work put into it. The auction included a black mare “used to all farm work,” a “bay hack 3 years off, broken to saddle and burners, by Prince Victor,” eight cows “in full profit,” a “springer due to calve,” four heifers, a sow “heavy in pig” and seven “porkers.”¹³³

Implements included a Duncan dray, frame and accessories, and the same make of plough with its leading chains, a “nearly new” spring cart, a “moulder and horse hoe,” a grindstone, half a ton of onions, half an acre under mangolds (a variety of large-rooted beets grown for stockfeed), “quantity” seed, small potatoes and poultry, some sacks of partridge peas, “large quantity of sundries,” as well as household furniture and dairy utensils.¹³⁴

The reason for the sale was that, aged 56, Frances was about to marry Deidrich Arps, a widower with 13 children, the youngest five aged between six and 16 years. She was then also a grandmother to her son Francis’s two children.

Frances Gabrielle (née Tadajewska) Grofski Behrens Arps with her sons, from left, Frank, Bernard, Joseph, and Alexander Grofski.¹³⁵

The upcoming nuptials spurred her to pursue a divorce from Henry Behrens, who continued to elude an arrest warrant for disobeying a Family Court order to pay seven shillings a week towards the support of his wife. In December 1902, Behrens appeared, among others, in the new zealand police gazette columns that covered “Deserting Wives and Families, &c.” and that said he then owed Frances £62 1s. The Gazette described Behrens: “A native of Germany, farmer, about fifty years of age, about 5ft. 11in. high, medium build, sandy complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, ginger beard whiskers and moustache, bandy legs, gunpowder marks on forehead and left side of face, finger-joints on one hand stiff through a cut across the wrist, a cut on throat.”¹³⁶

Four days after she received her decree absolute, Frances Behren married another one of Marshland’s first settlers, a man who had had his own share of sadness, but who became her “loving husband.”

By the time Frances died on 3 April 1912, all four of her sons had married and provided her with several more grandchildren. She died as Frances Arps and was buried under a macrocarpa at Linwood Cemetery, within calling distance of her daughters, and close to her son Francis, two grandchildren who had predeceased her, and so many of the other Poles from Marshland.

Her descendants have made sure that she is remembered as Frances Gabrielle Grofski.

Francis Grofski—the Franciszek Grochowski aged two on the friedeburg, and sitting with his mother and younger brothers in the studio photograph above—appeared on the 1896 Avon electoral roll with an address on Canal Reserve. A year later, he married Michael and Eva Piekarski’s second daughter, Mary Margaret. Their marriage certificate shows that she was 20 and living at home at the time of the 14 July 1897 ceremony at St Mary’s Catholic church in Manchester Street.

Francis and Mary’s first child, Eva Mary Anne (born in 1898) lived for only 30 hours, but they had five more children: David Laurence in 1900, Eileen May in 1901, Eric James in 1904, Doris Maud in 1908, and Ethel Jane in 1912. The elder two attended Marshland School until July 1908, when the family moved to Johns Road in Belfast.¹³⁷

Francis died in 1919, aged 44, still a farmer. Judging from the advertisement that appeared in the press when Mary sold the Belfast property in 1920, the Grofskis had turned it primarily into a poultry farm that she had had the strength to keep going for another five years. Included in the substantial list of items for sale at the auction were 50 pairs of purebred white Leghorn pullets and 100 pairs of the same breed of first-year hens, breeding roosters “all from the best-known breeder’s stock” and an array of equipment attached to her poultry plant. Other stock included a cow “springing to 4th calf,” another “in profit and in calf” and two horses. The equipment for sale suggested that they had turned the rest of their land into a market garden.¹³⁸ Mary then bought a quarter-acre property in Papanui, where she lived until she died, aged 47, in 1925.

Francis outlived his mother by only three years. He died in 1915, aged 44, and is buried at Linwood Cemetery with his wife, Mary, who died in 1925.

Francis’s brothers Joseph and Alexander Grofski served as volunteers with the British Imperial troops fighting in the South African [Boer] War in 1900 with the Fifth Contingent. In October 1900, Francis wrote to a Mr Tanner seeking clarity after the press announced Joseph had suffered internal injuries and had been sent to Mafikeng Hospital.¹³⁹ Alexander Grofski would not answer questions, and the matter had already been “torturing” his mother, “a poor woman already in very poor health” when a returned New Zealand soldier, a friend of Joseph’s, told her that her son had died in the hospital. Because Francis said that Mr Tanner would be in a “much better position” to approach the Premier about the matter, one can assume he was MP for Avon, William Tanner.¹⁴⁰

Both brothers returned from the war. Joseph recovered and in 1905 married Mary Anne Byrne, with whom he had four children. In 1910, Alexander married Mary Ann’s sister Katherine, with whom he had two children.

The last Grofski brother, Bernard, had been working in Hokitika when he met Martha Jamieson, the eldest daughter of a Mr and Mrs Jamieson of Arahura. the west coast times described their “pretty wedding” in 1909 in detail, with an afternoon tea held at the bride’s parents’ home and later, a “social and d ance” at the local Three Mile Hall.¹⁴¹ Bernard had been promoted and transferred to Wellington’s Mount View Mental Hospital but school records for Martha, the oldest of their six children, show that the family had returned to Christchurch by 1913, because Bernard had enrolled her into Harewood School. Bernard’s 1944 probate say that he was a fruitgrower in Papanui.

_______________

Thanks to the Rhodes Main Drain that dissected Rhodes Swamp, the western side of Canal Reserve was subdivided years before the eastern side.

Wilfred Walter: “On the East side of the road, the land was practically in its native state, nothing but flax, rapu [sic], and other virgin growth… covering this area… so boggy that it was no[t] safe for man or beast to wander over it… It was some time after the Rhodes block subdivision was sold that this land was broken in and settlers cultivated the soil. The place on the corner of the Canal Reserve and Cemetery Road, now called Reeves [Mairehau] Road… was full of stumps through and through… took no small amount of hard work in clearing… but the soil was very rich.”¹⁴²

Nowadays not a stump breaks the progress of machinery on corner of Marshland and Mairehau roads.

Walter also recalled that the Canal Reserve towards Preston’s Road was “nothing but a dense wilderness of flax etc. and dangerous for anyone to cross.”¹⁴³

Mr R Thompson, who wrote the “Marshland be a swampy place” verse at the beginning of this story, was 90 in July 1943 when Walter interviewed him. He remembered the “old pioneer residents” John Maffey, WM Dunlop, HW Gibb, the Hawken family, and Black and White Schimanski, which is how locals differentiated the Schimanski brothers: Christopher’s hair and long beard was dark, Matthew’s much lighter.

Walter remembered that Christopher Schimanski occupied a small farm next to the school grounds while Matthew “farmed a bigger place on the opposite side of the [Canal Reserve] road. The soil in this locality was of rich fertile quality, and produced heavy root crops.”¹⁴⁴

The Marshland Poles who left their Kaszubian and Kociewian villages in Prussian-partitioned Poland in the 1870s travelled within support groups containing family members and friends, and many of those relationships continued in Marshland. The Schimanskis are a classic example of this:

Christopher Schimanski’s three daughters—Julia, Augusta, and Mary—married Joseph Dunick, John Boloski, and John Rogal. His sons, John and Albert, married Ester Marsh and Martha Dodunski, the latter from Taranaki. His stepsons, Martin Sharlick and Michael Schimanski, married Mary Gearschawski and Annie Dunick.

Two of Matthew’s seven daughters, Rose and Augusta, marryied Blackburn brothers, and another two, Johanna and Magdaline, married Rogatski brothers Francis and John. Mary became another Mrs Dunick when she married John, and Martha and Julia Schimanski married John Hanright and Anthony Gorinski. Matthew’s sons Francis and John married Mary Black and Anne Austin.¹⁴⁵

_______________

Some of the young Marshland men looked farther afield to find their brides. Joseph Watemburg, for instance, had heard of the large Polish contingent in Taranaki, which arrived via the fritz reuter in 1876, and met Martha Neustrowski. After they married in 1897, Martha (26), left her Inglewood home and joined her new husband in Marshland—as did Martha Dodunski, who was 19 when she married Albert Schimanski in 1907.

School enrolment registers give concrete examples of co-operation and support within the community:Christopher Schimanski admitted his five-year-old nephew Frank Schimanski to Marshland School on 20 January 1890. The date coincided with the start of the February onion harvest, and suggests he was probably doing his brother a favour.

Albert Schimanski stood as guardian for Alfred, Leo, and William Watemburg when he enrolled the boys into Marshland School on 28 September 1915. Albert would have been supporting the newly widowed Martha Watemburg, while she organised the sale of their Yaldhurst farm and her move back to Taranaki, where she knew her parents and brothers woukd help her raise her young sons.

Martha (née Schimanski) Hanright’s brother-in-law Frank Rogatski started enrolling his niece and nephews, Elizabeth, John, and George Hanright, to Marshland School from 1912. On 17 December 1917 Frank Rogatski also appeared as Lawrence Kiesanowski’s guardian on the Prebbleton School record.¹⁴⁶

_______________

These days, Marshland Road buzzes with traffic. One of the longest straight stretches of road north of the city, it still follows the now “highly modified”¹⁴⁷ Canal Reserve watercourse, and becomes Main North Road. Satellite images show swathes of market gardens between Marshland Road and a new housing development to the east.

The fresh vegetable shops close to the T-junction of now-called McSaveneys and Marshland roads were doing a humming trade on the weekday I drove past. One owner, Tony, was not in when I asked permission to photograph the paddocks behind his shop, but an employee said he would not mind if I went out the back. His land looks directly towards another fruit and vegetable outlet on Mairehau Road. The late-July photographs do not do justice to the clean and newly planted paddocks.

Some of the water coming from the springs that still feed the area is contained drains that still run along roads and across paddocks. Drainage along some of the main roads is landscaped. Sections of stout, stone-filled gabion walls along Prestons Road rise next to black soil that gardeners among the new inhabitants will appreciate.

A golf course lies between Bottle Lake and a new housing development, which has a tiny cul-de-sac named Polish Settlers Place. Judging by the length of the 200-metre street, the developers had little interest in the history and hundreds of thousands of hours of toil that Poles put into the area.

In November 2024, as a memorial to the 838 Polish WW2 refugees that the New Zealand government accepted in 1944, Little Poland Park was opened in Burkett Street, in the new Marshland development between Prestons and Hawkins roads.

Marshland School is now a long, sleek, low building on a much quieter Te Korai Street. Its old premises is now a pre-school. Today’s Hills and Hawkins roads remain Marshlands’ western boundary. Some sections of the road are today divided into quarter-acres; elsewhere huge paddocks predominate.

Horses grazing on a Mairehau Road farm on the eastern side of Marshland Road avoid wintry surface water.

Remnants of the old swamp persevere in the Ōtukaikino Reserve, about three kilometres north of the Styx River’s intersection with Marshland Road.

Despite human intervention, some native species survived. The reserve—off Main North Road and bordering the Christchurch Northern Motorway out of Belfast—is today a restoration project overseen by the Department of Conservation. Volunteers have propagated seeds from stubborn raupō, toetoe, tall tussock sedges (pukio), the fern Blechnum novae-zelandiae (kiokio), Cordyline australis (cabbage trees, or tī kōuka) and small trees such as Pittosporum tenuifolium (kōhūhū ) and Coprosma robusta (karamu). Exotic specimens have been cut down or weeded out and the generations of the original plants now grow among other re-introduced natives.

DoC’s brochure: “Pūkeko, shoveler (kuruwhengu), grey teal (tete), marsh crake (koitareke) and even a bittern (matuku) have been spotted in and around the wetland. There are also long- and short-finned eel (tuna), upland and common bullies, native snails (pūpū) and a variety of aquatic insects.”¹⁴⁸

The new reserve may be a sanitised version of the original swamp—but it still holds the same ability to absorb those who fail to follow the instruction to remain on the boardwalk.

© Barbara Scrivens, 2017
Updated June 2025

THANKS TO:

THE POLISH EMBASSY IN NEW ZEALAND FOR CONTRIBUTING TOWARDS TRAVEL EXPENSES TO CHRISTCHURCH.

THE CHRISTCHURCH CITY ARCHIVES FOR ACCESS TO ITS COLLECTIONS.

THE POLISH GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY FOR ACCESS TO ITS CZERSK BAPTISM AND MARRIAGE RECORDS.

All coloured photographs are by B Scrivens, except the pre-earthquake Rhoda one, which was taken by Brian Dickson for Friends of Linwood Cemetery. Black and white photographs are sourced from the Hughes collection, or from early-settler families such as Grofski, Schimanski and Watembach, all used with permission.

Linwood Cemetery, Butterfield Avenue, Linwood, Christchurch. Since 1999, members of the Friends of Linwood Cemetery have been restoring the headstones and gravesites damaged by vandalism, prior neglect, and the earthquakes: www.linwoodcemetery.org

ENDNOTES:

All Papers Past citations from newspapers and the Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR), are through through the National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa.

• 1 -   R Speight, MA, MSc, FGS, Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Volume 43, 1910, p 425.
• 2 -   Thanks to Christchurch City Libraries
  https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/christchurch-place-names/
• 3 -   R Thompson, July 1943, found among papers in the WJ Walter collection of interviews held at the Christchurch Archives, Archive no. 196. Handwriting different from Walter’s and inserted after Thompson’s transcription.
• 4 -   HW Hughes thesis, Marshland: A Social Survey of a New Zealand Rural Community, p 13. Dated December 1939, written when Hughes was at the Christchurch Teachers College, and held at Christchurch Library Archives.
• 5 -   Ibid, HW Hughes, p 18.
• 6 -   Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 18–19.
• 7 -   WJ Walter collection of interviews held at the Christchurch Archives, Archive no. 196, p 3 [31].
• 8 -    Supplement to the New Zealand Gazette, 5 April 1940, pp 524, 558 & 599. Thanks to the Family Research Centre, Panmure, New Zealand Society of Genealogists,
  https://www.genealogy.org.nz/.
• 9 -   According to his posting record card, Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Hywel W. Hughes was posted to the MTB505 from St Christopher after completing his training and sent to the Mediterranean to serve with the flotillas of MTBs operating there. His boat was part of the Royal Navy Forces deployed as part of Operation AGREEMENT, a British naval raid undertaken against the port of Tobruk on the night of 13–14 September 1942. Royal Navy destroyers, an anti-aircraft cruiser, eighteen MTBs and three launches took part in the raid along with 350 Royal Marines that were to be landed. After heavy attacks overnight by the RAF an attempt was made to land troops on the morning of the 14th. The attempt failed and the few Royal Marines who reached shore were quickly captured. Sub-Lieutenant Hughes’ MTB308 was sunk along with MTB310 & MTB311 by the Italian 13th Fighter Bomber Group, which also sank the destroyer HMS Zulu. The MTBs were made from wood and had petrol engines, so exploded readily. As his body was never recovered, his name is recorded on the Second World War Memorial at the South Yard of HMNZS Philomel at Devonport.
  (Above material thanks to the New Zealand Naval Museum in Devonport, who have cited G. Hummelchen & J. Rohwer’s Chronology of the War at Sea 1939-1945: Volume One 1939-1942, London: Ian Allan, 1972, p 257.)
• 10 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 13 [13].
• 11 -  Image purchased from Christchurch City Libraries. File reference: CCL-Maps-4333589.
• 12 -  GNS Science Consultancy Report 2007/103, Waterways, Swamps and Vegetation of Christchurch in 1856 and Baseflow Discharge in Christchurch City Streams, pp 2 & 18.
• 13 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 21.
• 14 -  Ibid, WJ Walters, p 8 [36].
• 15 -  http://www.firstfourships.co.nz/
• 16 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 21.
• 17 -  Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage, licensed re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 New Zealand.
• 18 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 21.
• 19 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 22.
• 20 -  Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand,
  http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1g12/godley-john-robert, and
  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 23.
• 21 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 23.
• 22 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 25.
• 23 -  Ibid.
• 24 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 26 & 25.
• 25 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 28
• 26 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 30 & 34.
• 27 -  https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/early-marshland/
• 28 -  Examples:
  The Star (Christchurch), 3 May 1869, p 3, CORRESPONDENCE
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18690503.2.10
  The Press, 10 July 1869, p 2, NEWS OF THE DAY
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18690710.2.9
  The Press, 16 May 1871, p 2, CITY COUNCIL
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18710516.2.12
  The Press, 28 May 1873, p 3, AVON ROAD BOARD
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18730528.2.25
• 29 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 27 & 28.
• 30 -  The Star, 18 Sempember 1872, p 2, Local and General
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18720918.2.5
• 31 -  The New Zealand Herald, 4 November 1875, p 2, Untitled
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers?date=1875-11-04
• 32 -  Held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, reference: MS Papers 309 George Smith Diary.
• 33 -  Ibid, George Smith.
• 34 -  Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR), 1875, Session 1, IMMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND (LETTERS TO THE AGENT-GENERAL, TRANSMITTING REPORTS UPON IMMIGRANT SHIPS), D-3, pp 30 & 35.
• 35 -  Ibid.
• 36 -  AJHR, Session 1, 1875, IMMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND. LETTERS TO THE AGENT-GENERAL, D-1, pp 11–13.
• 37 -  The Manawatu Herald, 30 July 1927, p2, TRAGIC DEATH OF COOK STREET RESIDENT
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MH19270730.2.14
• 38 -  Ibid, AJHR, Session 1, 1875, D-1, p 11.
• 39 -  The exact location of her grave remains a mystery.
• 40 -  The Press, 6 February 1883, p 2, THE FIRTH OF FORTH.
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/press/1883/02/06
• 41 -  The Firth of Forth logbook thanks to Sister Mary St Martha Szymańska.
• 42 -  Margaret Copland, Portraits of Pioneers: Stories from Canterbury, New Zealand, p 97, Te Puna Ora Enterprises, Canterbury. See her story on her great-great-grandaunt, Rosalia Gierszawski, on this page.
• 43 -  Queensland State Archives
  http://www.archivessearch.qld.gov.au/Search/ItemDetails.aspx?ItemId=18476
• 44 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, pp 17 & 21 [45 & 49].
• 45 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 20 [48].
• 46 -  Lyttelton Times, 10 April 1884, p 1, Advertisements, Column 3
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18840410.2.2.3
• 47 -  The Press, 4 June 1904, p 10, Advertisements Column 2
  Newspaper digitised in partnership with Christchurch City Libraries.
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19040604.2.72.2
• 48 -  Image from:The Thames Advertiser, 26 October 1876, p 1, Advertisements Column 2
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THA18761026.2.2.2
• 49 -  The Thames Star, 31 August 1886, p 1, Advertisements Column 6
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/THS18860831.2.3.6
• 50 -  Lyttelton Times, 15 February 1884, p 1, Advertisements Columns 2 & 3
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/lyttelton-times/1884/02/15/1
• 51 -  Lyttelton Times, 3 June 1884, p 5, Obituary
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18840603.2.27
• 52 -  The Star(Christchurch), 17 March 1885, p 3, Doctor v Patient
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18850317.2.28
• 53 -  Ibid.
• 54 -  Walter Papers, pp 13–17 [13 & 45].
• 55 -  Ibid.
• 56 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 15 [15].
• 57 -  Press, 21 June 1884, p 4, Advertisements Column 4,
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18840621.2.37.4
  Lyttelton Times, 21 June 1884, p 7, Advertisements Column 6
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18840621.2.32.6
• 58 -  HW Hughes, p 27.
  The Department of Statistics began collecting average percentage rates of interest on new mortgages in 1914. (GT Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics, p 394. GK Hall & Co, Boston, 1984.)
• 59 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 1 [29]
• 60 -  Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand,
  http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/4490/damaged-spire-christchurch-cathedral.
• 61 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 9 [37].
• 62 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 13 [13].
• 63 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 15 [15].
• 64 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 43.
• 65 -  Thelma Mary Szymanska, RNDM, History of Marshland Christchurch New Zealand: Szymanski Brothers 1872–2012, p 28.
• 66 -  The Press, 6 May 1871, p 3, Correspondence
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18710506.2.19
• 67 -   Environment Canterbury Report U07/39, through the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited, pp 7–8. (Thanks to Christchurch City Libraries.)
  http://docs.niwa.co.nz/library/public/ECtrU07-39.pdf.
• 68 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, pp 27–28 [55–56].
• 69 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 10 [38].
• 70 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 12 [40].
• 71 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, pp 12 & 24 [40 & 52].
• 72 -  G Gibb, p 3 of his transcription, within the WJ Walter collection, Archive no. 196, Christchurch City Archives.
• 73 -  http://www.pilgrims.co.nz/charlotte_jane_list.html.
• 74 -  Lyttelton Times, 8 May 1886, p 8, Advertisements Column 4
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18860508.2.46.4
• 75 -  The Press, 15 May 1886, p 2, Auctioneer’s Report
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18860515.2.4.3
• 76 -  Press, 21 May, p 2, Live Stock Market,
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18860521.2.5
• 77 -  http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Heritage/PlaceNames/ChristchurchStreetNames-H.pdf.
• 78 -  Lyttelton Times, 7 December 1887, p 8, Advertisements Column 3
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18871207.2.49.3
• 79 -  Lyttelton Times, 22 December 1888, p 8, Advertisements Column 5
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/lyttelton-times/1888/12/22/8.
• 80 -  Ibid, WJ Walter, p 20 [48].
• 81 -  HW Hughes, p 52; photograph p 53.
• 82 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 29.
• 83 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 91.
• 84 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 29.
• 85 -  Ibid.
• 86 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 63–62.
• 87 -  Information obtained through microfiche held at the New Zealand Society of Genealogists’ Family Research Centre, Panmure, Auckland.
  https://www.genealogy.org.nz/.
• 88 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 66–69.
• 89 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 51.
• 90 -  The Press, 5 May 1888, p 1, Advertisements Column 4
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18880505.2.2.4
• 91 -  David Dunlop, pp 1 & 5 [29 & 33], of his transcription, within the WJ Walter collection, Archive no. 196, Christchurch City Archives.
  The Brothers Pride passenger list through:
  http://www.yesteryears.co.nz/shipping/passlists/brotherspride.html.
• 92 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 67.
• 93 -  Information from:
  The Press, 21 January 1890, p 6, MARSHLAND DISTRICT SCHOOL
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18900121.2.55
  The Star, 6 August, 1892, p 2, School Committees
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18920806.2.14
  The Star, 18 October, 1892, p 3, Latest Locals
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18921018.2.25
  The Star, 3 November, 1892, p 3, Latest Locals
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18921103.2.28
  The Star, 21 December, 1893, p 3, Local & General
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18931221.2.32
  The Star articles all digitised by Christchurch City Libraries.
• 94 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, p 82.
• 95 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 59–61.
• 96 -  Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 59–60.
• 97 -  The Evening Post, 22 May, 1876, p 2, Untitled
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP18760522.2.11
• 98 -  The Wairarapa Standard, 4 May, 1878, p 2, Untitled
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAIST18780504.2.5
• 99 -  JW Pobóg-Jaworowski, BEM, JP, BCA, BA (NZ), MPolSc (London), PhD (Lublin), History of the Polish Settlers in New Zealand, p 64, CHZ “Ars Polona,“ Warsaw, 1990.
• 100 - Wairarapa Daily Times, 2 June 1879, p 2, Consecration of St Patrick's Church
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WDT18790602.2.7
• 101 - Ibid, JW Pobóg-Jaworowski, pages 63–67.
• 102 - Information from:
  The Westport Times, 22 January 1884, p 2, Untitled
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WEST18840122.2.5
  Wairarapa Daily Times, 10 September 1884, p 2
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WDT18840910.2.4
  The Star, 3 May 1890, Local and General, p 3
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TS18900503.2.42
  Wairarapa Daily Times, 22 July 1890, p 2.
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WDT18900723.2.4
• 103 - Image from Margaret Copland's Portraits of Pioneers: Stories from Canterbury, New Zealand,
• 104 - Image through the Christchurch City Libraries.
• 105 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 60.
• 106 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 51.
• 107 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 64.
• 108 - Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 87–88.
• 109 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 87.
• 110 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 86.
• 111 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 75.
• 112 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 76.
• 113 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 34.
• 114 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 42.
• 115 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 45.
• 116 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 44.
• 117 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 33.
• 118 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 34.
• 119 - Told to Ray Watembach, his son.
• 120 - Ibid, HW Hughes, pp 47–48.
• 121 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 64.
• 122 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 50.
• 123 - Ibid, HW Hughes, p 38.
• 124 - Ibid, WJ Walter, p 21 [49].
• 125 - The list is available through:
  https://www.archives.govt.nz/discover-our-stories/womens-suffrage-petition
• 126 - Lyttelton Times, 15 February 1884, p 1, Advertisements Column 3
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT18840215.2.2.3
• 127 - The Sun (Christchurch), 15 June 1915, p 8, Eighth Reinforcements
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/SUNCH19150615.2.68
• 128 - Lyttelton Times, 30 August 1917, p 7, Country News
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT19170830.2.66
• 129 - Lyttelton Times, 19 September 1916, p 4, In the Trenches
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LT19160919.2.17
• 130 - Press, 10 April 1918, p 8, Roll of Honour
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19180410.2.61
• 131 - Thanks to Simon and Franciszka’s descendants Adrian Daley and Daphne-Anne Freeke, who shared their information. Daphne-Anne has written a family story on Franciszka’s life. Their information contributed to the Grofski (Grochowski) family story:
  https://polishhistorynewzealand.org/the-grofski-grochowski-family/
• 132 - Ibid, WJ Walter, pp 15 & 16 [15 & 44].
• 133 - Press, 27 May 1903, p 12, Advertisements Column 1
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19030527.2.72.1
• 134 - Ibid.
• 135 - Photograph from Adrian Daly.
• 136 - New Zealand Police Gazette, 17 December 1902, page 291, Deserting Wives and Families, &c.
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZPG19021217.2.6
• 137 - Information obtained through microfiche held at the New Zealand Society of Genealogists’ Family Research Centre, Panmure, Auckland.
• 138 - The Press, 20 March 1920, page 16, Advertisements Column 4
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19200320.2.86.4
• 139 - The Press, 13 October 1900, p 8, WITH THE FIFTH CONTINGENT
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19001013.2.39.29
• 140 - Letter courtesy of the Grofski family.
• 141 - The West Coast Times, 15 March 1909, p 3, A PRETTY WEDDING
  https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WCT19090315.2.8
• 142 - Ibid, WJ Walter, p 26 [54].
• 143 - Ibid, WJ Walter, p 27 [55].
• 144 - Ibid.
• 145 - Thelma Mary Szymanska, RNDM, History of Marshland Christchurch New Zealand: Szymanski Brothers 1872-2012, insert between pp 132 & 133.
• 146 - Ibid, New Zealand Society of Genealogists’ Family Research Centre.
• 147 - GNS Science Consultancy Report 2007/103, Waterways, Swamps and Vegetation of Christchurch in 1856 and Baseflow Discharge in Christchurch City Streams, p 4.
• 148 - More information from:
  http://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/parks-and-recreation/places-to-visit/canterbury/mahaanui/otukaikino-wetland-reserve.pdf.