‘Harry went to Hawera to see Concie. Harry is not tall as we thought, he is very good looking with nice gentlemanly manners, speaks well, he is musical, belongs to the Bathurst Brass band. I unpacked my pictures on Friday for him to see & to choose one of yours.’ Emily Harris is in New Read More…
Month: September 2019
Open Call for Emily’s Letters
Who did Emily Harris write to during her long life and where are those letters now? Her descendants have done an admirable job of preserving family papers and artifacts, and so it is that we have access to a history of Emily and her family in their own words through the 1840s and early 1850s. Read More…
Flames and archives
In her diaries from the 1880s Emily Harris tells two stories about burning. The first concerns the destruction of a diary when she was a young woman in Taranaki in the late 1850s. She is painfully conscious of the loss her action imposed at the time and regrets it still: Well, long ago, some seven Read More…
34 Nile St, Nelson
It is February 2018. We are visiting Peter and Roseanne Cranstone at their farm near Fordell, south of Whanganui. Roseanne has brought out the paintings and drawings by Emily and Edwin Harris she inherited from her father Philip Briant. Her cousin’s wife Judith is looking at a panorama of Nelson in Edwin’s sketchbook and says Read More…