Lindsay Rabbitt
Unpacking the Kists:The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking and Jim McAloon (Otago University Press, 2013), 412 pp., $70

In the nineteenth century John Polson, my maternal great-great-grandfather, downed tools as a cooper in the herring trade in West Helmsdale and said goodbye to his family at their croft in Marrel, a neighbouring village in Sutherlandshire, Highland Scotland, and sailed for New Zealand/Aotearoa. He arrived in Lyttelton in 1862 and sailed on to Port Chalmers. By chance a fellow passenger, contracted to walk a mob of sheep to Morven Hills Station, fell ill during the journey, and John, with apparently little experience in shepherding, manned up for the gig. Perhaps he travelled the Pig Route to the Maniototo Plains, or alternatively on a track the miners took to the goldfields, starting in Outram, West Taieri, on to the Lammermoor Range at Rocklands, and across the Rock and Pillar and over the Knobby Range, descending to cross the Manuherikia River near Alexandra, then on to Tarras and the Lindis Pass to meet John (Jock) McLean, one of the first leaseholders of Morven Hills who, according to John’s grandson Ian Polson, ‘saw his mettle and employed John as a boundary rider on the spot’. [Read more…]

A Woman’s Place: Good Wives, Happy Husbands and Why a Woman’s Work Is Never Done, compiled by Redmer Yska (Penguin, 2013), 128 pp., $24.99; Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890—1975, by Frances Walsh (Godwit Books, 2010), 375 pp., $49.99.

Yellowing and faded ephemera, whimsy, oddities, out-dated information and gender-specific beliefs feature extraordinarily in these two publications. In say 1957, a real woman with three or four children under five, how would she take the cheery ad-world housewife, zooming away chores with a new vacuum cleaner, fresh as a daisy due to castors on her fashionable furniture? 

As a youngster, I wondered in those days what women said during morning teas. Children were always herded outside to play whenever a swish of visitors settled in to sip and chatter. They were fine secret-keepers, the coterie of women my mother cultivated and belonged to. She also mentioned, emphatically, after she’d, ‘Helped with an an old lady who’d passed away’s house, cleaned it up. The things we found.’ I anticipated revelations. But Mum snapped, ‘I went straight home. Cleared out everything I didn’t want left behind, of mine.’
My disappointment was as heavy as any teetering stack of magazines given to charity. (My mother loved the Woman’s Weekly). 
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