Approaching Hotel Mesmer

So, I've plotted the first episode of the story, involving a Swedenborgian gold miner of ill defined nationality, founder of a vaguely satanic gold mining enterprise somewhere on the Coromandel peninsula, affectionately known by his cosmopolitan and native digger labour force as "The Father of the Settlement". Much ugliness results when a shark is fished up by three itinerant types, shrunken Maori heads fall from its opened belly, and the Father of the Settlement enlists Big Ben and his butcher gang to steal the heads (to be used for occult gold divining purposes) from the local Maori tribe. Into this fray wanders "Bodell" (pictured above), a lapsed Chartist, Kingite sympathiser and AWOL from the Waikato front. Now it will take me a year turn it into black and white images.

Captured Canoes

Alexandra Redoubt, at Tuakau, Waikato, was built by the 65th Regiment on a strategic bluff 300 feet above the Waikato River. Many men in the 65th Regiment were unlucky gold diggers from the Otago and Victorian goldfields who had answered newspaper advertisements placed by the New Zealand Government. Pencil Sketch

Patara Raukatauri

Patara Raukatauri, chief of the Taranaki people, who had been the principal leader in the fighting against the British at Kaitake. He was also one of Te Ua's five special disciples, and accompanied Kereopa to the East Coast. Alexander Turnball Library

The Ken Burns Ahuriri Promo

The soundtrack was originally Tom Waits' "Singapore" from the album Rain Dogs, but Youtube's supercomputers got the copyright baton out for Universal Music Group.

Maori Woman, American Photographic Company Portrait

Taken from "Auckland Through A Victorian Lens" by William Main. "The best series of Maori portraits (in 1860s Auckland) came from the studios of the American Photographic Company which was managed by a John McGarrigle".

Robert Coffin, American Sailor and Fijian Beachcomber 1855

Just finished a book by one of my old English tutors at Victoria University, Susan Williams Milcairns's "Native Strangers: Beachcombers, Renegades and Castaways in the South Seas". Took the opportunity of school holidays to do this sketch of Robert Coffin, an American sailor who was shipwrecked in Fiji in 1855.