Mary Coleman was born in Hove, Sussex, in 1836, the daughter of Benjamin Coleman. Her parents emigrated to Sydney soon afterwards but found the climate there too hot. They joined the group of recent arrivals in Australia recruited by John Jones to work on his Waikouaiti estate in Otago. The Colemans and 11 other families arrived in Otago on Jones’s boat the Magnet on 16 March 1840. Mary was just three years old. The new settlers set to work to develop Cherry Farm for Jones, but many became dissatisfied and after a couple of years secured their own land and moved to Ōtākou.
Mary later recalled seeing the John Wickliffe arrive when she was twelve:
‘I went to the top of the hill with my cousins and other children to get a good look at her. When the John Wickliffe and Philip Laing arrived there was quite a little settlement, comprising 34 families, at Otakou. At that time my father was keeping an accommodation house, and was trading with the whalers. There was then plenty of milk and butter, and the hardships that had to be faced by the emigrants in 1848 were nothing when compared with those which had to be endured by the Magnet’s passengers.’
This sort of ‘who had it hardest’ one-upmanship was fairly common among the aging pioneers and no one seems to have minded Mary’s claim. In fact Mary Woolsey was highly esteemed by the Early Settlers community in her old age. She lived to enjoy many years of celebrity as the oldest surviving member of the Magnet passengers and was fawned over at gatherings of the Early Settlers Association until her death in 1929, aged 93. She is wearing her Association ribbon in this portrait.
Mary’s body lay in state overnight at the Museum in this room in front of a model of the Philip Laing. Her funeral was held in the adjoining room (then called the Early Settlers Hall). If there are any ghosts in the museum complex, Mrs Woolsey is probably among them, still gloating over her primacy over both whalers and later settlers as one of the first ‘real settlers’ in Otago.
Mrs Mary Woolsey (née Coleman)