In 1930, Elsie Locke became the first student from Waiuku District High School to go to university in Auckland. She crossed the Waikato River from her native Waiuku and headed down the paper roads and stock races of the area sometimes known as Limestone Country. In the days it took her to travel south from the Waikato to Raglan harbour, Locke encountered M?ori communities still innocent of the English language and the cash economy, as well as vast sheep farms ruined by ragwort, gorse and the global financial crisis. The Great Depression had left thousands of people out of work. Locke wrote her journey up nearly five decades later in her autobiographical Student at the Gates, an impressionistic account of the miseries and pleasures of life in 1930s New Zealand.