Juliet Peter
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1915, d.2010
Harvesting, Rydal Downs
- c. 1943
- Watercolour
- Gift of Alastair and Gaelyn (Ensor) Elliott, 2018
- 650 x 800mm
- 2018/024
- View on google maps
Location: Contemporary Collections Gallery
Tags: animals, dogs (animals), farming, farms, hay, ladders, landscapes (representations), machinery, men (male humans), people (agents), women (female humans)
Juliet Peter was born into a farming family in Waitaha Canterbury and spent her childhood at Anama station near Te Kiekie Mount Somers. Preparing to sit her final exams at the Canterbury College School of Art, Peter’s artistic aspirations were temporarily sidelined by the outbreak of World War II. New Zealand’s support of the war effort was all-encompassing, and in 1942 she began work as a ‘land girl’, replacing male farmworkers serving overseas. While employed at Rydal Downs in Ōkūkū, she and her co-workers took up tractor driving, ploughing, harvesting, mustering, shearing and wool sorting. It was hard, physical work with long hours, six days a week throughout the year. Her years on the farm returned her to early and happy memories of rural life, and she documented her time at Rydal Downs through a series of paintings and sketches.
(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)
Exhibition History
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Juliet Peter's Harvesting, Rydal Downs
I grew up in a house in Glandovey Road, Fendalton—twenty-two bedrooms! Back then, my options were to be a nurse or a school teacher, but all my life, I’d wanted to be a farmer. My father encouraged that practical side of me. He was a keen fly fisherman and called me “sonny”. I had my hair cut at the barbers; I wore long pants in winter—I thought I was a boy.