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…
News
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…
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…
Kōwhai
I passed a kōwhai tree in flower this morning and thought of Emily. The early springtime flowers are opening up one after another and the tūī birds are getting louder and louder. Soon they’ll crowd the kōwhai, turning their beaks bright yellow with pollen. I love to see a puffed up tūī singing in black Read More…