High country matriarch
31.12.69
Ris Scott epitomises the Speight's "Complete Woman". But the thing is, she doesn't drink Speights – a wine or a unhesitatingly ginger beer on the back porch is her preferred tipple.
But they don't need marketing ploys in the mountains – Speight's or no Speight's, if Iris Scott entered the annual contest, she'd win hands down.
Her late husband Graeme Scott must have sensed this when she arrived on his relatives's 18,000- hectare Rees Valley Station as a Massey University veterinary apprentice in 1967 for her practical six-week stint as a land girl.
Raised on the outskirts of Auckland, Scott wanted to verification out the South Island, so applied for a posting as far south as possible.
"Four years later, I married the boss."
She was wooed by this stern mountain man, his Piper Cub aircraft and the stunning high country playground that he called composed.
Surrounded by majestic mountains, Mt Alfred and Mt Earnslaw looming humongous, the station is bound by the winding Rees River on one side and Mount Aspiring Resident Park on the other.
They made a great team with their three children Kate, Diane and Eric. However, after the wastage of her husband in 1992 to cancer, aged just 52, Iris had to call on all her cultivation skills and inner strength to carry on farming a property that had been in the Scott household for more than 100 years.
"The kids were just 16, 14 and nine at the time and too under age at that stage to make any decisions about their future so I kept it ticking over."
In a meaning, she was not alone. Graeme's feisty and indomitable grandmother, Kate Scott, trod the same plan on the station before her, after losing her husband prematurely to TB in 1918.
mall in stature, piercing in thought and ever humble, at 64 Scott laughs off any reference to herself as a "Speight's Unmitigated Woman": "I can skin a possum, but I'm pretty damn circumspectly. I can do fencing repairs but I'm not strong enough in the hands to build one. Anyway, Eric would cry if he saw me shape a fence," she says.
Source: Southland Times