The ‘apostle of the virtues of New Zealand-made goods’ who walked 2581km in the 1930s

Thursday, 9 July 2026

Esther James had already walked thousands of kilometres sporting Petone frocks and Canterbury locknit dresses in her bid to support New Zealand industries when she entered the south during the coldest season.

Along her trip she aimed to help the country recover from the Great Depression triggered by the New York Stock Exchange crash in October 1929, and held many lectures in town halls and schools to move Kiwis to consume “New Zealand first”.

She visited dairy factories and freezing works, walked through bush fires in the North Island and snow roads in the South Island.

Towards the end of her walk, which started in Northland in December 1931, she walked over muddy roads for 45km to Gore, then finally arrived in Bluff in June 1932. The end of the road.

She had walked 937 hours over 199 days, walking 128 days and resting 71, and enjoyed a lot of Kiwi hospitality during the trip, as she did not pay for a “meal or night’s accommodation during her six-and-a-half-month journey”, author Ian Dougherty said in his new book.

The Dunedin writer wrote about James’ 2581km enterprise in New Zealand Maid, published by Saddle Hill Press.

The title was a pun on New Zealand Made, Dougherty said, as her long journey was all about promoting products that were not made overseas.

James was born in Pahiatua, Wairarapa, and was part of a “gipsy family” that travelled from town to town in search of work.

“One of Esther’s great-great-great-grandfathers was the Boer leader, Andries Pretorius, after whom the administrative capital of South Africa, Pretoria, was named and from where Esther derived her second middle name,” Dougherty said in the book.

The 73-year-old interviewed James’ family members and researched historical newspapers for the book.

He found she was not always the reliable person she purported to be and tended to exaggerate her stories.

“Some of the stories she told were equally unreliable, which added to her complexity and my curiosity.”

For example she claimed she was the first to walk the plank in New Zealand.

She really did work for a week as a fashion model in Auckland in 1928, although likely not as New Zealand’s first fashion model.

James had a job-creating ethos and often created new jobs out of nowhere, like when she stood beside a wax model in the window of a Wellington shop, pretending to be a mechanical mannequin in a pantomime.

She had also patented domestic inventions in the 1920s, including a cutlery washer and rinser.

Then in December 1931, while the country was in the depths of the Great Depression, she set off from Spirits Bay on a walk that would take her across the length of the country.

She ate only New Zealand-produced food and wore only New Zealand-made clothes to help promote local products.

By 1931, the Great Depression had decimated New Zealand’s economy. The national income plummeted by 40% by 1932, commodity export prices crashed with export values dropping by 40-45% between 1929 and the early 1930s, and over 70,000 people were unemployed.

When interviewed by a journalist in Whangārei, James said people buying products manufactured overseas were “fattening foreign capitalists, to the detriment of New Zealand industries”.

Other countries around the world started a path of economic recovery through autarky (complete economic self-sufficiency), or at least tried to.

In an attempt to replace foreign imports with domestic or synthetic alternatives, Fascist Italy aimed to make the South European country self-sufficient in food production, Nazi Germany tried to do the same and the British Empire acted similarly when it abandoned free trade to establish a tariff wall around its Dominion.

But it was unlikely James was aware of what was happening overseas, when as a 31-year-old she walked from one end of New Zealand to the other to encourage people to buy local foods.

She was called a peripatetic philosopher by a detractor and was described in a newspaper clip as “the girl-apostle of the virtues of New Zealand-made goods”.

James trained for four weeks and started her walk in the wilds of Northland on the last month of the year.

During her trip, she had Creamoata porridge provided by a Gore cereal company and wore shoes made by Invercargill manufacturer and late mayor Abraham Wachner.

She was spirited like a missionary in her lecturing about New Zealand goods.

After walking for more than six months, she arrived in Bluff, but her commitment was not quenched and she embarked on a boat and sailed to Oban, Stewart Island, where she gave a speech at her 121st school.

On her way back to Auckland, she flew from Timaru to Christchurch, where the pilot of the plane was forced by a snowstorm to land on the Addington racecourse.

She arrived in Auckland by train in October 1932.

James then walked from Melbourne to Sydney and on to Brisbane between 1932 and 1933 to support New Zealand tourist attractions.

“Whatever a full biographer might write about Esther James, and her tall tales and true, she deserved the accolades and demands respect for her extraordinary long-distance walking exploits and their albeit immeasurable impact during the shattering economic and traumatic social experience that was the Great Depression,” Dougherty said at the end of his book.

New Zealand Maid: Esther James And Her Campaigning New Zealand And Australian Walks During The Great Depression is available from the publisher by emailing saddlehillpress@xtra.co.nz, for $40 post free.