A history of your station and the families who farmed it.
Run records, mortgage files and old newspapers show who held the land and when. The winters the road was shut, and the reasons one family sold to another, sit with the people who were there and in the photo albums their families have kept. I write histories of high country stations, farms and the families who worked them, built from those people’s accounts and checked against the archives, so the book is accurate and still reads like a story.
The Branches.
The Branches is a high country station at the headwaters of the Shotover River, farmed as a run since 1874 and reached by the Skippers road, which is often closed at the Blue Slip for months at a time. In February 2024 David Thomson, one of its partners, engaged me to research and write its history, because the station’s managers had been telling the partners that the early stories were slipping away as the people who remembered them grew older.
I made four trips to the station over the project, driving in on some and flying in twice, and interviewed the families of former owners, the current managers, the partners, people on neighbouring stations and a gold miner with a claim in the valley. By the end, the acknowledgements named 29 people. The records were spread between the Hocken Library and Archives New Zealand in Dunedin and the Lakes District Museum in Arrowtown, with much of the twentieth-century material in family photo albums. Before 1900 the record is mostly land transactions, court proceedings and the occasional newspaper report, so the early chapters were built from official sources and the later ones from the memories of people who had lived and worked there.
The book runs from the gold rush to the partnership that farms the station today. It is a 256-page, 290 x 290 mm hardback with more than 100 photographs, printed in a run of 1,000 copies and published by Laughing Penguin Press on 1 April 2026, and it went into bookshops including Paper Plus and Whitcoulls.
Who I write for.
- Families who have farmed the same land for several generations and want it recorded while the older generation can still tell it.
- Stations changing hands or taking on new partners, where the history is part of what is being handed on.
- Runs and farms approaching a milestone, such as 100 or 150 years on the same title.
- Owners and partners who live away from the land, including overseas, and want a record their own children will read.
How a station history comes together.
On the land. I come to you as often as the project needs, interview people wherever they are comfortable talking, and photograph the station while I am there. Family members who have moved away, including overseas, I interview by video.
In the archives. Station records are rarely in one place. For The Branches they were in Dunedin, Arrowtown and family cupboards. Run records, land and mortgage files, historic newspapers and museum photograph collections fill in what living memory can’t reach.
Photographs. Family photographs are scanned from the owners’ albums, archive images are ordered with permissions and credit lines agreed before the pages are finalised, and every image goes into the research database with its source, caption and credit. The database stays with you when the book is done.
Checking. Chapters go back to the families concerned before the next draft, so people see how they and their parents are portrayed. Where accounts differ, I go back to the people involved and to the records, and if they still differ, the book says so.
Production. I manage design, printing and distribution with the designer I have worked with from project to project, or with your preferred suppliers, so you deal with one person and receive one bill.
Deciding what kind of book.
The first decision is who the book is for. A large-format hardback for bookshops, like The Branches, needs an ISBN (free from the National Library of New Zealand), a national distributor and a print run in the hundreds or thousands. A private edition for the family and the people who worked the station can be smaller, with a shorter print run and lower production costs. Once a book is published, the law requires copies to go to the National Library: two within 20 working days of publication, or one if fewer than 100 are printed.
Time and cost.
Allow 12 to 24 months. The Branches took a little over two years from the first conversation to finished copies in bookshops, including design and printing offshore. Within that, interviews run to about 30 to 90 hours, alongside archival research and reconciling the records where they disagree.
Fees for the research and writing range from $90,000 to $190,000 + GST, depending on the number of interviews, how much archival research the land’s history needs and the length of the book. Design, photography, printing and distribution are quoted separately once the format is settled, with contractor costs passed on at cost.
If your family needs a shorter record for the grandchildren, that is a smaller project than a book like The Branches, and I will tell you so in the first conversation. If someone in the family wants to write it themselves, book coaching may suit you better.
Start while people can still tell it.
The Branches began because the people who remembered the station’s early days were getting older. Once those people have gone their stories go with them, and the photographs tend to be divided among grandchildren when an estate is settled. The first conversation costs nothing.
