By Roselyn Fauth
Every year on 8 March the world marks International Women’s Day, a moment to celebrate women’s achievements and reflect on the long path toward equality.
When I started the WuHoo Timaru blog, I was not trying to write women’s history.
In fact, the blog began for a very practical reason. I was worried I might lose a decade of WuHoo history hunting that was scattered across Facebook posts, so I started turning them into blogs. At first it was simply a way to store the stories somewhere safe so they would not disappear and so I could find them again myself.
By the time I had written about one hundred posts, I realised something that surprised me. Hardly any of the stories included women. It was not intentional. It was simply what had happened. Women’s stories were often harder to find. They appeared briefly in records, sometimes mentioned only as “Mrs”, and then disappeared again.
I never set out to write hundreds of blogs. I do this work voluntarily, with no budget and no research team. One grave led to another. A building led to a forgotten story. A newspaper clipping opened a side path I had never expected to follow. But something else unexpected happened along the way...
People began reaching out to help. Local genealogists, family historians, museum staff, council staff, descendants of the people I was writing about, and others who simply enjoy a good history hunt began sending information, photographs, newspaper clippings and family stories. Sometimes it was a missing date. Sometimes it was an entire new chapter of someone’s life.
I should also say that I do not come from an academic or institutional background. I am not a trained historian or archivist. Everything I have learned has come from curiosity, reading, asking questions and slowly following the clues. I do my best to research carefully and share what I find, but like anyone exploring history, I am always learning as I go.
Meanwhile, the interest in these stories began to grow. In January 2026 my Facebook statistics showed that WuHoo Timaru had reached half a million views in just 27 days. Clearly others were just as curious about these stories as I was.
And as I kept following the clues, something else kept appearing. Women.
They were everywhere in the story of this region. Settlers, nurses, teachers, artists, mothers, pioneers and survivors. Yet often they appeared only briefly in the records. Slowly, those fragments began to form a much bigger picture.
This is a collection of some of the women whose stories have appeared through WuHoo Timaru...
Digitised publications from Christchurch Art Gallery. South Canterbury Artists: a retrospective view on South Canterbury Artists, published by the Aigantighe Art Gallery in association with the South Canterbury Arts Society in 1990. 
