Donovan’s World

DEANS COTTAGE, RICCARTON

It might benefit from a cottage garden - hollyhocks and Canterbury Bells - but then the purists would say that that is not what Deans Cottage is all about. Maybe so. It was built in 1843 seven years before the Canterbury Pilgrims arrived in their first four ships. In sympathy with its moody Riccarton Bush surroundings it’s a simple house, especially so as totara, matai and kahikatea from that same forest comprised its frame and boards and shingles. The cob chimney looks suspiciously orderly, though, and doesn’t quite harmonize with the rest of the cottage, perhaps the temptation to tidy things up a little overcame the restorers?

The cottage had been standing for ten years when John Deans brought his new wife, Jane, there from Ayrshire in February 1853. I have been told that when she walked through the door she was suffering from three forms of sickness: sea-, morning- and home-. That year her first son, John, was born and less than a year later her husband died in the cottage leaving her a widowed solo mother. Despite its present impersonality it’s not difficult to imagine, while standing in the dim light of a small back room, how dear a haven the cottage must have been to a pioneer family twelve thousand miles from their origins with nothing but courage and faith to buoy them.

In that same room, on one of the dark-stained walls, there is an indistinct pattern. It looks as if a hot poker has scorched an etching of small leaves and flowers into the timber. Nobody seems to know what it is or how it came there but I believe it must be from wallpaper which has somehow offset into the timber. It is, to me, one of the more intriguing details of Deans Cottage.

© DON DONOVAN

Hororata came close to being a railway town when a line from Christchurch to the West Coast via Browning Pass was surveyed. It’s on record that the Hororata Domain Board members kicked up a stink when they heard that it might pass through the eastern part of the domain.

In 1882, Napier had a new, two-storeyed timber pub built by local tradesmen. It was described as: ‘large and lofty… almost entirely surrounded by tall pines, and the crescent-shaped roadway by which it is approached from the main road gives it a pleasing appearance.’

A 1903 photograph from the ‘Cyclopaedia of New Zealand’ shows Thomas Napier’s pub, owned at the time by Patrick Crowe. It is a fine clapboard building with modillioned eaves, and ornamented lintels over the doors and windows. Arranged before the pub, in attitudes of studied indifference, is a group of local patrons; the whole scene is framed by large macrocarpa trees. It is that same hotel that stands today; macrocarpas still frame the scene and the windows and doors still have their bracketed lintels but the modillions have disappeared and the clapboard exterior is hidden under a stucco cladding. The pub was ‘re-designed and modernised’ in 1967 but I suspect that the old timbers are still slumbering under all that plaster.

© DON DONOVAN

I wrote and illustrated ‘The Good Old Kiwi Pub’. It was published in 1995. It’s a snapshot of some New Zealand pubs as they were at the end of the 20th century. I have decided to share some of the entries from the book from time to time on this blog.

The first licence in Oxford was granted to William Satchell in 1859. His ‘pub’ was a four-roomed accommodation house. It was taken over by Salathiel Redfern who promptly put up the two-storeyed Oxford Hotel. Next came David Fisher’s Forest Inn of 1863, which was later named the Terminus Hotel (historical clues are in both names for there was a large forest near Oxford and there were two railway lines with stations at East and West Oxford). Pub number three, the Harewood Arms, built by a sawmiller named Luers, went up in 1864. They’ve all gone.

‘The West’, its solid walls a tribute to the craftsmen who built it, still offers accommodation and good service - although the ornate bells in the passageways no longer ring to summon chambermaids.

Under some straggly old pines in the adjacent paddock is a classical old two-door lock-up, looking a bit the worse for wear. It was brought there from the Heathcote Valley in 1869. No notable criminals languished in its darkness but it’s said that Michael Leahy, constable, locked-up a miscreant one night for being drunk in charge of a horse and dray. Leahy, next day unlocked the gaol door to find an even drunker drunk: he had forgotten that the cells contained a considerable amount of confiscated liquor!