Anna Wetherell’s attempted suicide is presented not as a fully remembered act, but as a night whose emotional cause she can name and whose final hours remain partly lost to her. In court, she links the crisis to falling in love with Emery Staines and to the belief that he could not love her in return. Her testimony changes the meaning of the incident: alongside the danger of her going under is her insistence that she did not set out to inflict real harm on herself.

The Night of 14 January

At the hearing, Lawrence Broham challenges Anna’s decision to leave prostitution, asking whether she had been provoked into changing her circumstances of employment. After Walter Moody objects to the premise of the question, the justice allows it. Anna answers that she fell in love with Staines. She identifies the night of 14 January as the first night they spent together and says that afterward she no longer wanted to continue prostituting herself. Her account places a major change in her life beside the night on which she was arrested for attempted suicide: love and the wish to leave her former circumstances are not separate from the crisis, but part of the same turning point.

Asked whether she had attempted to take her own life, Anna acknowledges that she meant to go under. She immediately qualifies that admission, saying she had never set out to do herself real harm. The distinction does not erase the danger implied by her actions, but it makes the event more complicated than a simple confession of intent. The court hears both her recognition of what she meant to do and her limit on what she says she intended.

A Night Recalled in Fragments

In response to Broham’s request for the evening’s events in sequence, Anna recalls meeting Staines at the Dust and Nugget at about seven o’clock and having a drink with him. He escorted her to his residence on Revell-street. At around ten, she returned to the Gridiron Hotel and lit her pipe. She says she was feeling strange and took more than usual. The sequence then breaks: she supposes that she must have left the hotel while still under the influence, because her next memory is waking in gaol.

That gap limits what her testimony can establish about the night’s final movements. Anna offers an account of the evening up to the point when her memory fails, but she does not recall leaving the Gridiron Hotel or the circumstances that ended in her arrest. The event is therefore reconstructed through remembered encounters, her admission about wanting to go under, and the abrupt endpoint of waking in custody. The missing interval remains a feature of her account, not a detail the testimony fills in.

Why She Had Refused to Plead

Broham also asks why Anna previously refused to enter a plea when she was tried for attempted suicide in the same courtroom. She explains that Staines was still missing at the time. She thought he might have gone upriver or into the gorge and might read the Hokitika papers for news. She did not want him to read anything that would make him think less of her. Her silence in the earlier proceeding was thus tied to the possibility that he was alive and might learn what had happened.

That explanation gives her earlier refusal a different significance from simple evasion. Anna had withheld a response while holding open the possibility that Staines would return or encounter news of her through the papers. At the later hearing, she speaks of the night directly, with Moody present and encouraging her to continue. The testimony makes clear that her account of the attempt is also an account of how her feelings for Staines shaped what she was willing to disclose.

The Event’s Double Turning Point

The night joins two changes in Anna’s circumstances. Her first night with Staines marks the beginning of her wish to stop prostituting herself; the same date is also the occasion of the attempted suicide charge and her subsequent arrest. When the court asks whether she had provocation to change her employment, the answer leads back to the crisis rather than away from it. Love offered a reason to leave one life, while the belief that Staines could not love her accompanied the act that put her in danger.

The event remains defined by this contrast and by the limits of Anna’s memory. She does not deny that she meant to go under, yet she rejects the claim that she intended genuine self-injury; she can recount meeting Staines and returning to the Gridiron Hotel, yet not the departure that preceded her awakening in gaol. In the courtroom, those admissions make the attempt neither a fully explained act nor an empty allegation. It is a crisis Anna can connect to love and fear, while its last moments remain beyond her recollection.