COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING: RURAL SUICIDES IN NEW ... · COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING 935 Figure 2 The new dairy farm as a crude site for family labor. Farm of William Coombridge

COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING: RURAL SUICIDESIN NEW ZEALAND, 1900–1950

By John C. Weaver McMaster UniversityDoug Munro Victoria University of Wellington

In the major settlement colonies of the British Empire and successor states, no-tably the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, protean mythsthrived about the independence of rural life and the contentment of small farm-ers relative to urban wage earners. A mix of anti-urbanism and rural nostalgiawas a continuing theme in British literature. It readily migrated to New Zealandwhere a relatively mild climate nurtured a green landscape that sustained rep-resentations of Arcadia. Periods of extraordinary rural expansion and prosperitypapered over acute and chronic rural troubles.

In several North Island regions, principally Taranaki, diversification fromsheep grazing to dairy farming boosted local prosperity by the early 1900s. Gen-erous land-granting schemes for farmers and immigrant promotional literaturecontributed to notions of rural life as a healthy national fixture. Governmentssubscribed to the myth. New Zealand not only assisted approximately nine thou-sand veterans to secure farms after World War I, but launched rural improvementschemes during the Great Depression.1 “The advisability of diverting our surpluslabour to the land,” wrote Prime Minister G.W. Forbes in 1932, “is fully realizedby the Government.”2 Depression era relief programmes subsidized farmers tohire unemployed men to improve existing tracts.3 The first Labour government(1935–1949) resuscitated rural settlement after World War II. The Land De-partment maintained in 1946 that “the small farmer working on his own farmfor the profit of himself and his family is in general a more contented and stablecitizen.”4 This social justification of farming regularly surfaced in post-war plansto open remote locales.

Agricultural produce was New Zealand’s largest earner of export income andthis fact contributed to the widely held perception that farming was a necessityas well as a virtue.5 In the late 1940s, the future Prime Minister Keith Holyoake,himself a farmer, proclaimed that “Farming is the very basis and lifeblood of ourcountry The farmer [is] always an individualist (a private enterpriser) with[a] self reliant independent spirit.”6 Crawford Somerset, author of Littledene, a so-ciological study of a rural community written during the late 1930s, depicted thecommunity as extraordinarily cohesive and, by implication, typical of the rest ofrural New Zealand.7 By contrast, the fiction of the time presents economic andsocial realities inconsistent with the national myth. Frank Anthony’s “Me andGus” stories and his novel Follow the Call, set in the dairy farming area of centralTaranaki in the years immediately after World War I, portray physical hardship,the burden of debt and inter-person disharmony, while John Mulgan’s Man Alonegraphically emphasises the harshness rural life in the 1920s and 1930s.8 Moredramatically, Jean Devanny’s portrayal of sexual oppression in rural marriagesresulted in The Butcher Shop (1926) being banned by the government censor.

934 journal of social history summer 2009

Figure 1

A graphic depiction of the rural idyll. More money from your dairy herd. Ridd Co. salescatalogue. Eph-A-Dairy-Farm-Equipment-1918-01-cover. Courtesy Alexander TurnbullLibrary, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa.

COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING 935

Figure 2

The new dairy farm as a crude site for family labor. Farm of William Coombridge. Wait-eika Road, Te Kiri, Opunake. 1/2 -024176-G. Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, Na-tional Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa.

As Devanny explained, “Probably the book was banned because of its brutality,but that cannot be helped, for it is a true story of New Zealand country life. Iknow it is true. I have lived in the country and seen for myself.”9 Some historianstoo are sceptical of the rural myth, finding little favour in the notion that rurallife was more wholesome and socially integrating than its urban counterpart.10

Testing the competing paradigms of New Zealand rural life can be problem-atic. Conventional sources that could furnish insights—diaries, letters, and me-moirs—are rare and subject to debate about typicality.11 One remarkable set ofroutinely generated records can provide glimpses and enable comparisons withcircumstances in towns and cities. New Zealand law required inquests into allsuicides and suspected suicides. The resulting files hold witnesses’ depositionsthat contain personal information and remarks on motives.12

Methodological issues

An analysis of New Zealand suicide case files from 1900 to 1950 exposes crisesin rural life. Evidence from this source reveals trials experienced by farmers and,significantly, by laborers, women and Maori, parties neglected in the rural myth.We assembled a data set that includes every known suicide in even numbered


years. For most years, our tally exceeded official counts because we reconsideredopen-verdicts and discovered that many deaths by drowning were unquestion-ably suicides. Other methods of suicide could not so readily be passed off asaccidental and granted the courtesy of an “open verdict.”13 By reviewing openverdicts we were able to add 492 cases to the official suicide count. Overall wecreated a data set of 4220 suicides. The additional cases naturally affected thecalculation of suicide rates (Graph 1). There were 3337 male suicides (79.1%)and 879 female suicides (20.8%); something like this ratio is common to manyjurisdictions and is often explained by noting that women have a lower successrate for suicide attempts than men. Suicide inquests, as we will show, containremarkable information about life, but bias social history with an unrelievedbounty of gloomy accounts. As a routinely generated set of documents for an en-tire country, however, inquests supply a non-anecdotal account of crises; there isregular coverage for an entire country. Witnesses’ statements and suicide notesadd poignancy and immediacy to the statistical patterns. The narrative elementsare rich but richer still when reinforced with numbers.

Care had to be taken in determining whom to include in the statistical portionof the discussion of rural suicides. In order to calculate the crucially importantsuicide rates for the rural sector, reliable counts of rural suicides had to be ex-tracted from the data set. But what is a rural suicide? There were at least fourpossible ways of counting rural male suicides. Unfortunately, the situation forwomen was narrowed by the fact that witnesses and officials seldom gave rural

Graph 1Rural Male Suicide Rates Compared with Other Male Rate, 1900–1950


women distinct occupational labels. Since a woman in either a rural or urbansetting was described by court officials as a wife, housewife, girl, or a spinstertending to household duties, it was impossible to separate neatly farm womenfrom other women. For men, the presence of occupational information, locales,and incidental facts allowed several means of sorting out rural men from all oth-ers. We could have included men selected by the following criteria: 1) all suicidescommitted in rural settings; 2) all individuals with an agricultural occupation:3) all individuals who both lived in the country and had a rural occupation; 4)all individuals with a rural occupation plus a prorated assignment of cases withan unknown occupation on the basis of the location of their suicide. The firstmethod of selection, simply by rural location, yielded 742 rural suicides by males.It is worth noting in passing the distribution in other locales: male suicides insmall towns numbered 709, in large towns 1192, and in cities 642. A handfulof suicides occurred at sea. Since a substantial number of farmers (n = 149) andfarm laborers (n = 199) killed themselves in urban places, there is a sound basisfor including all cases where the deceased had a rural occupation. By selectingpurely on the basis of rural locales, we would have passed over the travels offarmers into towns for business or a visit to the publican, ignored the proximityof many farms to small towns, and have missed the itinerate character of farmlabor. Typically, the urban locales where farmers and farm laborers committedsuicide were small centres. Crawford Somerset wrote with respect to the inter-mingling of hamlet and farms that the sheep farmers around Littledene couldsecure help at shearing and mustering “from among the small-farm-labouringpeople in the village.”14 During the years under consideration, much of NewZealand was a land of urbs in rus. Or Littledenes in the countryside.

The problem with the second means of establishing rural-sector suicides, sort-ing by occupations, is that in 370 instances of the 3337 male suicides occupationwas un-stated. That left 1066 men who were assigned typically rural occupationsby witnesses: “The body is that of my bother. He was 38 and a farm labourer;” orto cite another illustration, “my husband had been milking on shares.” The 1066men included farm laborers (433), farmers (431), retired farmers (30), garden-ers (29), station cooks (19), station managers (16), rabbiters (10), well drillers(9), horse trainers (8), share milkers (7), and a smattering of men in each ofover thirty additional occupations. The third method, constraining rural sectorsuicides by requiring both a rural location and a rural occupation, produced 571men. In common with the first technique for determining a rural suicide, thismethod excluded men who worked in the rural sector but happened to die inan urban place. The final way of selecting rural sector men—using rural occupa-tions and adding men of unknown occupation whose bodies were found in thecountryside—would have added fifty cases to the 1066. Some men could havebeen in transit between urban places, so an addition of the fifty cases would stillbe an imperfect solution.15

We decided that for our analysis of suicide rates we would consider all indi-viduals with a rural occupation. In several parts of the discussion, farmers (n =431) and farm laborers (n = 433) are compared. The concentration on thesetwo groups seemed reasonable due to their great prevalence, an interest in de-picting class relations in the countryside, and the possibility of illustrating theinteraction of emotional and material ramifications of class differences. There


were many gradations of farmers but witnesses seldom disclosed the size or na-ture of the operation. For the same reason, it is not possible to state accuratelythe relative proportions of the different types of farmers who committed sui-cide. Estimates based on assumptions about the dominance of particular typesof farming in specific locales could be attempted but would be misleading due tothe mix of sheep grazing, dairy farming, grain production, and orchards in someareas.

Gender is also an important category for close analysis, but it was impossibleto ascertain absolutely all farm women in the data set, although we identified130 women who lived in rural locations and another thirty-five whom witnessescalled farmers’ wives. The shortcoming with the first number is that we canassume that some farm women visited urban centres and a few lived on the mar-gins of hamlets. The number of rural women is under-represented in a data setof 165 cases, because on the basis of the 4 to 1 gender ratio for all New Zealandsuicides, the number for rural sector women could have been around 250. Ourinability to establish a defensible data set for rural women constrains our discus-sion of their circumstances to qualitative evidence taken from the 165 cases. Ofcourse, it is just possible that the suicide rate for rural women was lower thanfor urban women. If that were the case, it would contrast with men where therural suicide rate was considerably higher than the urban one. Farm labor com-bined with family rearing no doubt drove many women to despair—we haveseen this in individual case files—but the burdens of rural living might haveweighed more fatally on men in general and there is little doubt that mascu-line conviviality at the bar helped put alcoholism into the mix. Women largelyescaped that affliction (Table 1).

Table 1General Motives of Suicide for Rural Sector Men and Women and Urban Men and

Women, 1900–1950

WomenAll Men Aged Identified as

Principal Problem 20 to 65 in Women “Farmer’s All WomenCategory as Farm Large Towns in Rural Wives” in TownsCited by Witnesses Farmers Labourers & Cities Locales (after 1922) and Cities

Assorted Illnesses 93 (21.6%) 77 (17.8%) 394 (21.5%) 35 (26.9%) 9 (25.7%) 132 (23.0%)Mental Illnesses 92 (21.3%) 74 (17.1%) 321 (17.5%) 41 (31.5%) 16 (45.7%)* 242 (42.1%)Work & Money Problems 90 (20.9%)* 60 (13.9%) 351 (19.1%) 7 ( 5.4%) 0 ( 0.0%) 35 ( 5.9%)War Related Issues 39 ( 9.0%)* 19 ( 4.4%) 106 ( 5.8%) 2 ( 1.5%) 1 ( 2.9%) 10 ( 1.7%)No Idea 39 ( 9.0%) 45 (10.4%) 167 ( 9.1%) 8 ( 6.2%) 1 ( 2.9%) 23 ( 4.0%)Alcohol Problems 26 ( 6.0%) 80 (18.5%)* 207 (11.3%) 2 ( 1.5%) 1 ( 2.9%) 0 ( 0.0%)Marital or Romantic

Problems 16 ( 3.7%) 39 ( 9.0%)* 124 ( 6.8%) 20 (15.4%) 3 ( 8.6%) 46 ( 8.0%)Character Adjustment

Problems 16 ( 3.7%) 20 ( 4.6%) 68 ( 3.7%) 9 ( 6.9%) 2 ( 5.7%) 25 ( 4.3%)Death of Someone Close 10 ( 2.3%) 3 ( 0.7%) 44 ( 2.4%) 5 ( 3.8%) 2 ( 5.7%) 35 ( 6.1%)Problems with the

Police or Law 10 ( 2.3%) 16 ( 3.7%) 53 ( 2.9%) 1 ( 0.8%) 0 ( 0.0%) 4 ( 0.7%)

Total 431 433 1835 130 35 575

* Cells which contain observations worthy of note.


No calculation of a suicide rate for a sub-population (rural men) across thedecades can avoid inexact results. To find divisors for the calculation, we scouredNew Zealand censuses and also employed a table of occupations produced forthe conscription of soldiers in World War I. New Zealand normally conductedcensuses every five years but not in 1931 and 1941. Linear interpolation by SPSSwas conducted to estimate the rural sector working population in years betweencensuses. The computation of rates shows that the male suicide rate was higherfor the rural sector than for the male population generally (Graph 1). Anotherway of looking at rural male suicides is in relation to their percentage of allsuicides and the proportion of the male population engaged in rural production.The percentage of men working in agriculture edged downward after World WarI; the percentage of men with agricultural occupations who committed suicideincreased over the same fifty years (Graph 2). Inquests not only enabled us totrack rural suicides against other data but to analyze motives for suicide and toquote pertinent statements about rural hardships. We deliberately use the termmotive rather than cause. Motive implies choice and creates a space for doubtabout an ultimate factor; cause connotes a circumstance urging itself decisivelyupon individuals. Many men and women were not caused to commit suicide;however, most had motives and these motives along with suicide rates are thebasis for a discussion of the quality of rural life. By no means, however, caninquest depositions support a claim that rural isolation was a prevalent factor insuicide. Nearly three-quarters (71.4%) of all rural sector men who took their

Graph 2A Rural Population at Risk: The Percentage of Farmers, Farm Labourers and OtherRural Workers in the New Zealand Workforce and Among Suicides, Census Years


own lives resided near a railway line, harbour, town, or city. On occasion, how-ever, a farmer would mention that he could not abide the isolation. Mercury Bayfarmer William Harman, single and thirty-seven, told people he was “lonely, sickof the place.”16

Temporal patterns

The trials of rural living can be reviewed by year (Graphs 1 and 2) and sea-son (Graph 3); they can also be analyzed by rural class, gender, age, and maritalstatus. The yearly patterns present two broad points. First, they indicate thatthroughout the first half of the century, the rural male suicide rate always ex-ceeded that for urban men. When rural and urban suicides are compared bymotives, the two sets of data were similar (Table 1), but their rates differed. Thiscontrast suggests inconclusively that, whatever trials all men encountered acrossthe life cycle, rural men coped less successfully or felt the crises more intensely.Second, the rates follow the course of main events in New Zealand’s economy.In 1902, immediately following the Boer War, the end to profits from victuallingthe British army in South Africa were not yet fully realized and the recent goodtimes still sustained farmers. The rural and national suicide rates for men wererelatively low. In 1904, a spike in the rate can be related to the bite of a post-warrecession. Economic conditions worsened with a brief global business recessionin 1907. The completion of the North Island trunk railway line bumped manyworkers into the casual labor market where they competed with itinerant farmlaborers. War was splendid for commodity producers, but during World War Ithe suicide rate among rural males remained about the same as in peacetime.17

Unlike the Boer War, this conflict consumed many farmers’ sons, brothers, andfarmers themselves. Out of just over 100,000 men who served overseas, morethan 16,000 were killed and there were 41,000 casualties.18 The country’s popu-lation was merely 1,160,000. Grief affected urban and rural folk alike, but malefarm owners and, in a few instances, the women left behind to manage farmsfound it difficult to secure labor and cash-in on higher prices. Personal sorrowscompounded the usual stresses of managing a property. A number of farmerswho committed suicide between 1920 and 1950 suffered from wounds and shell-shock which, apart from the intrinsic burdens, impeded the routine toil of rurallife. Peter Macpherson, a thirty-three-year-old farmer, was so “shaky” from thewar that his doctor wanted him to apply for a placement at a special hospital forshell-shock, but Macpherson could not stand the idea of being treated as weak.19

Rural men put the blame for failure on their shoulders and needed achievementsat work. When influenza kept twenty-seven-year-old farm laborer William Bren-nan from a season of work, he told his mother “a man might as well be dead asout of work.”20 Sixty-six-year old John Verrall was one of a number of farmersin our sample who killed himself on the eve of a clearing sale on his property,and sixty-four-year old stockman Rudolph Brieske, who was “obsessed with theidea that he had narrowly missed having a stroke,” could not countenance thethought of being “a burden on people.”21

Postwar price deflation among farm commodities was underway in 1921–22.22

It contributed to the fact that, while the overall male suicide rate stabilized, the


Graph 3Seasonality of Suicide: Monthly Distribution of All Males and All Rural Occupation

Males, 1900–1950

rural rate rose. The Great Depression struck hard at farmers. A crisis caused byfalling global prices for primary products may have started before 1930; the sui-cide rate for males working in the rural sector peaked in 1928 at 52.1 per 100,000.Prices continued to fall. Since land values soared during World War I, fell in the1920s, and collapsed in the 1930s, many farmers who had acquired land before1920 carried for decades mortgages above the market value of their land.23 Loansfor supplies from ubiquitous stock agencies piled up debts.24 Between 1931 and1936, successive governments provided mortgage relief and a guaranteed pricefor dairy produce,25 but these measures were only partial successful. In 1939 aLands Department field inspector for rural Otago summarized a basic dilemmawhen he appealed for the government to implement a farm subsidy to reviv-ify rural life. “On average prices for produce it is impossible, after allowing forreasonable labour costs, to allow more than a pittance for the farmer himself,who has all the responsibility of managing the place. Either the labour or themanagement must suffer, and as the farmer himself desires a decent standard ofliving it is natural the labour is skimped.”26 Farmers relied on cheap labor; therural myth of prosperous farms depended on it. World War II restored rural com-modity prices, and this conflict did not inflict the shockingly high casualty ratesexperienced by New Zealand in World War I. Consequently, it is unremarkablethat suicide rates during World War II dropped to roughly half what they hadbeen at the start of the Great Depression. However, World War II did furnish


motives. There were suicides when family members were called up and whenfarmers felt over-burdened on account of the labor shortage.27

Farmers needed hired hands because of the labor-intensive and often strenu-ous nature of the work. “The long working day has now become a habit and thehabit a virtue,” observed Crawford Somerset, author of Littledene. “All the farm-ers interviewed admitted that they needed more help in their farms [and]nearly everyone interviewed thought that more leisure as a general rule wouldbe a bad thing.”28 A dairy farmer in Taranaki, responding in 1947 to a commentin a national newspaper, contrasted his work regime to the supposed sumptuous-ness of urban life:

Unable as we are to share the first-class amusements of the town-dweller who hasfirst-class concerts, pictures and plays to attend, we have to be content with thesecond-class fare of the wireless. [As if] a dairy farmer has no top dressing to do,lime to spread, manure to spread, autumn and winter feeding to do, ploughing, andsowing, chain harrowing, drains to clean, fences to fix, implements to renovateand mend, wood and coal to cart, hedge to trim, pigs and calves to attend to,noxious weeds, gorse, blackberry, thistle, and ragwort to eradicate, gateways to fillwith sand, buildings to patch and paint, gates to make, rushes to dig, sick cows todoctor, young pigs to castrate and ring, months of harvesting hay and silage, etc.,etc, to do; that life of a dairy farm merely entails six hours a day milking for 360days in the year including Sundays, Saturdays and all holidays—truly a lovely lifeif you can afford to pay someone else to do the work . . . [to] have “days off” asoften as you like. Quite a good life if you don’t mind slogging in for 65 hours aweek at 40 hours’ pay.29

New Zealand’s rural suicides were distributed unevenly in a menstrual patternthat contrasted with the distribution for all male suicides (Graph 3). The ruralpattern conceivably expressed heightened stresses that farmers as well as farm la-borers experienced during spring and early summer. By the southern-hemispherewinter and spring, roughly from July to October, grazers and grain farmers hadrun down savings from the previous harvest, wool clip, or cattle sale; credit wasimportant at this juncture because they were incurring a round of expenses. Forsheep grazers, costs began to peak when shearing crews arrived in November andDecember.30 Grain farmers needed help with the harvest and threshing in Jan-uary and February.31 While some rural operators put out money before receivingpayment on their staple, dairy farmers were paid differently, because they pro-duced daily. Typically they received monthly advances based on milk fat deliv-ered, but at the end of the fiscal year, often the end of June, butter creameriesor cheese factories paid bonuses based on the year’s revenues. Agrarian opera-tors faced financial and climate stresses from July to February, and received theirlargest payments from February to July. These events, directed a cycle of longstressful times and shorter good times, and help explain the seasonality of sui-cide for owners and operators of rural properties. Matters were slightly differentfor rural laborers who had farm tucker and money from September to perhapsMarch. For them, good times ran from September to December; then in Januarymany would have trekked to find harvest work after the mustering and clippingof sheep. By June the fall-winter-layoff was taking its toll on savings (Graph 4).At the start of winter in 1902, Andrew Parsons was broke, out of work, and beg-ging for “a shake down for the night.” He was put in the stable.33 Witnesses iden-


Graph 4Seasonality of Suicide: Farm Labourers and Farmers Compared, 1900–1950

tified work and money problems as the motive for farmer suicides in a fifth of theinquest cases which was more than reported for farm laborers and as common asfor urban males (Table 1). This fact and the failure of the seasonal pattern of sui-cides to follow exactly the economic reasoning offered above are reminders thatthe motives for suicide were not all susceptible to economic reasoning alone.

It is worth remarking that the attribution of motives for suicide that appears inTable 1 collapses hundreds of specific causes into clusters that seemed to embodya predominant element; however, these “judgement calls” are imperfect and onmany occasions they obscure the interaction of several problems. There is theadditional hitch that protective witnesses may have opted for explanations—motives—that put a favourable gloss on the deceased and themselves. For ex-ample, it is not surprising given the nature of farm work that witnesses oftenremarked on assorted physical aliments, but it is possible that sometimes wit-nesses emphasized physical troubles since they were more acceptable than fi-nancial failure, mental illness, or alcoholism. Nevertheless, witnesses seemedfrank, gave their statements under oath in open court, and occasionally hadtheir testimony investigated by police constables.

Crises along Life’s Course

The motives for suicide among rural men changed with age. Motives rankedby the mean age give a rough impression of a sequence of trials and sorrows:


marital and romantic problems (mean age = 34.7), problems with the policeor the law (35.3), character and adjustment problems (37.9), war related issues(40.1), mental illnesses (44.3), alcohol problems (46.0), work and money prob-lems (46.7), assorted illnesses (50.6), and the death of someone close (53.3). Across-tabulation of age cohorts and motives reveals more precisely the clusteringof problems though the life course. Rather than reproducing a cumbersome tableof cross-tabulated cells, we will highlight the more significant findings. Giventhat we used sixteen age cohorts commonly found in census publications, anycohort with more than 6.3% of the cases for a specific set of motives was over-represented. Young rural men, for example, were greatly over-represented amongsuicides attributed to romantic motives. Men who were 20 to 24, accounted fora quarter (24.4%) of all rural male suicides attributed to that motive and youngmen aged 25 to 29 made up another over-represented cohort (15.4%). Alcoholabuse struck middle-aged men: 35 to 39 (16.8% of cases for this motive) and 40to 44 (15.0%). Work and money cases were marginally more prominent amongrural men from 55 to 59 (14.1%) and 60 to 64 (10.7). The same age cohortsfigured significantly among suicides for which illnesses were claimed the mainmotive: 55 to 59 (10.9%), 60–64 (10.0%), 65 to 69 (11.4%). For reasons dis-cussed later, farmers and farm laborers had different age distribution patterns(Graph 5).

The discussion of mean age and age cohorts skims the surface of troubles thatcould arise in the country at particular phases in the life course. For example,nowhere was a clash between the rural myth and the hardness of rural life morevividly exposed than in the cases of boys channelled into farm labor by the state,charities, or neglectful parents. Fifteen-year old Ronald Nicholson was licensedout by the state in 1942 as a farm hand and he hanged himself fourteen monthslater. Described as moody, stubborn and prone to sulking moods, he “resentedbeing scolded for disobedience.” He ran away more than once.34 Sixteen yearold Frederick Hall was put to work as a farm laborer and two months later ab-sconded after stealing £20 of jewellery. He returned to the farm a week later,broke into the house, and shot himself.35 Another sixteen-year-old, William Lit-tle, had emigrated to New Zealand under the auspices of Flock House. Funded bysheep farmers, this organisation brought out roughly 760 orphans, mostly sonsof United Kingdom seamen killed in World War I. These juveniles were allo-cated as cheap labor to participating sheep stations. The magistrate in Little’scase remarked on the lad’s “lonely solitary existence” and what this would havedone to “a shy and reserved boy who found it difficult to make friends with thevery few people available [on the isolated station].” The magistrate criticizeda “taciturn, unapproachable and close-fisted” employer, and condemned thosefarmers “whose chief interest in the Flock House scheme is that they may re-turn them a fair proportion [of former prosperous times] by way of cheap farmlabour.” Little was not only being exploited—two-thirds of his wages went toFlock House—but Flock House representatives had pressed to obtain an openverdict.36 On other occasions, farmers criticized young laborers for failure toheed instructions. The employer of twenty-year-old Ralph Gibbs stated that he“was leaving my employ as a result of my desiring him to work differently.” De-spite the farmer finding him another billet, Gibbs shot himself, which suggestsfeelings of failure and hopelessness for the future.37 James Parks was given two


Graph 5Age Cohorts of Farmers (n=431) and Farm Labourers (n=433) who Committed

Suicide, 1900 to 1950

weeks’ notice. He arrived from England under a Salvation Army ImmigrationScheme seven years before and now in 1932, at the age of twenty-five and at theheight of the Great Depression, he faced unemployment. He poisoned himselfwith strychnine intended for rabbits.38 Farmers enlisted the police to help ridthem of lingering laborers. Reflecting on the events that led to Andrew Illing-worth hanging himself in jail, a constable recalled that he had been summonedto a farm. “I took the deceased’s swag and strapped it on my saddle and toldhim I would arrest him as an idle and disorderly person.” Illingworth refused togive his name, because, he said “I do not want my parents to know I have cometo this.”39 Rural men—farmers as well as farm laborers—could internalize thereasons for their poor state and this surfaced in shame.

Young rural men, like counterparts in the city, experienced romantic rejec-tion. However, farm laborers seem particularly at risk for romantic disappoint-ment. The arduous and sometimes isolated nature of farm work, combined withpoor wages, uncertainty of employment, the lack of legislative protection,40 andmeagre prospects for social mobility,41 help explain why farm laborers constitutethe single largest occupational category among youth suicides (31 farm labor-ers had ages below 21)—just as farmers were the single largest category amongadult suicides (422 farmers had ages above 20). Over half (53.9%) of farm la-


borers who committed suicide were under forty, while only a quarter (26.5%)of farmers were under forty. Given the poor quality of farm laborers’ lives, it isnot surprising that romantic disappointment appeared often in their ranks. Inthe serious business of courtship, prospective partners were rare on sheep sta-tions, thin on the ground in hamlets, and often under the watch of nervousparents. Twenty-one year old Sidney Tucker was prevented from “keeping com-pany” with a sixteen-year old whose parents thought her too young—“and hewas put out about it and was very jealous.”42 Nineteen-year old Edward Cam-mack had to break off his engagement because his fiancée’s friends thought shewas too young.43 Robert Cliffe had been courting for three years but his girl-friend declined his proposal, saying that marriage was “very serious” and she wasunsure whether she loved him enough; twenty-one-year-old Laurence Sansonrealized he had been jilted when his fifteen-year-old girlfriend ceased answeringhis letters.44 Twenty-one-year-year-old Victor Whittaker had a falling out withhis girlfriend, and Leonard O’Callaghan was afraid that the young widow he wascourting would turn him down on account of his epileptic fits.45 Twenty-three-year-old farm laborer Anthony Paterson went to Dunedin for a heavy drinkingbout to salve his rejection. His journey illustrates why rural locales are an im-perfect indicator of “rural” suicides. The binge remedy failed Paterson who shothimself in a hotel room, leaving a note for his ex-fianacée: “Your words have sev-ered my every cord in my heart.”46 According to Somerset, engagements wereseldom broken in rural New Zealand.47 If so, to the shock of an unusual disap-pointment was added loss of face in a small community. Romantic disappoint-ment applied also to farmer’s daughters. Nineteen-year-old Mabel Temperleywho kept house for her widowed father, took caustic soda when her father ob-jected to her seeing an older man. A further ingredient was her unhappy homelife.48

Measured by suicides, the stress of money problems was slightly greater amongolder farmers and intensified for all farmers during the Great Depression. Dairyfarming was regarded as “a young man’s business, and he must be fit to makeit pay.”49 Often dairy farms were owned and operated by different individualsand the operator, the share-milker, carried enormous burdens in poor economictimes. Any debilitating illness jeopardized a family’s well-being and that couldprecipitate an emotional breakdown. These circumstances affected GeorgeBrown, a forty-nine year old sharemilker who took an overdose of a sleepingdraught in June 1930. “Owing to illness,” his wife testified, “he has not done anywork this last six months.”50 In the same year, farmer Thomas Sadlier hangedhimself in a field; a friend stated that “he had no worries other than farm troublesand ill health.” Sadlier’s wife indicated that they needed a loan to hold onto thefarm and “if the money could not be raised, we would have to sell out.”51

Mental illness among farmers, often in the form of a nervous breakdown ormental depression, increased during the Great Depression. By then too, a num-ber of returned soldiers who farmed were finally being acknowledged as medi-cally unfit. “Age and the latent effect of war service are affecting the constitu-tion of the men. A re-action on the health of quite a number of men, previouslyfit and good farmers, has now set in, and in order to keep their farms going itis now necessary for these settlers to employ outside labour. Medical, hospitaland similar expenses are becoming constant and material charges against farm


revenue.”52 These circumstances, of course, affected more men than merely thereturned-soldier farmers. In light of the publicity given to the post-war rural set-tlement scheme, however, it is worth mentioning here that New Zealand’s highcasualty rate meant that many returned soldiers experienced war-related med-ical troubles. They also faced falling commodity prices, and often had to clearvirgin land that required years of unremitting toil.

The Concatenations of Farmers’ Crises

A recurring theme in rural suicides is the burden of debt and the strain ofrunning a business. During the 1949 general election campaign, Keith Holyoakedescribed a farm as a “piece of land surrounded by mortgages. A farmer is a landworker surrounded by troubles. Weather, prices, costs and pests.”53 The sheerworry of making a living, avoiding unsustainable debt, providing adequately forone’s family and paying the bills feature prominently in farmers’ suicides. Duringthe Great Depression, fifty-four-year-old Arthur Crowder ingested strychninewhen notified that the power was to be cut off because the electricity bills hadnot been paid. As his son pointed out, eighty cows could not be milked by handday in, day out.54

Seldom were finances the sole factor. The physical stresses of farming lifetook their toll. A sudden illness or persistent ill health affected one’s abilityto work the land, as did the onset of declining physical powers. Sixty-five yearold Charles Eaden, said a neighbouring farmer, had:

Troubles in connection with the working of his farm & they were evidently wor-rying him . . . he could trim the fences and do odd work & look after the sheepbut he wasn’t capable of working the tractor. I then offered him the loan of a sixhorse team to help him with his work through the winter & he accepted the offer& appeared very grateful, but at the same time he appeared very despondent. Iagain met him on my own farm . . . he went over old ground with me . . . He toldme he was worrying about his financial position & that he had seen Mr Hunterabout selling the farm & that Mr Hunter had informed him that there was littleprospect [of that] at the present time & when he left me he was completely downhearted & when I heard of his death I was not surprised.55

As Eaden’s case shows, there is a progression of motives for suicide, which canbe represented diagrammatically in this instance as:

Physical decline increasingly precarious financial position + unable to sellfarm despondency = suicide (shotgun)

Another example concerns fifty-one-year-old John Milne. He shot himself butdid not die immediately. When asked why he had done it, he replied: “There isno grass, the cows are starving. A cow kicked over a bucket this morning andthat was the end of everything.”56 The spilled milk was the precipitant:

Unwell for some time very depressed + worry of shortage of feed + cowkicks over bucket of milk = suicide (shotgun)

At the level of discrete tragic biographies, abundant permutations are feasible.Towards the end of the Great Depression, eighty-year-old dairy farmer Alfred


Smith wrote in his suicide note that he did not intend to continue “makingButter fat below cost I’m too old to take responsibility any longer Spent£3000 on improvements to farm over past 32 years not realising the presentprices would come—coming winter will be the worst NZ has ever had—hadenough.”57 Age and financial strain fused and Smith elected to chose his time ofdeath. When sixty-year-old Archibald Gray visited his doctor because “the workon the farm was too heavy,” he was given advice to sell out, advice he could notaccept because his life was tied up with his work.58 When the brother of singlefifty-seven-year-old farmer William Corwin gave testimony he remarked: “I donot know of anything apart from his financial worries to cause him to commit

Figure 3

Known as a swagman or swagger, the itinerant farm labourer led a hard life, but was es-sential to New Zealand agriculture. Swagger leaning against hut [ca.1910]. 1/2-020418-G. Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te PunaMatauranga o Aotearoa.


suicide other than the pain in his back.”59 Age, illness, and financial problemswere often united.

In connection with illness, a notable feature of rural suicides was the numberof returned servicemen, especially from World War I. The government’s schemeto assist ex-servicemen onto the land has been subject to revisionist interpreta-tion, the historians concerned arguing that its successes have been underplayedby ideological antipathy toward the Reform Government which inauguratedand administered the project. Based on the inquest files, there is indirect evi-dence that the soldier settlement scheme was flawed.60 Depositions do not al-ways indicate whether discharged soldiers who committed suicide had signedon as soldier settlers, but they indicated that it was unrealistic to expect menwho had been gassed, shell shocked and otherwise injured to make a successof a strenuous and often unaccustomed occupation. The army had dischargedWilliam Stephens as fit and ineligible for a disability pension, but since his re-turn he had had headaches and failing memory. His wife claimed his final “break-down was caused through overwork.”61 Thirty-three-year-old Robert Steele had“had a lot of stomach trouble while in Egypt and had several operations in NewZealand since his return”. He cut his throat, and by the time of his death theworry about his affairs had upgraded an “unstable nervous condition” to “tempo-rary insanity.”62 Another thirty-three-year-old farmer, William Foley, had been“suffering from depression and nervous trouble due to wounds received at thewar.” He shot himself in the hamlet of Dairy Flat.63

Farm Laborers: Further Ado

Seasonal factors dramatically affected farm laborers. Like farm owners, theywere stretched for cash by spring. In the late nineteenth century and early twen-tieth century, a rural itinerate laborer in New Zealand worked about 160 daysa year.64 Farm laborers could expect wages to begin late in the year, as notedabove.65 Waiting in boarding houses and hotels, in the homes of family members,or sometimes in their own homes, and perhaps finding temporary casual workin towns and cities, farm laborers nursed their savings during the slack monthsand worried about their future.66 Collected in hotels and boarding houses whilewaiting for a resumption of work meant passing time among friends and thatfrequently meant serious drinking. Alcohol addiction figured very prominentlyin the troubles of both young and old farm laborers; alcohol-related problemshelped set apart the explanations for their suicides from explanations for thesuicides of farmers (Table 1). With the return of shearing or harvesting, someyounger laborers recognized their poor future prospects; older men knew theyhad to maximize income or face destitution, vagrancy, charity, or dependencyon family. Increased illnesses and injuries cut into the rural laborers’ alreadyslender prospects. Moreover, some older men were on their way down sociallywhen they grasped rural employment. A constable reported that sixty-five-year-old Anthony Gratz had been a fisherman with his own boat, but “after his wife’sdeath, drink got hold of him and he came up here [a remote sheep station].”67

Crises crystallized as men prepared to trek to the countryside in search ofseasonal work or, in the case of alcoholics, soon after they resumed work andfound themselves restricted in their drinking. Quite a few experienced delirium


tremens as they worked on remote sheep stations; others discovered that theycould no longer work effectively due to the ravages of drink. Forty-eight andsingle, William Vyvian was not the type of robust worker sought by farmers,but he still found work mustering sheep until his strength failed on account of“suffering a recovery from a heavy spree.”68 Many rural laborers killed themselvesin meaner surroundings than farmers, although suicides from all social groupswere often committed in public spaces to avoid upsetting family or friends (Table2). Precisely because rural work required few skills and was paid poorly, it drewin men who had social adjustment problems or a proclivity for hard-drinking.It also depended on the strong backs of relatively young men; among suicides,farm laborers’ age cohorts were skewed toward youth and differed from the age-cohort profile of farmers who were older (Graph 4). The gruelling work woreout men before they could apply to enter a regional Old Men’s Home or applyfor the state-funded old-age pension which had been launched in 1898.

Wellington philanthropist Edwin Arnold compared “swaggies” to “sea dogs”because of their wanderings and love of a spree. He worried especially about thegap between the fifties, when “they are not able to do a day’s work as when theywere strong,” and the age of sixty-five when they were eligible for the pension.Not many manual laborers could work until sixty-five and, observed Arnold,“in many cases their own children don’t want them.”69 Richard Hiatt was fiftywhen he began telling friends that “he was getting too old to follow up his usualwork.”70 Thomas McVicar, aged fifty-eight, started to work on a threshing millin February 1922, but according to his employer he complained “that the workwas too heavy for him.”71 A sixty-year-old single alcoholic farm laborer Christo-pher Traves hanged himself in 1930. On the Monday prior to his death, therehad been a “meeting of his creditors.”72 Relations between employers and theitinerant laborers they relied upon surely varied and the files present instances ofdecent treatment, but connections could also be extremely causal. Asked abouthis deceased employee James McKay, farmer William Trail answered “I did notask him for his name and he did not tell me it.”73

Courtship difficulties have been mentioned when we introduced the idea that

Table 2Selected Locations for Suicides: Farmers and Farm Labourers, 1900–1950

Location Farmer N and (%) Farm Labourer N and (%)

House 73 (16.9) 56 (12.9)House of Friend 22 ( 5.1) 11 ( 2.5)Farm Building 68 (15.8) 38 ( 8.8)Hospital Room 8 ( 1.9) 5 ( 1.2)Hut 16 ( 3.7) 49 (11.3)Tent 0 13 ( 3.0)Boarding House Room 0 10 ( 2.3)Bush 27 ( 6.3) 51 (11.8)Field 73 (16.9) 45 (10.4)Other 144 (33.4) 155 (35.8)

Total 431 433


distinct troubles developed alongside phases in the life course. But it is worth re-peating that a man without prospects had a difficult time getting a girl’s parentsto see him as an asset.74 Marital problems also entered the picture, for some farmlaborers were married. Thirty-three year old Thomas May was unhappy with hismarriage and told his wife that he “would either have to get a divorce or get intothe car and gas himself.”75 Infidelity could unleash explosive passions. WhenWilliam Washbourne, aged twenty-seven, learned that his wife had “been famil-iar with another man” he fired a shot at her, then took off and shot himself in apaddock. His wife was so remorseful that she ran off and drowned herself, leav-ing behind four orphans.76 The bleakness and marginality of the farm laborer’slife comes into focus when the cases of Eric Wylie and John Leahy are consid-ered. The thirty-two-year-old Wylie, who worked for his brother, was drinkingto excess” and had been spoken to by the police. His suicide note reads, “fedup”, “absolutely tired fo [sic] my life.”77 The thirty-four-year-old Leahy was ner-vous and depressed in the aftermath of a recent breakdown, and in trouble withpolice for having accosted a young female employee.78

Only one in eight (13.1%) farm laborers who committed suicide was marriedwhile over half of the farmers who committed suicide were married (56.0%).Marital problems for farm laborers, as noted, were evident but as a group theirbasic problem was finding a mate. Perhaps the traits that brought men into therural labor pool—poor education, disabilities, health problems, alcohol abuse,family poverty, or no family—minimized their appeal as husbands and espe-cially as sons-on-law.79 Marital information suggests that many farm laborerslacked deep emotional support. When we coded information for the data set weconsidered whether there was any evidence of care or support for the men andwomen who committed suicide. Our assessment was subjective, but the resultsfor farmers and farm laborers contribute now to the picture of contrasting lifeexperiences. About three quarters of farmer suicides (74.2%) had someone whoapparently cared about them and gave emotional support; however, just overhalf of farm laborers (54.7%) were so fortunate. The fact that a number of farmlaborers in the suicide files lacked support may explain why witnesses occasion-ally reported that they noticed nothing unusual about the individual in the daysbefore the suicide; detached witnesses were in no position to be aware of thephysical or emotional state of others.

The locations where some farm laborers died indirectly expressed destitution.Many farmers took their own lives in rustic locations similar to those where farmlaborers died: fields, outbuildings, rivers, and bush, but quite a few ended theirlives in their own or a neighbour’s house. Other differences indicative of thesocial gap between farmers and farm laborers surfaced. Witnesses at inquests forfarmers averaged the following distribution: strangers 0.07, recent work mates orfriends 0.58, long-time friends 0.36, family including in-laws 1.15, and medicaldoctors who were treating them 0.27. Witnesses at inquests for farm laborersaveraged: strangers 0.15, recent work mates 1.10, long-time friends 0.33, family0.68, and doctors 0.15. At inquests for urban workers, there were on averagestrangers 0.22, recent work mates or friends 0.75, long-term friends 0.43, family0.91, and doctors 0.31. The suicide files suggest that relative to urban dwellers,farmers had about the same prospects for medical treatment and proximity to


family as town and city dwellers; however, farmer laborers were far more likelyto be among strangers.

Health issues were prominent among the farm laborers who committed sui-cide. Eighteen-year old Melville Broome suffered from acute hereditary asthma.His health worried him but not as much as social stigma. He would not go swim-ming lest others ridiculed his scrawny physique. His social life was almost non-existent.80 Twenty-two-year old Noel Cottier also felt a social misfit. These werethe depression years and he was unable to find a job worthy of his education. Hesettled for work on a dairy farm but “he contracted rheumatism which left hisnerves in a very bad state.” He drowned himself.81 The perceived inability ofthe body to withstand the rigors of farm labor, combined with lack of alterna-tive employment took its toll. Twenty-year old Norman Mojie had epileptic fitsas a boy. His health was still “not too good but on the mend.” Nevertheless heshot himself.82 Harold Brown, twenty-four, had been in a mental hospital sevenyears earlier. He “wasn’t too robust” and a convergence of a heavy cold, soreears and influenza proved too much.83 Sidney Verner, also twenty-four, sufferedheadaches and giddiness from a cycling accident; he threw himself in front of alocomotive.84

Suicides among farm laborers embrace almost the entire life cycle, from themid-teens to the early-eighties. Men in the 26–49 age cohorts suffered manyof the same problems as their employers in the same age cohorts. Questions ofphysical and mental health, war-related or not, are to the forefront. Anothermotive for suicide was financial, although farm laborers did not have financialproblems of the magnitude that could afflict indebted farmers. But their lowwages made the repayment of even a small debt seem insuperable. Twenty-eight-year-old John Smith “did not know how he was going to get out of debt again.”85

Trouble with the law also surfaces from time to time. Harold Smallbone, agedthirty-one, had been unemployed for four weeks and was due to appear in courtfor theft of money and clothing.86

The motives for suicide among aging and aged rural workers are similar tothose of the middle aged cohort, but with decrepitude and bereavement morepredominant. No one case exemplifies their experiences but the example ofJames Fisher comes as no surprise. This seventy-three-year old rabbiter routinelyspent his pension on drinking sprees; on such occasions he would often disap-pear several days. Alcohol was seemingly all he had to look forward to. He wassingle and had been living in the same hut on the same farmer’s property foralmost half his lifetime. His estate came to £21-10-0, almost half of which wasrealized from a wireless radio. He had £2 in the Post Office Savings Bank. Therifle with which he shot himself sold for £1-10-0 and his old horse fetched afurther £1 and was butchered for dog tucker.87

Farmers’ wives:

The motives for suicides among women in the country resembled those for ur-ban women, except that mental illness was noted more sparingly for rural womenand romantic or marital problems seem to have been slightly more prominent(Table 1). For married women the latter included frequent arguments with theirhusband, separation, and extra-martial affairs; for single women, romantic trou-


ble included rejection, unwanted pregnancy, and pregnancy and rejection. How-ever, as with farmers, there were usually concatenations of troubles. Assortedproblems merged in the case of thirty-four-year-old Ivy Lange. During her finalpregnancy she wanted a house but it was the height of the Great Depression.Two of her children had already died and she was always depressed when preg-nant. Her suicide note read: “Dear Mont[ague], It hurts me to think we couldnot agree. I came to you young and well in health. I leave you ill and broken.I loved you, Mont or I would never have married you, goodbye my dear onelook after my dear children. Your loving wife Ivy.”88 To her father she wrote thatshe was “going to my two babies in heaven .” Her closing remark and otherslike it bear on Somerset’s portrayal of faith in Littledene. “Religious belief,” hesuggested, “inclines toward fundamentalism and a literal interpretation of theScriptures.”89

As for mental illness, a few rural women who committed suicide were reportedas having a nervous breakdown, being depressed, being treated for nerves, suffer-ing from post-partum depression, suffering from melancholy, and fear of failure.Take the case of fifty-three-year-old Emma James who was diagnosed as havingmelancholia: “During the past two or three months my wife has not been ingood health. I attribute this to the change of life through which she was pass-ing. This change came late and as a result my wife became run down in healthand her nervous condition rather bad.”90 The strain on very rare occasions ledto murder-suicide. Forty-nine year old Eleanor Surrey suffered from high bloodpressure, insomnia and depression, and her husband, owing to his heart prob-lems, had done no work for the last eight months. She shot her eighteen-year-olddaughter and then turned the gun on herself.91

Physical as well as mental and emotional problems are also present, and oftenthey combine. Twenty-five-year-old Gertrude Errington suffered from goitre. It“troubled her night and day” and caused insomnia, leaving her irritable towardher three children. As well as her own wellbeing she worried about the health ofher husband, a World War I veteran. She died on her kitchen floor after ingestingthe herbicide and pesticide Black Leaf 40.92 Edith Cameron, aged forty-nine, wasdepressed by troublesome varicose veins and a husband who drank to excess andignored a court order prohibiting him from purchasing alcohol.93 In these andother cases it is difficult to know if the rural environment played a determiningrole, because the same motives were prevalent among urban women (Table 1).Never the less, the presence of rural tragedies deflates the idea that country livingwas idyllic or curative.

Women coped with some of the same economic stresses carried by their hus-bands but were tending children and running the household as well.94 The con-vention at inquests of simply designating married women as housewives andsingle women at home as spinsters or women carrying out household duties ig-nored the likelihood that women managed the household and contributed sub-stantially to the household economy. In the dairying district of Taranaki during1917, a wartime labor study reported that 62,552 cows were milked by 2285men and 1528 women.95 Grace Bickford was one of these women; when herhusband “went to the Front” she suffered from depression due to his departure,“the change of life,” but also “the straining of running their farm.”96 Wartimeconditions may have increased the participation of women, but their contribu-


tion was considerable on dairy farms at all times and the rigours of this workwere added to those of domestic chores.

Maori suicide

Rural New Zealand was home to many Maori and their suicides, which quitelikely had been under-reported, require separate discussion. Suicides by Maorimales numbered ninty-four and over half of these men (54.2%) had rural occu-pations and more than a quarter (28.7%) had no occupation recorded. Almosthalf of Maori who committed suicide (48.9%) lived in remote areas and morethan a quarter (27.7%) lived in non-remote rural areas. Although Maori hadbegun to migrate in substantial numbers to cities after World War II, their pre-war concentration in rural regions of the North Island meant that they wereprominent among farm laborers. It was a debt summons that bothered farm la-borer Turi Te Huha in 1916. “He could not help his family. He said this severaltimes.”97

Possibly, the under-reporting of Maori suicides derived from the difficulty ofdetermining from case files who was Maori in urban settings since many hadadopted European names. Unless a person’s name was Maori or a witness saidthat the deceased was Maori, identity was impossible to determine. AlthoughMaori suicides in the data set were strongly connected to rural life, they ex-pressed crises that varied significantly from those of rural sector Pakeha. Al-

Figure 4

The primitive remote life of a shepherd was not conducive to sound health or family life.Lake Heron, Ashburton District. PAColl-0859-01. Courtesy Alexander Turnbull Library,National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa.


cohol, assorted illnesses, work and money problems, and mental illness wereprominent for the latter; however, for Maori men the principal causes were mar-ital and romantic problems (22.9%), assorted illnesses (18.1%), and problemswith the law (9.6%). They were relatively young. The nature of witnesses at theirinquests is indicative of close-knit rural communities that had minimal medicalcare available. The mean number of witnesses was strangers 0.08, recent friends0.51, long-time friends 0.59, family 1.12, and doctors 0.16.

Conclusion

The advantages and limitations of suicide inquests as grist for social history areplain. It is essential to emphasize that not every case of rural suicide was causedin part or in whole by a purely rural hardship; the countryside is not necessarilyresponsible for how people treated one another. That many men and women inthe country endured troubles and sorrows of the same type as residents of townsand cities there can be no doubt. However, the higher rural male rate of suicideand seasonality suggest differences between rural and urban society (Graph 1).The main goal in this analysis was not to show that an exceptional number ofsuicides were caused by rural life per se. Rather, the objective was to demonstratethat a privileging of agriculture through a national myth obfuscated the chal-lenges of farming in a market economy and passed over crises experienced bythe exploited but essential rural laborers and the burdens of rural women. Therural myth also deceived by giving impressions of independence when farmerswere tied to banks and supply agencies.

Suicide cases cannot yield a full social history of rural New Zealand, but theycan scratch the surface of a rural veneer.

Department of HistoryHamilton ON L8S4L8Canada

Department of HistoryWellington, New Zealand

ENDNOTESThis article derives from presentations by the authors at the New Zealand HistoricalAssociation Conference, Wellington, 23–25 December 2007. We thank the staff of theWellington repository of Archives New Zealand for their sustained assistance during ourresearches there.

1. Records of the Lands Department (LS), Series 36, Box 24, File on Discharged Sol-diers Settlement: Notes on Reports for the Year Ended 31st March 1924. Abbreviated asLS 36, Box 24. Unless otherwise stated, all archival material comes from Archives NewZealand, Wellington repository.

2. LS 1[], Box 29, File 29/50, G.W. Forbes, Prime Minister, to W. Sullivan, Mayor ofWhakatane, 2 June 1932.


3. Government of New Zealand,Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representativesof New Zealand, 1931 (Wellington, New Zealand, 1932), Appendix H-35, 8–9.

4. LS 1, Box 21, File 21/149/3166, Preliminary Report on Subdivision of Farms forthe Settlement of Returned Servicemen in Thames, Bay of Plenty, and Rotorua-TaupoRegions, 16 August 1946.

5. A contemporary statement to this effect is in G.T. Alley and D.O.W. Hall, TheFarmer in New Zealand (Wellington, 1941), 115–16.

6. Barry Gustafson, Kiwi Keith: A Biography of Keith Holyoake (Auckland, 2007), 51.Coincidentally, Holyoake entered Parliament in 1933 as a result of the by-election cre-ated by the suicide of the sitting member. See Coroner’s Inquest file relating to GeorgeBlack, Records of the Department of Justice, Series 46, Wellington, Archives New Zea-land, file 1279 for the year 1932. The files are henceforth abbreviated, for example toJ46, 1932/1279. Names and ages of individuals are in the body of the text.

7. H.C.D. Somerset, Littledene: A New Zealand Rural Community (Wellington, 1938).Littledene is the fictitious name for the mixed dairy and sheep farming area surroundingthe mid-Canterbury township of Oxford. Another statement of rural community cohe-sion is “Best of Both Words: Ngahinepoiri’s Community Life,” New Zealand Listener, (13June 1947): 6–7.

8. Scholarly editions of Frank S. Anthony’s work are Gus Tomlins, together with theoriginal stories of ‘Me and Gus’, edited by Terry Sturm (Auckland, 1977); Follow the Call,together with an unfinished novel entitled ‘Dave Baird’ (Auckland, 1975); John Mulgan, ManAlone (London, 1939);

9. Quoted in Bill Pearson, “The Banning of The Butcher Shop,” in Jean Devanny, TheButcher Shop, edited by Heather Roberts (Auckland, 1981), 228.

10. Eg. R.M. Burdon, The New Dominion: A Social and Political History of New Zealandbetween the Wars (Wellington, 1965), ch. 11 (“The Indispensable Farmer”); Tom Brook-ing, “Economic Transformation”, in Geoffrey W. Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of NewZealand, 2nd ed (Auckland, 1992), 230–53. Much of the literature on rural New Zealandrelates to the nineteenth century. Miles Fairburn examines the origin of the Arcadianmyth in his seminal The Ideal Society and its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern NewZealand Society, 1850–1900 (Auckland, 1989), and he carries the argument into thetwentieth century in “The Rural Myth and the New Urban Frontier: An Approachto New Zealand Social History, 1870–1940,” New Zealand Journal of History (hereafterNZJH), 9:1 (1975): 3–21 (esp. 4–5).

11. For the nineteenth century, Rollo Arnold uses four farming diaries to dispute Fair-burn’s notion of New Zealand being an “atomized” society. Rollo Arnold, “Communityin Rural Victorian New Zealand,” NZJH, 24:1 (1990): 3–21.

12. It would be useful to make comparisons across societies, especially employing case-based data. However, Cororners’ inquests in many common law jurisdictions were oftenconducted by county or city-based coroners. This is true of England and much of theUnited States and Canada. Local courthouses were not dedicated to record preservation.In New Zealand, the inquest files were retained by the national government; in Australia,some states preserved inquest files. Although a thorough comparative study is impossible,we do not think that the hard lives of farmers and especially farm laborers was unique to


New Zealand. The country was neither an exceptionally fine country for working mennor a dreadful one. For recent data on rural suicides in Australia see Andrew N. Page andLyn J. Frager, “Suicide in Australian Farming, 1988–1997,” Australian and New ZealandJournal of Psychiatry, 36 (2002): 81–85.

13. These have been coded as probable suicides, as distinct from certified suicides. Ourcriteria are: was the person concerned experiencing severe difficulties, was the person’sbehaviour in the period leading up to his or her death out of character, and was theperson’s mode of death consistent with a suicide rather than an accidental death? Thequestion of open verdicts (in the nineteenth century English context) is discussed byVictor Bailey, “This Rash Act:” Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford,1998), 62–65.

14. H. C. D. Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change (Wellington, 1974), 14. This vol-ume contains the original work and a follow-up study conducted in the 1950s. Littledeneand its successor volume bear more than passing resemblance to Robert and Helen Lynds’studies of “Middletown” (code for Muncie, Indiana). Both “Littledene” and “Middle-town” were represented as being typical and each project involved follow-up studies.

15. Approaching the issue from the urban angle, a recent study makes similar pointsabout the difficulty of urban-rural distinctions. Eric Olssen and Maureen Hickey, Classand Occupation: The New Zealand Reality (Dunedin, 2005), 24–26.

16. J46, 1916/262.

17. On wartime profits see James Watson, “Patriotism, Profits and Problems: New Zea-land Farming during the First World War”, in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds),New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland,2007), 534–49.

18. Gerald T. Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston,1984), 362.

19. J46, 1920/1069.

20. J46, 1922/759. Apart from the evidence on this point that appears in many inquests,see Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 199.

21. J46, 1946/1099 (Verrall); J46, 1946/416 (Brieske).

22. LS 36, Box 24, File on Discharged Soldiers Settlement Account: Report for the YearEnded 30th June 1935, p.1; Brooking, “Economic Transformation,” 231–33.

23. Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 16–17; Burdon, The New Dominion, 149–50.

24. Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 18–19. Nonetheless, the only suicide inour sample where a farmer blames a stock agent (“a crawler & powerfull” [sic]) is that offorty-two-year old Francis Bartholemew (J46, 1934/117).

25. Barrie Macdonald and David Thomson, “Mortgage Relief, Farm Finance, and RuralDepression in New Zealand in the 1930s”, NZJH, 21:2 (1987): 228–50; H. Belshaw,D.O. Williams and F.B. Stephens, “Farming Industries during the World Crisis”, in H.Belshaw et al (eds), Agricultural Organization in New Zealand (Melbourne, 1936), 786–


806; H.G. Philpott, A History of the New Zealand Dairy Industry (Wellington, 1937), 202–03, 255–60. Many of the contemporary secondary sources used in the present study werecommissioned during the 1930s by organisations such as the Carnegie Foundation andthe Workers’ Education Association. See Ian Carter, “Most Important Industry: How theNew Zealand State got Interested in Rural Women, 1930–1944”, NZJH, 20:1 (1986):30–31.

26. LS 1, File 22/4476, John Mee, Supervising Field Inspector, Department of Lands andSurveys, to The Under-Secretary for Lands, Memorandum on Farm Labour, 11 January1939.

27. J46, 1940/1320; J46, 1940/1664, J46, 1942/1250; J46, 1944/492.

28. Somerset, Littledene: A New Zealand Rural Community, 27.

29. New Zealand Listener, 13 June 1947 (letter to the editor). See also W.T. Doig, A Sur-vey of Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy-farmers (Wellington, 1940), 48–55; Somer-set, Littledene, 28–34. The labor patterns of orchardists, and their risk to natural disaster,are described in Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, 23, 31, and those of sheep farmers in RichardWolfe, A Short History of the Sheep in New Zealand (Auckland, 2006), 123–41.

30. Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 15.

31. D.B. Copland, Wheat Production in New Zealand: A Study in the Economics of NewZealand Agriculture (Auckland, 1918), 28.

32. George A. Duncan, The New Zealand Dairy Industry (Palmerston North, New Zea-land, 1933), 284.

33. J46, 1902/591.

34. J46, 1944/57.

35. J46, 1938/1147.

36. J46, 1926/166. The Coroner’s complaints to the Department of Justice are enclosedin the file.

37. J46, 1924/1121.

38. J46, 1932/906.

39. J46, 1914/1456.

40. Jim McAloon, No Idle Rich: The Wealthy in Canterbury and Otago, 1840–1914(Dunedin, 2002), 118.

41. H. Belshaw, “Agricultural Labour in New Zealand”, in Belshaw et al., AgriculturalOrganization in New Zealand, 194–210; W.M. Hamilton, The Dairy Industry in New Zealand(Wellington, 1944), 106.

42. J46, 1928/790.

43. J46, 1936/1011.

44. J46, 1936/1395 (Cliffe); J46, 1936/339 (Sanson).


45. J46, 1938/713 (Whittaker); J46, 1944/294 (O’Callaghan).

46. J46, 1920/573.


48. J46, 1946/670.

49. NEB, (National Efficiency Board), Box 15, File 679, Thomas Moss, Wellington Dis-trict Commissioner, National Efficiency Board, Report on Dairy Farms in Taranaki, 1November 1917.

50. J46, 1930/636.

51. J46, 1930/385.

52. LS 36, Box 24, File on Discharged Soldiers Settlement Account: Report for the YearEnded 30th June 1935, p.3.

53. Gustafson, Kiwi Keith, 51.

54. J46, 1932/309.

55. J46, 1926/556.

56. J46, 1946/800. The transition from hand- to machine-milking in the 1920s dra-matically boosted dairy production but there was a down side to this dependence onmechanization.

57. J46, 1934/318.

58. J46, 1920/1311.

59. J46, 1930/1343.

60. A.N. Gould, “Proof of Gratitude?: Soldier Settlement in New Zealand After WorldWar I,” PhD dissertation, Massey University, 1992; Michael Roche, “Soldier Settlementin New Zealand After World War I: Two Case Studies”, New Zealand Geographer, 58:1(2002): 23–32. Some of the Australian studies take a sterner view. Marilyn Lake, TheLimits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria, 1915–38 (Melbourne, 1987).

61. J46, 1930/738.

62. J46, 1924/161.

63. J46, 1922/262.

64. Miles Fairburn, Nearly out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer’sDiary (Auckland, 1995), 137.

65. Fairburn, Nearly out of Heart and Hope, 83–85.

66. The seasonality of agricultural labor also has statistical implications. There is a pre-dominance of harvesters in the 1926 census and virtually no shearers, because that year’scensus was conducted after the shearing season had ended. Olssen and Hickey, Class andOccupation, 37.


67. J46, 1914/116.

68. J46, 1922/1213.

69. Edwin Arnold, “People Nobody Wants,” 1–28; “No Friends, No Home,” 1–7 inUnpublished Autobiography, MS-Papers-7237-25, Alexander Turnbull Library, NationalLibrary of New Zealand.

70. J46, 1916/317.

71. J46, 1922/251.

72. J46, 1930/130.

73. J46, 1916/200.

74. J46, 1904/745.

75. J46, 1946/927.

76. J46, 1928/413; J46, 1928/414. This is another case where pressure was put on theCoroner to deliver an open verdict. Florence’s father-in-law was “satisfied she went intothe water accidentally,” but the Coroner would not hear of it.

77. J46, 1926/1170.

78. J46, 1934/679.

79. J46, 1930/744. In this instance, a seventeen-year-old laborer was deemed backwardeven by his father.

80. J46, 1941/104.

81. J46, 1936/1284.

82. J46, 1934/232.

83. J46, 1934/319.

84. J46, 1934/1291.

85. J46, 1928/553.

86. J46, 1932/848.

87. J46, 1940/584.

88. J46, 1932/710.


90. J46, 1942/1371.

91. J46, 1928/829. This file contains a discussion on prolonged insomnia being “thefoundation of suicide.”

92. J46, 1926/229.


93. J46, 1926/410.

94. Doig, A Survey of Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy-farmers, 58–60.

95. NEB (National Efficiency Board), Box 15, File 679, Thomas Moss, Wellington Dis-trict Commissioner, National Efficiency Board, Report on Dairy Farms in Taranaki, 1November 1917. Similarly, a survey of 451 dairy farms in 1940 revealed that “60% wererun without any permanent hired male employees, the family members either alone orassisted by relatives being responsible for the work,” meaning that “wives and children ofschool age are of considerable importance to the organisation of work.” Doig, A Surveyof Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy-farmers, 50–51. The importance of children’slabor is further discussed by Hamilton, The Dairy Industry in New Zealand, 107–08.

96. J46, 1920/609.

97. J46, 1916/24.

Documents

COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING: RURAL SUICIDES IN NEW ... · COUNTRY LIVING, COUNTRY DYING 935 Figure 2 The new dairy farm as a crude site for family labor. Farm of William Coombridge