Do you sometimes hear a fragment of information, a saying or an idea and it sticks somewhere inside your mind, being all shiny and interesting with no particular purpose? Well, that happens to me all the time—usually when I am driving and cannot write it down.
Those little nuggets of ideas usually build into a story starter or at least inspire a scene or character of interest, and That's what happened nearly thirteen years ago when I moved to the Bay of Islands in the Far North of New Zealand. I forget how, but I learned a small fact that a people called Dalmatians settled in New Zealand to dig for gold and Kauri gum.
Doing a little digging of my own during research for Letting Go, I discovered the incredible tale of Lukre (Lucy) Martinovich through an archived documentary called “I think I go to New Zealand” (Encounter, 1976). Her story inspired part of Brett's family history and a fragment of her story is woven into a tale about his fictional grandmother. Something about that little nugget had finally found its way into one of my stories—how satisfying!
Lukre was truly one of New Zealand's pioneering women. She left Dalmatia and traveled to New Zealand aged twenty-one in 1907, after receiving a proposal of marriage from her future husband, Frank Martinovich—whom she had never met. I had never heard of Dalmatia up until then, but I soon found it is an historic region along the Croatian coastline.
Lukre followed in the footsteps of many other Dalmatians who had traveled to New Zealand in search of honest work and better opportunities since the 1880s, when Dalmatians faced significant hardship, including the prospect of the Austrian army’s conscription.
It is thought the first Dalmatians traveled to New Zealand via the Californian and Australian goldfields, where they gained the skills necessary to prospect in the South Island diggings. Some Dalmatians ventured to the very north of New Zealand to dig for Kauri gum. The skills they had honed on the gold fields were also put to good use on the Northland gum fields, which were swamp land, and difficult and dirty to work and live on.
Kauri are among the world’s largest trees, stretching to over 50 m tall and 16 m wide. Many live for over 2,000 years and can still be found submerged and preserved underground. Kauri forests were once common and covered some 1.2 million hectares of New Zealand from the Far North to West Waikato. Kauri timber was widely used by Maori for building boats, houses, and carving; and the gum was chewed or used as an aid to start fires. Although the gum was found within swamps, it could also be bled directly from Kauri trees. Europeans discovered Kauri gum could be an essential ingredient in the manufacture of varnish and other resin-based products, so it soon became a valuable commodity, driving a boom of gum-digging in New Zealand.
Kauri gum was found by thrusting a long pole deep into the swamp. Some innovative gum diggers attached wire to the pole so it could take a crude sample of the objects they hit, identifying whether it was gum or some other submerged object. When gum was found, workers undertook the challenging job of digging it out and preparing it for sale.
Dalmatians are remembered for methodically mining an entire area for Kauri gum and using the funds to send home to family in what was then Dalmatia. Over time, as gum fields became depleted, some Dalmatians used their earnings to purchase land that no one else wanted and they worked methodically at turning it into a new future for them and their family.
Lukre's incredible story inspired a beautiful scene in Letting Go, where eighteen-year-old Brett Jenson, who is struggling to find his place in the world, learns about his Dalmatian heritage. It is so much more than he hoped to learn, and as he stands on ground that was once a Kauri gum field, his life is changed. For the first time, he felt connected—a part of the land his father grew up on, and land that his ancestors worked until swamp land became productive farmland for generations to come. It is at this moment that Brett realizes he wasn't running away at all—he was simply going home.
Find the scene in Letting Go, book one of the Jackson's Bridge Series.
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