As a young teenager, Colin left school to pursue his ambition to become a farmer. Starting out at Lynwood Station as a farmhand, he eventually worked on various large properties throughout the southern South Island; mustering, shearing, ploughing and learning first hand what farm work involved. By his mid-twenties, he was married with a young family and on his own small farm back home in Greenhills. The family moved to Castlerock and eventually to the Lillbum Valley where for more than twenty-five years they have owned and run a large stock-rearing property with an international reputation for its Hereford cattle breeding unit. Due to the parameters of the oral history project, this recording is not a full life review: it concentrates on Colin's years working in the Te Anau Basin and some of the people he remembers from that time