A Christchurch link with Totara

Press, 28 November 1980, Page 15

A Christchurch link with Totara

Christchurch has a link with the first shipment of frozen meat made from New Zealand in the sailing ship Dunedin in 1832. Miss Sheila Macpherson, who is living in Christchurch still busy with her garden and outside interests, like the Red Cross, although over 81 years of age, is the daughter of John Macpherson, who was the manager of the Totara estate just south of Oamaru when sheep and lambs were killed for the pioneer shipment. Totara was one of the properties then owned by the New Zealand and Australian Land Company and it was the company's general manager in Scotland, William Soltau Davidson, who organised the pioneer shipment sending out detailed instructions to the company’s New Zealand superintendent, Thomas Brydone. to whom there is a memorial cairn on a high point on Totara. John Macpherson did not marry until after the pioneer shipment was made and as the eighth member of a large family Miss Macpherson was not born until shortly before the turn of the century, but she remembers that when she was quite young — about seven years old — butchers were still killing stock on the estate. Miss Macpherson recalls that much fuss was made when Brydone visited Totara. Her father and mother treated him with great deference and Brydone had a special room in the fine old homestead. It was an occasion she remembers when the children were banished to the nursery.

With many men being employed on the station Totara boasted a cookhouse with a Chinese

cook, Jimmy Hoey, and because Brydone enjoyed his soup Miss Macpherson remembers her mother’ sending someone down to the cookhouse to collect soup for Mr Brydone. One of Miss Macpherson's special memories of Mr Brydone is, however, of the smell of cigar smoke. Once she recalls she and her brother Bill, who was only a little older than her. found one of Mr Brydone’s cigars. They halved it and clambered up on to the top of the thatched roof of a poultry house constructed of bales of hay — there could hardly have been a more combustible site — to try out the cigar. Perhaps luckily they were espied by one of the several clerks who then worked on the station, and Sheila and her brother were brought before her father. Bill received a sound hiding which Sheila escaped because she cried so much.

But if that momentarily cast a small shadow over their life, Miss Macpherson has memories of a wonderful childhood on Totara helped by the fact that she and her brother Bill got on very well together. She says that she loved the place and still has snapshots recalling those happy days — one of she and her brother on an old fashioned tricycle. She says that people seemed to be very happy in those days. Men would be heard whistling and singing and there did not seem to be the same preoccupation as there is today with money. There was a fine orchard on Totara and- she remembers that as youngsters they used to spend school holidays picking the fruit, which was given away to people like the bank

manager and many others.

Those were also the days of draught horses and hacks and buggies and gigs. There is a photograph in Miss Macpherson’s albums of 10 reapers and binders at work in one paddock on Totara. However in the early years of the century the Macphersons also had an early motor-car of French design. One of Miss Macpherson’s treasured links with her father is a card that he wrote as he was waiting to leave London for New Zealand more than 100 years ago. She went to school at the local Totara public school about a mile away where the head teacher was a Greek scholar. Her secondary schooling at St Hilda’s College in Dunedin during World War I was interrupted when she had to return home to look after her parents. Her brother Sandy volunteered for war service when only’ 17 years old and was badly wounded at Passchendaele (one of the great battles of the first war). The only other surviving member of the family. Bill, who now lives at Wanaka, was one of the country’s early pilots being trained at Wigram and then going overseas to join the Royal Air Force. Towards the end of the war when there was a shortage of nurses Miss Macpherson volunteered for service at Dunedin hospital, spent her eighteenth birthday there and helped with the nursing of badly wounded soldiers who returned from the war. Something that has greatly pleased her is the way in which the present owner of Totara, Mr G. L. Berry, has restored the old homestead.