Seven thousand years ago, the world’s first city was born. New Zealand is still learning its lessons.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

The anchor splashed through the waves, sinking deep into the great harbour of Tara. Wind and rain hammered the sides of the ship. Its hull creaked from the brunt of 126 days at sea. 

On January 20, 1840, the Aurora set anchor just off Matiu/Somes Island, carrying 148 British settlers, the first organised European immigration by the New Zealand Company. The storm continued to rage for two days before they could make it to shore. When the conditions finally turned, there was a mad scramble for Petone beach. Row boats ferried passengers aboard, frantically tossing possessions onto the land. Māori from Pito-one Pā, led by Te Puni, helped get people ashore and built makeshift houses. 

It was a brief moment of harmony; two peoples supporting each other. It wouldn’t last. Te Puni eventually realised the New Zealand Company lied to him about the nature of land sales and just how many Pākehā were on their way. The British settlers also felt betrayed by the company: the land they were sold was in the floodplains of the Hutt River. After the waters wiped out most of the original settlement, the settlers picked up sticks and moved to the other side of the harbour, to the current site of Wellington.

That chaotic day on Petone beach was the start of an ambitious project, a rag-tag group of people trying to do something that had never before been done on New Zealand shores: build a city. New Zealand was the last significant landmass ever populated by humans. It had never played host to a city. The largest human settlement before then was probably the pā on Maungakiekie in Tāmaki Makaurau, which housed about 5,000 people in the 17th century. 

Most of the British settlers had never lived in a city either. The majority were picked because they had experience as rural labourers and knew how to work the land. Creating a city from scratch was a huge task, and none of them really knew what they were doing. 

Even 184 years later, Wellington is still in the very early stages of this immense, continually evolving project. Compared to the century- and millennia-old cities which dominate the world’s economy and culture today like London, Beijing and New York, Wellington (like all New Zealand cities) is a mere toddler, taking its first shaky steps towards urbanisation. 

Wellington’s new District Plan marks the next step for a city that is slowly growing into its ambition to be a global city of impact. The evolution from large provincial towns to truly urban, high-functioning cities is New Zealand’s greatest economic challenge of the 21st century. It’s the step that will take us from an economy based on agriculture and natural resources to one based on productive high tech and creative industries. To help chart our way forward, it’s worth looking back to the birth of cities. 

Seven thousand years ago, on the banks of the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq, humans were grappling with the promises and challenges of cities for the very first time. The world’s first city (depending how you define it) was named Uruk. 

Archaeologists are still uncovering Uruk’s stories, but we know it was the centre of a vast, prosperous trade network, with enormous central markets. There was a large class of bureaucratic officials who managed city business. There is evidence of mass production, with an industry manufacturing thousands of clay bowls. It was an agricultural juggernaut, with huge canals and irrigation projects, capable of growing a food surplus to feed the entire city population, and keep stockpiles for bad seasons. 

Uruk generated more resources than its residents could have accumulated individually. It was a world of new possibilities: novel foods and clothes, new forms of entertainment and different kinds of jobs. Even people who lived outside Uruk’s walls benefited from its manufacturing, markets, ports and agricultural systems. 

Cities, according to Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, are “man’s greatest invention”. They are the most powerful engine of trade, production, collaboration and social mobility ever created. “There is a near-perfect correlation between urbanisation and prosperity across nations,” he wrote in his book, Triumph of the City. 

After Uruk was born, other cities started popping up with increasing speed across Mesopotamia. Great cities also developed independently in India, China and the Americas. Humans are social animals. We are more likely to survive in the wild as part of a tribe than alone. The larger the tribe or community, the more support it provides. Cities are just the natural extension of that. When we create systems that allow as many humans as possible to collaborate in relative harmony, people tend to thrive. In the same way that bees create hives, humans create cities. They are the human habitat. 

So, when exploring the foundations of cities and how to build a great one, it makes sense to ask: what is a city? It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. There is no consistent definition other than a human settlement of some notable size. Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin each claim to be New Zealand’s “first city” for different technical reasons. 

There are few geographical or physical rules that are true across all cities. They exist on coastlines and inland, on rivers and in deserts, on the flat and in mountains. Cities don’t even need to be built on land: Venice is in a lagoon, and Tenochtitlan, the centre of the Aztec empire, was built in a lake. 

Even in terms of their economic functions, cities don’t have much in common. They can be centred around ports, manufacturing, government or tourism. But when you compare a city to a town or village, they all have one advantage: more people. 

Cities aren’t made of roads and buildings, they’re made of people. He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata. People come to cities for connection, they want to find partners, attend mass entertainment events and do business. In pure economic terms, a city is a labour market. In a large labour market, there are more workers available for big, complex projects. Businesses can find highly skilled workers to fill specialist roles. Workers are more likely to find the job that best uses their skills. Companies looking to open a new factory or office will choose to do so in cities with strong labour markets. People from outside a city will move there to access the jobs, making the labour market even larger and more appealing.

Even in the world of Zoom calls and international flights, this hasn’t changed. The most powerful cities are built on large, skilled labour forces. 

Uruk developed a large class of skilled bureaucrats, scribes and accountants who were responsible for Uruk’s most important contribution to human civilization: writing. Refining pictograms into a complex system of words and letters would have taken a huge amount of shared knowledge to develop, codify and spread the new system of communication. It’s the kind of innovation that could only be made possible in a city. It was also something that only a city would require. 

In a village, you could get by on your word. Disagreements could be hashed out in person, in front of a local leader. Uruk’s trade, farming and public works were far too complex to run on memory. Writing was a necessity. This is the natural problem of a city. Large cities are more productive and more powerful, but they are also far more complex and difficult to manage.

The earliest known codes of laws started to be developed during the Uruk period, the archaeological term for the period when Uruk was the dominant city in Mesopotamia. The code of Urukagina, the oldest known code of laws, was developed in the nearby city of Lagash, about 50km away from Uruk. 

The actual text hasn’t been discovered, but archaeologists have managed to piece it together from references in other documents. It was an effort to manage the risks of corruption and inequality that inevitably arise in a large city. It restricted the powers of priests and large property owners. It outlawed unfair loans, established welfare payments and set rules for fair trading: the rich had to use silver when purchasing from the poor, and couldn’t force a poor person to sell something they didn’t want to sell. 

The code also dealt with some of the more mundane details of city life: setting the price for tolls on the city gate and determining how much city officials would be paid and who was exempt from paying taxes. 

The code of Urukagina was complex because cities are complex. They need streets, pipes and some form of funding. A small town can be run by a part-time council, a large city requires a massive machine of public servants. All of these complexities come from people. The greatest complexity of all is this: where should all these people live, and how should they move around? 

Uruk was surrounded by 9.5km of brick walls five metres high, containing an area of 450 hectares. The walls protected the people from invaders and demarcated the city’s expansion. By coincidence, the original town plan for Wellington was almost the exact same size: 1,100 residential blocks of one acre each (445 hectares). 

For most of human history, the maximum size of a city was pretty static: it was determined by how far someone could conveniently walk. The only way to grow a city’s population within those constraints was to increase density by subdividing lots or building taller homes.

That’s roughly the plan Wellington followed. Over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, those one-acre blocks became smaller and smaller to cater to the growing population. Te Aro became a slum, filled with tiny shacks and choked by the smoke of industrial furnaces and garbage incinerators. There were outbreaks of typhoid and other water-borne diseases. People who were wealthy enough bought large homes in the city fringe suburbs to escape the destitution. 

The same problem would have been faced by Uruk and every other major city in history. When the population is growing but the city doesn’t have the right systems in place to deal with it, quality of life plummets, especially for the poorest residents. Even ancient cities eventually realised the only way to keep growing was to build up. Large apartment buildings called insulae were common in ancient Rome. There is evidence of multi-storey homes dating back to Jericho in 7000BC. But apartments are difficult, both architecturally and politically. They’re expensive and complicated to build, and often draw backlash from angry locals afraid of being crowded out of their own neighbourhoods.

There is one way to keep your city population growing without fully embracing density: expand outwards. In order to do that, you need some form of transport that is faster than walking and which will still allow people to get to the centre of the city. In some ancient cities, that meant ferries and canal boats. In Wellington, it initially meant streetcars, the cable car, and train lines. 

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch grew up in the post-war boom characterised by two intertwining trends: first, a huge government effort to build state homes, which accelerated the shift towards quarter-acre sections and sprawling suburbs that became New Zealand’s default way of life. Second, and more significantly, the rise of privately owned cars. Once cars became affordable for the middle class, it became more attractive to buy cheap land on the outskirts of town and drive to work in the city. New bridges and motorways, rather than trains, have been the dominant form of urban expansion in New Zealand for the past 70 or so years. 

But there are many problems with that form of growth. Car-dependent sprawl created more carbon emissions. It was more expensive, due to the cost of both petrol and parking. Suburbs hollowed out the city centres. We started using phrases like “central business district” because no one actually lived in them, they were just places to do business.

Cars are big, and keep getting bigger. We are running out of places to put them. They need big roads to drive on and carparks to store them in. There is only so much space on our public streets that we can dedicate to storing private vehicles. Commuting by bus, train or tram doesn’t require each passenger to store their own personal vehicle. Bikes and e-scooters are far smaller and more space efficient. 

Even with our current car-dependent city design, there is still a limit of how far most people are willing to drive every day. A commute of 45 minutes has such a negative impact on quality of life that economists found you have to earn 20 percent more to make the trip worth it. For a while, cars allowed us to make our city walls wider, but the walls still exist. 

After ignoring the big, thorny problem of density for a couple of generations, our cities are finally circling back to it. We can’t keep creating low-density suburbs further and further away from the city centre. Creating bigger, more powerful labour markets requires denser forms of housing and more space-efficient forms of transport. 

There is good news, though. Wellington, like most cities in New Zealand and the western world, is post-industrial. The city centre is no longer choked by smelly factories and furnaces. It’s a lot nicer now. There are glass offices, cafes and craft beer bars. There is a booming population of young people who want the opportunity to experience all that city living has to offer. 

This is the next great urban reset, and it’s already beginning. The world’s leading cities, such as London, Paris and New York, are moving towards a new future with more people living closer to town in higher quality apartments, with more energy and space-efficient transport. Those cities have all invested massively in cycling infrastructure over the last few years. They have realised you can’t have a large, dense city where everyone wants to drive through the centre of town; there simply isn’t enough room. It’s inefficient transport and it ruins the amenity of the streets. They’re ready for the next evolution of the city. 

Uruk was the birthplace of the world’s oldest surviving work of written literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh tells the story of Gilgamesh, a legendary king of Uruk, who represents the luxury (and corruption) of city life. His rival, Enkidu, is a wild man who represents the freedom and chaos of nature. The two start out as enemies, but eventually become friends and allies in a quest to defeat the demon Humbaba. The themes of the story show how the people of Uruk grappled with their place in the world, trying to make sense of this new style of city living, which was such a sharp departure from how humans had existed for millennia, working the land as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers. 

New Zealand today is still grappling with that same challenge. Our national identity has always been rural. We are the country of Footrot Flats, Fred Dagg and number eight wire. Our economy has been driven by natural resources: first moa and pounamu, then harekeke and kauri, gold and coal, and now grazing land for sheep and cows. Those resources have served us well. But natural resources won’t take us forward. The next great leap will be in information, creativity and technology; the economy of the city.

Figuring out how to design highly efficient and productive cities is New Zealand’s next great challenge. If we get it right, Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch will become powerful economic engines, capable of lifting prosperity and quality of life for everyone. If we get it wrong, we’ll squander our potential. 

Uruk’s peak of importance lasted for about 2,000 years. Since then, thousands of cities have grown up all around the world. Many of today’s greatest cities have stood for thousands of years; Paris, Constantinople, Delhi and Beijing are all far older than the countries they are in. If we learn the lessons of history, New Zealand’s cities may someday be thought of in the same breath.

Mina Foley was a formidable talent dogged by wild rumours about her mental breakdown. What is the truth?

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

The first time I heard Mina Foley singing, I ended up in pieces. I’d found a clip of her on YouTube performing the aria Casta Diva from the Bellini opera Norma. It’s around 1950, and in the background picture for the video, Mina has rosy cheeks to match her pink gown and long black gloves to match her raven hair.   

If you’re unfamiliar with the opera’s story, the lovelorn Norma is a high priestess of druids in the Roman Empire who considers killing her own children but (spoiler alert) decides against it. The title role is so hard to sing that only the bravest prime donne of all time have even dared. Here Foley, a former student at Mary’s College in Ponsonby, absolutely crushes it.  

Because I was meant to be doing something else, I followed Foley down a rabbit hole. She’d been discovered by super-nun Sister Mary Leo, later the wind beneath the wings of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Dame Malvina Major. Mina had trained in London, then Rome, where the locals adopted her as their own, calling her “the Italian nightingale”. Others called her “the voice of the century”. 

As she barrelled towards Lorde-like world domination, Foley became the nation’s sweetheart. Reporters gushed about her tiny waist and dreamy frocks, and documented her journeys to Australia, Europe and the US. 

When asked by BBC Radio 3 in 2015 about her favourite singers, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, born 14 years after Mina Foley, said Foley was her idol. “She was like the Pied Piper,” Te Kanawa said. “We were all following the Pied Piper to the top of the mountain.”

But then, just as suddenly as she’d shot to fame, Foley vanished, and for a long time no one spoke about her at all. When she died of a heart attack in 2007, obituaries referred vaguely to long spells of “ill health” that had nipped a glorious career in the bud. No one had written a book about Foley or made her life into a movie. It was as if she’d been forgotten on purpose.  

I contacted anyone who I thought might have known Foley to find out what had become of her. Which is when I started hearing some wild rumours. A Concert FM host told me she’d heard Foley had run naked through the streets of Rome. And several others told me that, back home in Auckland, when she didn’t get a part, Foley had run into Smith and Caughey’s department store and stabbed someone in a rage. 

Fantasy sometimes flowers where facts are missing, so had people just made this stuff up? Was it a coincidence that these tales sounded like the plots of the operas Foley sang? And how had someone so beloved been so thoroughly forgotten?

This all started nearly a decade ago, when my mate Jo Smith, then a screenwriting tutor at Unitec, mentioned Foley while we were researching a play we wanted to write (but never did). 

Jo’s office at Unitec’s Bachelor of Creative Arts was strangely narrow. A window at the back of the room would have had a pleasant view had it not been covered by bars. Outside her door, someone had painted over what used to be a peephole. 

Building Six, as it was known, had once been the women’s quarters of Whau Lunatic Asylum in Point Chevalier. The tutors’ offices had once been inmates’ cells, and the current theatre space for Unitec performance students was the inmates’ day room. At nearby Building 76, someone had counted out their days of incarceration by etching spindly lines into the brickwork. 

Everyone I met there seemed to have a ghost story. One room in Jo’s wing was only used for storage because anyone who’d tried to work in it ended up sick. One day, a nurse from the old days turned up and told Jo there was a woman inside the room who just kept spinning and spinning around. 

The original asylum, Building One, was built in 1865 and considered one of our finest examples of Victorian architecture. Paranormal New Zealand has a long and horrifying list on its website of “unusual activity” it claims people have experienced there, including keys clanging, radios changing station by themselves, weird scratching, a paintbrush flying across the room and people being pushed on the stairs. 

By the 20th century, the asylum had endured two fires, a typhoid outbreak and even murder by pitchfork. As attitudes changed, it became a mental hospital then a psychiatric facility, renaming itself an incredible six times. “Lunatics” became “inmates” then “patients” then “clients”. And throughout its history, it housed some of our most brilliant minds. 

The journalist and novelist Robin Hyde voluntarily committed herself in 1933, having survived an opiate addiction and a suicide attempt. But the only crazy thing about her seemed to be her work ethic. In four years she completed three novels, two volumes of poetry and a book on journalese, all while freelancing as a journalist. 

Janet Frame, misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and fresh from a stint at Seacliff Mental Hospital in Dunedin, turned up in 1951. In her novel Faces in the Water, she described her awful experiences with a new kind of treatment, electroconvulsive therapy.

Another celebrity patient arrived in 1961 at what was by then known as Oakley Psychiatric Hospital. The budding diva Mina Foley had suffered a mental breakdown. She checked in and didn’t walk out again for 16 years.

Foley was born Wilhelmina Maile Foley in 1930 and died 77 years later. She was the illegitimate child of James Rudling, a 22-year-old Tongan-English champion boxer and swimmer, and Ida Foley, an 18-year-old Aucklander descended from South Africans.  

Hers was a story of many Wilhelminas. It was not only her full first name, but that of both of her grandmothers, and on the South African side the name went back multiple generations. Her middle name, Maile, is Tongan for Myrtle and was also the middle name of James’s elder sister Gladys. 

James and Ida weren’t married but seem to have remained friends. Mina Foley’s family told me they have a photo of the young parents together at a function two years after Mina’s birth. The family members were unsure why James and Ida didn’t marry but speculated it could have been because of their different races, different religions (James’s father was staunchly Methodist while the Foleys were Roman Catholic), or simply the fact that they were so young. 

In any case, when Mina Foley was small, her father married another woman and her mother relocated to Australia where she married another man. Mina’s South African grandmother, also a singer, brought her up and paid for lessons in voice, cello and piano. 

In her book The Enigma of Sister Mary Leo: The Story of New Zealand’s Most Famous Singing Teacher, Margaret Lovell-Smith wrote that Mina Foley was always Leo’s favourite. But even as she “flashed like a meteor from comparative obscurity into a blaze of publicity,” per Lovell-Smith, Foley remained painfully awkward and shy.

After school, Foley worked as a physiotherapist’s nurse and would come to the convent in the evenings to train. She usually hadn’t eaten, so Sister Mary Leo would provide dinner too. Later, the nun recalled how Foley’s reticence had often made the lessons hard going. And she’d had to coach her into singing an emotional aria without bursting into tears. 

Coloratura singers like Foley were the Mariah Careys of their day, capable of hitting super high notes and performing tricky trills and runs. But it was the tone of her voice that won her so many hearts, possessing all the confidence and worldliness that she herself seemed to lack. And she was very good at making people cry. As the baritone Donald Munro put it, “It is the kind of singing that wrings one’s heart.”

By her teens, Foley was winning competitions, performing at concerts and playing pin-up to Australian soldiers bound for Korea. When she didn’t win the prestigious Melbourne Sun Aria competition, instead coming second, the Auckland Star called on her fans to stump up the funds for what would have been her prize: a passage to London for training. While there, Foley sang on the BBC, and an English family told her she shattered their best crystal. 

The Brits gave her a scholarship to study in Rome in 1951 with the retired opera star Toti Dal Monte. The first opera she taught Foley was Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, another Everest of a vocal feat. Like Norma, the Scottish aristocrat Lucia is lovelorn and homicidal, and eventually loses her grip on sanity. Foley’s teacher declared her ready for opera’s Holy Grail, La Scala. 

It all sounded impossibly glamorous. In reality, Foley was having to eke out her scholarship funds, and was hungry and exhausted. Later, she told reporters that some members of the family she’d stayed with resented her living with them and had starved her of meals. Foley collapsed and had to be treated for malnutrition. 

Then Foley found out her beloved grandmother was dying of cancer. Against everyone’s advice, she came home to Auckland. Her grandmother, who shared her name and love of music, died two weeks later at the age of 89. 

Mina Foley performed to sold-out crowds in a national tour. In Wellington, where she sang with the National Orchestra, she got a standing ovation that lasted nearly ten minutes. But poverty still followed her. She didn’t know how to say “no” to endless requests for charity concerts. Foley would walk from Herne Bay to Victoria Street for a 40 cent bowl of soup and stuff the holes in her shoes with newspaper. And she was never able to return to Europe.

In 1957, Foley won the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, to be performed at His Majesty’s Theatre in Auckland. This time the main character, a Parisian courtesan, was lucky in love but thwarted by a family feud plus a fatal illness. While rehearsing, Foley passed out on stage, leaving her young co-star Mary O’Brien to take over. And in 1961, she had a breakdown so severe she stayed silent for nearly two decades. 

Because no one would let us, Jo and I were desperate to visit the basement underneath Building One, to which only a few staff members had access. To our surprise, one day in 2016, our wish was granted and we won an afternoon in the creepiest place imaginable.  

Lena Corlett was then Unitec’s timetabling scheduler, who’d performed blessings and tapu-lifting ceremonies on the site. She met us in the foyer then led us down a well-worn concrete stairwell towards a cramped, dungeon-like space containing a tiny, windowless cell. 

Corlett didn’t hold back on what she suspected had gone on down there in Victorian times, namely torture, rape and murder. “A lot of bad things happened in this room,” she told us. “A lot of bad feelings were felt here.” She felt Jo and I had been sent down there for a reason, which only freaked us out even more. 

But when we met the facilities manager Frank Webb, who’d worked there for three decades, we got an entirely different take on things. He’d heard all the ghost stories but put them down to old pipes and wind blowing through windows that hadn’t shut properly in years. Not that he wasn’t poetic about it. “Sometimes it’s like the building sings,” Webb said. 

By the 1960s, when Mina Foley arrived, the asylum was a long-ago memory. But as mental health inquiries uncovered later in the 20th century, mistreatment and cover-ups continued. Patients at Oakley alleged that in the 60s and 70s they’d been sexually assaulted and beaten, locked in solitary confinement for long periods and punished with electric-shock therapy and drug injections. 

Whether Foley experienced any of this cruelty, I couldn’t say. Glimpses of her during this period were frustratingly scarce. 

I did learn that my aunt Margaret, a Point Chevalier piano teacher, would see Foley at the shops at a time that certainly sounds like the 1960s, since Foley was allegedly sporting a massive beehive and bright red lipstick. 

And in Bertie Plaatsman’s documentary Building One, the artist Lauren Lysaght, a former patient at Oakley, recalls peeling potatoes with a woman who barely spoke but had a beautiful singing voice. Later she learned the woman had stabbed someone. 

In recent years, heritage lovers lost their fight to save Building One, a Category 1 heritage-protected building, and work has begun to demolish it to make way for hundreds of new homes. Lena Corlett considered it a happy ending. “From my perspective, the building being torn down, because I love the architecture, it will be sad,” she said. “But for the patients, it will be an absolute happy moment for them.”

When Mina Foley finally left Oakley, it was the late 1970s, and the coloratura style was falling out of fashion. But when she announced a comeback concert, Aucklanders rushed out to buy tickets. A large profile by Susan Maxwell in the NZ Herald that year gifted us a rare treasure: Foley speaking in her own words. 

By then, nearly 50 and living in a state flat, Foley was working for a government department. Maxwell noted that she seemed just as “unworldly and hesitant” as she had as a teenager, but could at least now accept a compliment, albeit with a blush. 

In the profile, Foley said her name for friends who’d stood by her during her illness was “golden leaves”.  The ones who’d vanished were “autumn leaves”. The year being 1979, there was of course no talk of Oakley and definitely none of mental illness. In its place were euphemistic hints at Foley’s “bad luck” and the time “before her world folded up”. 

Foley told Maxwell she’d sung recognisable tunes back when she was still in a cradle. “They told me if they hummed a tune I would sing it right back.” About the La Scala debut that never was, she said, “La Scala? I’ve always loved New Zealand.” And she put a positive spin on whatever it was that made her go away. “I have something now in my life I could never have achieved in years of singing. Sincerity. Love of God.” 

Foley’s comeback show was a wild success. She sang 16 songs and arias and brought a ballroom full of fans to their feet (and yes, my aunt can confirm they were all weeping). Reviewers wrote that her crystal-clear, bell-like top notes were still very much intact. But pretty soon, Foley became unwell and disappeared again. 

In the mid-1980s, the singer Michael Tarawhiti McGifford met Foley at a dinner party. After convincing her to sing, he was so impressed he asked her to join him on tour. And it was a pretty big tour. On the sly, McGifford sent tapes of her singing to his managers in the US, who secured gigs for them both at the Lincoln Centre in New York and the Kennedy Centre in Washington. 

In an article in Women’s Weekly, McGifford empathised with Foley’s struggles as a singer abroad, describing it as “a rough and lonely life”. “If you are not in the public eye,” he said, “no one wants to know you. When you’re down, no one cares who you are.” Now, there was “an exciting life ahead of her and it is well overdue”. But the pair never made it to their tour because, once again, Foley fell ill. And that was the last of the comebacks. 

After a lengthy obsession, I was still unsure exactly what “ill” meant when it came to Mina Foley. Had she been mentally unwell, or was she just too nervous or too sweet or too talented? Were any of the crazy rumours about her even halfway true? 

But I did find out why Foley was still such a powerful singer, despite being out of sight and earshot for so long. Above all others, Sister Mary Leo was Foley’s golden leaf. The patron saint of New Zealand opera singing, tiny musical genius and woman Foley called a “little mother” had never stopped training her, not even during her long spell at Oakley.  

Thanks to Jo Smith, genealogist Christine Liava’a and Mina Foley’s family member Hadley Bensen for helping me piece together (some of) her story.