Helping keep a high-country station, its stories and its responsibilities alive
1917-2014
Mount Cook Station
High-country farming
Environmental guardianship
Cave and Mackenzie Country
The granddaughter beneath the Pioneer Museum, Perth St, Burnett Oak
Beside South Canterbury Museum in Timaru stands an oak linked to the Burnett family’s journey into the Mackenzie Country.
The tree is said to mark the place where Andrew Burnett camped while travelling inland to the land that became Mount Cook Station. In 1986, his granddaughter Catriona Baker unveiled a plaque beneath it.
It was a fitting role for a woman who spent much of her life helping to carry Mount Cook Station and its history into another generation.
Catriona’s formal name was Caitriana Mackay Beatock Burnett, although she was generally known as Catriona and within her family as Eona. She was born in 1917, the daughter of Thomas David Burnett and Agnes Ellen Burnett, née Little, and the younger sister of Donald Mount Cook Burnett.
The family’s life connected two parts of South Canterbury: Aorangi, their home near Cave, and Mount Cook Station beside Lake Pukaki. A surviving photograph taken when Catriona was about two years old shows her with her mother and brother, with open country and the Southern Alps behind them.
The landscape was not simply a backdrop to her childhood. It became part of her life’s work.
Sharing responsibility for Mount Cook Station
After their father died in 1941, Donald and Catriona became closely associated with the continuation of Mount Cook Station.
Later accounts describe Donald farming the property with the help of his sister, and the pair are remembered as its brother-and-sister owners. The wording does not tell us enough about how their responsibilities were divided, but it confirms that Catriona was part of the station’s working life rather than simply a relative who occasionally visited.
Running an isolated high-country station required constant practical work. Stock had to be managed across extensive country. Weather, feed, staff, transport, buildings, visitors, correspondence and finances all required attention.
Women’s work on stations was often absorbed into phrases such as “helped her brother”. That language can conceal administration, hospitality, food production, record keeping, decision-making and the everyday work that allowed a farming operation to continue.
Mount Cook Station diaries survive for parts of the period between 1912 and 2008. These may eventually provide a clearer account of Catriona’s daily contribution. Until they are examined in detail, it is safest to say that she shared in the ownership and continuation of the station, while recognising that the full extent of her work has not yet been recovered.
Part of a celebrated merino enterprise
Under Donald and Catriona, Mount Cook Station became well known for its exceptionally fine Saxon merino wool.
In 2000, a bale of superfine fibre from the station reportedly sold to the Italian textile company Loro Piana for $120,000. The achievement has often been connected particularly with Donald’s sheep-breeding knowledge, so it should not be attributed to Catriona alone.
Her contribution lay in helping sustain the station and the wider farming enterprise in which that breeding work took place.
A successful wool clip depended on more than one person. It relied on the care of stock, the maintenance of land and buildings, the work of shepherds and station staff, seasonal planning, business decisions and the practical systems that kept a remote property functioning.
Catriona was part of that continuity.
Connecting Cave with an international environmental movement
In October 1959, Catriona married forester and environmental campaigner Richard St Barbe Baker at St David’s Memorial Church in Cave.
Richard had founded the organisation originally known as Men of the Trees, now the International Tree Foundation. He travelled internationally promoting reforestation, soil protection and greater public understanding of the importance of trees.
Catriona’s story can easily become overshadowed by her husband’s international reputation. Yet the surviving evidence shows that she later took an active role in preserving and presenting parts of his environmental legacy.
Her marriage also connected the Burnett family’s experience of South Canterbury land with a much wider international conversation about conservation and environmental responsibility.
Becoming an author in her nineties
Catriona published two substantial books near the end of her life.
In 2013, she published The Story of James Mackenzie of the Mackenzie Country, New Zealand. The book brought together accounts of Mackenzie’s capture, trial, escapes, pardon and later commemoration.
Its chapter list also includes Taiko Topere and Wainui Tarawhata, two Māori men whose roles have often been reduced or omitted in later retellings of the Mackenzie story.
The book remains Catriona’s interpretation and should be read alongside Ngāi Tahu sources and other historical research, particularly where it deals with Māori people, land and authority. Even so, it represents a serious attempt by a woman in her mid-nineties to bring scattered regional history together in one publication.
In 2014, she published The Man of the Trees and Other Dedicated Environmental Guardians.
The 374-page book examined the work of Richard St Barbe Baker and other people associated with environmental protection, including Catriona’s father, Thomas Burnett. It was published in connection with the ninetieth anniversary of the International Tree Foundation.
These were not small family booklets. They were substantial works through which Catriona organised and preserved material that might otherwise have remained scattered through private papers, memories and organisational records.
Her books also reveal how she understood the Burnett story. Mount Cook Station was not only a farming property. It belonged within wider discussions about land, conservation, history and responsibility.
Planning for a future beyond the Burnett family
Donald and Catriona had no direct descendants to inherit Mount Cook Station.
In 2009, a charitable trust was established with purposes that included protecting Mount Cook Station and Cox’s Downs, preserving native plants and animals, caring for historic buildings, encouraging scientific research and education, and increasing public knowledge of the area’s environmental and cultural heritage.
The trust’s objectives provide clear evidence of what Donald and Catriona hoped would continue after their deaths. They wanted the station’s land, buildings, ecology and history to have value beyond private ownership.
The plan did not unfold as intended.
Donald died in 2010 and Catriona died at Fairlie on 13 November 2014, in her ninety-eighth year. The trust later faced serious financial and legal difficulties. Trustees were removed, the arrangements were challenged through the courts, and Mount Cook Station was sold in 2017.
It would therefore be inaccurate to say that Catriona permanently secured the property for public use.
What can be said is that she helped establish a documented intention to protect its environmental and historical values. The later difficulties do not erase that purpose, but they are an important part of the story.
What Catriona helped keep alive
Catriona Burnett helped continue Mount Cook Station through decades of change in high-country farming.
She shared in the life and ownership of a station known internationally for its superfine merino wool. She maintained relationships around the property and the wider Burnett family. In her nineties, she published two large historical works that preserved regional, family and environmental knowledge. She also helped create a charitable framework intended to protect the station’s land, ecology, buildings and history for future public benefit.
Her contribution is also a reminder to look carefully at the language used to record women’s work.
To say that Catriona “helped her brother” may be technically correct, but it is incomplete. It leaves unanswered questions about the decisions she made, the records she kept, the people she supported and the responsibilities she carried.
The diaries and correspondence held by South Canterbury Museum may yet allow more of that work to be seen.
For now, the Burnett Oak in Timaru provides a place to begin.
Catriona once stood beneath it to honour the generation that had travelled inland before her. Her own story asks us to notice the woman who helped carry Mount Cook Station, its records and its responsibilities forward after that pioneering generation had gone.
Impact: Catriona Burnett helped keep Mount Cook Station operating as a high-country farming enterprise, preserved regional and environmental history through two substantial books, and worked with her brother to create a charitable purpose intended to protect the station’s land, ecology, buildings and stories for future generations.
Read more about the Burnett family and the oak beside South Canterbury Museum: A plaque beneath the oak: Remembering Catherine Burnett
Short source list
South Canterbury Museum collections: Burnett family photographs, Mount Cook Station records and station diaries.
National Library of New Zealand catalogue: The Story of James Mackenzie of the Mackenzie Country, New Zealand.
International Tree Foundation: history of Richard St Barbe Baker and the organisation he founded.
Charities Services register: Mount Cook Station and Cox’s Downs charitable trust purposes.
Timaru District Council notable-tree assessment: Burnett Oak and Catriona’s 1986 plaque unveiling.
The Press death notice: Catriona’s formal name, family relationships and death at Fairlie.
Mount Cook Station historical account: Donald and Catriona’s association with the station and its superfine merino wool.