Page:Gillespies Beach Beginnings • Alexander (2010).pdf/35

 Hokitika cemetery. Imelda Devaney, daughter of Julia and Thomas Devaney, never married, but was known to have visited her relatives in Ireland in the 1930s. Geraldine Sloane, Annie (Vaughan) Carroll’s great-grand-daughter has verified these details as recorded in her father’s written memoirs.

It does seem extraordinary that Margaret Vaughan was 40 when she married Laurence Sullivan, yet gave birth to eight children.

The cottage in which the newly-weds, Margaret and Laurence Sullivan, started their married life at Gillespie’s Beach had a roof made from shingles. Although there was plenty of bush about, wood for building purposes was scarce because few men were able to use or keep a pit saw to produce the required timber.

The little house had two bedrooms and a kitchen-living room. All the cottages faced the sea. In wet windy stormy weather the choice of location may not have been ideal. As the family grew, Laurence built outside rooms with Irish thatched roofing. Food and stores including such things as window sashes, corrugated iron, axes and all the material required to keep the settlement supplied were landed from small coastal ships which anchored off-shore at Bruce Bay, 33 miles south of Gillespie’s Beach from where they were packed up the coast by horse or horse and dray. In addition to boats calling at Okarito, the government steamer, “Stella”, on its journey up the western coast eventually called every three months at Bruce Bay, putting down anchor about a mile off-shore, with the vessel’s boats ferrying goods ashore. The Jane Douglas and the Waipara were also remembered from early years.

Meat, mainly mutton, but also some beef, would initially have been purchased from those settlers, such as the Ryans, who had already acquired and cleared land for grazing. The gradual acquisition of land by Laurence Sullivan is part of this story.