|
Life Up The Clarence
River - Part 1
Dorothy - 18/4/98
Resilient and resourceful people have maintained their farms through
economic and personal crises.
Every day cars speed across the Clarence River Bridge, and most take little
notice of the valley and the roads leading inland, but that valley has been
divided up for sheep farming since 1860 and there farming families led
lives very different from the city or coastal dwellers. On these isolated
stations people had to be very resourceful and developed a tiny supportive
community of men, women and children.
Interview with three women from the Clarence
I talked recently with three of the women who lived up the Clarence and
have now retired to Kaikoura. Janet Middleton and Ann Murray, sisters in
the Todhunter family, lived at Glen Alton station. Anna Inkersell (nee
Chaffey) lived at Waiautoa further up the river and then at Kekerengu after
her father Jim Chaffey bought the Bluff station. After Ann and Janet
married they continued to live on stations in the valley. With this
background they had much to share about life in the Clarence, especially
for the women.
|
Map of the Clarence River area
(Click here
for a larger version)
|
Glen Alton
|
Glan Alton homestead 1930, later dismantled after move to Harkaway
|
Glen Alton station on the south side of the Clarence was the home of the
Todhunters from 1914. Joe Todhunter, a seed merchant, bought the station
from a man called Lissaman whose wife had said that she could have nothing
to do with sheep and that the house must be built where she could see the
sea. Joe Todhunter married Mrs Dora Denholm, a widow with three children. She
proved to be a very practical and resourceful back country farmer's
wife.
Access
|
Carting wool across the big slip in 1936
|
Access was always a problem. Up the south side of the river access was
hindered by a large slip, so at that point no vehicle could go any further
and only horses or people on foot could get through. The slide was
constantly moving. Once a year it was cleared for the wool to be taken
out and the main supplies for the farm to be taken in, but soon the access
became inaccessible to vehicles again. The Ford car with its celluloid
windows had to be left on the coastal side of the slip in a scrub shed on
the main highway side of Wharekiri Stream.
In 1923 transport in the Clarence area became even more difficult. The
main road bridge across the Clarence River was washed away and access was
only by punt across the river. The cattle being sent north had to swim the
river, and sheep were transported on the punt.
Educating the family at Glen Alton
At first the children were educated by a governess. The family stayed at
Glen Alton until 1924.
When the older children were needing secondary education Mrs Todhunter
moved to Christchurch where they could attend a city school. For thirteen
years she remained in the city in a house near Rangi Ruru school where the
girls were pupils. In the long Christmas holidays they returned to Glen
Alton and then, to use Janet's phrase, 'we ran wild". This was the place
they really thought of as home.
As the effects of the great depression deepened in the late twenties Mr
Todhunter closed the house at Glen Alton, left the farm to be looked after
by a staff member and joined the family in Christchurch where he became a
land agent. With wool at threepence a pound the farm was not a viable
proposition. To meet the expenses of the family's schooling Mrs Todhunter
took children from other country families to board with them in the
city.
As the farming situation improved each family member who had finished
school returned to Glen Alton.
The family at Waiautoa
The Chaffey family lived at Waiautoa, a very remote area up the river from
Glen Alton. They went from Glen Alton to their farm by travelling in an old
truck chassis made into a trailer and pulled by horses.
Janet Todhunter acted as governess until 1945 supervising the children's
correspondence lessons. Then Anna went to stay with her grandmother at
Woodbank to attend school and went home at the weekends. Finally the
Chaffey family moved to Kekerengu in 1945 and she attended the school
there.
War years
During the Second World War most of the men on the station went away on
active service, so David Todhunter (Ann and Janet's brother) left school
and took over the management of the farm, with the assistance of one man
whose leg had been injured and gave him only limited mobility. Men in
their seventies came up from Kaikoura to assist with the mustering. Janet
worked as a land girl at a wage of one pound a week.
There was a radar station and a camp of air force staff at Clarence during
the war which the women said gave the family a sense of security at that
time.
Change of access
The river gradually cut in under the toe of the hill with the slip so it
was decided that the best access would be along the north side of the
Clarence through Woodbank, with a river crossing at Glen Alton itself.
For two years during the war no wool had been taken out so the
Rehabilitation Board organised a flying fox which was used to transport
wool and people.
However, when all the wool was taken out they removed the flying fox and
the people had to go back to crossing the slip!
The next access was by a cage on wires. This was able to take three bales
of wool across at a time, and the load was pulled up by a truck on the
other side. The empty cage was pulled back by horses.
|
Bridge contractor's truck being swung over river under cage in 1947
|
After the war a bridge was built by the Public Works Department. The Hon.
Bob Semple, Minister of Public Works, came to see the project. The PWD
decided that the bridge should not be wide enough for a double-wheeled
truck as this would automatically limit the weight of the loads taken
across.
Isolation on the inland stations
Life at the Bluff
The inland station on the north bank of the Clarence is known as The Bluff.
It has been described as the loneliest sheep station in New Zealand.
Hardship for the early families
J. M. Sherrard in his book, "Kaikoura: A History of the District" (pub
Kaikoura County Council 1966), relates the experience of Mrs Bennett, wife
of W. S. Bennett who was one of a syndicate who bought the station in 1920
after it had been virtually abandoned and overrun by rabbits.
The Bennetts found that there was no growth to feed their horses. On the
steep faces not even tussock was growing. Everything had to be carried
there by packhorses - even chaff to feed the horses. The pack track was
gone as with the tussock eaten away there were land slips.
The Bennetts were to live at the Bluff homestead, a cob house built in 1860
of clay and chopped tussock. The steep roof is designed for snowy
conditions and the doorways are low. It had been unoccupied for some
years and on the first night the Bennetts slept in a tent in the house as
there were so many spiders in the roof. The rabbits had eaten holes in the
walls between the rooms. The only source of water was a spring below a
steep bank some thirty yards from the house. In the winter snow and floods
would often delay mail for weeks or even months.
Transport problems
Everything needed at the Bluff had to taken in by packhorses and mules,
three days each way. A tractor was transported there in pieces and
re-assembled on arrival.
The household there depended on home made bread and mutton killed on the
farm, supplemented if they went hunting by meat from pigs, deer, and
rabbits, and in due course vegetables grown on the property. All cooking
was done on wood stoves until a turbine was installed in 1946 and
everything was electrified - indoor lights, range, and floodlighting
outside. The only time the station experienced power cuts was if the
turbine iced up.
Large station formed north of the Clarence
After World War 2 J. A. Chaffey (then owner of the Bluff station) took over
the Kekerengu homestead block, forming a station of 37,230 hectares,
(92,000 acres), which ran along the north bank of the Clarence for some
sixty miles, extending inland as far as Mt Tapuaenuku (9,465 feet . The
high country part of the station is in the Kaikoura ranges, between 2,000
metres (7,000 ft) and nearly 3,000 metres (10,000 ft) above sea level.
Read on to
“Life up the
Clarence River - Part II”...
| 
