The Police Camp is the colonial police and gaol compound where Crosbie Wells’s body was brought after his death, kept before burial, and examined during the official inquiry into his death. Its role is practical as well as symbolic: it provides a place for custody and administration, but becomes the contested setting for a wake when Te Rau Tauwhare insists that his friend must not be left alone before interment.

Setting and Function

The Camp stands within Hokitika’s civic landscape, close enough to the town’s main road for the cart carrying Wells’s body to arrive before the public gaze. When the cart rattles into town, hoteliers and shopkeepers watch from doorways along Revell-street, and some hurry forward for a better view. The procession then turns toward the Police Camp, where Tauwhare remains seated beside the body while the other men confer. The Camp is thus not a secluded mortuary: the dead man’s arrival is visible to the town, while decisions about his body pass into official hands.

The compound includes the gaoler’s house, whose private study is used to lay out Wells’s body. Until a coffin is made and the grave dug, he lies on a muslin sheet on the study floor. The room is part of a domestic interior, but it is temporarily made to serve institutional needs. Its calico walls, stretched over the timber frame, tremble when doors slam or heavy footsteps disturb the building. The narrative’s attention to these thin, moving walls underscores how little separates the body in the room from those waiting outside it.

Wells’s Body and the Wake

After Wells’s death, Te Rau Tauwhare comes to his cottage with the food he customarily brought to share with his friend. He finds Dr. Gillies and Cowell Devlin departing with Wells’s body beneath a blanket. Tauwhare recognizes Wells by his boots and asks to accompany the body back to Hokitika. With no room beside the driver, he rides on the cart’s rear tongue, keeping out of the way as he is instructed. At the Camp, he holds Wells’s ankle and does not move while the men confer.

Tauwhare asks to remain with Wells until burial. He explains that, according to the rites of the tangi, a spirit has not fully departed while the body remains unburied; the dead should be watched over, touched, prayed over, and sung to. The gaoler rejects this account, calls him a heathen, and insists that Wells is a white man rather than Tauwhare’s brother. For Tauwhare, however, their bond is not settled by the gaoler’s racial distinction. He maintains that Wells was his friend and brother and that someone must stay with him.

The Camp’s authorities arrange the practical preparations for burial: a Hokitika cooper is to make a pine coffin and a rounded wooden headstone bearing Wells’s name and the dates of his life. Because his precise birth year is uncertain, the year 1809, written on the flyleaf of his Bible, is chosen as a plausible date; it would make him fifty-seven. The gaoler plans the funeral for Tuesday morning and suggests that Tauwhare help dig the grave. The official timetable and memorial arrangements do not, however, satisfy Tauwhare’s request to keep vigil.

Exclusion and Vigil

Tauwhare remains near the Camp, moving from the porch to the garden and then to the alley between the gaoler’s cottage and the compound as he is repeatedly driven away. Finally, the gaoler appears with a long-handled pistol and threatens to shoot him if he comes within fifty yards before Wells is buried. Tauwhare backs away, counting the steps, and sits against the wooden façade of the Grey and Buller Bank. From there, on the final night before burial, he watches over Wells’s body and speaks beloved words for his friend.

The episode makes the Camp a site where two kinds of obligation collide. The gaoler treats access as a matter of custody and order, while Tauwhare understands continued presence as a necessary duty to the dead. The threat moves the vigil beyond the Camp’s boundary without ending it: denied entry to the room, Tauwhare keeps watch from the prescribed distance. His observance exposes the limits of an institution that can control where he sits, but cannot make his responsibility to Wells disappear.

Inquiry and Narrative Significance

The Police Camp also becomes the setting for the official account of Wells’s death. George Shepard later tells Harald Nilssen that Wells’s body passed through the Camp before burial and that, because Wells had no family or friends to speak of, the wake was held there. Shepard says he was present when Dr. Gillies examined the body. Gillies attributed the death to drink; the examination also found traces of laudanum in Wells’s stomach and intestines, though Shepard says there was not enough to justify undue suspicion. Shepard states that he did not believe Wells had been poisoned, except by drink.

That account sits beside the earlier evidence of Tauwhare’s presence and care, complicating Shepard’s description of Wells as a man without friends. The Camp gathers the body, the official medical judgment, the preparations for burial, and the conflict over who may mourn. Its institutional authority is real, but the vigil reveals a form of kinship and ritual that its officials neither recognize nor accommodate.