Bishop Ditlev Gothard Monrad

Bishop Ditlev Gothard Monrad

With his family, Bishop Monrad (a former prime minister of Denmark) arrived in New Zealand in 1866, accompanied by a handful of hardworking young Danes who helped him clear bush at Karere in the Manawatū. Monrad’s hands and those of his fellows became ‘mercilessly puffed up by innumerable mosquito bites’. The immigrants were the first in a long line of Scandinavian woodsmen and women to feel the bite of the swamp dweller.