Addison's Flat- Unclaimed Mail

I have never been able to find a shipping record that listed my great-grandfather James Lalor when he left Victoria for the gold fields of the West Coast in New Zealand. It seems that such sailings were often treated as 'domestic' sailings, and passenger lists weren't routinely published.
However, I found an obituary from the Greymouth Evening Star, 5 October 1916, that said James came from Melbourne first to the goldmining area of Addison's Flat, near Westport, sailing via the ship Lightning.

With the help of the people at the Westport i-Site last summer, I managed to find where Addison's Flat was, not far out of Westport, and visited it. These days it's not obvious it used to be a thriving mining settlement, though the ground is uneven, giving hints of its past. There is a cemetery still there, and that has some more recent burials of rural inhabitants.

You can let yourself in through a gate, and cross farmland to the cemetery. There is something very special about being able to walk where you know your ancestor was living, treading in his footsteps, even though the 1860s were long ago. And from this relatively flat land, you look across to the mountains of the West Coast, that seem to have a sense of foreboding with them.

There is a historic noticeboard in the cemetery that gives some of the early flavour of the settlement. There are historic photos, a notice about a coach that takes miners to a hotel in Westport on a weekend, and a notice about the formation of a branch of the Hibernian Society, which indicates many Irish miners were on the land there.

Some years ago I attended a talk by Fiona Brooker of Memories in Time where she described tracking a relative's movements down via Trove and Papers Past, but I never got around to diligently trying that. Then the other day I stumbled onto a clue when I was just randomly surfing Papers Past using Lalor as a search term. (I know, rabbit holes and all that!)

What I found, via the Westport Times, 13 May 1869, was a list of unclaimed letters from Addison's Flat in January 1869. I can't be absolutely certain that this is 'my' James Lalor of course, as there were a couple of others on the Coast, but it seems quite likely it is. By September 1871 his marriage was being recorded in Greymouth to Catherine Rowland, and he then remained with South Beach as his residence for the rest of his life.