If you read the interview with the author on this blog after her last novel, Cristina’s comment was to say, “Murder. Perhaps two," when asked about what was the next piece of writing on the agenda. Cristina Sanders more than delivers and gives us not one but two murders in this grim and uncompromising tale of nineteenth-century New Zealand. And, in fact, numerous other murders are also woven into this macabre and gruesome story.
At the heart of the story is the mysterious William “Ōkiwi” Brown, so named for the bay on Wellington harbour’s eastern side where he sells rough grog and offers mean accommodation to travellers making their way to the Wairarapa via Pencarrow Heads. Ōkiwi Brown treats his common-law wife, the silent and servile native woman abandoned by a whaling ship, with contempt, and passing travellers with mean anger and disregard.
No one knows anything of his past before his arrival in 1840, but his dour and bad-tempered presence helps to foster the rumours of past evil and present misdoings. The sense of mystery is heightened because we only see this unpleasant man through the eyes of those who encounter him: Leckie, a ne’er-do-well with a weakness for the drink, his cherished and clear-eyed child Mary, and the rough and ready ex-soldiers, Spolan and Meney, disenchanted with fighting the natives and looking to scratch out a living in this raw and rough colony.
In Ōkiwi Bay a young boy in Brown’s care disappears and is later found dead, and then after some drunken quarrelling at Brown’s hut, a suspicious death leads to a murder charge and court case.
However, the story opens in Edinburgh several years earlier with a man hanged for murder and another murderer disappearing into the night, never to be heard of again. The sense of the mysterious and sinister foreboding is heightened as the story keeps harking back to Edinburgh to tell more of the story of Burke and Hare, two heartless and cold-blooded murderers. Is there a connection between these men in Scotland in 1829 and Ōkiwi Brown?
Once again, this author has dipped into the annals of New Zealand’s early colonial past for her source material. In her previous novels Displaced, Jerningham and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant, Cristina Sanders has shown her ability to take real events and people from New Zealand’s past and weave a living fiction. The archival photos and historical notes confirm that this rough character did actually exist and that there was speculation about his past and identity at the time.
Cristina writes with gritty realism about the early settlement in the Wellington harbour and the trials of surviving on this wild, windswept coast. Earthquakes and skirmishes with the Maori tribes of the area are touched on as incidental to the story. Little reference is given to the influential settlers, entrepreneurs and politicians of Port Nicholson and Wellington Harbour in the 1840s because this is the tale of the poor and uneducated people thrown up on these rough shores: men working as labourers to guide sheep around the coast and build fences, women cooking over wood fires and washing clothes for a coin or two, orphaned children at the mercy of whoever will take them in and all of them living hand to mouth, surviving in any way they can.
I felt a growing sense of horror as the Scottish murderers became bolder and more greedy with each killing. And the early New Zealand chapters have characters that I recognised and who pulled me into their stories: I felt sympathy for Leckie, the hapless drunk, grief-stricken at his wife’s death, who tries and usually fails to be a good father and provider but I also felt frustration for little Mary, his cheerful and stoic daughter whom he lets down time and again. Spolan’s fear of giving evidence and speaking up, Meney’s sideline of selling raunchy drawings to lonely men and the washerwoman’s vulgar mouth, rough manner and opportunistic attitude are all vividly real.
Cristina has put flesh on the bones of historical record and rumour and written a chilling, convincing and clever tale of early colonial New Zealand.
Reviewer: Clare Lyon
The Cuba Press
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