Maker: Alison Kember

Panel number: 83

Petition Sheet Number: 85

Person honouring: Janet Gilmour

Relationship to makers: Great-grandmother (paternal)

Janet Cameron Gilmour (nee Black) was born on 13 November 1841 in Stirling, Scotland. She married John Wright Gilmour on 18 November 1864 in Glasgow, Scotland and immigrated to New Zealand in early 1880s (between 1881 and 1884). She settled in Dunedin and moved a number of times. They were living in Forth Street at the time of the petition. 

She died on 7 August 1920 in Dunedin, having had seven children including my grandfather, Alexander Black Gilmour, who according to family stories, came to New Zealand with the family when he was three. We later lived with him in the family home in Whanganui until his death when I was six. Of these seven children two had died before they left Scotland, and the seventh was born and died less than two weeks later in New Zealand at the end of 1884.

Panel materials: All fabrics found at Vinnies Resew workshop in Wellington Museum. Cotton, corduroy, tweed, satin and chintz. The tartan represents her native Scotland, the blue/green the Pacific with the brown hills of Dunedin. The lilac strip has the colours associated with the suffrage movement. The tweed suggests the Scottish heather and the chintz the formality of life in 19th century Dunedin.