They Lie Quietly
They lie quietly, many under names different from the Polish ones given to them at birth, and as far from the places they were born as it is possible to get.
Walk through almost any cemetery in New Zealand, and you will find someone of Polish heritage. More than 900 Poles who arrived in New Zealand between 1872 and 1876, as part of Sir Julius Vogel’s 1870 Immigration and Public Works Act, expanded within a generation to more than 3,000 scattered throughout the new colony.
Poles who disembarked from ships in Lyttelton and Port Chalmers tended to remain in Canterbury and Otago, but when the Fritz Reuter arrived in Wellington, its 511 men, women, children and babies were scattered in groups via steamers to settlements that were expected to grow with the new railway through the Manawatū, for example, and to bustling towns like Hokitika on the West Coast.
Of the 65 passengers met by boatmen in New Plymouth and rowed to shore, just 24 began what became the largest Polish community in New Zealand. Fifteen adults—one heavily pregnant—and nine children between 18 months and 13, left the Marsland Hill Immigration Barracks in New Plymouth on 6 September 1876, and started the walk to Inglewood, which had received its first settlers a year earlier and which was then still a clearing in dense bush below Mt Taranaki and accessed from New Plymouth by horse or foot.
The family names: Biesiek, Doduński, Duszyński, Myszewski, Neustrowski, Potroc, Uhlenberg, and Volzke, are easily recognisable in Inglewood, even with slight adjustments for English spellings.
The only reason we can be sure of these names is because they are recorded in the immigration barracks’ ration book. When the Fritz Reuter arrived in Wellington, its passengers were at first not considered immigrants and officials were under no obligation to record who went where.
A return of immigrants who arrived in Wellington between July 1876 and July 1877 showed that 202 of the Fritz Reuter passengers had been sent to “other ports” but it does not say who or where. The same return assumed the balance of the passengers—309—stayed in Wellington, but that seems unlikely. Single women and men who could not speak English might have been able to find jobs, but what opportunities would there have been for farming labourer families in the city?
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Marianna and Paul Biesiek, whose 22-month-old daughter died at sea, had three sons in Taranaki. Paul Adam Biesiek and his brother Joseph both married other first-generation Poles, Mary Dravitzki, and Mary Ann Potroz, and Thomas did not marry. All of them are buried with the senior Biesieks at Inglewood Cemetery.
While first marriages between the Polish settlers tended to be with other Poles, as the younger of the 900 first settlers, and the first generation of children born in New Zealand went to English-speaking schools, it was inevitable that daughters’ names would change.
The other Polish families who first walked into Inglewood had first-generation daughters and a widow whose names became Williams, Crombie, and McKenna (Doduński); Hastie, Wells, and Christensen (Duszyński); Fryday, Collins, Reid, Todd, Fullforth, Fox, Meyer, Wilson, Binderbeck, and Wairi (Myszewski); Fawcett, Roberts, Bright, Arnold, James, and Hart (Neustrowski); Miller, Miskler, Clark, Jans, Coe, Newbold, Grey, Robson, Davies, Rayner, and Braggins (Potroc); Wheatley, Patten, Latham, Betts, Hogg, Gray, Tapp, Rowe, Neill, O’Neill, Stewart, Phellan, Carey, and Moosman (Uhlenberg); Summerhays, Ansford, Williamson, Moore, Douglas, and Walsh (Volzke).
Cemeteries in Taranaki hold by far the largest number of first-generation Poles—763—more than twice as many as in any other New Zealand region. Inglewood Cemetery has 272, Stratford’s Kopuatama Cemetery has 136, and in New Plymouth, there are 94 in Te Henui Cemetery and 63 in Awanui Cemetery.
Cemeteries in the Manawatū-Whanganui region hold the next largest number of first-generation Poles—360—followed by Otago with 331, and Canterbury with 308. The 71 first-generation Poles in Clareville Cemetery north of Carterton and the 64 in Archer Street Cemetery in Masterton boost the Wellington region’s numbers to 272, with its city cemetery in Karori holding 75.
Although the West Coast had only 122 first-generation Poles, the Hokitika Municipal Cemetery, with 84 early Polish settler burials, comes in at number six in New Zealand. The scarlet fever epidemic in 1877 hit Hokitika hard and resulted in the disproportionately high number of children buried there that year.
A new headstone at Hokitika remembers Rogucki siblings Leo (5) and Barbara (2), who arrived via the Fritz Reuter with their parents, Michał and Anna Rogucki, and their 10-year-old sister Cecylia, who later married George Bentley-Payne. Leo and Barbara died of scarlet fever on 30 July and 8 August 1877, and it did not sit well with Cecylia’s great-granddaughter Judith née Payne Stephens that the two were buried without headstones under names incorrectly spelt (Michael and Banula Ruska) and apart from each other.
One proudly Polish headstone stands out among the 14 interred in the Taruheru Cemetery in Gisborne: that of Anna Shaskey. Under her name and between the Polish and New Zealand flags is the name Jaroszewski, the one she, her husband and four children arrived with in Lyttelton in 1872. The next lines show that she was born in Poland on 1 June 1836, that she died in Gisborne on 7 March 1931, and that she was the loved wife of Mathias.
On his naturalisation papers in Papanui in 1893, Mathias signed himself as Matthew Shaskey, farmer, but a newspaper report in The Akaroa Mail about how he and his son thwarted an attack by a small, white bull shows he was already using that name in 1881. By then he may have been tired of struggling to get New Zealanders to spell it correctly. Mary Anne, the family’s third child born in New Zealand, in 1878, is the only one registered as Jaroszewski, yet the record takers still managed to spell her father’s first name Maththep. Christchurch Christening records show that Mary Anne was baptised as Sarsevski, yet her father was Matthias Jarsevski.
Matthew Shaskey died in Christchurch in 1912. The wording on his widow’s headstone follows his in Linwood Cemetery. His Polish name is in parenthesis, and it states that he was born in Poland.
The Jaroszewski name may have disappeared from the official record of New Zealand’s Births, Deaths and Marriages, but it is clearly marked in Taruheru and Linwood.
On Jaroszewski-Shaskey plinth in Gisborne are words fitting so many of New Zealand’s early settlers:
“Bringing another thread to our tapestry of nationhood.”
—Barbara Scrivens
1 June 2025
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