Mrs Thomas Pavletich

Ann Pavletich bears a Croatian name and is acknowledged as the mother of the first person of Croatian descent to be born in New Zealand. But she was actually Irish and Catholic, née Ann Connell. She married Thomas Pavletich in Victoria, Australia, in 1856.

They came to Dunedin with two small children on the Aldinga in 1862. They leased a house in Walker Street in an area that was characterised by overcrowded shanty housing, run up quickly to cater for the flood of new arrivals attracted to Dunedin by the Dunstan gold rush. In later years this area would degenerate into a slum, the notorious ‘Devil’s Half Acre’. Conditions must have been quite primitive even in 1864. Ann gave birth to a third child in February (Leander Thomas, the first person of Croatian descent born in New Zealand) but they lost three-year-old Casamira later that year.

The Pavletichs lost another three children, born in Dunedin, as well as Bonaventura, the son born in Victoria. Three other children were born and survived to adulthood. It is not clear how Thomas was making his living in this period but by 1868 he was ‘mine host’ of the Universal Hotel in Maclaggan Street. Earlier known as Abbeyleix House, this was a leading accommodation house in central Dunedin, as well as a cafe and restaurant. It was on a site just above that now occupied by the Warehouse. Thomas died there from peritonitis in 1878.

Ann then took over as proprietor of the hotel. Some years later she hosted Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, when the Taranaki Māori prophets were brought to Dunedin as ‘guests’ of the government. At the first hotel selected for them the hostess had baulked at taking in the infamous dissidents but Anne had no such qualms. The gaoler who accompanied them noted in his diary how she ’took our friends to her heart at once, so to speak, and made them as well as ourselves really comfortable’.

Ann Pavletich died in Dunedin in 1917, aged 84. Her Irish Catholic background and Croatian surname are symbolic of the great changes that the 1860s brought to Dunedin and Otago. Things had moved on considerably from the exclusively Scottish and Presbyterian settlement dreamed of by Cargill, Burns and McGlashan in the 1840s. There were now people of every race and creed in Dunedin, a pointer to the many different strands of identity that would characterise the settlement as it matured into New Zealand’s first great city.