Living in New Zealand

By Tim & Jos Vos
Published on September 1, 1974
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Tim and Jos brought along a passel of children when they decided to give living in New Zealand a try.
Tim and Jos brought along a passel of children when they decided to give living in New Zealand a try.
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Tim cooks over an open fire while his sons look on.
Tim cooks over an open fire while his sons look on.

Tim and Jos Vos left the Netherlands a few years back to escape the rat race there, found the same scene in urban New Zealand and left again, this time for a remote coastal homestead. The following report was originally written as a letter to a friend who passed it on to MOTHER EARTH NEWS, with Tim’s blessing.


MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine has arrived, all the back numbers. We haven’t read every one of them yet, but those we have looked through were terrific. They came just when we made the jump and started living in New Zealand off God’s good land.

I had been working for quite a while in a sawmill and logging camp in the forest to meet some expenses when we finally severed the last ties. Like a ship leaving port for a long voyage, we had stored enough honey, salt, coffee, oil and wheat to last us for a year. We comforted ourselves by saying, “As long as there’s oil in the jug and flour in the pot, we’ll survive.” I must admit, though, that I still felt anxious and the responsibility weighed heavily on me.

Just then MOTHER EARTH NEWS arrived, and it was a fine, reassuring experience to read the contributions from other pioneers. Some topics were of immediate interest. I couldn’t have done without the horseshoeing know-how, for instance, when we got our packhorse, and we found help in the magazine when we had all sorts of trouble with our chickens.

While we looked for a permanent home, I found a temporary job in a sawmill (where I also got loads of good building timber in all sizes, dirt cheap). We settled close by in a vacant farmhouse built by the last pioneer in this district, Mr. T. Hargreaves, who cleared the land out of the subtropical rain forest while he and his wife and child lived in tents on the beach.

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