Tracing one’s family roots is often an intriguing puzzle, using the few details and pieces one has on hand to join the dots. This ultimately helps paint a picture of the true nature of one’s ancestry.
For Australian Mark Pirie, the journey to discover his parental roots took him to Fiji, and through the memoirs that his mother and aunt had compiled, along with other bits and pieces of information he was able to collate, he discovered his grandparents shared a common denominator – Fiji.
A couple of months back, Mr Pirie travelled to Fiji with his cousins to retrace the steps his ancestors once took when they made Fiji their home all those years ago.
His lineage traces back to 1878, when his great grandfather Thomas Coster left Christchurch, New Zealand, for Koro Island.
One of his children was Mr Pirie’s grandfather, Thomas Herbert Coster.
Similarly, his seafaring great grandfather, Captain Peter Land, brought his family, along with daughter Gwendoline Coster (nee Land), to Fiji from Canada in 1902. Unfortunately for Captain Land, his sojourn turned to tragedy in 1919 when he was lost overboard in the Koro Sea.
Thomas Herbert Coster and Gwendoline Land would eventually go on to marry and become parents to four children: Olga Pirie, Peter Coster, Annette Dawe and Phoebe John.
Recounting the story, Mr Pirie told The Fiji Times that his great grandfather, Thomas Coster, started off working on a plantation on Koro before moving to Rakiraki to assume the role of manager at the Penang Sugar Mill where he worked until retirement.
“He retired in Suva and finally died there in 1931. He’s actually in the Suva Cemetery,” Mr Pirie said.
“He didn’t want to leave Fiji after he worked here all his life, it was his home.
“My grandparents had my mom Olga in Nadi and the remaining children – Peter, Annette and Phoebe – in Sigatoka.
“He (Thomas) built a house up on a hill in Sigatoka overlooking the hospital. He was a surveyor. He worked, initially, for the government and then joined with a partner and went out working on his own.
“He was contracted to survey a section of the Queens Road from Sigatoka to Suva, which would have been around 1920.
“He surveyed a lot of the Queen’s Highway and built a particularly difficult area around Sovi Bay. My mother, Olga, wrote a lot in her memoirs on how he did that, based on Thomas’s letters written at the time to his wife back in Sigatoka. We have been able to identify the area through old photographs and the descriptions he left.
“My mum was born in a bure during a hurricane in 1923. She remained in Fiji until, after WW II.
“Shortly after the war they all left, I guess, for bigger horizons. All the family went to New Zealand or Australia where I was born. All of Thomas and Gwen’s children have returned to Fiji on and off since that time.”
Mr Pirie said that after his grandfather died at the age of 56, his grandmother Gwendoline moved to Suva where she still had family. She worked as a librarian at the Suva Carnegie Library while the children went to school at the Suva Boys School and Suva Girls School respectively. Gwen was mentioned in a commemorative book for the library.
“During this time, my great uncle on my grandmother’s side was out in Samoa working for the Post and Telegraph, so we go way back in Fiji and surrounding islands. We’ve got a bit of history here.”
In the January 1951 edition of Pacific Islands Monthly, a notice of Mrs Coster’s death was published. The article mentioned that she had died in Melbourne on November 30, and that she left Fiji in 1949.
• Join us next week for PART 2 on how Mark Pirie and his cousins traced their roots in Fiji.
