Lloyd Esler has spent 25 years digging through Southland's graveyards and emerged with 150 stories of murder, mishap and the occasional elephant.
The historian and former Invercargill city councillor has turned his cemetery tours and 1200 newspaper columns into Dead and Buried in Southland — a collection that reads like regional history written by someone with a dark sense of humour.
"People are fascinated by cemeteries," Esler said. "Often the information on the gravestone is not recorded anywhere else, so you can read Southland's history by just reading the gravestones."
The book includes Minnie Dean, the last woman executed in New Zealand. The Winton baby farmer killed children in her care in the 1890s, burying three in her garden before police got suspicious.
"There's a body of opinion that it was, as she claimed, from accidental overdoses. There's no doubt she killed them. But I'm rather less sympathetic than that. I believe that it was, in fact, cold-blooded murder," Esler said.
Her executioner Tom Long made a profession of it, travelling by train with his own rope and testing men at railway stations "for their hangability". When he arrived in Invercargill, he refused to proceed until supplied with his usual bottle of gin. "Now, if you like, I'll hang 20 women," he declared.
Southland's worst land disaster came in 1863 when gold miners were caught in snowstorms on the Old Man Range. The same year brought the region's worst day of lightning — November 1883 — when three people died in separate strikes, including Arthur Crisp. "If you're going to be hit by lightning, then Mr Crisp is not an entirely inappropriate name," Esler observed.
The Manapouri Power Station project killed 16 men during construction — "not unexpected at the time, unfortunate, but it was tough work," according to Esler. Tim Shadbolt worked on the project.
Elephants feature surprisingly often. Five have died in Southland — two washed up on beaches after being thrown overboard from circus ships, three buried locally after eating hemlock, drinking weed killer, or consuming tussock.
"Southland would be a place for elephants to avoid in future," Esler noted.
The lost tribe of Fiordland was real — Māori who retreated there after tribal conflicts in the 1820s and avoided European contact until the 1860s. "Those early explorers were finding recent campfires and footprints and signs of camps," Esler said.
Tuatapere schoolteacher Dorothy Sheriff claimed she wrote the poem behind The Carpenters' hit "Top of the World" and sold it for $50. She wanted to be buried at sea from a specific fishing boat. Neither wish came true — she's in Tuatapere Cemetery, and there's no evidence she wrote anything.
Cecil Winter from Bluff did write a famous song — "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" — adopted by World War I troops with increasingly bawdy lyrics.
Esler is now working on a history of Bluff. "The present project is the history of bluff. And so I'm turning up lots of interesting nuggets for that one as well."