Re-Writing our History – The New First Female Child born to a Settler in the Upper Clutha
Jane McCallum was born on 7 June 1862, in probably a stone thatched hut or a ‘diggers tent’ somewhere up the Cardrona Valley. It is not clear exactly where the birth took place, but most likely in the thatched hut the year before the flood.
This is map is extracted from McKerrow’s Reconnaissance Survey of the Interior Districts of Otago Province 1862-1863. The top arrow points towards two buildings at Roys Bay (given the date, very likely to be the two thatched cottages built by Henry Norman) and the lower arrow, to a hut marked beside the Cardrona River between Spot Burn and Branch Burn (their 1863 names). Was this latter hut where the McCallum’s lived and Jane Jnr was born, keeping in mind that the McCallum’s were living in a hut up the Cardrona Valley in 1862/3?
The Birth Register records the birth taking place at Wanaka but note that at that time “Wanaka” was the name that generally described the area we now call Upper Clutha and not the town - it did not exist then. (Ignore the pinkish mark on the map indicating where Pembroke was to be, as it is a later “addition” to the original map).
Jane’s younger sister, Mary Ann, was born on 9 March 1864 and was the very first birth registered in the Register Book for the District of Wanaka by Henry Norman. In the absence of any other information, it appears that Mary Ann was the first settler’s female child born in what we now know as Wānaka Township, the first boy having been Robert Norman born in 1861.
Past writings on the history of the Upper Clutha have recorded that Catherine Maria Pipson, of Makarora, born 1868, was the first female settler’s child born in the Upper Clutha, but Catherine was not even close to being the first. In addition to Jane, her parents, whilst living on Wanaka Station, produced two other daughters before Catherine was born. History gets re-written once again and there is always the chance that an earlier birth occurred from amongst the other families who came to the Wānaka area to work on the new Sheep Stations!
