Bryants of Queenstown

Richard Cogar Bryant

Richard Cogar Bryant was born in 1823 in his family home at Salubrious Place St Ives facing onto the harbour, probably where many master mariners lived. He was part of a larger community of Bryant's which had a long history of shipbuilding and seafaring. He went to sea at an early age, working for several years in the Mediterranean and on the British coastal trade in the merchant ships of his fathers Penzance based fleet.

On 13 December 1846 at 23 years of age he married Mary Ann Bryant of St Ives and four years later their son James was born. In 1852 he set sail on the clipper ship 'Soldam' for Australia and joined the water police in Williamstown, Melbourne. He later moved to Creswick in the Victorian goldfields where his wife Mary Ann, son James and daughter Mary Ann joined him.

Richard may have had little luck as a prospector and in October 1861 he left to become a boat policeman at Port Chalmers, in Otago, New Zealand. He appears to have been estranged from Mary Ann as she died from complications of childbirth in Creswick on 31 March 1862, aged 37. Her unnamed baby girl and 10 year old daughter Mary Ann were taken back to England and their son James joined Richard in New Zealand.

With the discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully in May 1861, the Central Otago gold rush was well under way when he arrived at Port Chalmers, so how long he stayed as a boat policeman is not known. He may have spent some time prospecting for gold before his arrival in Queenstown in 1862 where he found immediate work in law enforcement. Being a mariner he was placed in charge of the gold escort using prisoners from the local jail to row William Rees' whaleboat to take gold down the lake to Kingston.

Increasing activity on Lake Wakatipu led to Richard's appointment as the first Queenstown harbour master in 1864 and on 13 November of that year Richard married again, to a 25-year-old Irish woman, Mary Anne Josephine Lyons. Richard was described in the marriage certificate as a widower and Superintendent of Police. In 1855 Mary Anne had left County Cork and sailed to Melbourne as governess to the Joachim family.

After finishing her education at the Melbourne Ladies College and by 1862 and then a trained maternity nurse, she sailed with the Joachims to Otago in 1862 on the "Omeo" where she worked for Dr T.N. Hocken, whose historical book collection is now in the Hocken Library. Later she again became a governess and companion in the Queenstown home of the goldfields warden, Richmond Beetham, and his wife and family.

In 1868, Richard retired from the Queenstown police and moved his family to Kinloch at the north-western end of the lake where he had acquired some land. With timber milled from a sawmill 5 km down the lake, he proceeded to build tourist accommodation which he called the Glacier Hotel; it is still there today under the name of Kinloch Lodge. Successive generations of Bryant's have lived continuously in Kinloch and Queenstown since Richard arrived in 1862.