Charlotte Badger by Lester Hall

Signed Open Edition Print

Print size in millimetres: 290 x 450

From Lester’s Aotearoaland Pakeha series whose design departs from his postage stamp design to echo the ‘Cabinet Card’ format of Victorial era photography. But who was Charlotte Badger? Lester writes “Charlotte was a defiant - said to be immoral - woman who was no stranger to the art of pleasing men. It is thought that using her feminine energies she incited the mutiny of a crew and took over the ship Venus while in an Australian port in 1806. She joined the fray with pistol and sword. Having taken the ship and returned a flogging to the captain, she masterminded the pirating of another vessel for supplies and headed with her lover on the Venus to The Bay of Islands here in New Zealand. Possibly understanding more about the repercussions for the mutiny she let the Bay sail from the Bay without her. She is said to be one of the first Pakeha women to live with the maori, taking up with a sub chief of the area. Her fate is not clear but she is known to have refused passage away from the the Bay on several occasions. She is thought to have eventually run away to Tonga with her daughter to escape Maori retribution for some unknown transgression and is thought to have even made it to America. Whatever the fate of Charlotte, she is shown here with some poetic license to be a woman of daring, intrigue and lust as is befitting a woman of such resilience and persuasion.”

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