Mr & Mrs Thomas Baker Kennard

Thomas Baker Kennard was known as the ‘first white boy born in Otago’ and a book of his memoirs was published under that title. This makes his position on the gallery wall rather unusual. As a ‘descendant’ rather than a ‘settler’ he was not entitled to be displayed here according to the original rules of the Early Settlers Association. He is here because of his wife, Mary McNicol, who was a genuine settler, having come to Otago on the Ajax in 1849.

Kennard’s parents were from Kent in England and had emigrated to Australia in about 1838. They were recruited soon after by John Jones to join his farming settlement in Otago. The Kennards were passengers on Jones’s ship the Magnet when it brought 11 farming families from Sydney to Waikouaiti in March 1840. Thomas Kennard was born there in May 1841, just weeks after Julia Ann Carey became the first ‘white’ girl born in the infant settlement.

One of the interesting things about these ‘firsts’ is that they exclude dozens and dozens of earlier children born to the European whalers and their Maori wives. Nineteenth-century notions of racial purity excluded them from consideration as ‘white children’. Julia Ann Carey and Thomas Kennard therefore took pride of place in the Early Settlers’ roll call of significant firsts. Julia Ann Carey’s portrait can also be found on display here – but only as a ‘descendant’ in the large group portrait of settlers and their children from the pre-1848 ships. She appears under her married name as ‘Mrs J Tayler’.

Thomas Kennard’s memoirs are full of interesting detail about growing up in early Otago. He was eight years old when the Scottish settlers began to arrive and could recall what it was like to see Dunedin develop from swampy wasteland.

Thomas Kennard married Mary McNicol in 1863. They had 12 children together. He made a living as a butcher and the family lived at various times in Central Otago and Arrowtown. After a brief spell in Auckland, Thomas spent his last 50 years living in Waimate. He gave up butchery to try fruit farming and then dairying. He lived to the ripe old age of 94, dying at Waimate in 1936. His fellow ‘first’ white child, Julia Ann Tayler, also lived to a good age. She died in 1924 aged 83.