A colonial rather than a New Zealand writer, Lady Barker nevertheless occupies a distinct place in nineteenth-century New Zealand literature, thanks to her lively account of station life in the pioneering period, Station Life in New Zealand. Lady Barker was born Mary Anne Stewart in Jamaica, where her father was a colonial official. During her infancy and young adulthood she travelled to England several times, where, as she records in an autobiographical chapter in Colonial Memories, ‘an old gypsy woman’ told her fortune, predicting that she would ‘never be rich’ and that she would ‘wander up and down the earth.’ Both predictions came true. Lady Barker never became wealthy, but she travelled all over the British Empire, leaving fresh, readable accounts of her life in places as far apart as New Zealand and Trinidad, Western Australia and Natal. In 1852 Lady Barker married George Barker, a soldier with whom she had two sons. The marriage appears to have been a happy one, but was marred by separation, as Barker had to leave England to serve with the British Army in Russia and India. (He was knighted in 1859 for his services during the Mutiny). At the end of 1860 Lady Barker joined her husband in India. Her stay was a short one, as Barker died there the next year. Lady Barker returned to England a widow, where she lived quietly with her family. This peaceful, conventional English existence came to an end in 1865, when Lady Barker married a young New Zealand sheepfarmer, Frederick Napier Broome. She took what she was later to describe as ‘the wild and really almost wicked step’ of leaving her children in England and going with Broome to New Zealand, where Broome planned to buy a sheep station. After a long, stormy voyage, the pair arrived in Lyttelton in October 1865 and made the trek over the Port Hills to the new city of Christchurch. There Lady Barker noted the ‘very practical style and tone’ of life and the ‘independence in bearing’ of the people, especially of servants (this last was a theme to which Lady Barker, who had a very English sense of class, returned more than once). It was in Christchurch, too, where the couple stayed for several months, that Lady Barker gave birth to her third son, who did not live long. In 1866 the couple moved to the sheep station, Steventon, in the foothills of the Southern Alps, that Broome had bought with a partner. The station house was called Broomielaw, and it was from Broomielaw that Lady Barker wrote most of the letters that later formed the basis of Station Life in New Zealand.