Page:Gillespies Beach Beginnings • Alexander (2010).pdf/62

 There is one whole year between these purchases. My guess would be that young Fred followed his brother to Gillespie’s, because other kin were also there. His half-brothers were much younger so when the name, Chesterman, appears in records as mining there presumably it would either have been his step-father or step-uncles. With the marriage of Henry Williams to Mary Sullivan strong bonds were formed between the two families, and my hypothesis is that when the two boys went inland young Fred helped Patrick on the Sullivan land until Henry had saved enough to buy his first twenty acres. Having said that, the date is unimportant compared to later achievements. All the land purchases by both families were reported in West Coast papers when the Westland Land Board had its meetings.

These first purchases were of bush-covered land near Lake Matheson, which would later become well-known throughout New Zealand for the magnificence of the reflected snow-capped Southern Alps which dominate the area and which, decades later, would influence the formation of the Westland National Park.

The Cook river flats situated at the foot of Mt Tasman, provide spectacular scenic attractions, although these early pioneers didn’t have scenery on their minds at the time. The river of ice tumbling down from its alpine setting - originally called the Albert Glacier, after Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, later to become the Fox Glacier, after Sir William Fox, a former Premier of New Zealand, today attracts tourists from all parts of the world, as does the Franz Josef Glacier area further north, then called Waiho. South Westland knows two climatic extremes - heavy rainfall at certain times of the year and pristine crisp sunny days at other times. In the background, the peak of Mt Cook soars into the sky on cloud-free days.

In both The Weekly News and Tales of Pioneer Women articles mentioned previously, Mick Sullivan described how his brother Pat and Fred Williams left Gillespie’s with a pack-horse, tent and fly, food, cooking utensils, and some tools, to make their way on foot through dense bush thirteen miles inland to the newly acquired land.