Fairfield House

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If Fairfield’s original matriarch, Maria Atkinson, could take a look at her old home today, would she approve?

Fairfield House in Upper Trafalgar Street, is used for weddings, funerals, parties, and various courses and classes – many in the ‘new age’ category. From what we know of Maria Atkinson, she would approve heartily. As colonial matrons go she revelled in her freedom from the constraints of English society.

She met her husband-to-be, Arthur Atkinson, on the sailing boat trip out to New Zealand in 1853. He was 19 and she 28, and although she wrote home about ‘marrying her grandson’, it was a very successful match. The Atkinsons settled first in Taranaki, and shifted to Nelson in the 1860s as refugees from the Maori land wars. They became key figures in early Nelson and moved into Fairfield House in 1883. Maria helped to get Nelson College for Girls established and when Arthur became an MP, Maria and her suffragette friends lobbied him to take the ‘votes for women’ message to Parliament.

Arthur was a keen astronomer and had his telescope mounted on the Fairfield tower. This part of the house was reconstructed a few years ago and is open to the public, with permission from the caretaker. In the 1970s Fairfield House was in disrepair and headed for demolition. Fittingly it was Nelson’s alternative life-stylers who moved in to keep out the vandals, and gradually gained funding and council support to restore the old home. You are welcome to walk around the gardens with their forest walks – a good stepping off point to explore the Grampians.

Across the road from the house is Fairfield Park. Originally a military reserve known as Copenhagen Square, the park became Nelson’s third settler cemetery and has old wrought iron grave surrounds typical of Victorian times. The headstones reveal the everyday tragedies faced by the settlers who often lost whole families to diseases like diphtheria.

Image Credits: National Library of New Zealand, Women's Christian Temperance Movement meeting at Fairfield House 1913, Atkinson Group at Fairfield House, Drawing room of Fairfield House.