High Country Family
Ratings1
Average rating3
Published in 1964, this book is written about life of a high country station in the South island of New Zealand. Written by Betty Dick, wife of Allan Dick - farmer and later a MP for Waitaki.
Betty Dick gives a good summary of the life of a hard working wife and her children in a relatively remote place (often cut off from the road by heavy weather).
This excerpt sums up things well - from a chapter named The History of Lilybank (Lilybank being the name of the station):
Lilybank Station is one hundred years old. To be more accurate, it is 100 years since sheep were first grazed on its steep tussock and rocky mountain slopes, and its miles of riverbed flats. Lilybank comprises 70,000 acres, and is called Run 78 on the files in the Lands Office in Christchurch. These bald facts may mean little to the average reader, but they convey a great deal to me now after twenty two years of being a part of this great isolated Mackenzie Country sheep station.This almost pear-shaped run, with two large rivers and steep mountains rising to over 9000 feet as its three natural boundaries, has a wealth of history, grave and gay, bound up in its acres, its waterfalls and streams, its snowfields, its lofty peaks, and its homestead; and in the people who, over this first century, have moulded its destiny and made no small contribution to New Zealand as a whole. For wherever there is new country to be broken, new acres to be farmed there must of necessity be men of courage; men with farsightedness and humour; brave men, physically fit and of good sounds commonsense. To these men of the past, many of them faded unknown into oblivion, I pay my respectful thanks for opening up this area of lands now so dear to my heart.
Nicely written, descriptive and easily read. This book however doesn't focus much on the station or station work as much as the role of the wife, and the experiences of the children - which is fine, but not as interesting to me as some other books on this topic - and I do have a bit of a soft spot for them.
3 stars.