The Mount White Country

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31209, 5 November 1966, Page 4

The Mount White Country

The Boss’s Story. By Peter Newton. A. H. and A. W. Reed. 191 pp.

The author’s name is synonymous with the high country of Canterbury and his latest book—his sixth—describes his years as manager of one of its largest and most famed sheep stations, Mount White, of 120,000 acres.

Mr Newton began his career as a station cow-boy. He went through the grades of mustering to achieve eventually a life-long ambition to be in command of Mount White. His experience with station work and with musterers and station hands prepared him well for the job. He achieved a substantial increase in flock numbers and wool weights, and total clip. This is no mean feat in a sheep station such as Mount White, which is an industry in itself but with its boundaries embracing 200 square miles of mountains and river valleys, subject to the worst extremes of climate, and its homestead 18 miles from the nearest highway over a winding, narrow mountain road.

The Mount White country is steeped in early Canterbury history. It covers a large portion of the country between the Arthur’s Pass and Lewis Pass highways and between the Puketeraki range —visible from Christchurch —and the Southern Alps. The station once grew large stands of oats for chaff for the coach horses travelling over Arthur’s Pass, and also supplied horses in the horse-

drawn tram era in Christchurch.

“The Boss's Story,” captures the hard-working, turbulent lives of the musterers. Their rigorous job takes them on mountain-sides thousands of feet up, or to outback camps 15 miles from the homestead, mustering sheep, fencing, or carrying out a host of other tasks. They live through winters so severe that one of the jobs each morning is to thaw out the frozen water pipes at the homestead with a blow-lamp. Crowbars are sometimes needed to prise vegetables from the frosthard garden. Heavy snowfalls are a constant worry because of the possibility of drastic losses of sheep. Other trials are the risk of sudden illness with wives and children on the station, far from medical aid; and the difficulty faced by most highcountry runs these days in getting cooks, full gangs of shearers and musterers, and other labour. The drift away from the back country is freely acknowledged by Mr Newton, whose main problem in this respect always seemed to be to obtain cowmen who liked cows and gardeners who liked gardening.

But over-riding all the hard realities of life in this country is the close companionship fostered among the outback breed, and the jovial good humour. The book is a good study of a delightful corner of the Canterbury high country—only 100 miles from the city, but worlds away in character and in the life it offers those who brave its isolation.