When Ivan Brenssell was 9, he spent a memorable three months with his parents wintering over in a remote hut in Otago’s hinterland.
The purpose was for Mr Brenssell’s father Roddy, then working on the vast Rocklands Station, to bring sheep down to the safety of the lowlands, so they would not get caught in snow drifts,
At the end of winter, he would herd them back to the higher land again to avoid the thaw and possible flooding and ice breaking up on the great swamps.
For Ivan Brenssell, now in his 80s and living in Dunedin, being based at the Canadian Hut was a special family time which he details in the book A Harsh and Rugged Life, co-written with his cousin Laurie Brenssell, who now lives at Kinloch, near Taupo.
The book, which is being launched on December 16 at the Taieri Historical Society, features stories and memories of Rocklands which was established in 1859.
The 22,500ha property, one of the largest privately-owned sheep and beef stations in New Zealand, is on the high tussock plateau of the Lammermoor Range, northwest of Dunedin, and has the Old Dunstan Rd running through it.
Altitude ranges from 360m above sea level at Deep Stream to 1132m and climatic conditions were extreme, with cold winters, featuring heavy snow and frosts, and dry summers.
The wider Brenssell family has had a long relationship with Rocklands Station; Roddy Brenssell was first hired as a musterer in 1935 and he and his wife Ivy, a cook and housekeeper, were later employed as the married couple.
In preparation for their Canadian Hut sojourn, they loaded up their second-hand Pontiac car with stores and bedding and Roddy Brenssell drove across the plains of the Maniototo negotiating swamps, peat bogs, creeks as streams, with no formed road or track.
Among the supplies was wallpaper and paste, to help make the one-room hut a more homely place, and Ivy Brenssell wallpapered the corrugated iron walls in floral patterns — and kept the match.
She also made mats with torn strips of fabric from her daughter’s old dresses, old curtains and tablecloths, sewn to a sugar bag base. An old army blanket, hung from the rafter provided some privacy.
Peat, dried from the year before, would burn continuously in an open fire throughout the day and night, providing the family with hot water from a huge iron kettle which hung above the flames.
Mrs Brenssell cooked in a cast-iron camp oven that hung from an iron rail above the flames. When the flames died down, baked potatoes were cooked in the embers.
Peat was the only source of fuel and it would be dug from the bogs on calm days and sledged back to the hut by horse, before being stacked against the iron walls.
Those external walls were always stacked up to the windowsills with three widths of cut peat that acted as insulation and fuel. The unusually high windows were designed to be above average snowdrifts and also internal space savers.
Roddy Brenssell would kill a sheep and prepare different cuts of meat for the meat safe and catch and shoot rabbits, eels and lobsters for a varied diet.
Ivan’s job was to look after the toilet, cutting neat squares out of sheets of newspaper at night, and emptying it once a week.
Bath night was once a week and he would get to go first before helping his father empty the bath the following morning.
The otherwise still quiet of the remote location was often broken by the sound of a plane approaching, dropping newspapers, Ivan’s green canvas correspondence school bag, and tobacco for his father.
As the married couple, Roddy and Ivy and their children lived in the Rocklands homestead with the manager Bob McDonald and his wife Barbara.
Prior to that, the Brenssell family lived at Allanton and, in 1949, the young Ivan ran away from home and headed for Rocklands where his father was working.
He rode his sister’s bike which had a broken frame and a seat so high he could not reach the pedals.
Reaching a property at Clarks Junction at lunchtime time, he lined up with shearers in the cookhouse, passed himself off as a shedhand and had a hearty lunch.
He arrived at Rocklands about 4.30pm and hid in the chicken run. He thought he might be on the receiving end of a "good thrashing" but his father was delighted to see him and said he could stay.
Ivan later had the distinction of being possibly the youngest worker on the property, his name entered in the wage book as "classer’s boy" when he was asked to help out in the shearing shed as a 14-year-old in 1954.
He worked alongside well-known classer Alex Ness who later helped him get a job at the Mosgiel Woollen Mill.
Ivan’s mother shared the cooking, on a coal range, with Barbara McDonald and there were usually around 15 people at the table.
The young Ivan was not lonely, joined by other Brenssell family members there.
At 13, he made good money skinning rabbits; he was allowed to pick out the ginger ones from the endless lines of dead grey ones.
Ferrets were kept on the station and his job was to look after them and clean out their cages.
In the book, he remembered them as "good looking critters"; a sort of creamy looking coat with little beady eyes and sharp fierce looking teeth. They could bite you in a flash but some became quite tame.
The rabbiters handled them with confidence and the ferrets, in turn, had no fear of humans. A man could keep a ferret down his trousers and often a rabbiter would keep tame ferrets in his hut for company.
A good working ferret was treated very well and carried around in the rabbiters’ jacket. Usually they were carried in sacks of small hessian sugar bands. They would be taken to the rabbit holes where they descended into the dark depths of the burrow to chase out the rabbits.
"The rabbit population grew and grew and, in those days, if you clapped your hands, the whole hillside would appear to move in clouds of dust."
Probably not more than two of the six owners of Rocklands permanently lived on the property; the task of running it entrusted to managers, their staff and their families.
Since 1970, Rocklands has been owned by Hopefield Investments Ltd, purchased in that name by South Otago brothers, the late George, Howard and Edward (Ward) Cross.
Howard owned the highly regarded Carterhope Estate, next to State Highway 1, a few kilometres south of Balclutha, Ward owned Greenfield, a sheep and beef finishing farm at Clydevale, and George owned Kai Point Coal.
Ivan Brenssell did not pursue a career in farming; from the woollen mill, he served an apprenticeship as a painter and decorator.
He served on HMNZS Pukaki on Operation Deep Freeze and as the NZ Royal Navy valet to Alfred Hitchcock on his New Zealand visit in 1963, and other international dignitaries of that time.
He was later sole interior decorator of the Chateau Tongariro and before sailing to England in 1968, where he settled in West Sussex and purchased Batworth Park House from the Duke of Norfolk, established it as a private residential hotel.
Returning to New Zealand 20 years later, he met his wife, artist Angela Burns — whose paintings of Rocklands would be on display at the book launch — while working at Toitu Otago Settlers Museum. In his mid-70s, Mr Brenssell graduated from Otago Polytechnic with a bachelor of culinary arts.
Four years of work had gone into the book, including much research and many emails. Rocklands remained a special place to him and he was keen to see its history protected.
