Soldiering on: 'There's no way that farm could have run without her'

Rhoda McWhannell farmed the Waikato property Rozel almost single-handedly when her husband went to war during WWII. She wrote a journal of her daily struggles and successes, weaving in her wry observations of global and local happenings. 

Her great-niece has been combing through these diaries, which are brought to life by actor Amy Tarleton for Country Life.

Rhoda McWhannell is in a paddock, kneeling over a writhing, bloated ewe, carving knife in hand.

She has the grim task of relieving it of the gas which has built up in its stomach after eating too much fresh green grass.

"With grim determination," McWhannell writes, she plunges the knife into the sheep's side. 

"Well, I expected gas to come whistling out, but it didn't. It came bubbling slowly in some blood, like a little pool of boiling mud at Rotorua."

She holds the puncture open for at least an hour until the ewe's breath eases and it can totter away. She wonders if the animal will be alive in the morning.

With no vet nearby, McWhannell's' medical training might have come in handy for some of her jobs on Rozel, the Waikato property she farmed - almost single-handedly - during World War II, after her husband Mac was called away to war.

But her own war effort - like that of many women - might have gone unsung if it weren't for the vivid journals she kept over the war period. She began writing aged 40 in 1938, in large notebooks, and continued for 50 years.

She donated her journals to the Alexander Turnbull Library in the 1980s.

McWhannell's great-niece Alex Shepard has been combing through the diaries and became entranced by McWhannell's wit, her writerly style, vivid tales of farming life and her painterly descriptions of the natural world.

As professor of gender history at the University of Glasgow, Shepard has a professional interest as well as a familial one.

"Rhoda at the time would have been classified as a housewife and, as a dependent, as a married woman, and her work wouldn't have counted or wouldn't have been seen to count."

But wartime saw growing confidence and independence among women as they learned new skills and gained a greater sense of autonomy, Shepard said.

"I think what's interesting is her writing shows just how vital her work was, not just to the war, but Mac depended heavily on her. There's no way that farm could have run without her."

The diaries depict McWhannell working tirelessly, sometimes 18 hours a day, adding all the farm work on top of her daily household chores.

She has the help of a land girl for some of the time but bears the brunt of caring for a 350-strong mob of sheep, farm crops, orchard and vegetable patch.

"They have no idea at home what it feels like to work at a great paddock of grass, ready to cut, and to know that, you yourself, have to lift and handle and stack every single blade of it… and then, in rain and wind, feed it all out again."

"I suppose that the experience I am having is common to farms all over the world at present, not only on the side of the United Nations, but of enemy countries too. The neglected fields are unaware which side of the war their absent husband men are fighting on. And if it is like this here, what must it be like in countries that are actually devastated?"

McWhannell's dog Jock is a novice to sheep work but crucial to the farm. His occasional disappearance can be a "Calamity of International Importance", she notes wryly.

"If he is lost I shall have to get Mac to return to the farm… and then I thought that, incompetent as the army is now, without Mac it will fail utterly, chaos will reign, and the collapse of the New Zealand forces will result in a speedy and glorious victory for Hitler."

When Jock finally ambles home, "I did explain to him that he must not again jeopardise the Allied cause, and the British Empire, in that light-hearted manner."

Shepard delights in her great-aunt's use of the wartime rhetoric of the day in relation to her daily life. 

"Jock now is part of the Imperial Forces and when mice get in the hen feed, she talks about bringing in the Panzer Division to try and eliminate them."

Shepard, who lives in the UK, visited McWhannell when she was four and remembers the lushness of Rozel and her great-aunt in frock and cardy, eating oatcakes for breakfast.

"She was quite twinkly. She was very short, and she had her hair drawn up in a bun. She looked a bit like a pepper pot."

Shepard said McWhannell wrote four or five times a week in her journal. Tucked in the books were newspaper clippings, letters and notes, giving a rich picture of her life and wartime goings-on.

"When she runs up against obstacles, she can be very funny as a way of criticising what she sees as general idiocy around her."

She describes slinking into the co-op to sell, under the counter, her oversupply of lemons, sorely needed in some parts of the country, but subject to red tape because of war rationing. Her abundant apple crop was also difficult to sell.

"The apples are thorough bastards," McWhannell writes. "Nobody will have them. Nope, definitely not apples. The government has complete control of them. They are rationed. It is impossible for a humble grower like me to reach the government with my apples in any way. They will make good compost, and what use will the compost be? I could use it to grow more produce to make more compost." 

McWhannell listened and read voraciously news of the war and had a large map on the wall, showing troop movements, according to Shepard.

"On the one hand, she's really aware of what's going on globally… where the action is, when ships have been sunk or where battles are taking place, what kind of losses are happening, and then she feels the incongruity of how her life is relatively peaceful."

A painter as well as a writer, her great-aunt takes solace in the natural world and this comes to life vividly in her writing, Shepard said.

After her sixth lambing, McWhannell pats herself on the back.

"The extraordinary thing is having got this far, I would much rather carry on and finish the job myself than hand it over. I'm exceedingly proud of my war effort."

Shepard said her great-aunt had an idea for a book that she would love to have written, called Backline Soldiers, about "the unsung valour of women on the home front during the Second World War."

She is hoping McWhannell's efforts live on and is planning to collate and publish her work.