We spent a lot of time in summer in the
backblocks of Northern and Western Southland, where the days are long and the nights are short, floating on lilos or rubber tyres down the rivers and streams.
European people living in the isolated Australian bush or New Zealand
backblocks, however, had always relied on their domestic health guide and, as Brookes indicated, this continued into the twentieth century.
Three riders (Hin, Jo, and the unnamed female character who tells the story) are heading for a store in the utter
backblocks of New Zealand; they are exhausted, their pack-horse is sick and they want to stop there for the night.
(30) Four cases of typhoid fever from one family were the subject of a New Zealand
backblocks hospital nurse's account in 1912.
Thomas wrote a booklet on first aid in the bush that was also recommended for use in the New Zealand
backblocks (Kai Tiaki 1911).
(9) The problems of living in a remote location are exemplified by Rachel Henning's description of her brother Biddulph's station homestead at Exmoor, inland from Port Denison, and the primitive conditions she and her sister Annie experienced there.' (10) The kind of itinerant horseback ministry conducted in the
backblocks of the colony by priests like H.
The book presents the poems in categories such as December Days, Santa, Beach and
Backblocks, Pets and Pests, Lazy Days, Sounds of Summer and Long Distant Blues, making it easy to access.
For example, historian Rollo Arnold (1994) tells of a communal approach to settlement in the 1880s, promoted by the Stout-Vogel government, in which groups of settlers from established communities formed "small farm associations" for the purposes of jointly settling new
backblocks. This approach to pioneering runs counter to the ruggedly individualistic model that is so often caricatured, and it surely helped shape social relations in both old and new settlements: In banding together, finding their block of land, and planning for their joint occupation of it, the group got to know and trust each other.
In 1909, Kai Tiaki refers to Maori and
backblocks nursing but reveals nothing to suggest that Maori nurses were seen as colleagues in the association.