Life Up The Clarence River

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
Map of the Clarence River area (Click here for a larger version)

Glen Alton

Glan Alton homestead 1930
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
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
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”…