The Water Joey

Mona Anderson.

Hardback, dust cover, second hand, black and white photos.

THE WATER-JOEY

IF you can remember the days when a trip to town meant harnessing the horse to the buggy. when the talk was about Hunter's White or the qualities of Black Tuscan, when a Canterbury autumn meant mile after mile of waving golden wheatfields, then you will remember watching the mills travelling along the country roads. First came the great traction-engine, clouds of black smoke billowing from its funnel. Next came the big red combine, then the green chaffcutter, then the men's whare, and lastly the cooking galley.

So says Mona Anderson in this book. And she tells of the mills and the men who served them, of hardworking farm-ers and their equally hardworking wives and children. Of hot harvest days from the early 1850s to the time when tractor and header-harvester sent threshing-mill and traction-engine down the road in the wake of the big Clydesdales they them-selves had once supplanted.

The book is rich in country yarns - of mischief and mishaps, hard cases and stealthy swaggers; and it also records factually the bonanza era of Canterbury wheatfarming. It mirrors a whole way of rural life that is all but forgotten now. The illustrations, too, are splendid...

Mrs Anderson was only just in time. Only today's oldies knew the mills at first hand, and their numbers are sadly dwindling now. The Water-Joey is a book for all lovers of open-country life: it is also an invaluable record of an important segment of New Zealand's rural history.