In 1878 Bessie Macready, a 28-year-old Belfast orphan, travelled for 79 days on the Pleiades to her maternal aunts, Elizabeth and Sarah McMain, residing at Governors Bay, near Christchurch. Shortly after her arrival Bessie wrote to her cousins in Ireland declaring blissfully, ‘I have travelled over about fifteen thousand miles of water and at last got to the desired haven’ (Ma 1). Many Irish emigrants settling in New Zealand shared Bessie Macready's initial rapturous view of the country as a south pacific paradise, an arcadia, a utopia. But did such favourable impressions linger?

Three years after her arrival Bessie Macready sent a vivid outline of colonial life to her cousins. In it she admitted to having spent ‘many a weary time’ managing a shop in Lyttelton, but acknowledged optimistically, ‘I was gaining something and that enabled me to bear up in prospect of a happier future’ (Ma 3). For Bessie Macready this future entailed a stint as housekeeper for a wealthy Christchurch family, an interlude teaching at Governors Bay school, and then a period as dressmaker. After her death Bessie was recollected as ‘a cultured Irishwoman with a flair for astronomy. She was tall and dignified and wore beaded mittens and a black dolman with a ruffle around the neck’.

Regrettably, Bessie Macready's bubbly, sanguine voice falls silent after 1881. Other sources, however, suggest that colonial life had turned sour. ‘Recluse Dies’ the Lyttelton Times announced audaciously upon learning of Bessie Macready's death in October 1926. Bessie's grocer, who called every Friday, discovered the deceased 82-year-old in her home at Governors Bay. He instantly summoned the local policeman who described her corpse as ‘half starved’. The Mount Herbert Council County Clerk, meanwhile, testified bleakly at Bessie's inquest, ‘Those who knew her were of opinion that she was not taking proper care of herself’.4 Bessie was buried at St Cuthbert's Anglican churchyard at Governors Bay.

Bessie Macready's last years mirror widespread and influential interpretations of migration as a destabilising process. Her initial reunion with her aunts, followed by their deaths, and her apparent descent into seclusion, echoes Patrick O’Farrell's analysis of the Irish who ‘brought their kinship mentality to Australia, where it gradually crumbled and fell apart, declining into a residual social atomism marked by separation, isolation, loneliness and eventual alienation of society's individual parts’.