History – A writer from the Port

Jane Mander was encouraged by her mother at an early age to become a storyteller. She was the daughter of Francis (Frank) Mander, who was born in Onehunga in 1849. He began working at age 10 and bought a dairy farm when he was 26, before his marriage to the shy Janet Kerr in 1876.

After the birth of their daughter in 1877, followed by four more children, Jane’s father, an entrepreneur, sold his small dairy farm in 1881 to purchase a sawmill at Awhitu. Frank set his sights firmly on the giant kauri, perfect for building houses for the early settlers. Many years later, he became known as the ‘King of Sawmillers’, but what may be ironic was that while he explored the country for more timber to mill, he expected his own family to live in the most impossible of places, like an abandoned store or mud hut.

Janet made sure her children were well educated and, when the family moved north to Wellsford, Jane was enrolled at the school built by the Albertland settlers and run by Mrs Rushbrook. Jane and her siblings attended schools in Port Albert, Kaiwaka and Onehunga, as the family moved 29 times in just a few years, sometimes having to be schooled at home by their mother when no schools were available.

The family returned to Port Albert when Jane was 15, after her father and business partner, Samuel Bradley, built the Raekau Mill across the river from Port Albert. This mill employed many local men from the district. Jane felt daunted at the prospect of becoming a homemaker and took up the position of pupil teacher at Port Albert School under the guidance of headmaster George Reid. She was indebted to George for his help and presented him with a book of poetry, which she personally signed and which is now a part of the museum’s collection.

Jane taught at many Auckland schools in the following seven years after she left Port Albert, while attending night school classes to gain her matriculation in eight subjects. While teaching, she could not pursue her first love of writing fiction, and she left the profession at the end of 1899. A few years later, in 1902, Frank bought the rights to a stand of kauri bush, just north of Whangarei, and the family moved once again.

While living in Whangarei, he became the MP for Marsden and owner of the Northern Advocate newspaper, and Jane took the position of sub-editor and reporter on the paper. Jane found provincial New Zealand and her conservative father too restrictive, so in 1906, against her father’s wishes, she left to go overseas, first to Sydney and then a few years later to New York, where she studied journalism at Columbia University.

She worked for the Red Cross during World War One while achieving her dream of writing a book. Her first novel, The Story of the New Zealand River, was published in 1920, and was the first of six books by this celebrated NZ author, whose stories are based on her own experiences of living in the timber-milling settlements in the north.