Revisiting the Tragedy on Mt Nobbler

In July last year (2025), I posted a 3-part series about the tragedy on Mt Nobbler.

This tragedy happened near the Kyeburn Diggings in July/August 1891 and resulted in four young people from the Upper Kyeburn losing their lives—Thomas Meikle aged 12, James Meikle aged 19, Robert Blanchard aged 23, and Alphonso Philip Beer aged 28. You can find links to those posts later in this post.

More recently (this month - April 2026), when I was asked to share a story at Speakers’ Corner, I decided to revisit this tragedy. You can watch videos of the April Speakers’ Corner sessions later in this post.

First, a little about Speakers’ Corner.

Speakers’ Corner is a monthly event convened by ProjectKin. It is produced and presented by Jennifer Jones (whose good idea it was in the first place). Jennifer is supported at these presentations by Barbara at Projectkin

Speakers’ Corner encourages those of us who write stories based in history—whether family history, local history (e.g., one-place studies, house histories), or whatever—to step onto a virtual and imaginary soapbox and tell a story. It may be something already written about—either here on Substack or elsewhere on some other platform—or something about to be written about.

If you have a story to share at Speakers’ Corner Jennifer Jones will be pleased to hear from you.

Each month, there is a theme. The theme for April is ‘Stories from Downunder’.

If you are looking at a euro-centric map, then downunder is where I am and it is where the tragedy on Mt Nobbler (Central Otago, New Zealand) happened in 18911.

Each month there are usually two speakers.

This month (April), I talked about the tragedy on Mt. Nobbler. The other speaker was Lex Knowlton, a genealogist from Perth, Australia. She spoke about a convict relative who was transported from England to Australia.

Speakers’ Corners has two events each month:

• A Special Preview - Live On Substack (30 minutes-ish).

• A Main Event - On Zoom (60 minutes-ish)

Here the two speakers provide some background or context to the story they are going to tell without giving too much of the story away.

April’s preview took place on 5/6 April 2026 (depending on your time zone).

You can watch the preview here:

In this preview, I focused on setting the scene for my story and mainly drew information from this written post:

This is where the two speakers share their story.

April’s Speakers’ Corner main event took place on 9/10 April 2026 (depending on your time zone).

You can watch the main event here:

At this session, most of what I talked about came from this post:

with a little from this post as well:

All my Kyeburn Diggings one-place study research findings to date—including documents, media, etc.—can be found on my one-place study website on the weare.xyz platform

You can find the Coroner’s Inquest File into the deaths of Alphonso Philip Beer, Robert Blanchard and James Meikle and the Coroner’s Inquest File into the death of Thomas Meikle on that website. These links take you to images of the original documents which I accessed from Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga2.

If you are already a subscriber to this publication—Kyeburn Diggings One-Place Study—thank you!

If not, and if you would like to receive future posts direct to your email inbox, please subscribe (it’s free!):

You may like to check out my other Substack publication as well:

BJNL's Genealogy