In her book Old Bucky & me, Jane Bowron uses the simplest weapon in the journalistic arsenal - being there. And she was, through the 2011 September frightener to February’s fatalities in the shattered city she clearly loved so much. Throughout all that time the February quake she nicknamed Old Bucky, was her constant, as it was to hundreds of thousands of other Cantabrians. Because she is both Old Bucky’s victim and witness, she tells the story of New Zealand’s worst national disaster through her eyes and those of other locals.