My family history interests led me to write and publish several books.
In
December 1992 The Johnson Line: Ebenezer and Ellen, was published.
This book recorded the lives of my great-grandparents and told of their voyage
on the sailing ship Adamant. They traveled from England to Bluff at the bottom
end of New Zealand in 1875. Their vessel was under the command of a drunken
captain who ran them aground on the coast of South America. They were becalmed
for weeks in the doldrums, met icebergs on their passage south of Africa, and
exhausted all their food (and tobacco) supplies before they reached New
Zealand. My family tree is here.
In August 1996 I published Himatangi Radio Station 1953-1995, a
book about a communications station I had worked at when I had been employed
by the NZ Post Office. The station was built at a time when high frequency
radio circuits were used to communicate around the globe - no Internet
browsing in those days! Data circuits were hand or machine Morse Code at about
20 words per minute and shipping telegraph or Pacific Island telex circuits
were at 50 baud (bits per second). Weather facsimile pictures had a resolution
of 60 lines per inch and were sent at two lines per second. The station closed
in 1995, its role having been overtaken by satellite and high capacity
under-sea cable circuits.
A
third book, this one about my father's years as a soldier with the 2nd NZEF
Medical Corps during WW II was completed in May 1997. It is based on my
father's personal diaries in which he recorded much of the social life of
soldiers in the North African desert and in the mountains of Italy. He told of
the many rugby games, 'plonk' (red wine) sessions, and of going AWOL (absent
without leave) in the desert to locate his brother. In Italy he helped farmers
bring in their harvest, was given a job guarding a brothel, sang with
washer-women in tiny mountain villages, and composed scripts for impromptu
concerts. The Johnson Line: Percy's Army Years has 170 pages and over
220 photographs.
Wanting
a bit of a change from my own family, I worked on a history for my
brother-in-law and his relatives. That book, Copeland Gold, tells of
two Copeland generations who worked the goldfields of the Nokomai valley in
Northern Southland, of a step-brother who settled in Oamaru and of cousins who
settled in Canterbury. While the Southlanders won their share of heavy
nuggets, they also knew a love of the land. Copelands helped turn the
country's rough, rabbit-infested bogs into fine farmland. They mustered the
hill country, fenced remote boundary lines and raised large families. Copeland
Gold is Southland's gold. The gold of its riverbeds, of its hills and plains
and of its towns and people.