Even if the homestead were a little better than Samuel Butler's sod hut, it was seldom very luxurious. (The name 'station' was used in the early days to mean what we today call ' home­stead,' denoting the place where the farmer lived, and not the whole area of the run.) Lady Barker was lucky enough to have a neat wooden house, cut out and .prebuilt in Christchurch, before it was carried out to the station on slow-moving bullock waggons to be put up on the chosen site— a good distance from the woolshed and men's quarters.

If the station were anything better than a bachelor's comfortless cob or slab hut, it would be an untidy-looking, straggling series of houses, added to the first hut as the station grew. The material used would be wood or sun-dried bricks. The roof would be grass thatch, or slab tiles. There were often bunks instead of beds, calico instead of glass in the windows, and, for light, tallow candles made on the homestead. On Guthrie-Smith's Tutira, in the North Island, young men lived in a reed hut on bread, mutton, wild pork, and potatoes, and the station itself was a wilderness of bracken, bush, and flax. Today there are cob huts used as chicken houses which the first owners were glad to consider their homes.

Some squatters built large country houses. When wool prices were high, they were able to keep up a polished social life. Ladies rode twenty miles to pay an afternoon call. They had plenty of amusements in the open air—pig-stalking, eel-fishing, picnics in the bush, and skating in winter. But the wives of many squatters did not have the leisure to leave their remote homesteads frequently,