When looking for information about Nellie Dempster I found this in the Dunedin Family History Group newsletter for June 2017. I can't better it so I'm using it with attribution Thanks to the author, Heather Bray, for her permission.
I've not personally seen flowers on her grave - yet.
“THE LONELY ROAD”
DEATH OF EXHIBITION SINGER.
Whangarei visitors to the Dunedin Exhibition will remember the concert stage in the Australian Court, where, all day and evening, vocalists were demonstrating old and now songs. Among them, they may recall one who frequently sang “The Lonely Road.”
The road seems long and lonely, When your luck is upside down; You don’t meet smiling faces, But just a gloomy frown. But when your star is rising, Friends are not so hard to find; But you always leave the best ones, On the lonely road behind.
The singer was Miss Nellie Dempster, a delightfully frank and attractive English girl, who came to New Zealand with a party of demonstrators for the musical firm by which the concert stand was organised. Well, her luck went all upside down at the close of the Exhibition, and her melodious, appealing voice is silent in death. She was taken ill just before the Exhibition closed, and serious complications developed. After ten weeks of an heroic, but exhausting, battle for life she passed along the last lonely road a week ago. To die away from home and kin, in a far country, on the threshold of all that life might become to a gifted singer, and almost at the end of her engagement, when the return journey was daily drawing nearer, was certainly upside-down luck. But she did not encounter the hard face and gloomy frown. The friends her voice and personality had won gathered about her, and willing hands endeavoured to lighten her painful lot. True friends made her last days as happy as possible, and followed her remains to their lonely resting place in Anderson’s Bay Cemetery. -The Northern Advocate, 19/7/1926.
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