# Gillespies Beach Beginnings/Part 2

​PART 2 - THE SULLIVANS
Anecdote says that Laurence Sullivan met his wife-to-be, Margaret Vaughan, at Okarito, probably because it has been reported elsewhere that the marriage licence was taken out there at the local police station. There are no reports of Margaret’s occupation either in Australia or elsewhere. At 40 years of age she had obviously been self-supporting both in Australia and later in New Zealand so presumably she would have worked as a domestic or possibly a barmaid.
The notice of the marriage appeared in the West Coast Times on 8.7.1870 as follows:
Marriage - Sullivan - Vaughan, on 27th June at the bride’s residence, Mikonui Beach, by the Rev. J.A. Goutenoire, Lawrence Sullivan, County Limerick, Ireland, to Margaret Vaughan, County Clare, Ireland. (Home papers please copy.)
A copy of the marriage certificate has been sighted. The newly-weds Made their home at Gillespie’s Beach and Mary Sullivan, the oldest of Laurence’s eight children was born the following year.
In an interview with Michael Sullivan, youngest son of Laurence, as reported in The Weekly News in September, 1959, it was stated incorrectly that his father had married a Julia O’Connor. At the time of the interview Mick was in his mid-seventies and either suffered a senior moment or was misreported. This error was repeated in Barbara Harper’s Petticoat Pioneers and also in the centennial album published by the Westland County in 1976. My source is the genealogical chart left to me by Sister M. Lawrence but more importantly the marriage certificate and also the headstone in the Hokitika cemetery. I doubt that Laurence is buried with the wrong woman.
​There were three Vaughan sisters, Julia, Margaret and a much younger Annie, daughters of Patrick and Julia Vaughan of Feakle, County Clare, Ireland. Their mother died shortly after Annie’s birth in 1845, leaving her much older sister, Julia, who’d married a man named Frank O’Connor, to care for her. Margaret Vaughan, left Ireland for Australia about 1863, when she would have been 33 years old. It is known that she sent the money home for Annie to join her when her much younger sister reached 18 years of age. It is also known her Irish family did not wish Annie to leave, according to a descendant (Imelda Devaney) who visited Ireland some decades later. Apparently Annie had been destined to look after other family members in their old age.
Both Margaret and Annie Vaughan then left Australia for New Zealand about 1865 and ended up on the West Coast. Annie eventually married a much older Michael Carroll, a cousin of Laurence Sullivan, in 1869, and they also took up residence at Gillespie’s beach. A photo of the Carroll homestead appears in Margaret Hall’s Black Sands & Golden Years. Despite being much older than Annie, her husband lived into his 70s, whereas Annie died in 1902 from an illness of the auto-immune system, - amyloids disease.
It does seem extraordinary that Margaret Vaughan was 40 when she married Laurence Sullivan, yet gave birth to eight children.
The cottage in which the newly-weds, Margaret and Laurence Sullivan, started their married life at Gillespie’s Beach had a roof made from shingles. Although there was plenty of bush about, wood for building purposes was scarce because few men were able to use or keep a pit saw to produce the required timber.
The little house had two bedrooms and a kitchen-living room. All the cottages faced the sea. In wet windy stormy weather the choice of location may not have been ideal. As the family grew, Laurence built outside rooms with Irish thatched roofing. Food and stores including such things as window sashes, corrugated iron, axes and all the material required to keep the settlement supplied were landed from small coastal ships which anchored off-shore at Bruce Bay, 33 miles south of Gillespie’s Beach from where they were packed up the coast by horse or horse and dray. In addition to boats calling at Okarito, the government steamer, “Stella”, on its journey up the western coast eventually called every three months at Bruce Bay, putting down anchor about a mile off-shore, with the vessel’s boats ferrying goods ashore. The Jane Douglas and the Waipara were also remembered from early years.
Meat, mainly mutton, but also some beef, would initially have been purchased from those settlers, such as the Ryans, who had already acquired and cleared land for grazing. The gradual acquisition of land by Laurence Sullivan is part of this story.
​In these years, teams of horses were used to transport goods. They were used to haul logs and timber. When land had been cleared sufficiently they pulled the plough. Horses were used to visit outlying areas, and horses were essential for droving. In the absence of a farrier, men had to learn to shoe their horses and also, through trial and error, discover remedies to use whenever their animals were sick. Home-made remedies evolved as they did also for sick children.
In Pioneer Work in the Alps of New Zealand, written by A.P. Harper in 1894, he commented that the inland track between Waiho (Franz Josef) and Weheka (Fox Glacier) had grown over, possibly because storekeepers and publicans at both Okarito and Gillespie’s wanted the horse traffic to continue along the beach. It was still a track in 1906 when Agnes Moreland went south, as recorded in her book, Through South Westland.
Laurence continued gold mining over the following decades and built a water-race to help him extract the precious metal from the black sand. He earned enough to not only feed his growing family of eight, but also to purchase land. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he would have witnessed the move by other settlers to take up land. Because his growing family included sons he obviously realised that the future lay in the land rather than in gold prospecting, hence his first purchase of 100 acres in 1889. He must also have appreciated that had he remained in Ireland, such a purchase would have been beyond his wildest dreams.
In the small cottage in which Laurence and Margaret started their married life, food was cooked on a camp oven with huge cast-iron pots and kettles hung on davits attached to the chimney. There was plenty to eat but little variation in the meals. Nevertheless, fruit cakes and girdle scones would have been produced, as well as bread. Reports indicated that yeast was made from a mixture of hops and potatoes. Wood was plentiful in the nearby bush with ​discoveries eventually being made as to which produced the hottest embers when burned, particularly rata, matai and lancewood.
All of these families relied on a vegetable garden to assist in the feeding of their families with the addition of whatever fish could be caught including eels. Native wood pigeons weren’t protected until the 1920s so these also formed part of the diet, as did weka, supplemented by whatever meat was available. Most settlers kept a cow to supply milk and butter. A fowl-run produced the much-needed eggs used for baking. Surpluses in any commodity were shared, bartered or sold for cash. Without electricity, kerosene lamps were used for lighting at night and also candles. The four gallon tin in which kerosene was supplied became an important utensil in households, for carting water, for laundry, for food storage and preserving eggs, for ablutions, and for transporting goods. The example in thrift and make-do set by their mother would stand her daughters in good stead when they married.
The native wood pigeon, the kereru, remained on the menu in our household at Whataroa into the 1930s despite the ban. Those of Irish descent tended to resent being told what to do. A common attitude existed that the powers-that-be up in Wellington weren’t going to decree what could or couldn’t be eaten, a defiance also shown on the Coast when six o’clock hotel closing became the law. Pigeons were plentiful in the nearby bush, and had been eaten since the first settlers arrived. They had been eaten by Maori for centuries. Whenever a pigeon was shot or stunned with the lead pellet from a shanghai, we children were taught to dig a hole and pluck the feathers directly into it before covering over. The aroma of pigeon soup was distinctive. The wings of pigeons were used as a hearth brush by early settlers. If the sole policeman stationed at Whataroa happened to sniff the aroma of pigeon soup wafting on the breeze when paying a visit to remote households, he obviously failed to enforce the law as I do not recall any prosecutions taking place - just as he failed to enforce six o’clock closing at the local ​pub. Environmental consciousness wasn’t yet part of the national psyche.
Social occasions in the early days were few and far between at Gillespie’s, but as mentioned earlier, residents travelled further afield to Okarito and the 5-mile for special yearly celebrations, especially on Boxing Day and at Easter. Funerals were also large social events giving settlers the chance to meet, talk, and in the Irish way, for the men to down a few of whatever brew was on offer.
In the era of medicalised child-birth in which we now live, it seems amazing that these pioneer women gave birth to large families, often with only the assistance of another woman in the district. Margaret Vaughan Sullivan had eight children, small in comparison to the McBride’s ten, and other large families in nearby scattered localities. Married in 1870, she gave birth to eight children within a decade or so.
My mother’s autograph book has an entry that Michael, the youngest, was born in 1881.
In the absence of a doctor those suffering an illness either got better or died. Remedies were home-made with often the best on offer for children a tablespoon of brandy or whisky laced with sugar. Among these pioneer women in South Westland there were miscarriages and deaths both of newly born infants and of those giving birth. Married life wasn’t, as the old saying goes, a bed of roses, with many in a constant state of pregnancy over many years. Pregnancy was delicately referred to as being “in that condition.” It was not a topic for polite conversation.
The nearest hospital up in Greymouth had opened in a tent in 1865, until an actual building came into being in 1866. In 1877 it was moved to a new site by which time the hospital at Hokitika had also come into existence, but too far distant to be of use to southern settlers. The nearest doctor was eventually located at Ross, some considerable distance away, and later again, at Whataroa.
​I recall both my mother and her sister, Anne, (Sister Mary Lawrence), stating that whenever their grandmother came in from Gillespie’s Beach to the Williams home at Weheka, the older children knew that another addition to the family was in the offing.
Some decades would elapse before pioneer nurses and those acting as midwives would become part of the local scene. These pioneer women were tough. Despite the famine years in Ireland, and the relatively spartan conditions at Gillespie’s with its hard work, plain food and pregnancy, Margaret was 87 years of age when she died.
We who live in an electronic age, with quick and inexpensive communication world-wide might find it difficult to comprehend that our New Zealand forebears lived minus radio, telephone, motorised transport, and the many other modern inventions we take for granted. There was no electricity or gas. Washing machines and refrigerators lay in the future, as did electrical tools and machinery which would have lightened the task of clearing the land and building shelters in remote areas. Keeping a large family fed, breakfast, lunch and tea, was a full-time job with hours upon hours spent in the kitchen. Growing daughters would eventually ease the burden for in these years children, when old enough, were expected to help with allotted tasks.
It needs again to be remembered that these Irish settlers probably thought themselves extremely lucky and well-off. As already mentioned, back home in Ireland food had been scarce and limited in variety for the vast majority who were poor. Their futures in Ireland were also limited, dependent upon others for a roof over their heads and a piece of ground in which to grow food. Gillespie’s, being on the west side of the South Island, had very heavy rainfall. So had the western counties in Ireland which they had left behind so they were accustomed to rain. Coast residents also seem to eventually become immune to the sandflies which would bother tourists in later years.
Two entries in the Grey River Argus are of interest.
​30.6.1875 - A subscription list of donations in aid of the Hokitika hospital listed a contribution by Lawrence Sullivan of 10/-. Two years earlier an advertisement had appeared advising that the Sea View Lunatic Asylum in Hokitika were holding a dramatic evening with funds to be used for the purchase of a piano and billiard table. The Asylum had been opened at the end of 1866. The harsh and often lonely living conditions for newcomers minus the support of family members back home took its toll on those trying to eke out a living on the goldfields and elsewhere.
17.10.1877 - Lawrence Sullivan elected Committee member of Bruce Bay School Committee. The correct spelling was LAURENCE. Later descendants would be christened Lawrence. Bruce Bay may well have been the name of the educational district.
This appointment would have been a proud moment. It would be interesting to know how much schooling Laurence had back in Ireland. Until the repeal of the Penal Laws in 1829, Catholic children could not be educated. In 1835 75% of Irish labourers were without work and begging was common. The Workhouse was the last resort. Interested readers may care to Google Irish Famine to learn of conditions before and after the famine years in Ireland to gain an understanding of why so many people left their homeland.
As more families remained to settle at Gillespie’s, a church was built by the settlers and also a school in 1877. This wasn’t officially opened with a government appointed teacher until 1880, but in the interim the children would have been taught the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic by a member of one of the local families. The school, in the absence of a hall, was also used for social events such as dances and meetings. Residents travelled north to Okarito for special events such as New Year’s Day or St Patrick’s Day when horse racing and a variety of entertainment was on offer.
A report by A.P. Harper, in 1893 described Gillespie’s Beach as having “a pub and two stores, perched just behind the top of the beach, amongst the sandhills - the most god-forsaken place imaginable.”
The explorer cum writer, Charles Edward Douglas, whilst working for the Survey Department, later Lands & Survey in the years 1889 to 1903 said of Gillespie’s: “This was never ever a proper township but entirely a digging one and has supported a fluctuating population for many years. It passed the calico era, and almost attained the dignity of the weatherboard but not quite. It now contains a few diggers’ huts, a store and schoolhouse, with of course the usual pub, but its life cannot last long as the beach is nearly worked out. It has however lasted longer than any of the other diggers’ townships of Southern Westland and contains a chapel, still standing, a building none of the others ever possessed.”
The church, incidentally, suffered the indignity of being razed in the early 1930s to allow the second gold dredge to move through the site.
The families who eventually settled inland made their way back to Gillespie’s for many years for church services there whenever a priest visited. Once all the Sullivan and Williams families had moved to Weheka, church services were held in the front room of the Williams home, their second home, the first being the totara walled bark roofed hut where they started their married life.
From 1895 onwards there had been a flying fox, then cage over the Cook and Fox rivers to assist travellers across. The bridge over the Fox river opened in 1937 and the Cook’s river bridge in 1938. It ​would be some years before the road would extend as far as Haast.
By 1911, all the Sullivans had moved inland by which time Laurence Sullivan and his wife had left Gillespie’s to live out their retirement in Hokitika. It seems a quirk of fate that they had both survived long sea voyages to come to New Zealand, had lived a long life in a remote area, had survived travel on horseback around dangerous bluffs and turbulent river crossings, and in Margaret’s case had given birth to eight children without medical assistance, only to meet their Maker in the way they did.
The following article in the Grey River Argus dated 26 October 1917 reads:
SHOCKING ACCIDENT AT HOKITIKA
MR LAURENCE SULLIVAN
KILLED
(Per Press Association)
Hokitika, October 25. A shocking fatality occurred at the railway station shortly after the arrival of the evening train during shunting operations. Laurence Sullivan, a retired settler from South Westland, over seventy years of age, was found run over, and his body terribly mutilated. He was seen on the railway platform shortly before, and it is inferred that he was taking a short cut across the railway line to his Residence nearby. He leaves a widow and grownup family. He was a well-known grazier of Cooks River. He had one son serving in the forces.
To add to this tragedy, his wife, Margaret died later the same day after hearing of the accident so the description of “widow” in the article was short-lived. Laurence was actually in his mid-eighties at the time of his death - not the “over seventy” mentioned in the obituary. Both were buried in the Hokitika cemetery at the same ​funeral service.
The son mentioned above, John (Jack) Sullivan returned safely from WWI but was handicapped during the remainder of his life by leg injuries sustained during the war.