Introduction

The envelope that Gretchen Briant inscribed ‘Grandmother’s letters’ contains more than typings of Sarah Harris’s early letters to her family in England. Twelve pages in Sarah’s hand have been folded into the envelope, not letters but journal notes from 1860, the year of the first Taranaki war. Some miscellaneous notes from the same and later periods are also in the envelope, one of them in Emily Harris’s hand. It is clear that Gretchen Briant has preserved an important cache of family papers associated with her grandmother’s early history in New Zealand.

Sarah made two sets of journal notes, covering in different ways events in New Plymouth between February and April 1860, when the Harrises’ son Corbyn and his father Edwin were called up for service in the Taranaki Militia and the family had to evacuate their outlying farm. There are no notes between May and August, when Sarah took refuge in Nelson with her younger daughters Kate, Frances, Mary, Augusta and Ellen. There are very few notes for September and October when Sarah returned to New Plymouth from Nelson after Corbyn was killed in ambush on the beach near Camp Waitara 28 July. By early December Sarah and Edwin were in Nelson permanently with their younger daughters. Eldest daughter Emily was still in New Plymouth with her employers Charles and Katharina Des Voeux, who took her with them when they departed for Hobart in March 1861.

The events of 1860 devastated the family financially and emotionally. The Frankley Road farm was lost, government compensation was slow in coming, their only son and brother was dead and returning to the ruined settlement of New Plymouth was out of the question. A new life had to be built in Nelson and only two of the Harris daughters, Kate and Mary, returned to settle in New Plymouth after they were married in 1863 and 1871 respectively. From 1860 onward, the Harrises, like many other Taranaki families, had post-war connections in Nelson as well as New Plymouth.

No other record of the Harrises’ experience in the early part of 1860 has come to light before now, though Emily copied her letters and scraps of diary from later in the war. See ‘Writing Lines’ 1-11 (2019). Sarah’s jottings, often hurried and fragmentary, show us what it was like to feel the grip of wartime uncertainty: ‘Very unsettled not knowing if we shall be obliged to remove to town’; ‘I was very anxious as Edwin & Corbyn were in the bush’; ‘Great alarm in the night when we were all asleep.’ They are also the raw material for the letters she was sending to her English family. And, curiously, they glance back at significant events in the family’s colonial history, marking anniversaries, birthdays and (once) a solar eclipse.

Sarah Harris made notes first in a small exercise book (Journal 1) and later redrafted them in a larger exercise book (Journal 2). Journal 1, eight pages, describes events to September-October 1860. Journal 2, four pages, stops at 31 March and its final pages list Edwin’s English relatives. Neither journal is a complete record of the year because pages have been removed that would have covered the period of Corbyn’s death and the siege of the New Plymouth settlement.

We present transcripts and contextual notes for the two parts of Sarah Harris’s 1860 journal, with images of the original documents that reveal a previously unrecorded part of the Harris story. Once again, the family’s instinct for preserving its written history links several generations, from Sarah herself, through daughters Emily and Mary, to Mary’s daughter Gretchen, then on to Gretchen’s son Godfrey Briant and his son, also Godfrey Briant.

Thanks to Goff and Judith Briant for permission to upload another important part of the Harris family papers. Thanks also to Kathryn Mercer at Puke Ariki for fielding research questions and digging once more into the museum’s Taranaki biography files. Ricci van Elburg and Brianna Vincent checked our early transcripts of Sarah’s handwriting and we are grateful for their expertise.

Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson
March 2025

Transcripts of Journal 1 and Journal 2

Notes and Sources for Very Unsettled: Sarah Harris Journal 1860

Images of of Journal 1 and Journal 2