Outside the hotel on Wentworth Avenue the temperature has hit 36 degrees. Sydney is burning: bushfires ring the city to north and west and an apocalyptic haze is turning the CBD sepia. We opt for a research day in our room and invite Sue Needham to come down with her big folders of Emily Harris Read More…
Author: Betty Davis
Adelaide report
Lee Hayes is looking thoughtfully at the three single bound copies of Emily Harris’s New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns in the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide. We can see that the dark blue leather of the original binding has been cut out and stuck on to cloth-bound boards that don’t quite Read More…
Sydney Report
‘It’s beautiful!’ Sue Needham is looking at the first plate of her great-great-aunt Emily Harris’s hand-coloured New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. She hasn’t seen the books before. The rich yellows of Ranunculus pinguis, the native buttercup, leap from the page. ‘And look how carefully she’s modelled those leaves,’ Read More…
Edwin’s sketches of Nelson
Edwin Harris sketched his Nelson environs for over thirty years after settling there with his family in 1861. Nelson Provincial Museum holds a number of Edwin’s oil and watercolour landscapes, and Harris descendants hold two sketchbooks likely to contain studies for some of his finished paintings. We present below a preview of pages from the Read More…
Kākābeak: Spring update
Michele and I are heading to Australia soon to check out hand-coloured sets of Emily Harris’s New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns. In Sydney we’ll visit the Mitchell Library / State Library of New South Wales. Then we’ll continue on to Adelaide, where the University also has a complete, hand-coloured set of Flowers, Berries and Read More…
Sue Needham Writes
Sue Needham contacted us earlier this week, excited to find that our project and her Emily Harris research are a perfect fit. Michele and Betty will be in Sydney at the Mitchell Library in a few weeks’ time. With luck, Sue will fly from Brisbane to meet us and examine Emily’s handcoloured New Zealand Flowers, Read More…
The Emily line in NSW: Moore, Tregeagle, Needham
The first person to transcribe Emily Harris’s 1860-61 letters at the Taranaki Museum in January 1999 was Sue Needham. For a long time we assumed that Sue was a staff member or a summer intern because part of her typed transcript is on museum letterhead. Later we learned from correspondence held by Roseanne Cranstone that Read More…
On the ground at Nile St
We’ve been thinking about 34 Nile St, Nelson for a long time now, consulting street plans, Post Office Directories and electoral rolls in our efforts to trace the movement of Harris family members on the site 1862-1925. We know that the family arrived in Nelson in three instalments. Sarah Harris sailed 11 April 1860 from Read More…
Nile Street again
Last week Michele and I contacted our Nelson correspondents/field researchers Belinda Fletcher and Iain Sharp with a small photo from the Harris family album. The photo is a street view with a row of three houses to the right behind a picket fence, a big tree after the second house, 8 figures on the road Read More…
The New South Wales Connection
‘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…