M.P. PAINTS, WIFE WRITES

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30557, 28 September 1964, Page 3

M.P. PAINTS, WIFE WRITES

The hills and homestead of the “Lilybank” sheep station, Tekapo, have been painted by the runholder, Mr A. D. Dick, member of Parliament for Waitaki, who had added oil painting to his summer holiday recreations. Shown holding the painting, his wife has just received advance copies of her book, “High Country Family,” the story of life on their sheep run, “Lilybank,” at the head of Lake Tekapo, says the Wellington reporter of “The Press.” It is a personal record of

life in the high country as well as the history of the run and the men who developed it, and an account of how the family’s life changed when her husband left farming for politics. Although their home is now in Oamaru and they rarely visit their farm except in the summer holidays, both, at heart, still belong to the rugged, sometimes isolated, hut busy life on a sheep station.

Mrs Dick began to write about it after she helped one of her four sons gather material for a correspondence school project. Last summer, Mr Dick began to paint its tussockcovered mountain scenes. Three of his first attempts with oils hang in his room

in Parliament House. Others remain in Oamaru. He plans to resume painting next summer, an idea stimulated by his daughter’s own painting at “Lilybank.” Mrs Dick’s story of how a family lives among the mountains is an intimate account of people, incidents, adventures, hard work and amusements in circumstances few New Zealanders share. Since she left the farm. ■ she has been called on to | lecture —usually at least two! or three times a week—to a widening variety of audiences I on that life. The book ends with an account of her term as tutor at Government House to Nicholas Lyttelton, son of Lord Cobham, when he was convalescing from an illness, ani of the perplexities that! face the wife of a member of i Parliament.