Damaging winds brought down trees and power lines in many places, cutting electricity supplies to thousands of homes. Items in this collection are restricted.In the middle of September, cold air sliding down off the Antarctic Plateau punched into mid-latitudes south of Tasmania, swung around a deep low, then hit New Zealand from the west. (Summary by Gail Timmerman-Vaughan)Īrchived from iTunes at. Lady Mary Anne Barker and her husband returned to England at the end of 1868. As one of the few women in her part of Canterbury at the time, she also helped provide the neighbourhood with books to read, and baptism and schools for children. In other letters, she describes her pride and enjoyment at joining and keeping up with nine men, who doubted her abilities, for long hours of walking in untracked, untamed bush with the aim of hunting wild cattle and her joy at setting ablaze the tussock grasslands on their sheep station in spite of the risk to her eyelashes. She describes instigating a bitterly cold late autumn overnight camping trip to the top of their nearest hill, Flagpole, followed the next morning by a serene sunrise over the Canterbury plains.

She describes the regular predations of the Canterbury nor'wester (a type of Fohn wind), including its role in completely blowing away her attempts at establishing a croquet lawn, the devastating effects of snow storm that killed over half of their sheep, and of a great flood that not only flooded Christchurch but demolished her poultry and nearly drowned her husband.Lady Mary Anne Barker was a strong horse woman and very keen for all sorts of 'adventures'. Consequently, little was known about, for example, the irregular Canterbury weather patterns that would dominate the lives of Lady Barker and her husband for those three short years. Although these letters are written with great humour and fine story telling, her life was marred by tragedy while in Canterbury through the illness and eventual death of her baby son.The first four ships of settlers that colonised the Canterbury region had only arrived in 1850. The letters were written between 18 and cover the time of her travel with her husband (Frederick Broomie) to New Zealand and life on a colonial sheep-station at their homestead 'Broomielaw', located in the Province of Canterbury, South Island of New Zealand. These letters are described in the Preface as 'the exact account of a lady's experience of the brighter and less practical side of colonisation'. Station Life in New Zealand is a collection of cheerful and interesting letters written by Lady Mary Anne Barker (nee Mary Anne Stewart) that is a New Zealand 'classic'.

Station life in new zealand lady barker