Country living, country dying: rural suicides in New Zealand, 1900-1950.

In the major settlement colonies of the British Empire and successor states, notably the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, protean myths thrived about the independence of rural life and the contentment of small farmers relative to urban wage earners. A mix of anti-urbanism and rural nostalgia was a continuing theme in British literature. It readily migrated to New Zealand where a relatively mild climate nurtured a green landscape that sustained representations of Arcadia. Periods of extraordinary rural expansion and prosperity papered over acute and chronic rural troubles.

In several North Island regions, principally Taranaki, diversification from sheep grazing to dairy farming boosted local prosperity by the early 1900s. Generous land-granting schemes for farmers and immigrant promotional literature contributed to notions of rural life as a healthy national fixture. Governments subscribed to the myth. New Zealand not only assisted approximately nine thousand veterans to secure farms after World War I, but launched rural improvement schemes during the Great Depression. (1) "The advisability of diverting our surplus labour to the land," wrote Prime Minister G.W. Forbes in 1932, "is fully realized by the Government." (2) Depression era relief programmes subsidized farmers to hire unemployed men to improve existing tracts. (3) The first Labour government (1935-1949) resuscitated rural settlement after World War II. The Land Department maintained in 1946 that "the small farmer working on his own farm for the profit of himself and his family is in general a more contented and stable citizen." (4) This social justification of farming regularly surfaced in post-war plans to open remote locales.

Agricultural produce was New Zealand's largest earner of export income and this fact contributed to the widely held perception that farming was a necessity as 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 our country. ... The farmer [is] always an individualist (a private enterpriser) with [a] self reliant independent spirit." (6) Crawford Somerset, author of Littledene, a sociological study of a rural community written during the late 1930s, depicted the community as extraordinarily cohesive and, by implication, typical of the rest of rural New Zealand. (7) By contrast, the fiction of the time presents economic and social realities inconsistent with the national myth. Frank Anthony's "Me and Gus" stories and his novel Follow the Call, set in the dairy farming area of central Taranaki in the years immediately after World War I, portray physical hardship, the burden of debt and inter-person disharmony, while John Mulgan's Man Alone graphically emphasises the harshness rural life in the 1920s and 1930s. (8) More dramatically, Jean Devanny's portrayal of sexual oppression in rural marriages resulted in The Butcher Shop (1926) being banned by the government censor.

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. I know it is true. I have lived in the country and seen for myself." (9) Some historians too are sceptical of the rural myth, finding little favour in the notion that rural life was more wholesome and socially integrating than its urban counterpart. (10)

Testing the competing paradigms of New Zealand rural life can be problematic. Conventional sources that could furnish insights--diaries, letters, and memoirs--are rare and subject to debate about typicality. (11) One remarkable set of routinely generated records can provide glimpses and enable comparisons with circumstances in towns and cities. New Zealand law required inquests into all suicides and suspected suicides. The resulting files hold witnesses' depositions that contain personal information and remarks on motives. (12)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Methodological issues

An analysis of New Zealand suicide case files from 1900 to 1950 exposes crises in 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 reconsidered open-verdicts and discovered that many deaths by drowning were unquestionably suicides. Other methods of suicide could not so readily be passed off as accidental and granted the courtesy of an "open verdict." (13) By reviewing open verdicts we were able to add 492 cases to the official suicide count. Overall we created a data set of 4220 suicides. The additional cases naturally affected the calculation 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 many jurisdictions and is often explained by noting that women have a lower success rate for suicide attempts than men. Suicide inquests, as we will show, contain remarkable information about life, but bias social history with an unrelieved bounty 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 is regular coverage for an entire country. Witnesses' statements and suicide notes add poignancy and immediacy to the statistical patterns. The narrative elements are rich but richer still when reinforced with numbers.

Care had to be taken in determining whom to include in the statistical portion of the discussion of rural suicides. In order to calculate the crucially important suicide rates for the rural sector, reliable counts of rural suicides had to be extracted from the data set. But what is a rural suicide? There were at least four possible ways of counting rural male suicides. Unfortunately, the situation for women was narrowed by the fact that witnesses and officials seldom gave rural women distinct occupational labels. Since a woman in either a rural or urban setting was described by court officials as a wife, housewife, girl, or a spinster tending to household duties, it was impossible to separate neatly farm women from other women. For men, the presence of occupational information, locales, and incidental facts allowed several means of sorting out rural men from all others. We could have included men selected by the following criteria: 1) all suicides committed 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 with an unknown occupation on the basis of the location of their suicide. The first method 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 in small towns numbered 709, in large towns 1192, and in cities 642. A handful of suicides occurred at sea. Since a substantial number of farmers (n = 149) and farm laborers (n = 199) killed themselves in urban places, there is a sound basis for including all cases where the deceased had a rural occupation. By selecting purely on the basis of rural locales, we would have passed over the travels of farmers into towns for business or a visit to the publican, ignored the proximity of many farms to small towns, and have missed the itinerate character of farm labor. Typically, the urban locales where farmers and farm laborers committed suicide were small centres. Crawford Somerset wrote with respect to the intermingling of hamlet and farms that the sheep farmers around Litttedene could secure help at shearing and mustering "from among the small-farm-labouring people in the village." (14) During the years under consideration, much of New Zealand was a land of urbs in rus. Or Littledenes in the countryside.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The problem with the second means of establishing rural-sector suicides, sorting by occupations, is that in 370 instances of the 3337 male suicides occupation was un-stated. That left 1066 men who were assigned typically rural occupations by witnesses: "The body is that of my bother. He was 38 and a farm labourer;" or to cite another illustration, "my husband had been milking on shares." The 1066 men included farm laborers (433), farmers (431), retired farmers (30), gardeners (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 of over thirty additional occupations. The third method, constraining rural sector suicides by requiring both a rural location and a rural occupation, produced 571 men. In common with the first technique for determining a rural suicide, this method excluded men who worked in the rural sector but happened to die in an urban place. The final way of selecting rural sector men--using rural occupations and adding men of unknown occupation whose bodies were found in the countryside--would have added fifty cases to the 1066. Some men could have been in transit between urban places, so an addition of the fifty cases would still be an imperfect solution. (15)

We decided that for our analysis of suicide rates we would consider all individuals with a rural occupation. In several parts of the discussion, farmers (n -431) and farm laborers (n = 433) are compared. The concentration on these two groups seemed reasonable due to their great prevalence, an interest in depicting class relations in the countryside, and the possibility of illustrating the interaction of emotional and material ramifications of class differences. There were many gradations of farmers but witnesses seldom disclosed the size or nature of the operation. For the same reason, it is not possible to state accurately the relative proportions of the different types of farmers who committed suicide. Estimates based on assumptions about the dominance of particular types of farming in specific locales could be attempted but would be misleading due to the mix of sheep grazing, dairy farming, grain production, and orchards in some areas.

Gender is also an important category for close analysis, but it was impossible to ascertain absolutely all farm women in the data set, although we identified 130 women who lived in rural locations and another thirty-five whom witnesses called farmers' wives. The shortcoming with the first number is that we can assume that some farm women visited urban centres and a few lived on the margins of hamlets. The number of rural women is under-represented in a data set of 165 cases, because on the basis of the 4 to 1 gender ratio for all New Zealand suicides, the number for rural sector women could have been around 250. Our inability to establish a defensible data set for rural women constrains our discussion of their circumstances to qualitative evidence taken from the 165 cases. Of course, it is just possible that the suicide rate for rural women was lower than for urban women. If that were the case, it would contrast with men where the rural suicide rate was considerably higher than the urban one. Farm labor combined with family rearing no doubt drove many women to despair--we have seen this in individual case files--but the burdens of rural living might have weighed more fatally on men in general and there is little doubt that masculine conviviality at the bar helped put alcoholism into the mix. Women largely escaped that affliction (Table 1).

Table 1
General Motives of Suicide for Rural Sector Men and Women and Urban Men
and Women, 1900-1950

Principal                                     All Men Aged
Problem                                       20 to 65 in
Category as                        Farm       Large Towns
Cited by           Farmers      Labourers       & Cities
Witnesses

Assorted          93 (21.6%)    77 (17.8%)    394 (21.5%)
Illnesses

Mental            92 (21.3%)    74 (17.1%)    321 (17.5%)
Illnesses

Work & Money      90 (20.9%) *  60 (13.9%)    351 (19.1%)
Problems

War Related       39 ( 9.0%) *  19 ( 4.4%)    106 ( 5.8%)
Issues

No Idea           39 ( 9.0%)    45 (10.4%)    167 ( 9.1%)

Alcohol           26 ( 6.0%)    80 (18.5%) *  207 (11.3%)
Problems

Marital or        16 ( 3.7%)    39 ( 9.0%) *  124 ( 6.8%)
Romantic
Problems

Character         16 ( 3.7%)    20 ( 4.6%)     68 ( 3.7%)
Adjustment
Problems

Death of Someone  10 ( 2.3%)     3 ( 0.7%)     44 ( 2.4%)
Close

Problems with     10 ( 2.3%)    16 ( 3.7%)     53 ( 2.9%)
the Police or
Law

Total                431           433           1835

Principal Problem        Women in      Women      AH Women in
Category as Cited         Rural     Identified     Toons and
by Witnesses             Locales        as           Cities
                                     "Farmer's
                                      Wives"
                                      (after
                                      1922)

Assorted Illnesses      35 (26.9%)   9 (25.7%)    132 (23.0%)

Mental Illnesses        41 (31.5%)  16 (45.7%) *  242 (42.1%)

Work & Money Problems    7 ( 5.4%)   0 ( 0.0%)     35 ( 5.9%)

War Related Issues       2 ( 1.5%)   1 ( 2.9%)     10 ( 1.7%)

No Idea                  8 ( 6.2%)   1 ( 2.9%)     23 ( 4-0%)

Alcohol Problems         2 ( 1.5%)   1 ( 2.9%)      0 ( 0.0%)

Marital or Romantic     20 (15.4%)   3 ( 8.6%)     46 ( 8.0%)
Problems

Character Adjustment     9 ( 6.9%)   2 ( 5.7%)     25 ( 4.3%)
Problems

Death of Someone Close   5 ( 3.8%)   2 ( 5.7%)     35 ( 6.1%)

Problems with the        1 ( 0.8%)   0 ( 0.0%)      4 ( 0.7%)
Police or Law

Total                       130         35             575

No calculation of a suicide rate for a sub-population (rural men) across the decades can avoid inexact results. To find divisors for the calculation, we scoured New Zealand censuses and also employed a table of occupations produced for the conscription of soldiers in World War I. New Zealand normally conducted censuses every five years but not in 1931 and 1941. Linear interpolation by SPSS was conducted to estimate the rural sector working population in years between censuses. The computation of rates shows that the male suicide rate was higher for the rural sector than for the male population generally (Graph 1). Another way of looking at rural male suicides is in relation to their percentage of all suicides and the proportion of the male population engaged in rural production. The percentage of men working in agriculture edged downward after World War I; the percentage of men with agricultural occupations who committed suicide increased over the same fifty years (Graph 2). Inquests not only enabled us to track rural suicides against other data but to analyze motives for suicide and to quote pertinent statements about rural hardships. We deliberately use the term motive rather than cause. Motive implies choice and creates a space for doubt about an ultimate factor; cause connotes a circumstance urging itself decisively upon individuals. Many men and women were not caused to commit suicide; however, most had motives and these motives along with suicide rates are the basis for a discussion of the quality of rural life. By no means, however, can inquest depositions support a claim that rural isolation was a prevalent factor in suicide. Nearly three-quarters (71.4%) of all rural sector men who took their own lives resided near a railway line, harbour, town, or city. On occasion, however, a farmer would mention that he could not abide the isolation. Mercury Bay farmer William Harman, single and thirty-seven, told people he was "lonely, sick of the place." (16)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Temporal patterns

The trials of rural living can be reviewed by year (Graphs 1 and 2) and season (Graph 3); they can also he analyzed by rural class, gender, age, and marital status. The yearly patterns present two broad points. First, they indicate that throughout the first half of the century, the rural male suicide rate always exceeded that for urban men. When rural and urban suicides are compared by motives, the two sets of data were similar (Table 1), but their rates differed. This conttast suggests inconclusively that, whatever trials all men encountered across the 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 victualling the Btitish army in South Africa were not yet fully realized and the recent good times still sustained farmers. The rural and national suicide rates for men were relatively low. In 1904, a spike in the rate can be related to the bite of a post-war recession. Economic conditions worsened with a brief global business recession in 1907. The completion of the North Island trunk railway line bumped many workers into the casual labor market where they competed with itinerant farm laborers. War was splendid for commodity producers, but during World War I the suicide rate among rural males remained about the same as in peacetime. (17) Unlike the Boer War, this conflict consumed many farmers' sons, brothers, and farmers themselves. Out of just over 100,000 men who served overseas, more than 16,000 were killed and there were 41,000 casualties. (18) The country's population was merely 1,160,000. Grief affected urban and rural folk alike, but male farm owners and, in a few instances, the women left behind to manage farms found it difficult to secure labor and cash-in on higher prices. Personal sorrows compounded the usual stresses of managing a property. A number of farmers who committed suicide between 1920 and 1950 suffered from wounds and shell-shock which, apart from the intrinsic burdens, impeded the routine toil of rural life. Peter Macpherson, a thirty-three-year-old farmer, was so "shaky" from the war that his doctor wanted him to apply for a placement at a special hospital for shell-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 achievements at 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 as out of work." (20) Sixty-six-year old John Verrall was one of a number of farmers in 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 the idea that he had narrowly missed having a stroke," could not countenance the thought 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 rural rate rose. The Great Depression struck hard at farmers. A crisis caused by falling global prices for primary products may have started before 1930; the suicide 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 the 1920s, and collapsed in the 1930s, many farmers who had acquired land before 1920 carried for decades mortgages above the market value of their land. (23) Loans for supplies from ubiquitous stock agencies piled up debts. (24) Between 1931 and 1936, successive governments provided mortgage relief and a guaranteed price for dairy produce, (25) but these measures were only partial successful. In 1939 a Lands Department field inspector for rural Otago summarized a basic dilemma when he appealed for the government to implement a farm subsidy to revivify rural life. "On average prices for produce it is impossible, after allowing for reasonable 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 the management must suffer, and as the farmer himself desires a decent standard of living it is natural the labour is skimped." (26) Farmers relied on cheap labor; the rural myth of prosperous farms depended on it. World War II restored rural commodity prices, and this conflict did not inflict the shockingly high casualty rates experienced by New Zealand in World War 1. Consequently, it is unremarkable that suicide rates during World War 11 dropped to roughly half what they had been at the start of the Great Depression. However, World War II did furnish motives. There were suicides when family members were called up and when farmers felt over-burdened on account of the labor shortage. (27)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Farmers needed hired hands because of the labor-intensive and often strenuous nature of the work. "The long working day has now become a habit and the habit a virtue," observed Crawford Somerset, author of Littledene. "All the farmers interviewed admitted that they needed more help in their farms ... [and] nearly everyone interviewed thought that more leisure as a general rule would be a bad thing." (28) A dairy farmer in Taranaki, responding in 1947 to a comment in 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 has first-class concerts, pictures and plays to attend,
  we have to be content with the second-class fare of the wireless. [As
  if] a dairy fanner has no top dressing to do, lime to spread, manure
  to spread, autumn and winter feeding to do, ploughing, and sowing,
  chain harrowing, drains to clean, fences to fix, implements to
  renovate and 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 fill with sand, buildings to patch
  and paint, gates to make, rushes to dig, sick cows to doctor, 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 360 days in the year including Sundays, Saturdays and all
  holidays--truly a lovely life if you can afford to pay someone else
  to do the work . . . [to] have "days off"" as often as you like.
  Quite a good life if you don't mind slogging in for 65 hours a week
  at 40 hours' pay. (29)

New Zealand's rural suicides were distributed unevenly in a menstrual pattern that contrasted with the distribution for all male suicides (Graph 3). The rural pattern conceivably expressed heightened stresses that farmers as well as farm laborers experienced during spring and early summer. By the southern-hemisphere winter and spring, roughly from July to October, grazers and grain farmers had run down savings from the previous harvest, wool clip, or cattle sale; credit was important at this juncture because they were incurring a round of expenses. For sheep grazers, costs began to peak when shearing crews arrived in November and December. (30) Grain farmers needed help with the harvest and threshing in January and February. (31) While some rural operators put out money before receiving payment on their staple, dairy farmers were paid differently, because they produced daily. Typically they received monthly advances based on milk fat delivered, but at the end of the fiscal year, often the end of June, butter creameries or cheese factories paid bonuses based on the year's revenues. Agrarian operators faced financial and climate stresses from July to February, and received their largest payments from February to July. These events, directed a cycle of long stressful times and shorter good times, and help explain the seasonality of suicide for owners and operators of rural properties. Matters were slightly different for rural laborers who had farm tucker and money from September to perhaps March. For them, good times ran from September to December; then in January many would have trekked to find harvest work after the mustering and clipping of 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 begging for "a shake down for the night." He was put in the stable. (33) Witnesses identitled work and money problems as the motive for farmer suicides in a fifth of the inquest cases which was more than reported for farm laborers and as common as for urban males (Table 1). This fact and the failure of the seasonal pattern of suicides to follow exactly the economic reasoning offered above are reminders that the motives for suicide were not all susceptible to economic reasoning alone.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It is worth remarking that the attribution of motives for suicide that appears in Table 1 collapses hundreds of specific causes into clusters that seemed to embody a predominant element; however, these "judgement calls" are imperfect and on many occasions they obscure the interaction of several problems. There is the additional hitch that protective witnesses may have opted for explanations--motives--that put a favourable gloss on the deceased and themselves. For example, it is not surprising given the nature of farm work that witnesses often remarked on assorted physical aliments, but it is possible that sometimes witnesses emphasized physical troubles since they were more acceptable than financial failure, mental illness, or alcoholism. Nevertheless, witnesses seemed frank, gave their statements under oath in open court, and occasionally had their testimony investigated by police constables.

Crises along Life's Course

The motives for suicide among rural men changed with age. Motives ranked by 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 police or 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 problems (46.7), assorted illnesses (50.6), and the death of someone close (53.3). A cross-tabulation of age cohorts and motives reveals more precisely the clustering of problems though the life course. Rather than reproducing a cumbersome table of cross-tabulated cells, we will highlight the more significant findings. Given that we used sixteen age cohorts commonly found in census publications, any cohort 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 among suicides attributed to romantic motives. Men who were 20 to 24, accounted for a quafter (24.4%) of all rural male suicides attributed to that motive and young men aged 25 to 29 made up another over-represented cohort (15.4%). Alcohol abuse struck middle-aged men: 35 to 39 (16.8% of cases for this motive) and 40 to 44 (15.0%). Work and money cases were marginally more prominent among rural men from 55 to 59 (14.1%) and 60 to 64 (10.7). The same age cohorts figured significantly among suicides for which illnesses were claimed the main motive: 55 to 59 (10.9%), 60-64 (10.0%), 65 to 69 (11.4%). For reasons discussed 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 that could 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 more vividly exposed than in the cases of boys channelled into farm labor by the state, charities, or neglectful parents. Fifteen-year old Ronald Nicholson was licensed out by the state in 1942 as a farm hand and he hanged himself fourteen months later. Described as moody, srubborn and prone to sulking moods, he "resented being scolded for disobedience." He ran away more than once. (34) Sixteen year old Frederick Hall was put to work as a farm laborer and two months later absconded after stealing [pounds sterling]20 of jewellery. He returned to the farm a week later, broke into the house, and shot himself. (35) Another sixteen-year-old, William Little, had emigrated to New Zealand under the auspices of Flock House. Funded by sheep farmers, this organisation brought out roughly 760 orphans, mostly sons of United Kingdom seamen killed in World War I. These juveniles were allocated as cheap labor to participating sheep stations. The magistrate in Little's case remarked on the lad's "lonely solitary existence" and what this would have done to "a shy and reserved boy who found it difficult to make friends with the very few people available [on the isolated station]." The magistrate criticized a "taciturn, unapproachable and close-fisted" employer, and condemned those fanners "whose chief interest in the Flock House scheme is that they may return them a fair proportion [of former prosperous times] by way of cheap farm labour." Little was not only being exploited--two-thirds of his wages went to Flock House--but Flock House representatives had pressed to obtain an open verdict. (36) On other occasions, farmers criticized young laborers for failure to heed 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." Despite the farmer finding him another billet, Gibbs shot himself, which suggests feelings of failure and hopelessness for the future. (37) James Parks was given two weeks' notice. He arrived from England under a Salvation Army Immigration Scheme seven years before and now in 1932, at the age of twenty-five and at the height of the Great Depression, he faced unemployment. He poisoned himself with strychnine intended for rabbits. (38) Farmers enlisted the police to help rid them of lingering laborers. Reflecting on the events that led to Andrew Ulingworth hanging himself in jail, a constable recalled that he had been summoned to a farm. "1 took the deceased's swag and strapped it on my saddle and told him I would arrest him as an idle and disorderly person." Ulingworth refused to give his name, because, he said "I do not want my parents to know I have come to this." (39) Rural men--farmers as well as farm laborers--could internalize the reasons for their poor state and this surfaced in shame.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Young rural men, like counterparts in the city, experienced romantic rejection. However, farm laborers seem particularly at risk for romantic disappointment. The arduous and sometimes isolated nature of farm work, combined with poor wages, uncertainty of employment, the lack of legislative protection, (40) and meagre prospects for social mobility, (41) help explain why farm laborers constitute the single largest occupational category among youth suicides (31 farm laborers had ages below 21)--just as farmers were the single largest category among adult suicides (422 farmers had ages above 20). Over half (53.9%) of farm laborers 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 is not surprising that romantic disappointment appeared often in their ranks. In the serious business of courtship, prospective partners were rare on sheep stations, thin on the ground in hamlets, and often under the watch of nervous parents. Twenty-one year old Sidney Tucker was prevented from "keeping company" with a sixteen-year old whose parents thought her too young--"and he was put out about it and was very jealous." (42) Nineteen-year old Edward Cam-mack had to break off his engagement because his fiancee's friends thought she was too young. (43) Robert Cliffe had been courting for three years but his girlfriend declined his proposal, saying that marriage was "very serious" and she was unsure whether she loved him enough; twenty-one-year-old Laurence Sanson realised he had been jilted when his fifteen-year-old girlfriend ceased answering his letters. (44) Twenty-one-year-year-old Victor Whittaker had a falling out with his girlfriend, and Leonard O'Callaghan was afraid that the young widow he was courting 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 drinking bout to salve his rejection. His journey illustrates why rural locales are an imperfect indicator of "rural" suicides. The binge remedy failed Paterson who shot himself in a hotel room, leaving a note for his ex-fianacee: "Your words have severed my every cord in my heart." (46) According to Somerset, engagements were seldom broken in rural New Zealand. (47) If so, to the shock of an unusual disappointment was added loss of face in a small community. Romantic disappointment applied also to farmer's daughters. Nineteen-year-old Mabel Temperiey who kept house for her widowed father, took caustic soda when her father objected to her seeing an older man. A further ingredient was her unhappy home life. (48)

Measured by suicides, the stress of money problems was slightly greater among older farmers and intensified for all farmers during the Great Depression. Dairy farming was regarded as "a young man's business, and he must be fit to make it pay." (49) Often dairy farms were owned and operated by different individuals and the operator, the share-milker, carried enormous burdens in poor economic times. Any debilitating illness jeopardised a family's well-being and that could precipitate an emotional breakdown. These circumstances affected George Brown, a forty-nine year old sharemilker who took an overdose of a sleeping draught in June 1930. "Owing to illness," his wife testified, "he has not done any work this last six months." (50) In the same year, farmer Thomas Sadlier hanged himself in a field; a friend stated that "he had no worries other than farm troubles and ill health." Sadlier's wife indicated that they needed a loan to hold onto the farm 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 or mental depression, increased during the Grear Depression. By then too, a number of returned soldiers who farmed were finally being acknowledged as medically unfit. "Age and the latent effect of war service are affecting the constitution of the men. A re-action on the health of quite a number of men, previously fit and good farmers, has now set in, and in order to keep their farms going it is now necessary for these settlers to employ outside labour. Medical, hospital and similar expenses are becoming constant and material charges against farm revenue." (52) These circumstances, of course, affected more men than merely the returned-soldier farmers. In light of the publicity given to the post-war rural settlement scheme, however, it is worth mentioning here that New Zealand's high casualty rate meant that many returned soldiers experienced war-related medical troubles. They also faced falling commodity prices, and often had to clear virgin 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 of running a business. During the 1949 general election campaign, Keith Holyoake described a farm as a "piece of land surrounded by mortgages. A farmer is a land worker surrounded by troubles. Weather, prices, costs and pests." (53) The sheer worry of making a living, avoiding unsustainable debt, providing adequately for one's family and paying the bills feature prominently in farmers' suicides. During the Great Depression, fifty-four-year-old Arthur Crowder ingested strychnine when notified that the power was to be cut off because the electricity bills had not been paid. As his son pointed out, eighty cows could not be milked by hand day in, day out. (54)

Seldom were finances the sole factor. The physical stresses of farming life took their toll. A sudden illness or persistent ill health affected one's ability to work the land, as did the onset of declining physical powers. Sixty-five year old Charles Eaden, said a neighbouring farmer, had:

  Troubles in connection with the working of his farm 6k they were
  evidently worrying him ... he could trim the fences and do odd work &
  look after the sheep but he wasn't capable of working the tractor. I
  then offered him the loan of a six horse team to help him with his
  work through the winter 6k he accepted the offer 6k appeared very
  grateful, but at the same time he appeared very despondent. I again
  met him on my own farm ... he went over old ground with me ... He
  told me he was worrying about his financial position 6k that he had
  seen Mr Hunter about selling the farm 6k that Mr Hunter had informed
  him that there was little prospect [of that] at the present time 6k
  when he left me he was completely down hearted 6k 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 can be represented diagrammatically in this instance as:

Physical decline [right arrow] increasingly precarious financial position + unable to sell farm [right arrow] despondency = suicide (shotgun)

Another example concerns fifty-one-year-old John Milne. He shot himself but did not die immediately. When asked why he had done it, he replied: "There is no grass, the cows are starving. A cow kicked over a bucket this morning and that was the end of everything." (56) The spilled milk was the precipitant:

Unwell for some time [right arrow] very depressed + worry of shortage of feed + cow kicks over bucket of milk = suicide (shotgun)

At the level of discrete tragic biographies, abundant petmutations 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 "making Butter fat below cost ... I'm too old to take responsibility any longer. ... Spent [pounds sterling]3000 on improvements to farm over past 32 years not realising the present prices would come--coming winter will be the worst NZ has ever had--had enough." (57) Age and financial strain fused and Smith elected to chose his time of death. When sixty-year-old Archibald Gray visited his doctor because "the work on the farm was too heavy," he was given advice to sell out, advice he could not accept because his life was tied up with his work. (58) When the brother of single fifty-seven-year-old farmer William Corwin gave testimony he remarked: "I do not know of anything apart from his financial worries to cause him to commit suicide other than the pain in his back." (59) Age, illness, and financial problems were often united.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In connection with illness, a notable feature of rural suicides was the number of returned servicemen, especially from World War I. The government's scheme to assist ex-servicemen onto the land has been subject to revisionist interpretation, the historians concerned arguing that its successes have been underplayed by ideological antipathy toward the Reform Government which inaugurated and administered the project. Based on the inquest files, there is indirect evidence that the soldier settlement scheme was flawed. (60) Depositions do not al' ways indicate whether discharged soldiers who committed suicide had signed on as soldier settlers, but they indicated that it was unrealistic to expect men who had been gassed, shell shocked and otherwise injured to make a success of a strenuous and often unaccustomed occupation. The army had discharged William Stephens as fit and ineligible for a disability pension, but since his return he had had headaches and failing memory. His wife claimed his final "breakdown 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 New Zealand since his return". He cut his throat, and by the time of his death the worry about his affairs had upgraded an "unstable nervous condition" to "temporary insanity." (62) Another thirty-three-year-old farmer, William Foley, had been "suffering from depression and nervous trouble due to wounds received at the war." He shot himself in the hamlet of Dairy Flat. (63)

Farm Laborers: Further Ado

Seasonal factors dramatically affected farm laborers. Like farm owners, they were stretched for cash by spring. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a rural itinerate laborer in New Zealand worked about 160 days a year. (64) Farm laborers could expect wages to begin late in the year, as noted above. (65) Waiting in boarding houses and hotels, in the homes of family members, or sometimes in their own homes, and perhaps finding temporary casual work in towns and cities, farm laborers nursed their savings during the slack months and worried about their future. (66) Collected in hotels and boarding houses while waiting for a resumption of work meant passing time among friends and that frequently meant serious drinking. Alcohol addiction figured very prominently in the troubles of both young and old farm laborers; alcohol-related problems helped set apart the explanations for their suicides from explanations for the suicides of farmers (Table 1). With the return of shearing or harvesting, some younger laborers recognized their poor future prospects; older men knew they had to maximize income or face destitution, vagrancy, charity, or dependency on family. Increased illnesses and injuries cut into the rural laborers' already slender prospects. Moreover, some older men were on their way down socially when 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's death, 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 of seasonal work or, in the case of alcoholics, soon after they resumed work and found themselves restricted in their drinking. Quite a few experienced delirium tremens as they worked on remote sheep stations; others discovered that they could no longer work effectively due to the ravages of drink. Forty-eight and single, William Vyvian was not the type of robust worker sought hy farmers, hut 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 themselves in meaner surroundings than farmers, although suicides from all social groups were often committed in public spaces to avoid upsetting family or friends (Table 2). Precisely because rural work required few skills and was paid poorly, it drew in 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 cohorrs were skewed toward youth and differed from the age-cohort profile of farmers who were older (Graph 4). The gruelling work wore out men before they could apply to enter a regional Old Men's Home or apply for the state-funded old-age pension which had been launched in 1898.

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

Location                 Farmer N      Farm
                          and (%)    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

Wellington philanthropist Edwin Arnold compared "swaggies" to "sea dogs" because of their wanderings and love of a spree. He worried especially about the gap between the fifties, when "they are not able to do a day's work as when they were 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 fifty when he began telling friends that "he was getting too old to follow up his usual work." (70) Thomas McVicar, aged fifty-eight, started to work on a threshing mill in February 1922, but according to his employer he complained "that the work was too heavy for him." (71) A sixty-year-old single alcoholic farm laborer Christopher Traves hanged himself in 1930. On the Monday prior to his death, there had been a "meeting of his creditors." (72) Relations between employers and the itinerant laborers they relied upon surely varied and the files present instances of decent treatment, but connections could also be extremely causal. Asked about his deceased employee James McKay, farmer William Trail answered "1 did not ask him for his name and he did not tell me it." (73)

Courtship difficulties have been mentioned when we introduced the idea that distinct troubles developed alongside phases in the life course. But it is worth repeating that a man without prospects had a difficult time getting a girl's parents to see him as an asset. (74) Marital problems also entered the picture, for some farm laborers were married. Thirty-three year old Thomas May was unhappy with his marriage and told his wife that he "would either have to get a divorce or get into the car and gas himself." (75) Infidelity could unleash explosive passions. When William Washbourne, aged twenty-seven, learned that his wife had "been familiar with another man" he fired a shot at her, then took off and shot himself in a paddock. His wife was so remorseful that she ran off and drowned herself, leaving behind four orphans. (76) The bleakness and marginality of the farm laborer's life comes into focus when the cases of Eric Wylie and John Leahy are considered. The thirty-two-year-old Wylie, who worked for his brother, was drinking to excess" and had been spoken to by the police. His suicide note reads, "fed up", "absolutely tired fo [sic] my life." (77) The thirty-four-year-old Leahy was nervous and depressed in the aftermath of a recent breakdown, and in trouble with police for having accosted a young female employee. (78)

Only one in eight (13.1%) farm laborers who committed suicide was married while 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 their basic problem was finding a mate. Perhaps the traits that brought men into the rural labor pool--poor education, disabilities, health problems, alcohol abuse, family poverty, or no family--minimized their appeal as husbands and especially as sons-on-law. (79) Marital information suggests that many farm laborers lacked deep emotional support. When we coded information for the data set we considered whether there was any evidence of care or support for the men and women who committed suicide. Our assessment was subjective, but the results for farmers and farm laborers contribute now to the picture of contrasting life experiences. About three quarters of farmer suicides (74.2%) had someone who apparently cared about them and gave emotional support; however, just over half of farm laborers (54.7%) were so fortunate. The fact that a number of farm laborers in the suicide files lacked support may explain why witnesses occasionally reported that they noticed nothing unusual about the individual in the days before the suicide; detached witnesses were in no position to be aware of the physical 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 farm laborers died: fields, outbuildings, rivers, and bush, but quite a few ended their lives in their own or a neighbour's house. Other differences indicative of the social gap between farmers and farm laborers surfaced. Witnesses at inquests for farmers averaged the following distribution: strangers 0.07, recent work mates or friends 0.58, long-time friends 036, family including in-laws 1.15, and medical doctors who were treating them 0.27. Witnesses at inquests for farm laborers averaged: strangers 0.15, recent work mates 1.10, long-time friends 0.33, family 0.68, and doctors 0.15. At inquests for urban workers, there were on average strangers 0.22, recent work mates or friends 0.75, long-term friends 0.43, family 0.91, 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 likely to be among strangers.

Health issues were prominent among the farm laborers who committed suicide. 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 swimming lest others ridiculed his scrawny physique. His social life was almost nonexistent. (80) Twenty-two-year old Noel Cottier also felt a social misfit. These were the depression years and he was unable to find a job worthy of his education. He settled for work on a dairy farm but "he contracted rheumatism which left his nerves in a very bad state." He drowned himself. (81) The perceived inability of the body to withstand the rigors of farm labor, combined with lack of alternative employment took its toll. Twenty-year old Norman Mojie had epileptic fits as a boy. His health was still "not too good but on the mend." Nevertheless he shot himself. (82) Harold Brown, twenty-four, had been in a mental hospital seven years earlier. He "wasn't too robust" and a convergence of a heavy cold, sore ears and influenza proved too much. (83) Sidney Verner, also twenty-four, suffered headaches and giddiness from a cycling accident; he threw himself in front of a locomotive. (84)

Suicides among farm laborers embrace almost the entire life cycle, from the mid-teens to the early-eighties. Men in the 26-49 age cohorts suffered many of the same problems as their employers in the same age cohorts. Questions of physical and mental health, war-related or not, are to the forefront. Another motive for suicide was financial, although farm laborers did not have financial problems of the magnitude that could afflict indebted farmers. But their low wages 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, aged thirty-one, had been unemployed for four weeks and was due to appear in court for theft of money and clothing. (86)

The motives for suicide among aging and aged rural workers are similar to those of the middle aged cohort, but with dectepitude and bereavement more predominant. No one case exemplifies their experiences but the example of James Fishet comes as no surprise. This seventy-three-year old rabbiter routinely spent his pension on drinking sprees; on such occasions he would often disappear several days. Alcohol was seemingly all he had to look forward to. He was single and had been living in the same hut on the same farmer's property for almost half his lifetime. His estate came to [pounds sterling]21-10-0, almost half of which was realized from a wireless radio. He had [pounds sterling]2 in the Post Office Savings Bank. The rifle with which he shot himself sold for [pounds sterling]1-10-0 and his old horse fetched a further [pounds sterling]1 and was butchered for dog tucket. (87)

Farmers' wives:

The motives for suicides among women in the country resembled those for urban women, except that mental illness was noted more sparingly for rural women and romantic or marital problems seem to have been slightly more prominent (Table 1). For married women the latter included frequent arguments with their husband, separation, and extra-martial affairs; for single women, romantic trouble included rejection, unwanted pregnancy, and pregnancy and rejection. However, as with farmers, there were usually concatenations of troubles. Assorted problems merged in the case of thirty-four-year-old Ivy Lange. During her final pregnancy 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 pregnant. Her suicide note read: "Dear Mont[ague], It hurts me to think we could not 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 one look after my dear children. Your loving wife Ivy." (88) To her father she wrote that she was "going to my two babies in heaven ." Her closing remark and others like it bear on Somerset's portrayal of faith in Littledene. "Religious belief," he suggested, "inclines toward fundamentalism and a literal interpretation of the Scriptures." (89)

As for mental illness, a few rural women who committed suicide were reported as having a nervous breakdown, being depressed, being treated for nerves, suffering 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 having melancholia: "During the past two or three months my wife has not been in good health. I attribute this to the change of life through which she was passing. This change came late and as a result my wife became run down in health and her nervous condition rather bad." (90) The strain on very rare occasions led to murder-suicide. Forty-nine year old Eleanor Surrey suffered from high blood pressure, insomnia and depression, and her husband, owing to his heart problems, had done no work for the last eight months. She shot her eighteen-year-old daughter and then turned the gun on herself. (91)

Physical as well as mental and emotional problems are also present, and often they combine. Twenty-five-year-old Gertrude Errington suffered from goitre. It "troubled her night and day" and caused insomnia, leaving her irritable toward her three children. As well as her own wellbeing she worried about the health of her husband, a World War 1 veteran. She died on her kitchen floor after ingesting the herbicide and pesticide Black Leaf 40. (92) Edith Cameron, aged forty-nine, was depressed by troublesome varicose veins and a husband who drank to excess and ignored a court order prohibiting him from purchasing alcohol. (93) In these and other cases it is difficult to know if the rural environment played a determining role, because the same motives were prevalent among urban women (Table 1). Never the less, the presence of rural tragedies deflates the idea that country living was idyllic or curative.

Women coped with some of the same economic stresses carried by their husbands but were tending children and running the household as well. (94) The convention at inquests of simply designating married women as housewives and single women at home as spinsters or women carrying out household duties ignored the likelihood that women managed the household and contributed sub-srantially to the household economy. In the dairying district of Taranaki during 1917, a wartime labor study reported that 62,552 cows were milked by 2285 men and 1528 women. (95) Grace Bickford was one of these women; when her husband "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) Wartime conditions may have increased the participation of women, but their contribution was considerable on dairy farms at all times and the rigours of this work were added to those of domestic chores.

Maori suicide

Rural New Zealand was home to many Maori and their suicides, which quite likely had been under-reported, require separate discussion. Suicides by Maori males numbered ninty-four and over half of these men (54.2%) had rural occupations and more than a quarter (28.7%) had no occupation recorded. Almost half of Maori who committed suicide (48.9%) lived in remote areas and more than a quarter (27.7%) lived in non-remote rural areas. Although Maori had begun to migrate in substantial numbers to cities after World War II, their prewar concentration in rural regions of the North Island meant that they were prominent among farm laborers. It was a debt summons that bothered farm laborer Turi Te Huha in 1916. "He could not help his family. He said this several times." (97)

Possibly, the under-reporting of Maori suicides derived from the difficulty of determining from case files who was Maori in urban settings since many had adopted European names. Unless a persons name was Maori or a witness said that the deceased was Maori, identity was impossible to determine. Although Maori suicides in the data set were strongly connected to rural life, they expressed crises that varied significantly from those of rural sector Pakeha. Alcohol, assorted illnesses, work and money problems, and mental illness were prominent for the latter; however, for Maori men the principal causes were marital and romantic problems (22.9%), assorted illnesses (18.1%), and problems with the law (9.6%). They were relatively young. The nature of witnesses at their inquests is indicative of close-knit rural communities that had minimal medical care available. The mean number ai witnesses was strangers 0.08, recent friends 0.51, long-time friends 0.59, family 1.12, and doctors 0.16.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Conclusion

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

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

Department of History Hamilton ON L8S4L8 Canada

Department of History Wellington, New Zealand

ENDNOTES

This article derives from presentations by the authors at the New Zealand Historical Association Conference, Wellington, 23-25 December 2007- We thank the staff of the Wellington repository of Archives New Zealand for their sustained assistance during our researches there.

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

(2.) LS 1[1, Box 29, File 29/50, G.W Forbes, Prime Minister, to W Sullivan, Mayor of Whakatane, 2 June 1932.

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

(4.) LS 1, Box 21, File 21/149/3166, Preliminary Report on Subdivision of Farms for the Settlement of Returned Servicemen in Thames, Bay of Plenty, and Rotoraa-TaupO Regions, 16 August 1946.

(5.) A contemporary statement to this effect is in G.T. Alley and D.O.W. Hall, The Farmer inNew Zealand (Wellington, 1941), 115-16.

(6.) Barry Gustafson, Kiwi Keith: A Biography of Keith Holyoake (Auckland, 2007), 51. Coincidentalty, 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 hie relating to George Black, 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 to J46, 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 surrounding the mid-Canterbury township of Oxford. Another statement of rural community cohe sion is "Best of Both Words: Ngahinepoiri's Community Life," New Zealand Listener, (13 June 1947): 6-7.

(8.) Scholarly editions of Frank S. Anthony's work are Gus Tomlins, together with the original 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,Mnn Alone (London, 1939);

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

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

(11.) For the nineteenth century, Rollo Arnold uses four farming diaries to dispute Fairburn's notion of New Zealand being an "atomized" society. Rollo Arnold, "Community in Rural Victorian New Zealand," NZJH, 24:1 (1990): 3-21.

(12.) It would be useful to make comparisons across societies, especially employing casebased data. However, Cororners' inquests in many common law jurisdictions were often conducted by county or city-based coroners. This is true of England and much of the United 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 Co New Zealand. The country was neither an exceptionally fine country for working men nor a dreadful one. For recent data on rural suicides in Australia see Andrew N. Page and Lyn J. Frager, "Suicide in Australian Farming, 1988-1997," Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36 (2002): 81-85.

(13.) These have been coded as probable suicides, as distinct from certified suicides. Our criteria are: was the person concerned experiencing severe difficulties, was the person's behaviour in the period leading up to his or her death out of character, and was the person's mode of death consistent with a suicide rather than an accidental death? The question of open vetdicts (in the nineteenth century English context) is discussed by Victor 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 volume contains the original work and a follow-up study conducted in the 1950s. Littledene and its successor volume bear more than passing resemblance to Robert and Helen Lynds' studies of "Middletown" (code for Muncie, Indiana). Both "Littledene" and "Middletown" 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 points about the difficulty of urban-rural distinctions. Eric Olssen and Maureen Hickey, Class and 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 Year Ended 30th June 1935, p. 1; Brooking, "Economic Transformation," 231-33.

(23.) Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 16-17; Burdon, The New Dominion, 14950.

(24.) Somerset, Littledene: Patterns of Change, 18-19. Nonetheless, the only suicide in our sample where a farmer blames a stock agent ("a crawler &. powerful!" [sic]) is that of forty-two-year old Francis Barrholemew (J46, 1934/117).

(25.) Barrie Macdonald and David Thomson, "Mortgage Relief, Farm Finance, and Rural Depression 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 Organisation in New Zealand (Melbourne, 1936), 786806; 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 were commissioned during the 1930s by organisations such as the Carnegie Foundation and the Workers' Education Association. See Ian Carter, "Most Important Industry: How the New 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 and Surveys, to The Under-Secretary for Lands, Memorandum on Farm Labour, 11 January 1939.

(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 Richard Wolfe, A Short History of the Sheep in New Zealand (Auckland, 2006), 123-11.

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

(31.) D.B. Copland, Wheat Production in New Zealand: A Study in the Economics of New Zealand 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 enclosed in 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., Agricultural Organization in New Zealand, 194-210; WM. Hamilton, The Dairy Industry in New Zealand (WelUngton, 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'Caliaghan).

(46.) J46, 1920/573.

(47.) Somerset, Littkdene: Patterns of Change, 61.

(48.) 146,1946/670.

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

(50.) J46, 1930/636.

(51.) J46, 1930/385.

(52.) LS 36, Box 24, File on Discharged Soldiers Settlement Account: Report for the Year Ended 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 dramatically boosted dairy production but there was a down side to this dependence on mechanization.

(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 World War I," PhD dissertation, Massey University, 1992; Michael Roche, "Soldier Settlement in 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, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria, 19/5-38 (Melbourne, 1987).

(61.) J46, 1930/738.

(62.) J46, 1924/161.

(63.) J46, 1922/262.

(64.) Miles Fairbum, Nearly out of Heart and Hope: The Puzzle of a Colonial Labourer's Diary (Auckland, 1995), 137.

(65.) Fairbum, 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's census was conducted after the shearing season had ended. Olsscn and Hickey, Class and Occupation, 37.

(67.) J46, 1914/116.

(68.) J46, 1922/1213.

(69.) Edwin Arnold, "People Nobody Wants," 1-28; "No Friends, No Home," 1-7 in Unpublished Autobiography, MS-Papets-7237-25, Alexander TurnbuU Library, National Library 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 the Coroner to delivet an open vetdict. Florence's fathet-in-taw was "satisfied she went into the 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 labotet was deemed backward even 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.

(89.) Somerset, Littledene: Patterns ojChange, 52.

(90.) J46, 1942/1371.

(91.) J46, 1928/829. This file contains a discussion on prolonged insomnia being "the foundation 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 District Commissioner, National Efficiency Board, Report on Dairy Farms in Taranaki, 1 November 1917- Similarly, a survey of 451 dairy farms in 1940 revealed that "60% were run without any permanent hired male employees, the family members either alone or assisted by relatives being responsible for the work," meaning that "wives and children of school age are of considerable importance to the organisation of work." Doig, A Survey of Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy-farmers, 50-51. The importance of children's labor is further discussed by Hamilton, The Dairy Industry in New Zealand, 107-08.

(96.) J46, 1920/609.

(97.) J46, 1916/24.

By John C. Weaver

Doug Munro

McMaster University 

Victoria University of Wellington