Seaview

Seaview is a terrace north of Hokitika that serves both as a burial ground and the site selected for a new gaol. Its importance comes from this closeness: the town plans a lasting institution there even as the graves and memorials around it register how quickly people, ships, and their histories can disappear. For Te Rau Tauwhare, the place also holds the grave of his friend Crosbie Wells, whose hurried funeral left him little opportunity to mourn in his own way.

Position and the planned gaol

George Shepard sought the Commissioner’s endorsement to build a gaol-house away from the Police Camp, on the terrace north of town. His proposal was to use his own convict labour, invoking the earlier use of convicts to clear the Hokitika road. The project therefore linked Seaview to an existing colonial practice of using prisoners’ labour to build public works, while placing the new prison outside the town’s existing police compound.

The proposal also arose amid a dispute about what convict labour should accomplish. Alistair Lauderback had argued before the Council for using it to build and maintain Christchurch Road, a route Shepard describes as still too treacherous for a coach or even a horseman. Shepard’s prison plan and Lauderback’s road proposal thus placed Seaview within a larger argument over the colony’s priorities: local confinement and punishment on one side, transport across the Alps on the other. The prison was not yet complete when it was discussed; it was a future work whose proposed site already shaped the way characters imagined the town’s development.

Cowell Devlin later walks along the beachfront and returns toward Hokitika by way of Seaview. From the terrace, he can see the site of the future Hokitika Gaol, which is also described as his own future residence. At the time of that walk, the foundations have been paced out and their dimensions marked in white lead on the soil. The marked ground gives the project a visible, measured presence before the building itself exists. Seaview is therefore both a working burial place and a landscape being prepared for a new civic institution.

Graves, memorials, and Wells’s burial

Crosbie Wells’s grave makes the exposed character of Seaview’s burial ground especially clear. Two weeks after his death, the wooden headboard is already swollen by the coastal climate, its surface spotted with black mould and the engraving softened. The paint has faded from white to yellow-grey. The grave’s unseeded plot looks settled rather than newly turned, as though it will not be opened again. These details give Wells’s resting place a fragile material presence: even its marker seems to be passing into obscurity.

The surrounding memorials broaden that impression beyond one man’s death. Seaview has only a handful of headstones, and many commemorate vessels wrecked or lost at sea, including the Glasgow, the City of Dunedin, the New Zealand, and the brigantine Oak. Wells lies beside reminders of shipwreck and disappearance; the graveyard’s memorials make the Coast appear as a destination where arrivals may end in wreck, sinking, or loss. Near him is a small, unnamed wooden headstone bearing only a verse. A name is absent, leaving the marker to preserve a statement without identifying the person whose grave it marks.

Wells’s own funeral had taken place in heavy rain before a small, perfunctory gathering. Te Rau Tauwhare was not invited to speak: George Shepard explicitly told him to remain silent except for the chaplain’s Amen. Tauwhare did not join the benediction, which was swallowed by the downpour. He was allowed to help lower the coffin and shovel earth into the grave, but the party finished filling the hole quickly and left. His first later visit to Seaview since the interment brings the contrast into focus: the public ceremony was brief, while the friendship and grief it could not accommodate endure beyond it.

The child’s grave and the place’s human scale

Seaview is also the burial place of Anna Wetherell’s child. The baby had died the previous year, after Anna had been pregnant. Its body was wrapped in calico and buried in a shallow grave on the terrace. The account does not describe a public ceremony there; instead, it records the burial through Joseph Pritchard’s private response. He had not spoken to Anna about the child’s death and did not visit her regularly, yet he wept in private when he heard the news. His grief is sharpened by the scarcity of children in Hokitika, whose presence made them seem like familiar reminders of home.

That small grave places a personal loss beside the larger funerary landscape and the proposed gaol. Seaview is not only a planned site of confinement or a setting for Wells’s burial: it holds more than one private sorrow, including a loss that remains unspoken between the people most closely connected to it. The child’s grave also makes the terrace’s distance from ordinary town life less important than its role as a place where personal histories are physically left behind.

A threshold between memory and civic order

The terrace brings together two forms of marking the land. Graves and memorials record lives and voyages that ended on the Coast; the gaol foundations outline a structure meant to impose order on the living. Yet neither kind of mark appears secure. Wells’s headstone is already weathering, the unnamed grave remains without an identity, and the prison exists only as measured lines on the ground. Seaview’s significance lies in this juxtaposition, not in a completed transformation: burial and construction occupy the same landscape while the futures they imply remain uncertain.

The place also reveals whose participation is controlled. Tauwhare is permitted to help bury Wells but denied a voice in the ceremony, even though Wells was his friend. Against that exclusion, his return to the grave gives the landscape a continuing human connection that the formal service could not supply. Seaview thus holds together institutional plans, fragile memorials, and private attachments, making the town’s projected order inseparable from the losses and relationships already rooted in the terrace.