The Dobson Monument commemorates Assistant District Engineer for Westland, George Dobson, who was murdered by a notorious gang in 1866.
George Dobson, born in London in 1840, was the eldest son of Edward Dobson and Mary Ann Lough. In 1850 Edward Dobson emigrated to Canterbury, New Zealand, taking his two eldest sons, George and Arthur, along with him. Mary Ann and the remaining children joined them the following year. The two boys spent three years, 1851-3, in Tasmania with their uncle Rev. Charles Dobson while their education continued. In 1854, Edward Dobson was appointed as Canterbury Provincial Engineer and the two boys who had been working at odd jobs including milking cows and collecting firewood both trained with him, learning building skills, surveying and engineering. In the following years they worked both together and separately, exploring the Canterbury province.
Westland was included as part of Canterbury until 1867 when the Westland Council was formed and then in 1873 it was given status as a separate province. With the West Coast gold rushes in progress and a practical route from Canterbury being sought, George reported on the feasibility of a track over the Southern Alps through what he referred to as Arthur's Pass as it had been first investigated by his brother Arthur. Arthur and George's father Edward, as provincial engineer, made the decision on George's recommendation that this should be the main route between Canterbury and the West Coast and the road opened on 29 March, 1866. At the top of this pass which remains as a principal route between the two provinces, there is also a 'Dobson monument' which commemorates its discovery by Arthur Dudley Dobson, aided by local Maori, in 1864. George continued working as engineer for the roading that was being constructed and in January 1866 he was appointed Assistant District Engineer for West Canterbury, as the area was still known.
On 28th May 1866, as part of his normal professional programme, Dobson headed alone for Greymouth from Lake Brunner via the Arnold Track which he had surveyed the previous year. His purpose was to assess the track's condition. A gang of Australian bushrangers, Joseph Sullivan, Richard Burgess and Thomas Noon (Kelly), recently arrived on the West Coast from the Otago Goldfields, committed a number of violent crimes in the Ross/Hokitika region. They believed that a lucrative target, a diggings gold-buyer named Edward Fox, would be travelling in the Grey River area and Dobson was mistaken for him. He was killed so he could not give evidence of his attack. It was some time before it was realised that he was missing and meantime, the culprits made their way to Nelson. A detailed search was made for Dobson by police, assisted by a large number of volunteers and a reward was offered for information. On 12 June the gang's most horrendous crime occurred when they murdered five men at the diggings at Mt. Maungatapu near Nelson. To help his own position, Sullivan had turned Queen's evidence against his three accomplices but confessed to association with Dobson's killing and told the authorities where the body had been buried in a shallow grave some 30 yards (27.5 metres) off the Arnold track. On 5 July the grave was found, the body exhumed and on 7 July it was buried in the Greymouth cemetery. In pouring rain, the ceremony and procession to the cemetery at Greymouth's south beach was led by the Bishop of Christchurch with Edward Dobson, who had been assisting with the search, among the large crowd of mourners. He had requested that his son be buried between his fellow surveyors, Whitcombe and Townsend. These two early government employees had suffered the more typical 'national death' by drowning in West Coast rivers.
There always has been doubt about who committed the murder. Richard Burgess, one of the trio that Sullivan had turned against, claimed that Sullivan had told him how he and an accomplice had dragged Dobson into the bush beside the track and strangled him. However, Burgess was trying to implicate Sullivan in retaliation for his treachery in turning Queen's evidence. Burgess and the two others were subsequently hanged while Sullivan went free. A man named Wilson was charged with Dobson's murder, with Sullivan giving evidence against him, but was acquitted. When Sullivan was brought to Hokitika in 1866 for this case he was fortunate to avoid lynching by an angry crowd of townspeople. The public perception of his guilt remained and he was kept under police protection until he could be removed from the country. It is believed that he lived in hiding in Ballarat, Victoria, where he eventually died in misery. Nobody else was ever charged over the murder and whether it was Sullivan alone or in partnership with Kelly and Burgess was never established.
Philip May in his book The West Coast Gold Rushes, p.298 states that 'Murder was rare on the West Coast diggings'. He continues to recount the story of Dobson's death and explains that only two other premeditated murders were known to have occurred in these times in the West Coast area. David Burton, editor of Confessions of Richard Burgess :the Maungatapu murders and other grisly crime, pp.9-13, reaches similar conclusions about crime on the New Zealand goldfields. There were numerous unlawful deeds on the goldfields which Burton explains was not surprising, but more surprising is that there were not more. He further comments that, 'compared to the goldfields of Australia and California, the New Zealand goldfield were remarkably orderly'. The irony of Dobson's murder was that this particularly vicious gang mistook him for the known gold buyer returning to Greymouth with his purchases and killed him not for gain, but to ensure he could not identify them.
By 1867 the recently established Westland Council voted to provide a suitable monument to commemorate Dobson. It was agreed that three other recently deceased officials also be remembered - Henry Whitcombe, road surveyor, Charles Townsend, government agent and Charlton Howith, explorer - and a grand Sydney sandstone obelisk was commissioned to be made in Melbourne. It was the first and only stone monument in Westland when it was erected on 23 March, 1868.
The memorial to Dobson at the site of his death appears to have been erected in the early 1870s by a Mr J. Walton. Bill Carse, a long time resident of Dobson, said in 1947 that he had been told by Mr Walton's son that his father had built it about 75 years before. A photo (appendix 3) shows it was a four-stepped stone structure with four vertical timber posts supporting the engraved stone. Mr Carse further noted that the under-structure had recently weathered to the point where it was considered a danger to visitors, so he and others had replaced it with a concrete structure that would 'last for all time'. He also said that when he was a boy (probably about the late 19th century) he recalled the then surviving adjacent tree, with a tin plate nailed to it to indicate where the murder had been committed. The original permanent memorial was of stone construction and of similar appearance. It is likely that the work done in c.1947 simply concreted over the original base structure and replaced the eroding posts with concrete ones to support the surmounting stone slab.
Although various other information sources have been searched, no further facts have been found about who made the decision or financed the erection of this monument. His brother in the reminiscences he wrote in 1930 makes no mention of commemoration of his brother's death so it cannot be concluded that the family erected the monument. It was probably a low key initiative by a group of locals wanting to ensure that apart from the official memorials at Hokitika and in the Greymouth cemetery, a fitting marker should identify the place of Dobson's death.
The Dobson Monument remains as a landmark for travellers in the Grey River valley along State Highway 7 at the Dobson township. It continues as a reminder of the tragic death of the 26 year old road engineer and surveyor whose work contributed so much to the early development of Westland.
