A Life's Roundabout

Arnott Anderson began his farming career as a cadet ? 'for the privilege of my being able to get up at 4.30 a.m., groom, feed and work a six-horse team, my father paid the boss £1 a week' ? and next became a roustabout on the huge St Helens Station, near Hanmer. His descriptions of this and other North Island runs on which he worked give an authentic picture of life in the back country during the early years of this century. The years brought a variety of experience: working on the great Makatoke railway viaduct, clearing bush land in the King Country, breeding pedigree cattle, milling timber, breaking in horses - and having to walk off his property after the 1921 slump. He began again with a stock and station firm and was developing an isolated high-country run of 45,000 acres behind Taihape when World War II began. By putting his age back fifteen years he was able to enlist and was sent to the Middle Est. His day-to-day account of army life will ring true to every Kiwi soldier and includes a vivid report of the tragic campaigns in Greece and Crete.

After the war his major energies were devoted to developing his North Canterbury property, Kalimera, along with his son Derek, to whom he sold out in 1961. On return from a visit to Greece and Crete the lure of the land proved too much and he purchased a Banks Peninsular property neglected and most difficult to access. The bringing back of this farm to an economic unit was a retirement project few in their sixties, let alone octogenarians, would lightly undertake, yet the author and his wife successfully carried out the restocking and improvement of Double Bay and only an accident forced them to relinquish their work.

- from the dust jacket.

A Life's Roundabout
E. Arnott Anderson

Whitcomb and Tombs
Christchurch
1974
Second revised edition

Green cloth boards with titles in gold on the spine.