Joseph Crocome was the first doctor to reside in Otago. He was born in Bath, England, in 1811. After training as a surgeon in London he set off with a whaling ship, the Lucinda to the South Seas in 1836. Wrecked off New Caledonia in 1838, he arrived in Sydney destitute and took up the offer of a job at the Weller brothers’ station at Ōtākou to earn his passage home. After this stint on the New Zealand coast Crocome was looking forward to a return to London to establish a medical practice and enjoy a life of comfortable prosperity. On his return to Sydney in 1839, however, he discovered that his family’s fortunes, based on West Indian sugar plantations, had collapsed. He had no future in Britain.
He went back to New Zealand, this time employed by John Jones at Waikouaiti, cementing his historical status as the first resident doctor in the South Island. As well as being a doctor he was also the clerk for the whaling station and a tutor for Jones’s sons. His medical expertise was much valued in the harsh conditions of the early settlement but it was a difficult environment in which to practise. When he ran out of medical supplies he was forced to turn to Māori herbal remedies. He learnt traditional remedies from the tohuka Korako and found these very effective.
In 1844 Crocome married Arapera (Arabella) Raureka of Huirapa with whom he had four children before she died in 1851. Two surviving children were brought up by his wife’s Māori family but Crocome maintained his support of and interest in them. He subsequently married a Scottish immigrant, Mary Ann Warden, and had a further 13 children with her, of whom seven survived childhood. In 1859 Dr Crocome was appointed the first postmaster at Waikouaiti and he joined the committee for its first school.
Joseph Crocome never made it back to England. Instead he became a respected member of the Otago community, living to see Waikouaiti develop from a frontier whaling outpost to a thriving village community. He died of typhus there in 1874.
Dr Joseph Crocome