ON STONY SOIL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 200, 23 August 1940, Page 5

ON STONY SOIL.

TRAGIC LIFE STORY. LIVED IN MUD HUT. A tragic life of toil, loneliness and hardship has ended with the death of Rose Laager, at the age of eighty-two, says the "Christehurch Star-Sun." She and her brother Joe, "the hermits of Ram paddock Hill," lived for forty years in a rush-thatched clay hut on the eide of Rampaddock Hill, near Mount Oxford, winning a meagre living from the stony soil by unremitting labour, dressed in old sacks, and shunning the world. Immigrants from Boravia,. the Langer family arrived at Lyttelton in 1874, and eventually bought, as they thought, 20 acres at the foot of Rampaddock Hill, cleared the land, and built a home. They had been misled into settling on another man's land, and at the owner's behest the local constable* burned the house over their heads. Evicted Four Times. i The Langers were told that their section was about a mile away. They again built a home, only to find themselves again misled. After this eviction, a Mr. Horrock offered them the use of a section, where they built a third home, jbut when he sold the property, the new owner turned them out. I * Fellow countrymen of the Langers then took the matter up and eventually their 20-acre section was located, in a bleak, sterile valley on the hillside. Here the Langers dug clay from the hillside and built an adobe hut, made their own furniture and raised meagre crops of vegetables in \he thin soil. Then the road board sold them up for 5/3 arrears of rates, but the people of Oxford raised a subscription and repurchased the place for £80 from a man who had paid £20 for it at the auction. Lived Aβ Hermits. Two brothers and two sistere left the homestead to seek better fortune elsewhere, but Rose, the eldest, and Joe,

some sixteen years her junior, lived on in the little clay hut. They tilled a little vegetable plot, sowed their wheat and barley, milked their one cow and were perforce vegetarians, save when Joe snared a rabbit or a hare. The brother used also to get a little work on neighbouring farms, and in 1934, through the efforts of friends, Rose Langer received the old-age pension. Music was their only pleasure. Rose Langer on her concertina, and Joe on his violin, would play old German songs of the homeland they left for a life of misunderstanding, hardship and cruelty on the other side of the world.