This is the story of Roland Clark (aka ‘Nor’wester’), a provocative and entertaining farmer and agricultural commentator, and his wife Betty, who farmed at Staveley in the Foothills area of Mid Canterbury from the 1950s to the 1980s.
For more than twenty years Roland’s New Zealand Farmer articles, notable for their wisdom, charm and provocative humour, were a monthly highlight for farming families through-out the country. Readers of the Christchurch Star were equally enthusiastic, avidly reading his weekly columns – about one thousand of them, and some two thousand articles in all. Where the Nor’wester Blows draws extensively on Roland’s lively writing.
In addition to chronicling family, farming, local and social history, the book colourfully charts Roland’s rise from farming novice (he had to ask a neighbour to show him how to plough a paddock!) to being one of New Zealand’s leading agricultural commentators and a founder of the New Zealand Tree Crops Association.
The narrative takes us from their early days in Ireland and the Queensland outback, through years of war (Roland was in the Special Operations Executive in the Mediterranean) and managing a Belfast linen mill to when they moved to New Zealand in 1958. The book provides a rich account of their early days in rural New Zealand as well as the development of their farm, ‘Glenshane’.