Station life in North Canterbury

Press, 28 March 1981, Page 17

Station life in North Canterbury

A Year at Hawkswood. The diary of Frances Caverhilf for 1865, Vof. 1: January-June. Nag’s Head Press, 1981. 90 pp. $11.70. (Reviewed by Robert Lamb) '‘One of the great gaps in New Zealand ’ [history is that of the story, of the lives of j women- on stations and farms,” wrote W. 'J. Gardner in his history of theAmuri (published in 1955. It is good to find a diary such as Frances Caverhill’s that goes , .some way towards bridging this gap. How ;Well it reflects the ups and downs of ‘ life in those far-off times! s i We read here, for example, that when * the head shepherd at Hawkswood fell 1 down a precipice on the property in mid- I June, 1865, he had to nurse his bruises for j more than 24 hours before the doctor from ’ Parnassus could attend to him; and that when the doctor eventually arrived, he tried to explain his lateness by saying that « his horse “had been knocked up.” i A regular visitor to Hawkswood was the ’ ■Reverend’W. Hogg, Presbyterian minister stationed at Sefton, who went the rounds of the remote North Canterbury sheep Stations where there were quite a few

Scotch runholders. (The entries in this diary which read: “Had porridge for breakfast” certainly have a Scotch ring about them.) The autumn of 1865 was a good season ’ ? for fruit at Hawkswood when Mrs i Caverhill, assisted by two maid-servants, I was often to be found gathering plums and apples in the station orchard. The . same two maids were rather industrious, | judging from the following entry in the ) diary of 12 June: “Jane and Agnes finished < washing by 9 o’clock this morning as they j were up before 1.” g Hawkswood, being situated near the I coast just south of the Conway River, was 1 able to have its wool-clip shipped by | coastal vessel to Lyttelton. On the same | vessel Mrs Caverhill sometimes sent S presents of home-made jam to her 1 Christchurch friends. What great | , quantities of it she made — amounting to a , no less than 241 lb in the autumn of 1865. g That happened to be the time when I hundreds of goldminers, who had come by * ship from Otago to Lyttelton, were to be seen trekking overland to the West Coast diggings. When Mrs Caverhill was on her

way to Christchurch with her husband, on ;■ March 29, travelling in their horse-drawn ‘ carriage, she counted 84 diggers between Weka Pass and Leithfield — "besides t some in coaches.” A further 94 were encountered on the following day as the Caverhills continued their journey. Already several men from Hawkswood — as this diary records — had caught the gold fever and left the station. The circle of friends and relations in ■which the Caverhills moved while ( holidaying in Christchurch, belonged for i the most part to their own run-holding class. They included, for example, the Murray-Aynsleys who lived at Riverlaw on the Heathcote, Mrs John Deans of Riccarton, and the Tempters of "Coringa” station near Avonhead. (Mrs Templer was ; a sister of Mrs Caverhill.)'' / I After affording the reader some delightful glimpses of contemporary Christchurch and of the long overland journey homeward, once the visit was over, our diarist returns to the Hawkswood scene. There is a touching simplicity in her description of that homecoming as she writes: "The dear children were so pleased when I w'ent in and had so much to tell me. I kissed my little pet Johnnie who was fast asleep.” The boy referred to here was her 14- 1 months-old son for whom she made warm j petticoats and pinafores that winter. A second volume, which Mr R. S. Gormack is now printing and annotating, will carry the diary forward to the end of 1865. It has already called for considerable annotation to shed light on its obscure passages — a task which Mr , Gormack has performed with commendable thoroughness. He is to be congratulated for having brought it out of the hidden recesses of the Canterbury Museum into the light of day; for it is a piece of writing that will be avidly read by all who have a ; genuine interest in . Canterbury history. Great as their number ■ may be, the printing of this edition is • limited to 300 copies. . s .>