The beginnings and development of a New Zealand music: The life ...

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••. You know wh,en you talk about the loneliness
of childhood that I had at that particular time
when my parents went off to England and my
brothers and sisters disappeared •.• I remember
the first time :D.y brother and sister came back,
and we played together again. The big diningroom
table was ~ade into a house with rugs hung
over it, something like that and we all got
inside. This was fabulous. But then of course
they went off and I was wandering round again,
and tried to do it on my own. But I finished
up in tears I tnink, with the realisation that
one is alone, and that one can't repeat things
like that. A very searing kind of experience
1n a sense. It's not a very big house now but
it was a very big house to me as a child." 4
The 'big house'
was tne homestead to Drysdale Station where
Douglas Lilburn was to spend the first ten years of his life. Situated
about eighteen miles northwest of Hunterville (a small servicing township
for farme,rs, with a population of about 550), Drysdale Station was set in
the picturesque surroundings of the Upper Turakina Valley:
there was the
nearby Turakina river with its waterfall and swimming hole, there were
the hills, bush, open spaces and a skyline dominated by the nearby
Pukeora Hill. In the distance there was the outline of Mt Ruapehu.
brother in 1907.
Drysdale Station had been purchased by Robert Lilburn from his
By the time of Douglas Lilburn's birth it was showing
all the E,igns of a successfully managed farm.
The property was virtually
a self-contained village: it had a shop, dwellings for three married
couples and their children, a blacksmith's workshop and electric power
provided by a generator driven by the nearby waterfall. Nearly all the
food conEumed was produced on the premises, and Robert Lilburn could
boast ownership of the first automobile 1n the valley.5
Robert Lilburn, a Presbyterian of strong faith from Perth,
Scotland, had emigrated to New Zealand around 1888.
He had married a
Wanganui girl, Rosamund Louisa Shield, on 10 February 1898, and the couple
6
had had their first child, John, within a year. Robert Lilburn instilled
4 Douglas Lilburn in Jack Body. Fragments of a stolen conversation.
Douglas Lilburn 2nd ed., Wellington, Composers Association of New
Zealand, 1980:16-7.
5 John 1'. Scott, Notes (1975-9) on Douglas Lilburn. A collection of
unpublished material relating to the life and works of Douglas
Lilburn. [Scott papers].
6 Birth Certificate of Douglas Lilburn, op.cit.