ONCE A ROAMER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 17 June 1936, Page 6

ONCE A ROAMER

A NELSON NONAGENARIAN SAW GREAT SEARCH IN MAITAI MANY YEARS AGO A roamer for the greater part of his life, a man with no fixed calling and a bachelor all his days, Mr Francis Harman Dwyer, of Tasman street, who has just celebrated his 90th birthday, would be a roamer still but for the hand of Father Time, for the desire still lives. The nonagenarian’s years, however, sit surprisingly lightly on his upright frame, and he enjoys good health in the evening of his long life. Mr Dwyer’s parents landed in Auckland from the ship Norman Morrison, a barque of some 300 to 400 tons, in the year 1854, his father erecting a sawmill at Freeman’s Bay. From that unsuccessful venture they drifted to Nelson in 1857, and after trying his hand at the Collingwood diggings, and facing the Tasman wind on the Peninsula, Mr Dwyer’s father settled in the Maitai, at what was later called Dwyer’s Flat, where he kept an accommodation house for 18 years. Mr Dwyer’s parents both passed the age of 90 years before their death. His mother was born in Bath, Somerset, and his father in Bristol. Mr Dwyer said that he had loved the free life, and did not mind “roughing it,” and for many years he had wandered from pillar to post after leaving his home in the valley, and spent many years on the West Coast, where he was engaged on the first survey of the railway. The Coast was a “pretty rough place in those days.” It was while he was still a boy living with his parents in the Maitai Valley that the Maungatapu murders took place, and as one who was close to the spot Mr Dwyer is one of the few people living who can recount frqm actual memory the incidents of those times. Situated as their house was, virtually as the key to the valley,'front where the two Dwyer boys lived a good view could be obtained of the operations of the Committee of Search,, and although they took no part in the actual hunt for the murdered men the two boys often went across to Franklin’s Flat during that exciting week to watch the searchers, who swarmed like flies, but. whose closest scrutiny of the impossible country failed to leveal that for which they were searching. “They had to give it up,” said the nonagenarian, recalling Sullivan’s part in pointing out, under guard, the locality of the crime. “We had a lot of cattle that used to go astray, the food not being very wonderful,” said Mr Dwyer in describing an incident of the time that had remained in his memory. “Ten or twelve had gone over the Maungatapu Saddle, and I went after them, for they used to join others and there was the ‘deuce and all’ to pay to get them separated in such country. I had lunch that day close to the locality where next day the men were murdered.” Mr Dwyer’ unconsciously laid emphasis' "on his great age when he'remarked: “I know of no one living 1 now who participated, and there j were hundreds of them, in that search on Franklin’s Flat.” Mr Dwyer said that he had been north, south, east and west of Nelson and had done a lot of work for the Government in the early days; and he had “found them good paymasters in that he always got his money.” He had put in a good part of his life among harvesters in Blenheim, where the people were sociable, and he had made the place his home at times. He had been a station hand among the “tussock-crawlers” (shepherds), on Carter Bros.’ sheep station which property had extended through Hillersden, 50,000 sheep being shorn. An interesting photograph which Mr Dwyer possesses is a group of six old residents taken one sunny day on Church Hill, including Messrs T. Stringer, Sutherland, S. Street, Drogemoller, N. Hargreaves and F, Dwyer, All except himself, Mr Dwyer believed, had passed away, and he was the only one of the “old school” remaining.