Allan Hughan's life in Noumea-introduction

We'll pause for a moment here and take stock of Allan Hughan's personal life as the year 1871 dawned. Allan was to turn 33 years old in March of 1871...his wife Phoebe would attain the age of 41 during the year, and his daughters Ruth and Minnie would turn ten and four respectively.He had been married for eleven years, and had lost a 15 month old daughter to 'congestion of the brain' and 'dentition' four years previously.
Allan had spent the past four years travelling extensively, by both sea and overland...he had sailed the far west coast of Australia looking for pearls; transported sheep to Freemantle, collected plant specimens for Ferdinand Von Mueller wherever he happened to roam,and travelled to Sydney and Queensland on unknown business.His venture into trading with the islands of Fiji and New Caledonia had been cut short by the shipwreck of his vessel the Pilot in late August 1870. 1871 was to be the year that heralded changes that would determine the fate of Allan Hughan and his family for the next decade and beyond. It is also the time period which interests most followers of Allan Hughan's life, as it was during the time span 1871-1883 that Allan was to take the many photographs of New Caledonia and her people that fascinate collectors and researchers to this very day.

Two excellent books have been published which deal with Allan Hughan and his time in Noumea and surrounds, and I am fortunate to have tracked down both of them for my collection. Unfortunately, both of them are written in French, and I cannot understand a single word of this language! The Hughan photographs are beautiful, though, and my friend and fellow Hughan researcher, Jenny Vivian-Smith, kindly asked a French friend of hers to translate a section of "Photographs de Nouvelle Caledonie" by Patrick O'Reilly, which has been very helpful in tracing Allan's life in Noumea.
The other book is "La Nouvelle-Caledonie- Terres Lointaines' by Marie-Claude and Jacques Valette, and also has fabulous reproductions of Allan's photographs.
From what I have observed when viewing samples of Allan's work published both in books and on the internet, no photos exist of his wife and daughters. I am so lucky to have inherited from my grandfather and his brother (Norman and Gordon Oakley, grandsons of Allan's sister Bertha Hughan) examples of Allan's work, including several of himself and his daughters which he had sent back to Bertha in Melbourne. There was also amongst Bertha's studio photographs from the 1860s a photograph we are very sure is Phoebe Hall Hughan- taken not by Allan, but by a Melbourne Studio, and a photo from the same period of Ruth Hughan.
I look forward to sharing these photos in this blog, although it is very sad that there are no living descendants of Allan Hughan to view them...none of his family of daughters had children.

POST SCRIPT: Of course, this last statement has been proved incorrect, as Allan's daughter Ruth died just after giving birth to a son who wonderfully survived and went on to marry and have a son himself.