The Clarence: People and Places of Waiau Toa

Description

In The Clarence: People and Places of Waiau Toa, rural journalist Tim Fulton explores more than 200 kilometres of mountains, rivers and valleys bordering Canterbury and Marlborough. With its headwaters above Lake Tennyson, the Clarence has connected people for more than 800 years, from highly organised Maori settlements at the Pacific mouth to up-country trails through Molesworth and Clarence Reserve. The Clarence is vast, sparsely populated country - a wilderness carved out by earthquakes and the thrust of steep mountain ranges. People who work this rugged country understand that no one truly 'breaks in' the Clarence. It's always a wild place, spiked with danger for those who take it for granted. It's also country that breeds and nurtures incredible characters, like the musterers who keep coming to these stations for seasonal work until their legs, hips and backs can give no more. For these men and women, the grandeur and solitude of the back country is an addiction. The Clarence: People and Places of Waiau Toa captures the breathtaking majesty of this rugged region and the epic stories it holds.

Tim Fulton grew up on a sheep and crop farm at Swannanoa in North Canterbury. Inspired by family farming stories and a love for the New Zealand heartland, he became a rural journalist and has written much about the transformation of farming in the early 2000s, when agriculture first started to emerge from a so-called 'sunset industry'. His book on the lives of New Zealand farmers, Kiwi Farmers' Guide to Life, was published in 2021. When he was starting out in journalism, an old family friend, the late Jim Rossiter, told Tim about his 'last sheep muster' at Molesworth in the late 1930s, just as the government was about to take back control of the famous station. Tim kept a picture of Jim and his mates out in this wild country and always wondered what Jim had endured out there. Now, after nearly three years of research, Tim has a kind of answer - an account of life in and around the Clarence, from one end to the other. In The Clarence: People and Places of Waiau Toa, Tim shares the near misses, unlikely accomplishments and cases of 'making do' in these wild places, finding people who've never lost their wonder at being lucky enough to live and work in such a spellbinding part of New Zealand. With any luck, these are the sort of yarns that old Jim and his mates would have been happy to tell themselves.