Latest news with #Middlemarch
Spectator
4 days ago
- Spectator
Why Middlemarch is ‘the perfect beach read'
At the time of writing, I am not more than a few hours away from leaving this dismal hell-hole and hightailing it for the South of France in a battered Skoda Octavia. And there, I shall settle down for a fortnight, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of 1970s camping – the blue gas-bottles; the nylon sleeping bags; the fold-out chairs where the cup-holder in the arm is torn so your Orangina plummets to the floor when you absent-mindedly deposit it there. Bliss. And what will I do there, apart from squatting on my haunches to cook awful one-pot beany casseroles and eating croissants? Why, read, of course. Isn't that what holidays are, fundamentally, for? This is where my long-suffering wife and I find ourselves somewhat at odds. She thinks I am boring and antisocial and an all-round suboptimal husband because all I want to do on holiday is sit in a sunny place with a cold drink and a paperback. Vigorous activities and sparkling conversation should, she thinks, also form part of a holiday. What's the point, she thinks, in going to a foreign country if all you're going to do there is sit in a chair and read a book, which is what you spend the rest of the year doing anyway? Also she thinks men, especially men with feet like mine, shouldn't wear flip-flops, that my straw hat makes me look like a wally (she doesn't say this, but I intuit it), and that if we ignore the children they will drown in the river. As they say: agree to disagree. For most people of working age, the summer holiday is the one time when you can read continuously for a week or two – so what you take matters a good deal. This is your chance. But all sorts of myths surround the idea of 'holiday reading'. I'm forever being emailed by publicists, for instance, announcing that this book or that one – usually thrillers or romantic comedies – is 'the perfect beach read'. Isn't that weird? In most of the rest of our lives, we feel under vague but palpable pressure to read something improving and high-minded – not what our more austere older relatives would dismiss as 'trash'. We reproach ourselves, many of us, about our failure to do so – dutifully chugging through ten pages of Middlemarch before bed and becoming ever more dispirited as the weeks pass. But then, at the one time of year when we could, for instance, read a couple of hundred pages of Middlemarch in a day and really get into it (there's a lot going on in that book: you do need to immerse yourself a bit), we get reading-shamed in the other direction. Now is, apparently, the time to get stuck into the new Dan Brown and if we insist on taking a Victorian classic we are, implicitly, the sort of pretentious person who doesn't know how to enjoy a holiday. It should be, I suggest, quite the other way round. Think how much happier we'd all be if we read thrillers and chick-lit and science-fiction and all that lovely pulp in our day-to-day lives, when our batteries are low and our phones and emails a constant distraction, and saved up the more challenging material for our holidays. I don't say this to denigrate popular fiction – I love that stuff, and the writers who do it well are consummately skilled – but to note that there are different types of reading, and that the circumstances in which you read makes a difference to how enjoyable and successful a given type of reading will be. It goes without saying, of course, that all of us should read what we damn well like when we damn well like, and that shaming people for what they read is one of the most insidious and philistine of our cultural contagions. But the holidays are a precious opportunity. They are the one time of year when we really do have leisure to properly immerse ourselves in a book. For what it's worth, I think there is something to the stereotype that paperbacks are best. Thick hardbacks are heavy, and e-books may help with the luggage allowance but reading on screen is tricky in bright sunshine and you don't have to worry about sand getting in the charging port of a paperback. My own situation is a bit unusual, obviously. I am privileged to have a day job, as literary editor of this magazine and host of our weekly podcast, that involves a lot of reading. But it has given me a very distorted reading life: it means almost everything I read in the ordinary course of things is published within a month or two of the time in which I read it. Holidays, then, are usually the chance to catch up on things I've missed. Books by friends, for instance, which I've shamingly failed to find time for the rest of the year; classics I've never read; a bit of homework in advance; and, yes, sometimes 'something sensational to read on the train'. So, this year I'm taking a mix: it's Elif Shafak's There are Rivers in the Sky (she's a great writer and I've been wanting to read this for a year), Stuart Jeffries's A Short History of Stupidity (something chewy and, hopefully, also fun), Graham Robb's The Discovery of Britain (forthcoming work by another fine writer), Terry Pratchett's The Night Watch (reissued classic I've never read)… and David McCloskey's Damascus Station (spy thriller friends have raved about) on the Kindle for emergencies – because the great thing about holiday reading is you don't have to follow even your own rules. And once I've read them, if she hasn't divorced me, I'll put some proper shoes on and have a conversation with my wife.
Otago Daily Times
15-07-2025
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Trust important in three-way equity partnership, farmer says
Trust is an important part of a three-way equity partnership in a Strath Taieri sheep and beef farm. Dave and Hayley Vaughan, of Lee Stream, James and Nikki Hall, of Middlemarch and Sam Kane and Cynthia Robson, of Wānaka, launched an equity partnership in Hillcroft at Lee Stream six years ago. Mr Hall and Mr Vaughan spoke about the partnership at a Beef + Lamb New Zealand event in Balclutha last month. Mr Vaughan works on the 590ha farm, running about 4200 ewes, 1100 hoggets and 100 cattle. Before entering the partnership, Mr Vaughan worked in a senior role at Waipori Station for Pāmu. He never regretted making the move despite taking a 40% pay cut to enter the equity partnership. "This is my dream and I've landed it." However, working in a corporate environment taught you to be accountable for your decisions, he said. The Vaughan family own a dozen student flats in Dunedin, which were used as "a vehicle" to enter the equity partnership. "We were prepared to sell those to get into a farm but the way the negotiations went it didn't happen like that, which was a godsend because we didn't want to sell them." The student flats were a reliable income for his family, Mr Vaughan said. "They give us much more capital gains to date than the farm." As the Wānaka investors were the previous owners of Hillcroft, entering the partnership progressed a farm sale and the Vaughan family could retain their student flats. "We brought them in for a five-year term and we are past that and everybody is keen as to stay on." All parties in the partnership met three times a year for a formal business update. Trust was a "huge" part of the success of the partnership. "We have such a good relationship we can talk openly." He enjoyed sharing the successes and ideas of the farm business with the partnership shareholders. "Being in a partnership makes us accountable for every decision we make and keeps us focused on running the business as sharp as we can and I think we do it better from being in the partnership." A farm management package was agreed on at the start of the partnership. They had talked about implementing a plan for changes in remuneration but it never happened. "Everyone said 'let's just give you an increase and we'll move on' so we haven't really dealt with that properly but our relationship is strong enough we can have a conversation when required." Mr Hall said he and his wife entered an equity partnership with another couple in a Southland dairy farm about nine years ago. The Halls owned half a dairy farm and a sharemilker ran the herd. Trust was an important part of a successful partnership including with real estate agents and bank managers, he said. "We have met some good people and we trust each other ... it is all about people." He enjoyed how an equity partnership allows an experienced farmer to help a younger farmer enter farm ownership. "That's where I get a kick, the new wave coming through with all the good, new ideas." When he met the Vaughans for the first time, he had a good feeling about entering an equity partnership with them. "Sometimes you have to go with a gut feeling and my gut said 'go'." Mr Vaughan agreed. "We just clicked after one meeting, we said 'right, let's go shopping'."
Atlantic
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Canonization of James Joyce
When Richard Ellmann's James Joyce hit the shelves in 1959, the sheer size of the book (842 pages, 100 longer than Ulysses) was as dazzling as the degree of detail. Joyce, who had been dead for 18 years, vividly inhabited its chapters, getting drunk, going blind, spending money, spiting enemies, cogitating, and, of course, creating a series of works that immediately made literary history. Moving briskly across the first half of the 20th century (not just a single day in Dublin), Ellmann spun a tale about the formation of a writer whose name could be mentioned in the same breath as Homer's without irony. Ellmann owed his triumph, in part, to being in the right place at the right time. By the early 1950s, he had spent a year at Trinity College Dublin researching his prizewinning dissertation on William Butler Yeats, received a Ph.D. from Yale, and become an ambitious 30-something professor at Northwestern University. Yeats's widow was ready to provide introductions in Dublin; Joyce's most important patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, and his dear friend Maria Jolas released a trove of unpublished letters. Stanislaus Joyce, his brother, had shared material from his diaries and unfinished memoir. Nelly Joyce, Stanislaus's widow, unleashed holy-grail-grade manuscripts; so did Jolas. And Sylvia Beach, a fellow American and the fearless publisher of Ulysses, was still knocking around Paris willing to entertain questions. From the April 1957 issue: Letters of James Joyce You also need charm, lots of it, to make a biography like James Joyce happen. Ellmann, a virtuosic schmoozer, could get people to do his bidding without ever seeming too pushy. A delivery of coal during the winter; some chocolates, cigarettes, cocoa, or tea in any season—accompanied by a carefully worded request, such offerings could go a long way when he needed to gain (or restrict) access to material. James Joyce (Ellmann wisely heeded his mother's advice to drop the subtitle, The Hawk-Like Man) was immediately recognized as a masterpiece—not just a comprehensive life-and-art account of Joyce, but a genre breakthrough. Developing a style that was at once detached and ornate, Ellmann works as a historical novelist, using facts as a springboard for a subtle psychological portrayal intertwined with layered critical interpretations. Consider, for instance, the moment when the young, unknown Joyce arrives in Rome to take a job at a bank. It's 1906, a few years after his voluntary exile from Ireland; Joyce is all but penniless at 24. Ellmann wants to capture the way the eternal city, strewn with ruins, acts on someone who is homesick. Joyce's 'head was filled with a sense of the too successful encroachment of the dead upon the living city,' he writes. 'There was a disrupting parallel in the way that Dublin, buried behind him, was haunting his thoughts.' Like the newly married, disillusioned Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch, the young, impressionable Joyce feels psychologically unmoored by his time in Rome. He loves and hates Ireland all at once, and out of this emotional struggle, he will end up producing 'The Dead,' the final story in Dubliners. It is set in Dublin, but through Ellmann, we come to appreciate that it is also a ghost story with Roman roots—and a prelude to the universal sweep of Ulysses. In his quest for a definitive biography of Joyce as a cosmopolitan artist, above the parochial fray, Ellmann downplayed Joyce's interest in politics. In fact, before Joyce ever published a book, he wrote newspaper articles and delivered lectures in Italian about Irish nationalism and his disdain for British imperialism in his native country, work that shed helpful light on his fiction. 'My political opinions,' he summed up in a letter to his brother, 'are those of a Socialist artist.' His work is saturated with references to Irish history, politics, geography, and culture—rich in allusions, both explicit and puzzlelike, to major figures and events. From the December 1946 issue: James Joyce Still, to say that Ellmann is to Joyce what James Boswell is to Samuel Johnson is not too big a stretch: He didn't arrive in time to befriend Joyce, but he got to the posthumous scene first; gathered fresh accounts; captured not just the context, but his subject's character and his creative process. Not least, Ellmann emerged, as Boswell did, with a mold-breaking portrait that has retained an enduring power over the readers and scholars who have followed. Ellmann the portraitist has now come in for a portrait of his own. (So did Boswell, though not until two centuries after his one-of-a-kind work was published.) In Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker, Zachary Leader—who has written engaging lives of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow—has cobbled together a curious two-part chronicle. Part one is a meticulously researched account, woodenly rendered, of Ellmann's not particularly colorful life up until 1952, when he began work on his Joyce biography. In part two, Leader explores in detail topics involved in the book's creation—sleuthing methods, rivals, reviewers—as well as its afterlife (a second edition appeared in 1982, the centenary of Joyce's birth, by which time errors had been unearthed, critiques launched). A coda skims over Ellmann's life until his death, in 1987 (and includes what the publisher's blurb bills as 'a startling secret,' which can be revealed without spoiling a thing: The happily married Ellmann had a late-in-life affair after his wife, Mary, suffered an aneurism and was confined to a wheelchair). What you won't come away with are insights into why Ellmann was so fascinated by Irish writers (he went on to write about Oscar Wilde too), or how the intellectual questions he asked about his subjects might illuminate his own life and scholarly trajectory. Surely Ellmann's Jewishness in the WASP-dominated precincts of elite literary studies, I found myself thinking, played a role in priming his interest in the outsiders he wrote about. Leader doesn't pursue such potential connections. So why bother with a biography of a biographer who spent decades doing what academics usually do: reading, researching, writing, teaching, repeat? If nostalgia was part of the project's attraction for Harvard University Press, that's entirely understandable. Ellmann and his achievement represent a moment in American cultural history when pulling off a book like that was possible: a door stopper with appeal inside the academy and out. When James Joyce appeared, the rigidly narrow siloing of literary fields still lay ahead; for medieval scholars, 18th-century historians, and Romanticists alike, Ellmann's book was an event not to be missed. The biography made Joyce approachable for generations of readers. And if some dove into Ellmann to avoid reading Joyce, others clung to Ellmann for dear life as they navigated the dense pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's wife, Nora, dismissed his last work as nothing but 'chop suey,' but Ellmann uses anecdotes and snippets of Joyce's conversations as well as written passages to make it cohere. Finnegans Wake, in his skillful hands, is a tapestry of all the works Joyce ever wrote, the final and protracted project of a writer who could never stop thinking about Ireland. From the March 1958 issue: The perceptions of James Joyce For Ulysses, too, Ellmann showed how the network of cryptic allusions and the experiments with syntax were part of a bigger plan to capture something true about the intricate crosscurrents of life. He wove together hundreds of biographical stories (some apocryphal) and concise plot summaries so that the critical interpretation was barely noticeable. Ellmann had an 'intelligence of expression,' as his friend Ellsworth Mason noted, that obscured his tendency to lean heavily on the fiction as a source of facts about its author's life. What kept me turning Leader's pages were the glimpses of the academic Atlantis that Ellmann inhabited. Running in the background of this meta-biography is a history of literature as a discipline in America. Ellmann came of age during a period of unprecedented abundance. From 1920 to 1970, the higher-education professoriat grew tenfold, and a new university press was founded every year or so. Thanks to the legendary GI Bill (which, after Ellmann's stint in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, partially paid for his graduate work at Trinity College), undergraduate enrollment exploded, along with federal subsidies for university libraries under the National Defense Education Act. As Ellmann was quietly assembling materials for his biography, specialization was on the rise in American literature departments, as the critic Erich Auerbach warned, auguring the decline of a general humanities education. Literary subfields that had been defined by genre or historical period were giving way to a narrower focus on single authors of much more recent vintage than Shakespeare and Milton. An infrastructure of professionalism—conferences, along with scholarly journals and societies—had begun to emerge. A writer like Joyce, whose works inspired exegetical devotion, was clearly at the forefront of likely 20th-century candidates for academic canonization, and the arrival of Ellmann's biography as the 1950s ended helped spur his elevation to Saint James status in the postwar university. But Ellmann himself was a Joycean avant la lettre. With no 'Joyce industry' yet in place, he had the freedom to shape his subject as he chose. Leaf through the mass of footnotes at the back of James Joyce, and you'll find fewer than 20 books of criticism in the mix. Citations abound of unpublished archival sources—mounds of letters, diaries, telegrams—and exclusive interviews. Size counted for the clout of a pioneering endeavor. At one point, Ellmann had envisioned 'a short book of perhaps 150 pages,' combining biography with reminiscences from Joyce's contemporaries. By 1953, when he signed a contract with Oxford University Press, nervous about the huge $1,500 advance, no competitors were on the horizon, and he had something substantially larger in mind that could serve as an introduction to a barely plumbed subject. From the September 1995 issue: Ulysses in Chinese His ambition paid off, not just in attracting a broad audience, but in advancing his career, at a time when crossover appeal added to academic luster. The accolades poured in for his monumental book, printed on large-format pages with a dark-blue cover and gold lettering on the spine. Ellmann won the National Book Award for biography in 1960, and dream-job offers from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford (where he landed in 1970) soon followed. Like Lionel Trilling before him, Ellmann leaned out of the ivory tower and gained stature within it as departments of literature were specializing. By the early '80s, when the revised edition appeared and he was at work on Wilde, literary studies had already moved in a very different direction. A decade earlier, Theory (with a capital T ) had arrived from France, and soon Lacanians and Freudians; Marxists and feminists; deconstructionists, queer theorists, and postcolonialists had flooded the field. Whereas the focus on single authors had been a boon for a book like James Joyce, the emphasis on Theory proved a bane. The previous approaches to literary works were now suspect, and new questions came to the fore: about their status as commodities in a capitalist system; about the text itself as part of a power struggle and language as an expression of the unconscious. Biography Ellmann-style was left looking hopelessly naive in its effort to understand the work by understanding its writer's life. The author was dead, as Roland Barthes put it, so what was the point of searching for intentionality behind the words on the page? When I entered graduate school in the late '90s, Joyce was a dartboard for every theoretical trend available. Reading him (and most major authors) in a suitably cutting-edge way entailed two steps: picking an available theory and applying it. In Columbia University's English department, where I was and where theoretical allegiances were fierce, I still went ahead and read Ellmann, considering it a guilty pleasure, almost like cozying up with a romance novel. But I shouldn't have felt apologetic, nor should Leader, who feels compelled to explain that Ellmann 'had little time' for theory. Ellmann didn't need to make time for theory. James Joyce has long outlived many of the theoretical interventions that seemed so urgent back then, propelling academic careers even as they deterred nonspecialists from reading Joyce. Ellmann's Joyce is not just a product of its era, but an index of our age. No responsible adviser in a doctoral program in English now would recommend a single-author dissertation if a tenure-track job in the profession is the goal—an ever more daunting one, given the implosion of literature departments, and of so many disciplines across the humanities. In a tighter job market, students aiming to be professors now need to demonstrate range as they pursue a particular problem or literary historical period. The fate of Ellmann and his Joyce biography highlights the disorienting transformation of literature as a field of study. The canons dismantled during the Theory incursion of the 1970s and '80s introduced a more inclusive world of letters, even as the upheaval left English departments fragmented. Harold Bloom, a lightning rod for controversy, responded with The Western Canon in the mid-1990s. In his survey of mostly white, male authors, he argued against the so-called school of resentment, which believes that literature can 'save society' or drive social change and reform. The response was swift, and Bloom became a punching bag for leftist critics, who valued literature's power to deliver social and political messages for the underrepresented. Joyce has made the cut in the 21st century, but just barely. I teach graduate students, most of whom arrive without ever having read a story from Dubliners, let alone tackled Ulysses. Literary historians and critics of various stripes might be willing to acknowledge his value, but in academia, Joyce has long since become one more specialized topic. Those already intimidated by the difficulty are likely to be further put off by the experts' gatekeeping. From the October 2013 issue: Why we're still struggling to make sense of modernism Given how rarely literary scholars and critics these days read outside their field, just imagine the difficulty of reaching a wider nonacademic audience, among whom reading at all is an endangered pastime. A National Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that fewer than half of American adults read more than a single book in 2022. If the data were refined further to rank reading by genre, I'm willing to bet that literary criticism would be close to the bottom. Which makes Ellmann's achievement all the more remarkable. Being able to shape strong sentences, elegantly weave together plot strands, and bring characters to life (even with some inventive fudging)—that may sound like the obvious recipe for any good story. Still, it's no small feat, especially if you add in the pressure to provide interpretive guidance. All the way back in 1938, when he was a Yale senior, Ellmann was convinced that he had to choose between two professions: academic or writer. Thankfully, he managed to be both.
Daily Mail
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
From which tome did Rachel Kelly think every line was worth noting for future reference?
What book... ... are you reading now? I AM rereading Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Unlike Blakemore, I'm no neuroscientist but I became interested in adolescent mental health about five years ago. As a writer in the mental health field and an ambassador for charities including SANE and Rethink Mental Illness, I was getting more and more messages from parents struggling with troubled teenagers. What did I recommend? Did I know a good therapist? I wanted to figure out ways we could support young people's psychological health. Blakemore's book prompted a lot of 'Ah ha!' moments – 'So that's what's going on in the teenage brain!' Right now I need a refresher on up-to-the-minute brain science: it is fascinating but also complex and Blakemore delivers. ... would you take to a desert island? IT would have to be Middlemarch by George Eliot – a classic for a reason: it's so good. I enjoy underlining bits of books that resonate and squirrelling them away in my commonplace book to savour later. Usually, I might note down four or five good lines. But I had to abandon the practice with Middlemarch as I was almost copying out the whole thing. I love Eliot's wise and compassionate view of the world. She combines a cracking plot stuffed with unforgettable characters with an ability to weave in observations on what makes us human. ... first gave you the reading bug? I remember a boring summer holiday on the coast of Wexford in Ireland aged about 11 or so and discovering Agatha Christie. I couldn't stop reading The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd to find out who'd done it. Detective stories help me stay present and alleviate my anxiety by diverting my thoughts from the past or future. ... left you cold? I struggled with Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Yes, there is indeed an epidemic of teenage anguish, for which Haidt squarely blames smartphones. But my experience over the past five years is that adolescent mental health problems are complicated and resistant to any single explanation. They also need multiple, imaginative and fresh solutions, and those Haidt offers are somewhat limited in that regard.
RNZ News
03-06-2025
- Climate
- RNZ News
Regional council says low risk to life when Middlemarch floods, residents say it's still stressful
Sewage in the Tap and Dough Bistro in Middlemarch, central Otago, in 2018. Photo: SUPPLIED The Otago Regional Council says there is no simple solution to stop the rural town of Middlemarch from flooding, but the risk to life is lower than expected. In recent years, flooding has spread water and contaminated muck through homes, businesses and streets, impacting bores and blocking roads. On Tuesday, the council hosted a community meeting to discuss the latest flood update and potential ways to reduce them. The sound of heavy rains sparked anxiety for some Middlemarch residents, as swelling streams flowed down the Rock and Pillar Range towards the town. In 2018, a deluge turned some streets into sewage ponds with one business flooding to knee-deep filthy water . Ruth Manning has owned a holiday home in Middlemarch for more than 20 years - it has been hit twice in recent floods. "So about 50 to 60 centimetres up the wall the water damage spread. I've had to have the carpet fully replaced twice and most of the furnishings that were in the cottage replaced as well," she said. "That's two insurance claims and we have been advised now that we won't be insured again should it happen again and our excess has gone up to $5000." The community hall was packed with Middlemarch residents who wanted to hear about the latest science and solutions from Otago Regional Council. The council found existing culverts, channels and bridges were too small, there were no easy solutions and they would likely be costly and challenging to implement. But council's flood hazard analyst Nathan Anderson said there was also some good news, including debris flow not being a major concern . "The risk of people losing their lives or getting injured ... is what specifically our focus was and that is relatively low because we don't have areas that are getting extremely deep or moving very fast," he said. One resident told the meeting that calling it low risk did not properly account for the toll it took on the community. "I think that underplays and undervalues the stresses that people have that live in the flood-prone areas and when the rain hits, I get a number of phone calls from people that live in those areas that have been flooded and they're damned anxious," he said. Flooding in Middlemarch in 2021. Photo: Supplied / Robin Thomas Nathan Anderson acknowledged the concerns, saying that the risk to life might be low but the council was aware of the other impacts from flooding. A flooded caravan did not deter Patrick Flanagan from settling here about five years ago. "It didn't stop us from building, we just had to build 400 millimetres above any known flood height," he said. "For the community, it was a bit devastating because some businesses closed down and, obviously, it puts a lot of stress on people whose places are very close to flooding." He was pleased to see the council were taking the issue seriously and he hoped to see more solutions that would help to protect homes in the community. Ruth Manning was keen to see some longer term solutions that could help Middlemarch to grow, saying it was an affordable place to live. "There's multiple residential properties here in the area and I think people are put off by the risk of flooding and actually buying in the first place," she said. "But if we had a good flood mitigation scheme, then it would actually attract more people to this area." In 2023, the council installed a new rain gauge to boost flood forecasting in the area. Improving channels, creating a diversion channel and debris basins were among the possible solutions, but Nathan Anderson said there was no silver bullet solution despite using modelling to test a range of different options. The ballpark figures ranged from about $2 million to upwards of $15 million and did not include design or land costs. "We're here to help solve their problems. That's really what we hope to get out of it," Anderson said. "At the end of the day, it really comes down to it's going to be their decision of how they want to achieve that balance between cost and effectiveness." Another resident told the meeting that the flooding hit their water bores and could potentially take weeks to fix, forcing people to boil their water to brush their teeth or rely on water tankers. Angela and Shane Foster hoped to start building their Middlemarch home in the next 12 months. Armed with information from the council and locals, they were opting for a foundation that would raise it up on piles to give them more protection, he said. "We are on a wee bit of an incline so we believe from what we've been told it doesn't get that far up but one in 100 year (flood) could get that far up," he said. Angela Foster said the community wanted to see some action. "There has been a lot of modelling done in offices. There's been a lot of interesting work done behind the scenes, but there doesn't seem to be much happening on the ground," she said. "I think if people see things happening on the ground, whether it be widening of creeks or clearing out of creeks or whatever it may be, if they could see some actual work it might help people's view that they're being helped and not just being forgotten about." Otago Regional Council hoped to have more detailed options to show the community in the next year, but said it was clear that the community wanted to hear more about solutions. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
