The Acland family, 1887.
Feature
Green remembered hills
by Natasha Hay
A blissful return to the first high-country sheep station in Canterbury.
It’s 25 years since I left Mt Peel and, as I head inland toward the mountains, driving alongside the mighty Rangitata River and up the shingle road to the handsome colonial homestead, I feel my heart surge.
In 1981, that time of national social fission, I’d worked for several blissful months at Mt Peel Station, the first high-country sheep station in Canterbury. I was a self-titled slave girl to the Acland family, the descendants of the original pioneer, John Barton Arundel Acland.
He was a restless spirit, too. The sixth son of a Devon baronet, he had emigrated with his mate Charles Tripp, both having abandoned law careers in London for colonial adventure. They were perfect candidates for Edward Wakefield’s dream of transplanting English society to Canterbury but, when they arrived, the flat plains were all taken up, and the two men headed for the remote, uninhabited mountains. It was high up the Rangitata River that Acland decided to build a home.
To inhabit this landscape you have to be staunch. Samuel Butler, who based the first chapters of his satire Erewhon on his time near here, lasted only four years. But for Acland and Tripp, who arrived here in the mid-19th century, the new land possessed a future. Acland wrote to prospective farmers in England that some men came to the colony “to make as much money as possible in a few years, and return to England”, but far better was the immigrant who wished “to improve his condition by finding and making for himself a new home in a new land and as a true colonist was prepared to cast his lot in with the fortunes of his new country”.
Acland built a solid brick home – an idio-syncratic yet elegant 18-room house with fanciful gables – that would last for generations. He planted trees that would shelter the house from the brutal nor’westers that whipped down the gorge: rhododendrons, elms, cedars, the first pinus radiata in the country. He was here for the long haul.
On this drizzly Saturday at the end of April, over 300 former workers have gathered in front of the homestead to mark the 150th year of the arrival of the station’s founders. The rain deters none of this hardy mob: shearers, shepherds, fencers, rabbiters, contractors, musterers. We have all been touched by this land.
Johnny Acland runs the family farm now. He’s 41. I remember him as a wilful, exasperating lad; now he’s a passionate and resourceful farmer, with deep feeling for the countryside. On a tour of the property, he regales us with station history. A fog has set in, turning the world white. The windswept hillsides are bleak and forlorn.
John’s 70-year-old father, also John, handed over the reins to his son a decade ago and now – following a family tradition of public service – devotes himself to chairing the government’s Land Access Committee. He and his brother Mark, who was his joint manager, describe taming the land. It’s boulder-free and verdant, the paddocks beaten into workable shape; there’s a carpet of green where not a blade had grown before. Well-nourished deer blink back at us.
Back at the woolshed, a display of photos records the men and women who weathered the ups and downs of farming the property. Stuart Davis, 80, has spent the past week getting the shed ready. “All this work for one day,” he harrumphs; but he’s beaming with pride, clutching a Speights, and tossing titbits to his elderly jack russell. The photos show floods, droughts, disastrous snowstorms – the snow that lay for three weeks in 1886 and killed half the sheep – the cattle musters. In one of the pictures, there I am, in overalls, arms specked with blood, grinning as I lop off lambs’ tails with a gas-fired guillotine. Stockmen Rennie McRae and Kevin Edge are beside me, snipping off the sheep’s testicles. I remember they were later fried with butter – my first mountain oysters.
At the dinner that night in the marquee beside the woolshed, Kevin gives an emotional speech. There are tales of stockmen and managers and mountain kings Tim Wallis and Doug Maxwell, legends on the station in airborne wild-deer recovery and derring-do. These guys lived life on the edge.
The star of the night, though, is Lady Kit Acland, the matriarch. She’s 95 and formid-able, and she salutes the women of the station and the community spirit they nurtured. In stentorian tones, she speaks of her time on the farm, from 1935 to 1981, when her husband Jack managed the station and later commuted weekly for five years to Wellington as the National MP for Temuka. (On one of his last trips in 1968 he was in the sea for three hours after the Wahine sank.)
I remember Lady Acland in 81; aged 71, she marched in Christchurch against the Springbok tour. Red Kate, the upper ranks of the National Party had nicknamed her.
Next morning, it’s a glorious day. You can see the sharply edged peaks of little Mt Peel and big Mt Peel overshadowing the homestead with a faint dusting of snow. The air is crisp. I take the meandering path through the homestead gardens to the family church, with its holly hedges, blackberries, giant Himalayan lilies. Bellbirds sing and fat wood pigeons swoop overhead in the dappled light. It feels a blessed land.
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