It was a pretty poor copy that I looked at, and it was cut down from 85 minutes to a bare 61, but as the second oldest film from New Zealand I had ever seen, it was interesting, if only for the occasions I had to stop it and look up local words I was unfamiliar with, and for the star playing with a kiwi.

It starts during the Boer War, when a young man is about to ship out. He and his girl friend have a passionate meeting, and she falls pregnant. Her rich uncle, Walter Gray, discovers the baby boots she has bought, and unchristianly throws her out for violating her Christian upbringing. She wanders around and finally finds refuge with a farming family. She gives birth and dies. Eighteen years later, the child has grown into Dale Austen (she also plays her own mother), courted by handsome naval officer Cecil Scott, and less successfully by comic relief Al Mack. The farmers send a letter to Gray, saying they can't afford her education and suggesting he do so. However, his secretary, Ernest Yandall, who is in his will for half the estate, throws out the letter, leaving only her name and one of the baby boots. Yandall also poisons the old man before he can change his will. When the lawyer reads the will, he notes that Gray added that it all goes to Miss Austen if she shows up within a month of the reading, so Yandall arranges to have her kidnapped and spirited out of the country.

In its current form, it's not a terribly inspiring bit of film making, but it's clearly ambitious to offer a local product to compete with the far more sophisticated movies from elsewhere. Mack is a good comic, taking a lot of pratfalls and one feels sorry for him in his hopeless, goodhearted quest.

It's directed by Rudall Hayward, an Englishman who settled in New Zealand and made a bunch of films between 1922 and his death in 1974 at the age of 73.