Station Life in New Zealand

by Lady Barker.

1883



Preface.

These letters, their writer is aware, justly incur the reproach of
egotism and triviality; at the same time she did not see how this
was to be avoided, without lessening their value as the exact
account of a lady's experience of the brighter and less practical
side of colonization. They are published as no guide or handbook
for "the intending emigrant;" that person has already a literature
to himself, and will scarcely find here so much as a single
statistic. They simply record the expeditions, adventures, and
emergencies diversifying the daily life of the wife of a New Zealand
sheep-farmer; and, as each was written while the novelty and
excitement of the scenes it describes were fresh upon her, they may
succeed in giving here in England an adequate impression of the
delight and freedom of an existence so far removed from our own
highly-wrought civilization: not failing in this, the writer will
gladly bear the burden of any critical rebuke the letters deserve.
One thing she hopes will plainly appear,--that, however hard it was
to part, by the width of the whole earth, from dear friends and
spots scarcely less dear, yet she soon found in that new country new
friends and a new home; costing her in their turn almost as many
parting regrets as the old.