Riding with Whales: Stories of Great Sounds Women

Heather Heberley in her first two books wrote about her own life on Arapawa Island in Queen Charlotte Sound. While she researched, she talked to many other women who had spent most or all of their lives in the remote Sounds. This book, Riding with Whales, began because of these meetings and the huge admiration she feels for these older women, all pioneers in their own way. They have great stories to tell about a way of life now mainly gone forever. The impact of whaling on nearly every family, the awesome responsibilities for their children’s futures when the women were their only teachers, and the unbelievable differences which electricity eventually made to their lives - all of these and much more thread through this delightful book. The lives of the thirteen women featured in Riding with Whales, two Maori, eleven Pakeha, cover a large part of the 20th century. Their stories are dramatic, funny and tragic in turn, and always touching in the honesty with which they talk to Heather Heberley. Nobody complains. Nobody dwells on her health problems. As one of them says, looking back on a life of physical danger, loneliness, huge responsibilities and sheer unremitting hard work, “It’s just the way it was.”