Included in an old album of autographs, drawings, bon mots , photographs , quotations from Shakespeare , Tennyson , Victor Hugo , Longfellow and Adam Lindsay Gordon , were the above entries made in Christchurch, New Zealand , in 1909, by Frederick N. Ambler and M . Ambler . The coloured in or tinted view of children holding hands in snow is signed F.A., perhaps Frederick ? An ink mark is termed a lonely spot and there is a penny New Zealand stamp gummed to a page .
The album , bearing the trade stamp of Mason's , booksellers , Carlisle, Scotland, starts on August 25, 1902 , with an entry to Annie from Priscilla , a sprig of dried heather attached. Could Annie have been about to travel to Australia and New Zealand ?
There is a glued in gumleaf urging a return to the land of sunshine and gum trees , Bondi entries , autographs obtained aboard ship , several from Tasmania , Cottesloe , Western Australia .
There are numerous other entries in New Zealand - Wellington , Dunedin, Raetihi- with photographs of several women , a pencil drawing of a stag , a pressed fern like plant accompanies the above 1909 entry headed Roslyn, Dunedin , New Zealand .
The recent appalling Christchurch massacre prompted Pat Campbell of the Canberra Times to make this powerful comment on the enormity of the atrocity by depicting the New Zealand silver fern with its leaves consisting of victims of the shootings .
