Janet White is pictured with a boat on the island in New Zealand, in 1954, when she was 24. She arrived in New Zealand after six weeks on a crowded emigrant ship. Photo / Supplied
Janet White is pictured with a boat on the island in New Zealand, in 1954, when she was 24. She arrived in New Zealand after six weeks on a crowded emigrant ship. Photo / Supplied
In January 1953, Janet White arrived from the UK after six weeks on a crowded emigrant ship to farm in Northland. This is an extract from her book The Sheep Stell.
It was no kind of day for violence and bloodshed. The morning on Aroa [Motukawanui Island] was as beautiful as any I can recall: a blue sky, no wind, and all the promise of heat. The water in the bay was a deep clear green and I watched white wide-winged gannets pose, plummet and pierce the calm surface, their swift impact flinging up fountains of spray.
Aroa was my personal idyll – the island of my dreams, three miles off the New Zealand coast, where I lived as a young British woman, blissfully alone with only my flock of sheep, horses, sheepdogs and other animals for company.
I was a female farmer in the early 1950s, barely out of my teens – and found myself something of a curiosity. On this particular day my paradise was shrouded in fear. There stood Jack, a fellow British emigrant to this far-off land, frantic with frustration at my repeated refusal to marry him and give up my treasured freedom, threatening me with a rifle.
The brilliant sunshine, the sheep filing quietly across the yellow pastures to find shade, the sea, vivid, indolent and sparkling beyond the flat-leafed fig trees, made our shouts – and the blows that followed – seem small and ludicrous. It was like a brawl in a church, a desecration of serenity.
I begged him to wait, to think, to do nothing in fury which he might later regret, but he would not listen to me. He hit me again and again until I fell and the butt of the rifle broke off. It dropped on to the pebbles beside my face. I could feel the blood running down my neck and round my ears.
There was a long, taut silence and I tried not to move a muscle so that he would think I was dead. Then I heard the crunching of shingle as he walked away.
Every animal needs its territory and humans are no exception. By the time I was 14, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
I intended to live somewhere wild and supremely beautiful. I imagined searching the whole world for a place, high and remote as a sheep stell, those drystone hillside shelters; quiet as a monastery, challenging and virginal, untouched and unknown.
Growing up the child of academics in the Cotswolds countryside during wartime, my restlessness at school turned into downright rebellion and I got a job as a milkmaid. I loved the smell of cows and hay; the clang of buckets and drumming milk and the whistling of the men.
Later, at agricultural college, thrust into a lecture room full of young men, I fell passionately in love. I was hypnotised, addicted and furious with myself. Such infatuation was a threat to my freedom, self-sufficiency and ambition. I raged at my weakness, but as soon as I was confronted by him I was lost.
On the final day of term he brought me roses. We danced at the ball and swam in the river.
A crescent moon shone as we walked back across damp meadows, while our locked fingers proved that there could be no greater rapture in life than to touch someone for the first time with innocent, unspoken affection.
A fertile correspondence and devoted friendship began, which survived both his marriage the following year, and my own eight years later. But I loved him too much and ended up exiled from his company.
My first experience as a shepherd came in Scotland's Cheviot Hills a year later. This was a wild landscape, full of blending, variegated colours: green, yellow and rust-red on the lower flanks then, above the fern line, purple, grey, blue and black, the shades changing with the seasons and brightened, or softened, by the light. Here was the work and environment I craved, and the freedom which I needed and valued so much. A measure of solitude had become essential.
It was a hard beginning. Sheep are such mild, vulnerable creatures with too many enemies. Lambs were abandoned, starved, frozen and buried under snow. Ewes, rolling to scratch their backs and unable to get back on their feet, died ignominiously, four hooves in the air, after hours of struggling.
I minded these disasters too much, fretting away the night over a sheep or lamb that, I felt, I could have saved. But in the morning, when I opened the cottage door, I was consoled. Sometimes a sea of mist lay along the valley floor, while the crests of the hills caught the first shafts of sunlight.
Janet White is pictured with a sheepdog on the island in 1954. She wanted to see a country renowned both for its natural beauty and for its progressive sheep-farming. Photo / Supplied
Often a heron stood motionless by the trout pool, waiting for his breakfast, or a russet fox slipped down through the ferns to drink and, watching his grace, I forgot the lambs he might have taken.
The man I loved had married so I threw myself into work. I wanted to excel, to be not just a shepherd, but a good one and to match the men in all their skills. At shearing time I insisted on clipping alongside the herds [male shepherds]. No one wanted to be outdone by a mere girl and as I became practised, so the pace hotted up. After a week, I could manage 50 ewes a day. Often the men made fun of me, laughing when I picked a ewe which refused to be turned over or kicked the shears out of my hand or escaped with a half-shorn fleece trailing in a woolly train behind her.
Here in the hills, wethers [rams] were still castrated by a shepherd slicing off the tip of the scrotum with a knife and drawing out the testicles with his teeth. Sometimes our operator spat his false teeth in the bucket by mistake and the herds suggested that my strong, young teeth would do a much more efficient job. My female weakness prevailed for once.
When I was still inexperienced, I found a wild young ewe in trouble with an enormous headfirst lamb.
I could not shift the monster, and there it was, looking at me with open eyes and tongue turning dark and swollen. There was no one I could shout to for help, not a soul within a mile, just a pair of black crows circling overhead like vultures with some uncanny premonition of the pickings to come. Quite suddenly the lamb slid free. I shook it by the heels but it looked dead.
As a last resort I blew half-heartedly into its mouth and a few moments later, like a miracle, the lamb gave a bubbly choky gulp and began to breathe.
Not all lambing cases ended so happily and sometimes it was necessary to replace a dead lamb with a twin taken from another ewe. The foster lamb had to be dressed in the dead one's skin so as to deceive the mother into thinking it was her own offspring. She recognised her lamb by its smell and, if the skin was a poor fit, she circled round and round the impostor suspiciously, or began to bunt it away. But if the skin fitted like a glove, a maternal ewe could be hoodwinked.
My first season brought me beginner's luck, but my second taught me that no amount of enthusiasm and hard work necessarily ensures success. Snowstorms and prolonged frosts may bring a shortage of food when the ewes are heavily pregnant or the lambs newly born. Unexpected disease, marauding dogs, foxes, gulls and crows may take their toll. After two years, accommodation shortages meant a family was to move into my cottage with me. The spell was broken – it was time to move on.
It was midsummer, January 1953, when I arrived in New Zealand after six weeks on a crowded emigrant ship. I wanted to see a country renowned both for its natural beauty and for its progressive sheep-farming, and to put the greatest distance between myself and the man I loved.
I became friends with a fellow British emigrant called Jack, and we both became herd-recording officers on dairy farms, noting the quantity and quality of milk yields. One day, Jack asked me to marry him. I was dumbfounded. How could anyone in their right mind want me as a wife? A more reluctant housekeeper and a lousier cook would be hard to find. Didn't he know that I lived in the clouds with my feet hardly touching the ground at all, that my head was full of far more exciting plots and plans than marriage?
I explained I was in love with a married man in England, and that I was obstinately heading for my own particular sort of nunnery – an island and a flock of sheep!
One day I noticed an island of 1,000 acres for sale in the newspaper. My map of New Zealand revealed it as a dot in the far north, miles from anywhere.
I could have hunted the whole world over and never in a lifetime found anywhere so right: warm, high, pastoral and severed by the sea. It was golden: a dare, a dream and a challenge but it was sold.
The island, I discovered, had been bought by a doctor who planned to use it for fishing holidays, so I wrote asking if he would consider me as a tenant, manager or share farmer.
The Sheep Stell, by Janet White, is published by Constable in Great Britain and is available from Hachette NZ Ltd at NZ $37.99.
He could not conceal his astonishment that I should want to go there. And alone! We struck a bargain. I was to accomplish all that a man would and look after the island – fences, boat, machinery, house, gardens and 120 cattle – in return for grazing up to 1,000 sheep of my own. Neither of us really knew in whose favour the scales tipped.
Everything moved fast – I bought 200 sheep and moved to Aroa [Motukawanui Island].
The sea was a tropical blue-green; diamond clear, revealing every dark weed and pale shell. The island was infinitely peaceful, the hilltops catching the mounting sunlight. I learnt to judge the time by the pattern of sunshine on my bedroom wall, but time was of little importance.
There was no sink, no sanitation, no electricity, no radio.
The weather decided my activities, but usually in the mornings I rode round the stock, watchful for sheep caught on cliffs or stuck on their backs, for gates blown open or fences in need of repair.
In the afternoons I gathered driftwood, cleaned the boat, cut the manuka scrub or worked in the garden. There were also seasonal jobs: lambing, shearing, dipping, drafting cattle and ear-marking calves.
I loved to sit listening to the soft breathing of the waves on a calm night, or the surf pounding on the beach with the knowledge that the wild sea would permit no one to come. At low tide, on a warm and moonlit night, the beach gleamed wet and silvery, the surf shone ghostly white and the sharp, serrated teeth of the rocks loomed black. It was incomparable.
Solitude had never been a goal in itself; it was simply a part of the pastoral environment which I loved. Besides, I did not consider Aroa solitary. Everywhere one looked there was life: wader-birds strutting along the shore, fish swimming in shoals, cows munching kelp, ewes cropping the banks of the creek, pheasants calling from the fir plantation, sand worms burrowing, plants growing.
Within months my Eden was threatened when, without consulting me, the doctor sent Jack to help me. To give me no warning, allow me no choice and simply arrive on the beach like a shipwrecked sailor made me mutinous. Sexual equality and women's lib were unheard of in those days, but I was prepared to fight for my freedom. He was a turbulent companion. Sometimes the first thing he said at breakfast was "marry me!"
Other mornings he might say nothing at all. His discontent festered like a sore in the sun and he waged a losing battle trying to convince me that marriage would be the answer to all my problems.
He eventually left, but telegrams, like sudden claps of thunder, began to arrive with increasing frenzy.
One night, while the doctor was visiting, he burst in with a knife and was handed over to the police.
But weeks later, he arrived while I was alone and carried out his vicious attack. Left for dead, I crawled on to the boat and rowed to the mainland, spending three weeks in hospital with a suspected skull fracture.
Jack was sentenced to three years in jail and, although it never occurred to me not to return to Aroa, I knew in my heart my days on the island were numbered.
The Boss made it clear in his letters that, for my own safety, I must be gone from the island before Jack was finally released from prison. When the time came, I sold the animals and booked my passage back to England where my family and friends had been neglected far too long.
Just before dark on the night I left, the liner sailed within sight of my island. I could see it lying humped in the far distance across the smooth, leaden sea, islets and reefs studding its boundary.
