Amos and Catherine McKegg (née Murray)

Amos McKegg was an Irish sailor drawn to Australia by gold in the late 1850s. Born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, in 1840, he went to sea at the age of 10 and travelled the world on ships captained by his cousins. He deserted his ship at Melbourne in 1859, lured by the possibilities of the Victorian goldfields.

Two years later he stowed away on the Empress of the Seas to get to the new goldfield at Gabriels Gully in Otago. Discovered en route to Dunedin, he worked so hard on the passage over that the captain not only let him off criminal charges but paid him for his work. Amos then got ahead of a pack of miners waiting to cross the flooded Clutha River by swimming across. By the time the other gold seekers made it to Tuapeka, he was on his way back with enough gold to set himself up in business. He then opened a general store and butchery at Otakia.

In 1864 Amos married Catherine Murray. She was born at Dumblane, Perthshire, Scotland in 1846 and came to Otago as a teenager with her married sister on the Stormcloud in 1860. The McKeggs’ position in the portrait sequence is based on Catherine’s arrival date rather than Amos’s. Two of her other sisters had come to Otago a couple of years earlier. The McKeggs were to have three sons and nine daughters together. They had run their store at Otakia for about four years when Amos returned from a sale of effects from the Bush Inn at Henley with the news that he had bought the place. Rebuilt and renamed as the White House the hotel was to be in family hands for the next 77 years.

Amos McKegg was quite a ‘character’ – the subject of a song by Thomas Bracken – a dedicated Orangeman who could not abide the colour green. He pioneered a weekly market at Taieri Mouth, ran a steam launch up the Taieri River as a tourist venture and regularly sailed the vessel himself.

Catherine meanwhile was a superb hostess at the Inn, described by a newspaper reporter in 1904 as ‘the picture of what a landlady should be.’She remained at Henley for some years after Amos died in 1901. The hotel had passed to their eldest son, Amos junior, and Catherine eventually retired to the North Island. She lived her last years at Levin with two unmarried daughters and died there in 1928, aged 82.