Colin and Isabella settled to a more comfortable lifestyle at 'Riverina', as befitted their advancing years.  They joined the congregation of the St Andrews Presbyterian Church in Wairoa and celebrated their Golden Wedding in July 1902. Colin worked the farm with the aid of his sons, principally William (Willie) and Duncan.  William indeed became something of a pillar of the local community, serving for six years as a member of the Wairoa County Council.

Unfortunately, the more prosperous conditions in New Zealand sheep farming came too late to help Daniel and Catherine (Kitty) McDonald on the old 'Lochinver' property, where by the early 1890s they were raising a family of five children and where Daniel's standing in the district resulted in his appointment as a Justice of Peace for Taupo.  The lease for 'Lochinver' ran out in 1893, and Daniel and Kitty decided against renewing it. (The problem was that the grazing was poor due to cobalt deficiency, a condition which was not identified until the 1930s. This meant that 'Lochinver' could not carry the number of sheep that would be necessary to cover both the rental to the Maori owners and the higher overheads of 'backcountry' operations.)  Instead, they drifted down to the vicinity of Dannevirke, some 80 miles south of Napier (the main town in the Hawkes Bay region), where by 1896 Daniel had found employment as a 'station overseer' and continued to serve as a JP.  By 1911 the family were settled in Eskdale, a little to the north of Napier, where Daniel managed the 'Hedgeley' sheep station.

Such moving around was very common among Kitty's siblings. Like their cousins on the high plains of Montana and the Dakotas, the younger generation of Munros on the North Island gradually dispersed from the parental homestead, spreading out across the island.  While Willie, the oldest son, and Duncan, Colin and Isabella, the youngest children, tended to stay at or close to 'Lochinver' and 'Riverina', their brothers and sisters fairly quickly took themselves off elsewhere, to find work or start up their own farms. (Whether this restlessness stemmed from an earlier itinerant childhood, or an abundance of job opportunities, or a desire to escape the strictures of a Presbyterian family life, or some combination of the three, is very difficult to decide.)

Murdoch (Murdy), Colin and Isabella's third son, was the first to leave home permanantly.  Murdoch - spirited or headstrong depending on your point of view - left 'Lochinver' around 1883-4, when he would have been about 22 years of age - and headed north.

Murdoch Munro

At first he tried raising cattle in high plateau bushland near Oropi, to the north of Taupo, and when that venture failed he headed westwards to Cambridge, a settlement on the road to Hamilton. In Cambridge in 1885 he married a young single mother, a girl from London named Emily Key, thereby causing a rift with his parents, who did not approve.  For the next twelve years Murdy provided for a growing family - he and Emily had six more children - by working in the haulage and transport business, sometimes for others but mainly on his own account. He operated principally out of Paeroa, a river town that connected Aukland with Waihi and Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty, and which also had traffic generated by a local gold-mining industry.