Daily Photo – Lake Forsyth on Banks Peninsula

If you stand on the shore of Lake Forsyth today and look up into the hills of Banks Peninsula, you’ll see the green slopes of Kinloch. Looking at those hills now, it’s hard to imagine that in the 1880s, this was thirteen thousand acres of curated Scottish hope.

Hugh Buchanan, a Scotsman with a memory for the Highlands, wasn’t just farming this area, he was recreating a lost home. But Kinloch didn’t end up in the history books for its merinos or its sixty-five miles of wire fencing, it became the site of a tragedy of historic proportions.

Annetta Maccioni was only nineteen, a daughter of Italian immigrants working as a housemaid at the Buchanan homestead. In those days, a job at Kinloch was a prestigious position which really meant heavy expectations and very little room for error. On April 27th, while dusting behind a heavy dressing-table mirror in the master bedroom, Annetta found a six-chambered revolver that belonged to Hugh Buchanan.  As Annetta handled the gun, Buchanan’s six-year-old son, Frederick, was playing nearby. In the space of a single click and a flash, everything changed. The gun fired and young Frederick was gone instantly.

The aftermath was a mess in many different ways. The local pub was turned into a makeshift courtroom, which feels strangely New Zealand, men drinking at the bar one minute and deciding a woman’s fate the next. While the jury ultimately saw it for what it was, a devastating accident returning a verdict of excusable homicide, the court of public opinion wasn’t so kind.

Frederick’s parents didn’t just grieve; they turned their pain into a weapon. They painted Annetta as a “darker” character, an outsider with a vindictive streak. The whispers in the surrounding settlements near Lake Forsyth were more like shouts, gossip that traveled faster than official news. Despite no evidence, she became a social pariah.

Left with little option, Annetta eventually vanished from the area, never seen near Lake Forsyth again.