1 - Introduction

Summary

Sad to relate, one far too often hears the young generation talk with a twang that horrifies the ear of anyone used to good English … This twang is worse in Australia than in New Zealand but it is gaining ground here and ought to be strenuously eradicated by school teachers, for it does not sound nice, and robs sweet girlish lips of all their poesy.

(Herz 1912: 352)

Introduction

In 1862 Richard Cotter and his wife Frances travelled with their family to New Zealand. They had left County Cork in Ireland and moved first to the goldfields in Ballarat in Australia, where two of their children were born. From there they moved across the Tasman Sea, still in search of gold, and settled in Arrowtown, in the South Island of New Zealand, where another eight children were born. The Cotter family story is a familiar one from the New Zealand goldfields of the 1860s and 70s. What makes it unusual is that one of these children, Annie, born in Arrowtown in 1877, was recorded in 1948 by the Mobile Disc Recording Unit set up by the New Zealand National Broadcasting Service (NZBS) to collect oral histories and musical recordings from the provinces. In her recording, the seventy-one-year-old Annie Cotter, now Mrs Hamilton, tells of her family's experiences as the first European settlers in the district, and of her life as a child and young woman in Arrowtown.