Overview From a young age, Ray knew that he wanted to become a sheep farmer. After leaving school he completed tertiary studies in commerce and agriculture at Lincoln College. Having also got married to the daughter of a farmer, he went on to work at her family's farm near Riversdale before securing a position as shepherd in the Moa Flat area. It was there that Ray and Ruth decided to apply for a balloted farm under the government's citizen settlement scheme which ran for almost thirty years until the...

Overview Fifty years ago, Lottie boarded ship at a Dutch port bound for Wellington. She and her fellow passengers were New Zealand immigrants under the government's assisted passage scheme for displaced persons following the end of WWII. Embarking on a new life with the help of her first employers, Sir Matthew and Lady Oram, Lottie quickly adapted to the New Zealand lifestyle. A few years later, she crossed the Tasman but unable to adjust to the hot South Australian summers, she returned to New Zealand....

Overview Evan's boyhood interest in deer hunting around Waimate led him, at the age of twenty-one, to apply for a job as government culler in the Te Anau Basin. Two seasons for the Forest Service were followed by several years as a shooter involved in the venison recovery industry in southern New Zealand. For almost a decade, he and his wife and children were based at Martins Bay on the Fiordland west coast before moving, in 1983, to start a new deer farm on the outskirts of Te Anau. This recording...

Overview Leaving school as soon as he was able, Allie began his builders apprenticeship with the same Dunedin firm, McLellan Construction that employed his father. It was a move which saw Allie forge a long-term career in the building trade that led to his overseeing some major projects in the Te Anau Basin in the early 1970s, including a complete redevelopment of the fire-damaged Te Anau Hotel and an early version of eco-tourism design at Takaro Lodge on the edge of the Fiordland National Park. This...

Overview More than fifty years ago Ray first set eyes on the Fiordland Mountains while doing a tour of his adopted homeland. As a child growing up in war-time London, he immigrated to New Zealand in 1953 on the cusp of his seventeenth birthday to work on a dairy farm in Northland. Captivated by that first visit to Te Anau and Milford Sound, Ray and his wife, Helen, have lived in the Te Anau area since 1961, with only a five-year separation from the Fiordland Mountains when they worked as managers of a...

Overview Fifty years ago, while the politicians and planners made board table decisions about the future development of what was one of New Zealand's remotest regions, Chris Carran and his brothers were working on those changes from the ground up. As agricultural contractors, in the mid-1950s they were hired to clear the land and plough paddocks that would permanently alter the topography of former run country in the Te Anau Basin. From those inauspicious beginnings as a teenager, Chris returned to Te...

Overview Dave spent about eighteen years working as a shepherd and farm manager in the remote back country ranges between Mossburn and Te Anau before and after the government's 30-year farm development scheme in the same region. This interview looks at the changes Dave experienced working for an individual runholder whose attachment to, and investment in, the Burwood/Mavora/Centre Hill area could not compete with the government agency that by 1966 had bought the rights to the leasehold properties and...

Overview From an early age, Jeff Carter's driving ambition was to spend his time hunting deer, rabbits and possums that roamed the hills and mountain passes of southern New Zealand. Despite being cajoled into taking up a more stable occupation in motor mechanics, it was hunting that proved the enduring option especially as it developed into a financially lucrative one in the early 1970s. Bounty was to be had in the venison recovery industry in Fiordland and the reserves and basins adjacent to the...

Overview From a young age, John Barker developed a keen interest in deer hunting around the Gisbome district in which he grew up. But it was the lure of hunting the bigger Fiordland wapiti that inevitably drew him to a job at Milford Sound where his spare time was spent shooting deer and hybrid wapiti in the Fiordland mountains. Not long before his arrival, helicopters had started being used in the venison recovery industry in the same area and by the early 1970s John formed a business partnership which...