Mackenzie Country

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 4

Mackenzie Country

Life On A Five Pound Note. By Evelyn Hosken. Published by the author at Timaru. 204 pp.

The country atmosphere is in the pages of Mrs Hosken’s book, and it is the Mackenzie Country with which she is concerned. Casting her mind back over a period of 60 years, she recalls the time when her father made a cob cottage at Adair, and when the butter made in the churn had a nutty flavour. From Adair the scene shifts to Simons Hill Station, which she and her husband drew in a land ballot in 1911, and with a woman’s eye for homely detail she tells of such things as five different types of iron that she remembers using from time to time when coping with the clothes-basket full of newly-washed linen. Surprisingly few people know that the tree-capped island depicted on the back of the New Zealand fivepound note was once at the south end of Lake Pukaki, but disappeared when the waters of the lake were raised for hydro-electric purposes. Although the island and its poplars have vanished, a picture of them has been painted by Esther Hope for the jacket of this book. The same unforgettable scene which Mrs Hosken looked out upon year in, year out, from her Simons Hill homestead has supplied the title of her book.

Mrs Hosken is a good raconteur if one is to judge from the many uncanny stories that fall from her pen—the story, for example, of the army of rats that moved out of the Washdyke boiling-down works the very day before the works were destroyed by fire, as though some lucky premonition had led the rodents to flee the pending holocaust. Her account of the accident on the terminal face of the Hooker Glacier that occurred on June 1, 1916—with the photo that accompanies her

narrative—is little short of incredible.

Mrs Hosken has a way of moving rapidly from the past to the present. She seems as much at home in dealing with the horse and buggy days, as when she is describing the mountain flying which—as she states —has become a “highly specialised business.” (One can almost sense the pilot at her elbow as she writes about “updrafts and downdrafts.”) The sixth chapter of her book is entitled “Some Mackenzie Country Stations.” It tells of when certain stations were taken over and by whom, as well as noting the area of the runs and the number of sheep they carried. Although the information given concerning these stations is scrappy and amounts to only a line or two in some cases, it is nevertheless welcome, as so little has been published concerning the Mackenzie Country. It still awaits its historian. Mrs Hosken tells of a visit she paid Pukaki in 1905, travelling there in a springcart with her mother (and a brother and sister). One of her memories of the place concerns a carrier pigeon which she saw arrive there with a message “secure in a little cylinder around its leg.” The message told the Pukaki Hotel manager, Mr Glasson, how many tourists would be arriving by coach. It would have been interesting to know from what place the pigeon had been sent. The author does not mention the pigeon service between the hotel and the Hermitage.

Extracts from the Pukaki Inn Visitors’ Book (now in the Timaru Museum) are contained in an appendix to Mrs Hosken’s book. They cover the period from 1886 to 1929 and Include entries made by their Excellencies the Earl and Countess of Ranfurly and party on the occasion of their visit on March 5 and 6,1902.