Frederick Mieville

Frédéric Louis Mieville was from an ancient Swiss family that had been resident in England for a couple of generations before his birth in London in 1830. Links with Switzerland were maintained, however, and ‘Frederick’ spent his final years of education in Geneva. He was supposed to then enter the military but opted to emigrate to New Zealand instead. He sailed with the early Canterbury settlers to Lyttelton on the Dominion in 1851 and carried on with the ship to disembark at Dunedin.

Mieville spent his first years in New Zealand as a cadet on a sheep station in North Otago and then went exploring southwards. With Māori help, he investigated the Mataura River catchment and was able to take first choice of land for a sheep run of his own. He had travelled out to New Zealand with the Richardson family. In 1854 he married Fanny Richardson and took his new bride south to ‘Glenham’, his chosen run. They were to have seven sons and four daughters together.

In Southland the young couple faced all the toils of backcountry pioneers, building a primitive cottage and enduring the isolation and supply difficulties of their remote location. One consolation for Fanny was that her father, Dr Frederick Richardson, leased the adjoining run and her brother who ran it for him became their nearest neighbour. Over the next few years Frederick pioneered sheepfarming in the Mataura district, building up Glenham station into a profitable enterprise.

In 1857 the Mievilles sold up their sheepfarming interests and returned to England. A year later they returned to Otago and Frederick established himself as a merchant in Dunedin where they lived until 1868. He then retired to England permanently, becoming a member of the Stock Exchange, in the family tradition, and devoting his leisure time to scholarly pursuits. He was also something of an artist and raconteur. In 1910 he wrote a wonderful memoir of his early days in Otago and Southland that is full of rich colour and detail. The picture on display here was a self-portrait, painted in 1895 when he was 65. Frederick Mieville died in England in 1922, aged 92.