Alfred Mudd (1849—1919)
Mermaid Sighting off Astrolabe Bay, August 1881

'I have led the life of a wanderer,' Alfred Mudd wrote to his mother in Manchester in 1903, 'and have nothing to show for it but impressions and sketches.' Mudd's modest statement gives little idea of the epic scale of his larger paintings in oils. His most famous canvas, Mermaid page 256 Sighting off Astrolabe Bay, August 1881, measures over three metres in length and is almost two metres wide. Painted in 1883, it was purchased by Dunedin banker and politician William Larnach who hung it in the ballroom of his castle on the Otago Peninsula. Following Larnach's death in 1889, it was acquired by the Dunedin Art Gallery.

Today, it greets visitors as they walk through the gallery's door, roped off to protect it from those who would press their faces too close to the gleaming oil paint as if wishing to propel themselves into the sublime moment painted by Mudd: the ultramarine ocean with its luminous splashes of white, the inaccessible mountain behind it, and the mermaid rising from the water like an Antipodean Medusa, shaking out serpentine locks in which sea-wrack, kelp and Neptune's necklace are wound.

It is often assumed that Mermaid Sighting off Astrolabe Bay, August 1881 records Mudd's own experience. In fact, the work is based on a description that appeared in the Oamaru Daily Mail of a mermaid sighting by John Knocks, a former sealer.

Certainly Mudd visited Astrolabe Bay, where he spent a week in 1882 making detailed sketches. By then, however, the waters of the bay were calm, and no mermaid appeared to ruffle their surface.

By that time Knocks had also left the district, traveling to the West Coast where he briefly worked as a publican before settling in Westport. Here, he gained a reputation for his exquisite carvings in bone of chess pieces and other small, decorative items. In Westport Knocks also began, with the assistance of his second wife, Airihi Herangi, to explore Maori cosmology, eventually changing his name to Ehekiera ('Ezekial'). During this time he designed and manufactured the deck of cards known as the 'Westport Tarot'. The pack is notable for its unique blend of traditional European symbols with figures and motifs borrowed from Maori mythology and art. This syncretism is carried over to the backs of the cards, which feature a design in which Celtic motifs are interlaced with the decorative pattern known variously as unaunahi (fish scales) or ritorito (young shoots of a flax plant).² In the 'Westport Tarot' the page 257 card of the High Priestess is represented by a figure with serpentlike tail and the body and face of a woman; it is assumed to portray either a marakihau or mermaid.

Violet d'Ath (1901—1932)
Novelist, author of The Ice Station

'and the wind's breath moving across the bay, carrying the memory of icebergs . . .'

Daughter of the lighthouse keeper at Point Medusa, Violet D'Ath claimed to have seen a mermaid in the autumn of 1910 while walking to meet the mail launch from Bluff. Eighteen months later, she published her remarkable novel, The Ice Station. Described as 'New Zealand's first truly Gothic novel', The Ice Station is the story of Thora Sars, daughter of the manager of a whaling station on South Georgia. Thora, the only child on the station, is haunted by the spectral figure of a woman dressed in white. The novel leaves unresolved whether the figure is the spirit of her dead mother, a figment of a lonely child's imagination, or an incarnation of the South Pole itself, which Thora visualises as the guardian spirit of the whales and other sea mammals that the men of South Georgia hunt and render for blubber.

The novel has been admired for its unflinching depiction of the brutality of life on a whaling station, where the water occasionally turns red with blood, and the stench of rotting carcasses and rendered fat contrasts with the stark beauty of the sub-Antarctic surroundings. It is also notable for its portrayal of a father who loves his daughter, but is unable to communicate with her or to meet her emotional needs.

Violet D'Ath was working on another novel when, while walking to a dentist's appointment, she was struck by a tram in Princes Street, Dunedin. Rushed to hospital where an examination revealed no major injuries, she died a week later from the effects of a dislodged kidney. Several Dunedin residents have claimed to have seen an ethereal figure, robed in white, at the intersection of Princes and High Streets where the accident occurred.

Percy Lithgow (1918—2005)
Oboist and composer

An oboe player and aspiring composer, Percy Lithgow claimed to have seen a mermaid in 1948 while camping on Codfish Island with his companion, bassoonist Miles Sanderson.

Later that year Lithgow composed 'Soundings', his haunting suite for orchestra and solo bassoon, and the first composition by a New Zealander to make use of the pentatonic scale.

from A E Braithwaite (ed) Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Toshio Satoe (1919 —)
Poet

In the winter of 1951 Toshio Satoe was walking on the rocky point just south of Brendan Beach when a movement in the water caught his attention.

Satoe, who had traveled from his home near Osaka to visit the country where his brother had died in the failed prisoner uprising at Featherston in 1943, never spoke of why he happened to be exploring that particular stretch of coastline. The most likely explanation is that the visitor, not completely satisfied by the food served to him at the Majestic Guest House, had gone out with the aim of collecting some of the shellfish and edible seaweed he had observed growing on the nearby rocks.

Satoe had gathered some mussels and was retying his shoelaces when, chancing to look up, he came face to face with the creature he would later describe, in halting English to staff at the Majestic Guest House, as woman-fish.

Afterwards, Satoe was unable to recall how much time passed during the encounter. Nor did he recall the details of his journey back to his accommodation on the Centennial Highway, although the mussels and sea lettuce he had collected were still wrapped in his handkerchief.

Back in his room at the Majestic Guest House, Satoe sought to page 259 calm his sense of agitation by reading a book he had brought with him, a guide to the astronomy of the southern skies. But to his surprise, instead of restoring a sense of normalcy, Satoe found that certain words and phrases seemed to stand out from the rest, almost as if they were trying to propel themselves from the page.

With a sense of urgency but no conscious plan, Satoe began to rewrite the text, preserving the highlighted phrases, instinctively rearranging the fragments across the page while maintaining the spaces between them. The result was a strange and fragmented poetry that seemed to hang from the page like a tattered banner or a portion of the night sky, irregularly scattered with constellations. Satoe named the transfigured work The Eclipses; its method is hinted at in the lines, occurring towards the end of the third section, which read:

                     To erase the skies
         to let the stars go out,
                                       one by one
                  growing the night.

Satoe's The Eclipses did not find its way back to New Zealand, in translation, for another two decades. The work had a more immediate impact in Japan, where Satoe became the reluctant hero of an avant-garde that promoted erasure as a tool in the quest to re-make traditional poetic forms—those forms which, as Satoe himself wrote, 'hold us tightly in their embrace, as if to keep us from falling off the edge of the world'.

from Ichiyo, Steve: Satoe: poet of the tremulous world (Berkely, Calif.: Echo Press, 2003)

Olive Burling (1922—)
Artist

A longtime resident of Timaru and botanical illustrator, Olive Burling saw a mermaid while visiting her sister and brother-in-law in the coastal resort of Raumati. The sighting occurred during a trip to Kapiti Island. Burling was sketching a clump of grasses at the southernmost tip of the island while her brother-in-law fished from his dinghy on the other side of the island, when an alteration in the colour of the sky made her look up from her page.

Of the experience she would later say only that 'the light changed for me'.

Burling was unable to recall how much time passed before the mermaid sank beneath the waves and the light returned to normal. Silent during the journey back to her sister and brother-in-law's house, she went out the next day and purchased oil paints. Using a discarded set of sails she found in the garage as canvas, she painted the works that would become the basis of the Keel series: Keel I, II, III, IV and V.

In these paintings bold swathes of ochre, cream and brown paint, applied with both brush and palette knife are anchored by the dark vertical shapes that rise from the base of the canvas, bisecting the paintings like a great keel. The colours and shapes appear to float in space; a space that is invented by the artist and has been described as 'profoundly meditative, while not excluding the world'. Ostensibly the record of the changing light over the course of a single day, Burling's Keel series possesses a power which, like Satoe's The Eclipses, compels its audience, even while its meaning eludes comprehension.

Burling continued to work on a monumental scale using unstretched canvas. Besides Keel I, II, III, IV and V, she is most well known for the twelve paintings that comprise the Hieroglyphics series.

from 'Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand'

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'Mermaid Fever' comes to the Kapiti Coast

On the Kapiti Coast there is a saying, 'To dream of beaches and wake with sand in your bed.' Generally, it is used to caution those who are in danger of letting their imagination run away with them, mistaking wishes and dreams for the solid forms of reality.

Yet in the autumn of 1951 it seemed that everyone was dreaming of beaches and few thought to caution them. 'Mermaid Fever' had come to the coast and, as the hotels and guest-houses swelled with visitors all hoping for a sighting of the elusive creature, a sense of excitement, an almost electric energy, ran from one end of the coast to the other.

To entertain the visitors, the Waikanae Ladies' Choir were persuaded to give a special performance, while Olive Burling's paintings Keel I, II, III, IV and V could be viewed at the Raumati Scout Hall pending their transfer to the National Art Gallery. A menu from the Centennial Inn for 1951 shows that guests dined on Potage à l'Américaine, followed by a choice of Roast Saddle of Mutton or Pressed Ox Tongue, both served with potatoes and green peas; dessert was Fruit Salad and Cream, or Blanc Mange with Prunes. A photograph of popular Paraparaumu band, the Hinemoa Hotspots, suggests that those still eager for entertainment drove to the Coronation Hall where they danced to midnight to the Hotspots' favourite tune, 'Send me a Mermaid'. From there, they returned beneath the starlight to their borrowed beds, sleeping soundlessly until the early morning when the north-bound freight train rumbled through their dreams, dispelling other, more ineffable melodies.

A discordant note was introduced when a driver lost control of his car on the state highway, and crashed into rocks just south of Paekakariki. In its editorial for 19 July 1951, Wellington newspaper the Dominion queried whether the accident should be regarded as evidence of 'the dangerous fascination ascribed to the mermaid, who is traditionally said to lure the unwary to their doom on the rocks'.

A week after these prophetic words were printed, a cold front swept in from the sea. Rain and wind lashed the beaches, rattling the doors and windows of baches along the Parade and Esplanade. A veil of cloud descended over Kapiti Island, concealing it from view. As the visitors cut short their holiday or huddled around log fires, 'mermaid fever' subsided almost as quickly as it had arisen, and the beaches were left once more to gulls, fishermen, and solitary walkers.

from Iris Dorizac: A Centennial History of Kapiti and its surrounds (1997)

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Rediscovering Frank Cloud

An interview with Greg Swift, Publisher, Entry Press Radio National, 23 November 2008