Sarah Jennings - From Keelinga to Canterbury explores and celebrates the life of a tenacious Irish woman whose life bridged two countries and two centuries. Sarah, the youngest child of a farming family, left home as a 21-year-old bride to live in a modest stone cottage with her husband Barnabas and several adult members of his family. Here she would manage household work, work on the farm, provide care for family members with an incurable disease and learn midwifery skills, all while she and Barnabas welcomed eight children of their own into the world. With no farm mechanisation, no electricity, no running water, and transport confined to a horse and cart life had many challenges.
Widowed at age forty, her youngest child just two years old, Sarah continued her life in West Cork as a mother, farmer and midwife for the next twenty years. She was a strong, fit sixty year old when she made the decision in 1921 to leave Ireland for New Zealand and start another chapter of her busy life.