In 1862, Julius Vogel was Waikouaiti’s elected
representative on the Otago Provincial Council.
Ten years later the ambitious Vogel had been appointed to the position
of colonial treasurer and in this capacity he instigated New Zealand’s grandest
ever public works scheme. Vogel – the
Rob Muldoon of the nineteenth century, borrowed enormous sums of money from
Britain in order to boost migration and build infrastructure. He promised to build a thousand miles of
railways in order to open up inaccessible land (much of it confiscated during
the Maori wars) and vowed that this target would be met within nine years.
Thousands of men were needed to help construct Vogel’s railways;
however, in 1870 a work force of that size simply didn’t exist. The English firm contracted to build the rail
network, were obliged to recruit more than two thousand men to meet this labour
shortage. These strong but mostly
unskilled ‘navvies’ were given free
passage to New Zealand and promised two years steady work. On arrival, these men
soon discovered that the salaries they had been offered in England were not as
generous as they had first supposed – parity with colonial wages and working
conditions (an eight hour working day!) was demanded.
The recruitment scheme was something of a disaster, immigrant railway
workers arrived faster than engineers could organise work for them, and the experienced
agricultural workers among them soon found employment elsewhere. Having paid nothing towards their passage,
these men found they had little to lose by breaking their contracts; the
majority simply walked away avoiding prosecution. Within a very short period of time another
labour shortage loomed. Several recruitment alternatives were considered and
dismissed, Maori were considered to be ‘inefficient’ workers, and the
importation of Chinese labourers was actively opposed by provincial
authorities. The shortage was eventually
alleviated by an influx of German and Scandinavian immigrants and by settlers from
the United Kingdom who enjoyed free passage to New Zealand during 1873.
A few years later the government sought to combat the
‘unemployment outcry’ by reserving sections of railway construction for the
jobless, in 1876 an able bodied
unemployed man could earn 6s 6d a day on the Waikouaiti
Railroad workers were a diverse group, ethnicity, skills and
motivation varied widely, but all workers shared the same difficult working
conditions. Picks, shovels and dynamite
were used to break hard ground, and barrows were used to move it. Injuries and fatalities were not uncommon. In
1878 a young man named James Patterson took up work on the Waikouaiti railway
after failing to make his fortune in the goldfields. “Slung in a boatswain’s chair on the side of
a steep precipice near Purakanui station”, Paterson was clearing away loose stones
when he fell fifty feet, striking his shoulder then fell fifty feet further, smashing
his head on the railway track. He was taken into the guard’s van of the
Waikouaiti train “in a dying state” and was dead before the train reached
Dunedin.
Men who faced such risk for a reward of six shillings a day
could hardly be blamed for choosing to slip away into bush. Absenteeism was widespread and individuals
regularly absconded from the transient workforce. The disappearance of a single man from a
railway ‘navvy’ camp would have raised no suspicions, the absence would have been
attributed to desertion – foul play would never have been suspected.
The Waikouaiti to Palmerston section of the main trunk line
was completed in September 1878. When a
skeleton was found in a railway drainage ditch beside the Waikouaiti station in
1890, the railway completion date became important. Because the ditch had been dug no later than
1878 there was a twelve year period during which a body had been concealed.
The journalist who reported the discovery was eager to
present an unbiased account of the find.
The original newspaper headline read “Murder or Suicide?” The article
suggested that the death was either a “ghastly murder” or a “determined
suicide.” It was not considered unlikely that a truly determined man might have
tied himself up in a small sack containing two heavy pieces of iron, and
drowned himself in a ditch containing no more than three feet of water.
Uncommonly hot conditions dried the ditch exposing the
remains, two boys aged ten and nine removed the skull and eventually informed
their parents of the find. The skeleton
was taken into the possession of Sergeant Conn, of the Palmerston Police who
made “careful enquiries but failed to find that anyone in the district had been
reported missing since 1878.” Initial
medical investigations ascertained that the bones belonged to an aged man, 5
foot 9 inches in height.
Further forensic examination of the remains was more
detailed. Walter Hislop, a Surgeon from
Palmerston examined the skeleton. During
the inquest that was held in Waikouaiti, he reported that the skull was of the
“Mongolian type” with a massively wide lower jaw and had teeth that were
“stained yellow, as if from Opium smoking.” He remarked that “the head was a
large one, on a small body, no more than five feet in height and concluded that
the evidence suggested that the bones had belonged to a Chinaman. The coronial
jury returned a unanimous verdict, in their opinion there was a very grave
suspicion that the unnamed man had met his death through foul play.
The local newspapers presented several theories as to the
timing of the murder and identity of the victim. They postulated that the dead man
might have been a railway ‘navvy’ whose body was placed in the ditch around the
time that the railroad was being built. Alternatively,
it was suggested that the corpse might have been placed in the ditch some years
after the railway was completed and that it may have been transported there
from a nearby local hotel. No sightings
of a very short Chinaman with a disproportionately large head were ever reported.
Within weeks newspapers reported a ‘satisfactory or possibly
ludicrous’ revelation. An unnamed local
man claimed that a ‘gorilla’ from a travelling circus had died when its company
were passing through Waikouaiti and that its remains had been hastily placed in
a gunny bag and thrown into the convenient ditch.
An article in the North Otago Times reported satisfaction that
‘foul murder’ had not been committed on a human being and ridiculed the solemn coroner’s
enquiry. The credibility of the surgeon who
had identified the skull as belonging to a ‘Chinaman’ was also questioned, but
in fairness the article also noted that “the skull of a gorilla accords in
shape with those of some members of the human family, a fact that gives us
reason to have faith in Darwin.” In an final effort to remain impartial the
closing sentence of the newspaper article read:
“However, the gorilla
story might be a joke.”
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