A drunk in Eastbourne

There is a photo from the 1880s of an elderly couple sitting in the sun outside a scrappy hut under a hill in Rona Bay, Eastbourne. They look quite peaceful to me, but history records that she wore perpetual bruises, and he was often too drunk to stand up. Looking closer you might notice her face is turned away and her eyes are down, while he stares belligerently into the camera. This is William “Ōkiwi” Brown and his common-law wife Nan, a woman who had been abandoned by whalers on the Rona Bay shores some 40 years before.
You’ve got to wonder what the story was behind this photo. My historical novel Ōkiwi Brown is a book I’ve come up with about this pair, with researched facts sewn into a tale of personality disorder, changed identity and abuse.
There are many old stories from the locals about where Ōkiwi came from, his nickname “murderer Brown” hinting at an evil past. I’ve tried to make some sense of the rumours. Other stories say that Nan was from Rēkohu, the Chatham Islands, and was sold or given to whalers as a young woman. If this is true that would have made her a child when Ngāti Mutanga and Ngāti Tama invaded and enslaved her people. My descriptions of her as a traumatised woman, detached from her life, come from this supposition.
Here are some of the descriptions of Brown that informed my recreation of his character.  A newspaper correspondent recalls a “squarely-built, strongly-made man but with a repulsive looking countenance. His face was more like a grotesque mask than anything else, the chin dropping for an unusual length below the mouth, and generally his appearance was very much against him.”
Local man N E Bendall describes a most villainous looking scoundrel with an extraordinary physiognomy, his lower jaw being abnormally deep and prominent, the head very long and narrow and added to these the brown, wrinkled skin  and deep sunk black eyes. Victorians believed God painted a man’s soul on his face, so we have to read these descriptions with the knowledge of the hindsight that created them.
Brown and his wife Nan ran an accommodation house in Rona Bay, a ‘bush pub’ for people travelling to Wairarapa, providing a mat to sleep on and serving grog with a fierce reputation. There are stories that he regularly purloined stock from drovers walking the coastal trail, stole from his paying guests and terrified them by appearing with a tomahawk by their bedside in the night. Elsdon Best, writing shortly after Brown’s death, reports one guest departed in the middle of the night, “so hastily indeed that he quite spoilt the appearance of the window, and tradition states that he melted into the landscape clad in one brief, sad garment, but festooned with window-frames and things”.
Brown’s wickedness appears in several records.  Elsdon Best reports Brown would work himself up into such a frenzy that children would rush away from him in terror. A good choice of candidate then, to be given the charge of a young orphaned boy as a cadet to train in the ways of farming. Eleven-year-old Matthew Hobman was found with a tomahawk in his head up the gully a few months later.
You’d think Brown might have been put in the dock for that, but these were the racist colonial days and a Māori man had been on the scene earlier. Why would you investigate a notoriously violent Irish man when you had a native right there? No wonder the accused fled into hiding.  And then, a few years after the boy’s murder, a body with signs of a beating washed up in Rona Bay and Ōkiwi gets his time before the judge.
Wondering about old stories and scraps of facts kicks off historical fiction. A photograph, some snippets of record, some gossip and an empathy for a person – maybe long dead – can set a writer off on a ‘what if?’ challenge, to build a plausible scenario out of bits and pieces of history that will have some truth, perhaps bigger than the immediate story, and some creativity.  I’ve come up with a story about this pair. Is it true? I don’t think anyone can prove me wrong.
The bestselling novel Ōkiwi Brown by Cristina Sanders (The Cuba Press, $37) is available in bookstores nationwide.