The Murchison Earthquake From 'The Busch Line - From Serfdom to Freedom', by Harold R. Busch

Jim and Bev Payne have very impressive information on the earthquake here.

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'Shortly before 10 o'clock on the morning of the 17th day of June 1929 I left my said homestead with a sledge and two horses to go to Murchison township distant about three miles to the north. When I left the homestead my wife Jane Busch and my daughter Emily Mary Elizabeth Busch were washing clothes there and my son the said Ronald Samuel Revell Busch was also there and was preparing the churn for churning.

'At 10.20 o'clock I was about a mile and a half away from the homestead on the road along the left bank of the Matakitaki River when there was a violent earthquake with a great noise from the southward, I looked back and could not see my homestead site which was hidden by the hillside in a bend of the road, but I saw an enormous mass of rock and stones falling from the westward and then saw a landslide cross the bed of the Matakitaki River and ascend the low land on the other side of the river where I saw it destroy the dwelling house of Charles Morel which was about half a mile to the eastward of my homestead.

'After waiting about a quarter or half an hour until the shaking of the earth had subsided enough to allow me to go back, I walked southward along the road towards my homestead but had not gone far before I found the road completely covered by the landslide. I continued on over the landslide to the place where my homestead had been and found that the slide was about three quarters of a mile in width and extended all the way across the bed of the Matakitaki River, and that the site of my homestead was about in the middle of the landslide and was covered by rocks and stone and debris to a depth which I estimate at 40 to 50 feet and I could not see then and have not since been able to discover any trace whatever of my homestead or farm buildings or of my said wife and children.'