Overview For most of his life, the Hollyford Valley has played a significant role in Murray's life. As a boy it was a distant place where his father, Davey Gunn, tried to make a living as a high country farmer. On the other side of the country, Murray grew up in Oamaru surrounded by women, his mother, aunt and two sisters. His first visit to the Hollyford was as a schoolboy in the late 1930s when he was one of a party on a walking holiday. The contrast between his home environment and that of his...

Abstract Murray Alexander GUNNInterviewer: Morag ForresterInterview date: 13 October 2008Tape I Side A011: States he is MURRAY ALEXANDER GUNN, born in MIDDLEMARCH in 1925.016: His first year, he says, was spent at his family's 1100-acre rural property at SUTTON near MIDDLEMARCH, which he describes as a small (grazing) RUN. He adds that his, FATHER (DAVEY GUNN) had to sell the property (in1926) due to making financial errors on the stock market...

Overview The younger son of a Canterbury dairy farmer, it was Tony's boyhood ambition to run his own sheep farm. School holidays in the early 1960s were spent on an uncle's sheep farm in Northern Southland where he learnt the basic skills of stock management such as drenching, lambing and shearing. A decade later Tony returned to Southland with wife, Judy, when they moved to their own 500-acre sheep and beef farm on one of the newly developed farm settlement blocks in the Te Anau Basin. This recording,...

Overview Anthony Phillip (Tony) MATTHEWSInterviewer: Morag ForresterDate of interview: 10 September 2008Tape I Side A005: States he is ANTHONY PHILLIP COLIN MATTHEWS, born in 1944. He adds that his FATHER was JOHN ROBERT CHARLES MATTHEWS who emigrated from ENGLAND at the age of nineteen, starting out in KAIKOURA.015: Goes on to say that his paternal GRANDFATHER, who was a church minister, died suddenly, leaving his estate to both sons. This,...

Overview Brought up on a farm in Canterbury in the 1950s and 60s, Judy was well-versed in the changing seasons of a rural lifestyle. So it was with some equanimity that not long after she married her farmer husband she was ready to leave the rolling midCanterbury plains for the more rigorous climate and terrain of Northern Southland followed by the remote, uncultivated soils of the Te Anau Basin. As new settlers of the Long Valley Block — part of the government's farm settlement scheme in the Basin — in...

Overview Born the youngest of four sons, Snow's early teens were shadowed by events in Europe. His older brothers on active service during WWII, he left school at the age of fourteen to help out on the family farm in North Otago. Post-war, he continued working as a farmhand on various properties throughout North Otago. A spell of employment with an Oamaru-based limeworks company led to his introduction to Te Anau where lime was extracted from a local site for use on the goverrnment's farm development...