Wyllie Cottage is located in the Tairawhiti Museum complex on Stout Street, Gisborne. It is situated right next to the road, in front of the museum building, and next to two other old buildings, Sled House, and stables, as part of a display about the settler history of the Gisborne region. While the land on which Wyllie Cottage stands has been substantially developed since it was built in 1872, and the cottage has been moved, its present location is still within the immediate vicinity of the building’s original location (on the site of the adjacent museum).
Wyllie Cottage was built for James Ralston Wyllie and his wife, Kate Halbert. Wyllie was a trader who began working for Captain G.E. Read in 1854, and who later became an interpreter. He was born in Ayrshire in Scotland in 1831. Wyllie began trading on the Waipaoa River, where most of the small European population then lived. Kate Halbert was born at Tutoko, near Waerenga-a-Hika, in the early 1840s. She was the daughter of trader Thomas Halbert and his fifth wife, Keita Kaikiri, of the Ngati Kaipoho hapu of Rongowhakaata. She is said to have been educated at the Anglican mission school at Waerenga-a-Hika, and it is believed she married Wyllie on 14 August 1854. In 1856 they went to live on a family farm at Tutoko, where they lived until 1865, when it was destroyed in fighting between Hauhau and government forces. They lived at Matawhero, being warned and escaping in time to avoid the attack of Te Kooti and his men in November 1868. In the early 1870s they lived in Gisborne, and built the house now known as Wyllie Cottage.
Preferring not to live in the European settlement of Gisborne, being developed on land which Kate and 16 other owners had sold to the crown in 1869, the family built their house on land that her iwi owned on the other side of the Taruheru River. The land was under lease to a European, and the Wyllies took out a sub lease in 1872. Building on the crest of the section now known as Kelvin Rise, the family moved into their new home in either late 1872 or early 1873.
Wyllie Cottage was the first European building on the Taruheru side of the river, and in its original location it faced towards the small settlement of Gisborne. A photograph by William Crawford dated 1874 and now in the collection of the Tairawhiti Museum, illustrates the isolation of the cottage with its small wooden fence amidst the manuka and scrub covered landscape. A shelter belt of macrocarpa trees were planted by the Wyllies along the river bank, a detail just visible in the Crawford photograph. It is possible that the cottage was built by John Forbes, who came from Dunedin in 1867 and built the first Albion Hotel in Gisborne. He was definitely living here in 1872. In 1879 he built the original Catholic Church. To mark this possible connection, two of Forbes’s saws hang in the hallway of Wyllie Cottage.
Wyllie Cottage is an early Victorian Colonial cottage in the style that Jeremy Salmond identifies as English Colonial. It is one and a half storeys and has totara framework, totara external tongue and groove vertical boards and battens, and beaded tongue and groove kauri interior linings and kauri floors and stair treads. The cottage uses balloon construction. As Salmond writes, ‘In 1 ½ storeyed houses, the American 'balloon frame' was sometimes used. Invented in 1833 this had studs running full height in the walls, and first floor joists fixed to the sides of the studs.’ The front or north facing façade is symmetrical, the roof is shingled, and the windows are double hung with fixed upper sashes.
According to Robert Hall, when first erected the cottage had a verandah that wrapped around the front and both sides of the building, providing 30 square metres of covered space. The parlour was located downstairs on the right, with a fireplace at the end and in interior chimney. The main bedroom was on the left, with a smaller bedroom at the back of the house, and the rest of the downstairs taken up with a long back room, probably used as a living room. There was no chimney or vent for a stove, suggesting that cooking was done outdoors. The stairs turn to the right, leading upstairs to two rooms that were used as bedrooms. The bedroom located over the downstairs bedroom is the smaller of the two upstairs rooms by the width of the stairs. Wyllie Cottage is very similar to Waikahua cottage (now destroyed), which was built for Archdeacon W.L. Williams at the base of Titirangi/Kaiti Hill and also used balloon construction. The exterior vertical boards covered by battens was also used in other buildings of the time, including Matawhero Church which still survives and is registered as a Category I building (Record no. 796). Salmond writes that this was a simpler alternative to weatherboards, and consisted of wide boards (about 300 mm) being fixed vertically with each joint covered by a narrow (75 mm) batten. The building has a skillion or lean to added to the back of it. Construction details suggest that the skillion was part of the original scheme, and added as soon as the main building was erected, in order to meet the space requirements of a large family.
The Wyllies did not occupy the cottage for long. Wyllie had taken another and larger sub lease with the notion of turning the land into a sheep run, but the titles were insecure and the land became caught up in a larger transaction covering 8000 hectares. Kate Halbert secured 120 hectares after the freehold titles were awarded, the south east boundary of which ran along the land they had lost, with the rest of the area in the direction of the current Gisborne hospital. Kate and James Wyllie built a new house on this property at Mangapapa, which may have been the second European building in the area. On the 19 December 1875 James Wyllie passed away at the age of 44. Kate Halbert later married Michael Joseph Gannon, a licensed interpreter, and lived in Wellington, Auckland and Gisborne with him.
Hall suggests that the cottage remained substantially unchanged for a decade after the Wyllies left it. It may have been used informally by Wi Pere, Kate Halbert’s half brother. By 1882 the land had become the property of the New Zealand Native Land Settlement Company, and after litigation, which ended in 1883; the surveyed and sectioned land was sold. An inscription on a damaged sheathing plank reads IFD - JRW 19/6/84, which might refer to James Ralston Wyllie, a 19 year old son, and is a final sign of the original owners.
By 5 January 1886 the land and the cottage had been purchased by James Charles Dunlop, an accountant. Dunlop built a new house on the site of Wyllie cottage, and moved the older building to its present location at the rear of the section next to Stout Street. The original chimney and verandah was demolished, and the cottage was modernised. A new chimney was built at the back wall of the parlour, acting as a kitchen fireplace as well, a back porch was added, the roof shingles were replaced with corrugated iron, and a new verandah with a concave iron roof was built along the front façade.
Due to financial difficulties, Dunlop sold the house and cottage to William Douglas Lysnar on the 26 August 1898. William Douglas Lysnar was one of the great characters of Gisborne. A lawyer who could speak Maori, Lysnar earned a reputation as a fearless opponent in and out of court. He would not accept defeat, and during his career was involved with a number of well known court cases, one of which went as far as the Privy Council in London. In 1893 he married Ida Eleanor Tiffen, the daughter of a wealthy Hawke’s Bay sheep farmer. With financial help from his father in law Lysnar began developing a business empire. By 1901 he had a dairy farm at Makorori and a butter factory at Okitu nearby. In June 1915 he formed the Poverty Bay Farmers’ Meat Company Limited and became its first chairman. From 1908 to 1911 he was mayor of Gisborne. He managed to convince the council to raise a loan for electricity, sewerage, improvements to the streets, and a tram system. Willing to take risks and adopt new technology, Lysnar purchased two battery powered trams on the advice of Thomas Edison, the American inventor. A later foray into national politics saw him elected to Parliament in 1919, defeating Sir James Carroll. He was a passionate and vocal defender of the region’s interests and future, and he held his seat until 1931. Douglas Lysnar died at Gisborne on 12 October 1942.
Information is lacking about the history of the cottage when it became a rental property. Robert Hall suggests that a man named Steele rented the cottage in 1886, and was possibly the first tenant. Mrs Dunlop, who was a teacher before she married, ran the Whataupoko Ladies’ College in the cottage, with Miss A.L. Rees, who later moved into bigger premises and turned her school into Cook County College. A large window in the south wall of the cottage was probably added during this period to provide suitable light for a classroom. There are advertisements in the Poverty Bay Herald from 1896 which suggest that the classes in Wyllie Cottage were taken over by Miss Drummond and then Miss Glanvill, who was trained and had been working as a teacher in England. J.T Evans rented the cottage in 1898, and Hall also notes another teacher, Miss Aylmer occupying the cottage, along with a dressmaker called Miss Simeon. In the twentieth century a freezing worker called Outen rented the cottage from 1934 to 1940, and worked two days a week for Lysnar instead of paying rent. The final tenant was Mrs J.G. Brown. A newspaper article published in 1960 noted that she had lived in the house for the past 20 years, and ‘finds it a frail, but otherwise tenable home’.
Hall writes that in 1899 W.D. Lysnar approached his mortgagee Rev. Samuel Marsden to demolish the cottage and replace it with a stable and buggy house. Avoiding destruction at this time, the cottage was again faced with demolition in the late 1960s. By this time the ownership had been transferred to the Gisborne City Council, according to the wishes of W.D. Lysnar and his daughter, Winifred Lysnar, who sold Kelvin Rise (the big house on the section) and the cottage to the council for a nominal sum so it could be used as an art gallery and museum. The council declared that they could not afford to restore the building, and the public rallied to the cause, fighting for restoration and raising money so that it could become a tourist attraction as part of the museum complex. As Hall writes, ‘The Gisborne public responded vigorously and restoration was achieved without cost to public funds, save for the gift of shingles by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. Private loans and gifts were added to Museum resources in furnishing the cottage. The Gisborne Garden Club created the garden, following early descriptions and photographs.’ When it was moved to its present location the cottage was restored to its late 1880s condition, and furnished with items from the museum collection that related to domestic life at the end of the nineteenth century.
