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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 10 (January 1, 1936)

The Country Women

The Country Women.

There were capable women in the old backblocks days, when life was more or less in the rough and when the wives and daughters perforce had to fend for themselves a good deal. They can do it now, for that matter, but colonial life is becoming so ironed out and standardised that there is not so much necessity for self-reliance as there was in our younger days. I have been reading a capital book of New Zealand reminiscences issued by A.H. and A. W. Reed (Dunedin and Wellington). The writer is the last of the sisters of those plucky brother-soldiers, Major W. G. Mair and Captain Gilbert Mair, whose life stories have been given in the “New Zealand Railways Magazine.” Mrs. Howard Jackson, of Dunedin née Lavinia Laura Mair, is eighty-three, the last survivor of the children of Gilbert Mair, who arrived at the Bay of Islands from Peterhead, Scotland, in 1821. Her story of North Auckland days especially is an epic of colonisation, with many passages of charm in its description of country life sixty and seventy years ago.