R Nicol

Biographical information provided for by Fiona Oliver for the He Tohu exhibition:

Robina Sinclair emigrated from the Shetland Islands to Nelson in 1874 on the Ocean Mail, along with her mother and three older siblings (two brothers and a sister). She was 13 years old at the time of sailing, and like her mother and sister, her occupation was recorded on the passenger list as ‘servant’. In 1885 she married Alexander Scott Nicol, a moulder, by which time she was living with her mother in Wellington. She had risen to become a woman of some means and leisure, and was a keen amateur photographer of gardens and people of middle and lower classes. She appeared to have had no children, and died in 1942, aged 81.