The Kawau, looking to Auckland

In this panoramic vista Constance Gordon-Cumming gives a sense of the remarkable geography of Kawau. While it appears to be taken from another island looking towards Mansion House Bay, it was in fact made from the northern headland opposite, which overlooks the entrance to Bon Accord Harbour. The island is shaped like a backwards ‘C’ with the magnificent harbour and its many bays running deep into its centre. Auckland’s distinctive landmarks – Rangitoto and Mt Eden – are recorded on the horizon, their presence also noted in inscriptions along the base of the watercolour.

Mansion House, Sir George Grey’s home sits at the centre of the bay in the middle distance. Grey had purchased the island and house in 1862, remodelling it with the assistance of architect Frederick Thatcher. For the colonies it was quite grand, but, accustomed to the castles of Scotland, Gordon-Cumming described it as ‘a cosy old English home’*.

Grey also transformed the island introducing exotic flora and fauna, ultimately becoming home to wallabies, kookaburras, zebras and monkeys. After more than a year in Fiji the sight of pastoral land ‘just like Sussex downs – with sheep and cattle feeding’ was a welcome reminder of home for Gordon-Cumming, carrying her ‘right back to Gordonstown, and our own green hills overlooking the Moray Firth’*. She noted her surprise on discovering ‘such pleasant slopes of English grass’ were ‘the result of patient toil’, and just as exotic as Grey’s introduced species. Indeed, a visit to the island today reveals much of it reclaimed by indigenous manuka which she observed ‘spreads so rapidly as to cause endless trouble to the settler’.

A remarkable historical feature of the watercolour are the signatures of her party appended to the bottom lefthand corner. These include: her host Sir George Grey; his niece Annie Thorne George; Lavinia Coates, a daughter of Grey’s friend who later served as an aide; Rachel Hamilton Gordon, Gordon-Cumming’s travelling companion and wife of the Governor of Fiji; and Alfred P. Maudslay, then serving as secretary to the Governor of Fiji, who subsequently made his name as a Mayan archaeologist.

* C. F. Gordon-Cumming, At Home in Fiji (New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1882), 265.

* Ibid., 265, 266.

* Ibid., 270.

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