DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
Today the names of streets can be contentious, reflecting changing attitudes toward the colonial past. In earlier eras this was no less true.
In 1934 a letter to the editor of The
Dominion protested the moniker of a new thoroughfare off Wellington’s Fitzherbert Terrace.
The street was named in honour of the country’s second premiere, William Fox. Today Fox’s ambivalent attitude toward ownership of Maori land and association with the New Zealand Company would render him persona non grata but the correspondent’s objections were grounded more in the belief that Fox had too little association with the growth of Wellington.
Fox’s 1848 assertion that Auckland was ‘‘the most drunken town in New Zealand’’ at least had the virtue of prescience.
The pseudonymous ‘‘H.F.’’ argued instead that the road would be better named after William John Swainson (1789-1855), my great-great-great grandfather.
H.F. noted that Swainson, the first Fellow of the Royal Society to emigrate to the antipodes, settled in the Hutt Valley in 1841.
His achievements — as cited in the letter — included the cultivation ‘‘of his primitive bush land’’, ‘‘ . . . despite interference from bands of marauding natives’’ and his mentorship of Sir William Buller, the noted ornithologist and painter. If Swainson too was tainted with an association with the New Zealand Company, he at least broke from them, writing a monograph criticising their corrupt practices.
Interest in Swainson was heightened in 1934 after one of his many grandchildren gifted a painting to New Zealand, the work of her husband, Vereker Monteith Hamilton.
‘‘Quatre Bras’’ depicted the 1815 battle of the same name, a skirmish that immediately preceded the Battle of Waterloo.
Given William Swainson served in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars there was a certain aptness to this endowment.
The painting remains in the art collection of Te Papa.
In an era when the bust of the Duke of Wellington is deemed objectionable the likelihood of its exhibition today would likely be remote.
The Swainson Streets found in Naenae and Greymouth are probably named after another William Swainson (1809-1884), an early attorney general whose championing of indigenous rights does perhaps warrant recognition.