Station Cook

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30586, 31 October 1964, Page 4

Station Cook

Cooks and Shepherds Come Away. By Irene Staples. A. H. and H. W. Reed. 160 pp.

Mrs Staples had lived in the city nearly all her life when she and her husband decided to take a post as shepherd and cook on a sheep station in the high country, so the life as well as the job was a new adventure for her. For two years she cooked for “five permanents and casuals,” and found time as well to observe and record the routine of the station and the ways of the men who worked there, whom she describes with cheerful friendliness, even though they would never say “thank you” for a meal except once, on Christmas Day. Obviously it was in many ways a hard life, isolated from shops and conversation, and sometimes the station hands were exasperating—“lf there’s scones on the table he says he’d rather have pikelets. If there’s pikelets he says he’d rather have sandwiches”—but Mrs Staples writes with zest and humour, and even admits to having been bored at first when they returned to soft city life with only six to feed.