Story by Michele Leggott

It is November 2024. Harris descendant Heather Jones hand-delivers Emma Hill’s scrapbook, the real thing, to a kitchen bench in Devonport. The scrapbook and an envelope of family letters and photos has made its way from Judith Briant in Marton to Heather in Clevedon to its latest destination in Auckland. In the days that follow, husband Mark, friend Susan Davis and I will pore over the pages of Emma Hill’s notebook, exclaiming at the range and variety of its contents. We’ve seen them as image files but there is no substitute for the material object and being able to appreciate its physical attributes. Another friend, April-Rose Geers, finds the first watermarks that will help date the scrapbook.

Back to the kitchen bench, where Heather Jones is taking the scrapbook out of its archive box. She opens it and says: ‘There’s a loose page tucked inside. It looks like a letter.’

And that is exactly what it is: a single sheet almost the same size as the scrapbook, front and back covered in handwriting that has become familiar to everyone who has worked on the Emily Harris project. Not being able to see the writing for myself, I ask Heather if she can read the first few lines. She begins: ‘Jan 1th 1862, My dear Mamma.’

We are looking at a previously unknown letter from Emily Harris in Hobart to her mother Sarah in Nelson. It will fill in more of Emily’s sojourn in Tasmania 1861-1865, when she was housekeeper and nursery governess for the family of Charles and Katharina Des Voeux.

Jan 1th 1862
My dear Mamma
Mr Des Voeux sailed last night so this is a melancholy beginning of the new year for Mrs Des Voeux, and even I feel that I have a great responsibility: Mr Des Voeux’s implicit faith in my doing all in my power for Mrs Des Voeux. She is subject to very strange attacks in the night which as the Drs cannot see they cannot understand.
As soon as it can be arranged we shall all live together.
Mr Des Voeux may perhaps sail from Sydney direct to Nelson. I have sent a small parcel to Mrs Standish which he will give to you as my photograph is in it for you and papa. If he goes to Taranaki first Mrs Standish will forward it to you.. If not, will you send the parcel to Mrs Standish.
Tell papa if he sends me the photos by post I can get them framed here, mine cost ten shillings. You will most likely see Mr Des Voeux.
– – – –
Emily

MS copy of letter to mother Sarah Harris, Nelson. Written in Hobart, Tasmania, 1 Jan 1862. Copying date unknown. Briant collection. Single folio, watermarked ‘Hammond’s Trademark.’

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Emily was 24 when she wrote this letter to her mother, disclosing the responsibility that was about to fall on her as Charles Des Voeux set out for New Zealand to attend to business interests there. He would be absent for almost three months, leaving his physically and emotionally fragile wife and their two children in Emily’s care. Emily is under no illusions about the difficulty of her task, having already weathered Katharina’s caprices many times in the course of her two years with the family as they fled the war in Taranaki for the safer ground of Hobart. However the note makes it plain that Katharina’s troubles have escalated and her doctors are baffled. Emily’s heartfelt wish for reunion with her own family is poignant: ‘As soon as it can be arranged we shall all live together.’

But the reunion will not take place for more than three and a half years. Meanwhile, Emily alerts her mother to the imminent if uncertain arrival of a photograph of herself she has had framed and which Charles Des Voeux now carries with him. If he delivers the parcel directly to Nelson, Sarah is to remove Emily’s portrait and send the rest of the parcel to family friend Mary Standish in New Plymouth. If Charles sees the Standishes first, Mrs Standish will forward the precious artefact to Nelson.

Having covered all eventualities, Emily also urges her father Edwin to send photographs to her for framing, perhaps at Alfred Bock’s City Photographic Establishment, where she herself was photographed at least once during her stay in Hobart.

There is a hand-tinted photograph of Emily in an elegant crinoline in the Harris Weyergang Album Photographique. It is from Bock’s studio at 140 Elizabeth Street in Hobart, carte de visite size and unframed. It may or may not be the portrait of Christmas-New Year 1861-62. But it is a fair guess at the kind of photo Charles Des Voeux was carrying on his first visit to New Zealand since leaving Taranaki with his family and Emily Harris in March 1861. It is also the earliest photo of Emily Harris to be recovered and the only image we have of Emily in her twenties.

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The letter we are looking at is a copy, written on the same bond paper as the other two copies of letters from Hobart. We don’t know when Emily decided to copy some of her 1860s letters and scraps of diary, covering the period of the first Taranaki War and her subsequent stay in Tasmania. But something prompted her to copy out two letters to her sister Frances Harris in Nelson (1861 and 1863), and now a third letter has appeared, copied on a page watermarked Hammond’s Trademark that has been cut from a notebook. The letters to Frances have been written on folded sheets of Hammond’s Trademark and are now among family papers in the Harris collection at Puke Ariki. The letter to Sarah is copied onto an unfolded sheet with the same watermark and has been stored in a different part of the family archive. Its reappearance adds weight to the probability that Emily copied more of her early letters than the dozen or so we know about.

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Lying on the kitchen bench is a large envelope Heather has also brought to Devonport. Inside it are two smaller envelopes, one inscribed ‘Godfrey Briant from Aunt Grace’ and the other ‘Grandmother’s letters.’ The envelopes will reveal more of the Harris story but for now the discovery of the 1862 letter is a cause for celebration. Soon it will join transcripts of Emily’s other early letters in our Art and Writing section. We’ve also included the letter in the update of our Des Voeux Chronology.