Brian Rudman: Saga of the journo and the fishergirl

Just before Christmas 1989, the popular fishergirl statue in Albert Park in central Auckland was vandalised - her head taken and part of her torso left lying on the grass nearby.

On Monday, after lingering for years on the city council's statue repair waiting list, the young maiden is to undergo major reconstruction surgery at the hands of stonemason Jerry Smith.

The plan is to make her nearly as good as new. To do that, Smith urgently needs more pictures of what she looked like before her accident.

Best, of course, would be if someone saw the picture at right and linked it with the old discarded head that just happens to be lying in their back shed or garden.

Short of that there must have been thousands of snaps - and even, possibly, home movies - taken of the monument which was also known as the Peter Pan statue.

Anyone who thinks they can help can telephone parks officer Dawn Bardsley on (09) 353-9577.

Now before you think I'm going all soft in my old age, my interest is not so much in the young fishergirl, fetching and all as she is, but in the man in whose honour the statue was put up in 1901, Herald columnist George McCullagh Reed.

I'd walked past the statue a thousand times while studying at the nearby university and no doubt read the inscription, "In loving remembrance of G.M. Reed, BA, of Auckland, journalist", without a passing thought to who he was.

It wasn't until Dictionary of New Zealand Biography editor Claudia Orange sweet-talked me into writing a piece for the dictionary about Reed that I went searching.

Start with the obituaries, I was advised, and what a great send-off this journo got in the spring of 1898, with a 20-carriage procession stuffed full of Auckland City's finest following his hearse down Symonds St, a number of his more lowly fans following on foot.

Three years on, they were back in Albert Park, led by mayor Sir John Logan Campbell, to unveil not just the fishermaiden statue in his honour, but a water drinking fountain as well.

Since he was a supporter of the temperance movement, I can understand the drinking fountain connection. But as to why a chaste marble fishermaiden was chosen to represent this departed journalist there are no clues.

There were plenty of clues to what Reed was like, though. I started to empathise just reading the obituaries. Here were his rivals at the Auckland Star - a paper which he had helped to set up - noting how his "virile and forceful" literary style had been assisted "by a habit of mind which was enthusiastic rather than judicial and which enabled him to present one side of a question in the strongest possible light". Praise or veiled criticism? It's hard to tell.

It didn't take much digging back into Herald files to see what they were getting at. Here he is mocking settler grumblings at the pardon of Te Kooti in 1883. The prophet had "only exhibited the tender mercies which ruled among our forefathers and only paralleled barbarities which make up a great part of British history".

Reed wasn't afraid to take a poke at the local gentry, either. An outburst by Justice Gillies one afternoon during a celebrated society rape trial he put down to "undigested lobster and disordered spleen".

He said Gillies had been irritable ever since Prime Minister Julius Vogel had removed Gillies, his political rival, to the High Court bench.

Asking "who would bell the cat", Reed made mock of the local lawyers who wanted to complain to the fearsome judge about his behaviour, but couldn't find anyone brave enough among them to do it.

Reed was a fascinating character, an Irish-born Presbyterian minister who preached for 10 years in Australia before entering the Queensland Parliament. He arrived in Auckland in 1869 aged 38 and soon after set up the Evening Star newspaper. Six years later, he headed to Dunedin, where he wheeled and dealt in newspapers there.

He returned to Belfast as New Zealand Government immigration agent, then returned as a journalist in Australia and New Zealand, finally as a columnist and leader writer in the 1880s and 1890s on this newspaper.

These were colourful and rambunctious times and Reed was in the thick of it. At one time he sued a fellow journalist for criminal libel. The offender, one R.A. Sherrin, had written in the Waitangi Tribune that it had been "frequently stated" that Reed had been "unfrocked [in Queensland] for the seduction of a girl of immature age". Sherrin continued that "there is no truth in the assertion whatever. The girl was well up in her teens and solicitous".

Sherrin pleaded guilty and made no explanation for his outrageous comments. He got six months in jail. As for the editor, he tried to plead diminished responsibility on the grounds that Sherrin had got him "a little elevated" beforehand, thus clouding his judgment.

The judge said it would set a bad precedent to absolve an editor on a libel charge because he was "worse for liquor", and fined him £100.

Who said 19th-century New Zealand history was dull?