You would think, judging by my color slide of Reta and Tommy Thomson in their garden, admiring their rhododendrons, that they have lived a pretty genteel life. In fact, although gentle folk, they have lived a hard life in a hard country.
A beautiful country, though. To get to their place, Earnslaw
Station, you start from Queenstown, the Aspen of New Zealand, full of Japanese
tourists; drive up the shore to the head of
After talking first with their son, Geoff, about some of the modern troubles
of
Reta grew up on a sheep station nearby. She was
used to that type of isolation, but not the type she faced when she married
Tommy, a mining engineer, and he took her to
Things were in bad shape. The station was sadly run-down and badly over-run
with rabbits--the European gray rabbit, introduced to
With the help of Reta's father, they did learn how to run the place. They recall how they adapted the flock to the landscape, getting rid of Merinos and cross-breeding a Perendale flock that would prosper there. They describe the techniques peculiar to the craft of sheep farming in the tussock country, such as selective burning. But most of all, they talk about the darned rabbits.
At this time, in the 1940s, the
On his own run, he brought in professional rabbiters. The main road up the valley divided the flats of the station in rough halves. He settled one family of rabbiters on one side, a second family on the other. The rabbiters went after the pests by laying out poison oats, carrots, and jam on freshly turned furrows. They got to keep and sell the rabbit skins.
The common problem with professional rabbiters was that they were not motivated to do a thorough job. If they wiped out the rabbits on their allotted blocks, there would be no profit the next year. So Tommy developed a system of rotation. Every month the rabbiters had to switch sides of the road. Both rabbiters thus worked hard, not desiring to leave rabbits for the other. Still, it took many years of poisoning and gassing to clean up the station.
After discussing the grisly details of rabbit extermination, we had some tea and a stroll in the garden.
Two months later, thrashing through a box of papers at the National Archives of New Zealand, I had one of those small-world experiences. I was reading a crusty letter someone had written to the Minister of Agriculture in 1950, insisting that he "lay the blame for the state of the country where it rightly belongs--that is, with the runholder and the farmer." Rabbits were eating out the range, and instead of crying for help, the pastoralists needed to take care of their own problems. They needed to bring in professional rabbiters and attack the problem with market incentives. (Pretty sound doctrine.)
The signature at the bottom? T.E. Thomson.