Alan Brunton (1946–2002), poet, editor, scriptwriter, film-maker, actor, director, impresario and provocateur, was born in Christchurch and spent his childhood and adolescence in Hamilton. At Auckland and Victoria Universities in the late 1960s he entered the emerging counter-cultural scene, founding the magazine Freed in 1969 (motto: ‘The word is freed’) and in the mid-1970s co-edited the magazine Spleen. In 1974 he formed with Sally Rodwell the theatrical troupe Red Mole and they toured the company through New Zealand, New York, London, New Mexico and Amsterdam. He returned to New Zealand in 1988, living in Wellington. Slow Passes, collecting work written overseas between 1978 and 1988, appeared from Auckland University Press in 1991. Ephphatha, a beautifully illustrated collaboration with artist Richard Killeen, came out in 1994, followed by four collections from Bumper Books. Three of these, Romaunt of Glossa, the epic Moonshine and the posthumous Fq, are book-length poems. Brunton published more than a dozen books of poetry over thirty years in places as far afield as London, New York and Taos, as well as essays, playscripts and videos. A novel, Pendulum Swing, a major work, was substantially complete but unfinished at his death.
Rachel Bush (1941–) is a Nelson poet and former teacher who completed one of the first MAs in creative writing at Victoria University. She has published in a range of literary magazines and her third full collection, Nice Pretty Things, appeared in 2011.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902), English writer, came to New Zealand in 1859 and farmed in Rangitātā, Canterbury, on a station he named Mesopotamia. Despite the demands of station life, he managed to spend a good deal of time in Christchurch, being active in its social, musical and artistic activities. He explored the ranges of the central South Island—the Butler Saddle, Mt Butler and the Butler Range are named after him—and made use of this landscape in his Utopian novels Erewhon, or, Over the Range (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901). Butler’s letters home to his family were published in 1863 in England as A First Year in Canterbury Settlement but his dislike of his father’s editorial role (and of his father) led him to write an anonymous savagely critical review of the work in the Christchurch Press. He returned to England in 1864.
Kate Camp (1972–) was born in Wellington. She completed an honours degree in English at Victoria University. Her first book of poetry, Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars, was published in 1998. She is also an essayist and radio commentator.
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1926–2009), born in the Cook Islands, came to New Zealand as a child after the death of both his parents and was placed in a Dunedin orphanage. He went to Otago and Victoria Universities and to Teachers’ Training College and in the late 1940s and early 1950s began publishing in small magazines such as Spike, Hilltop and Arachne. He was a member of the ‘Wellington Group’, alongside James K. Baxter, Louis Johnson and Peter Bland, and married the poet Fleur Adcock. The group saw themselves as at odds with the nationalist agendas of Curnow and his associates. Campbell worked as an editor for the School Journal. After a breakdown and divorce from Adcock he remarried. His writing from this period onwards pays increasing attention to his Polynesian background and the Māori traditions implicit in the landscape of his home in Pukerua Bay, working through his response to place and memory in poetry collections, novels and memoirs.
Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), Scottish poet, literary editor and anthologist, is now largely forgotten but in the early decades of the nineteenth century Byron rated him above Wordsworth and Coleridge. Campbell wrote ‘Song of the Emigrants to New Zealand’ for the first issue of the Wellington newspaper the New Zealand Gazette which was, in anticipation, published in London before the New Zealand Company ships departed England in 1839.
Peter Cape (1926–79), born in Helensville, studied English at Auckland University, was ordained as an Anglican minister and worked for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service and for Volunteer Service Abroad. His songs, both traditional ballads of pioneering existence and original songs of his own composition, were recorded from the early 1960s and were widely popular. In the latter part of his life Cape lived in Nelson where he wrote about the arts and crafts community.
Eleanor Catton (1985–) was born in Canada to New Zealand parents. She grew up in Yorkshire and Christchurch, and attended Canterbury University before undertaking an MA in creative writing at Victoria University. Her MA project was the novel The Rehearsal which was published in 2008.
Janet Charman (1954–) was born in Auckland and has worked as a nurse and teacher. She tutored in New Zealand literature in the English department at Auckland University in the 1990s. Her poems first appeared in the 1980s in such theoretically driven journals as the Wominspace Collective and AND.
Catherine Chidgey (1970–), novelist, short-story writer and translator, was born in Lower Hutt. She wrote her award-winning first novel, In a Fishbone Church, as part of her MA in creative writing at Victoria University.
John Clarke (1948–) was born in Palmerston North. He came to prominence in New Zealand in the 1970s for his ‘Fred Dagg’ persona, a stereotype of the ‘Kiwi bloke’ in gumboots and floppy hat, which he enacted on local television and in live performance. He has lived in Australia since the 1970s, where he works as an actor, satirist and scriptwriter.
Hamish Clayton (1977–) was born in Napier. While writing an MA thesis in the English department of Victoria University on Dylan Horrocks’s graphic novel Hicksville, Clayton wrote his novel Wulf, which was published in 2011. He is at present writing a PhD thesis on David Ballantyne.
Geoff Cochrane (1951–) was born in Wellington into a Catholic family. His fiction and poetry began appearing in periodicals and collections from the late 1970s, and a selected volume of poetry appeared in 1992. He has also written novels, short stories and edited an anthology.
William Colenso (1811–99) was born in Cornwall. He came to Paihia in 1834 as a printer for the Church Missionary Society. In 1835 he produced the first book printed in New Zealand, a translation of some of the Epistles of St Paul into Māori, which were followed by a Māori New Testament and a Book of Common Prayer. In 1840 he was responsible for printing the text of the Treaty of Waitangi. He became an Anglican deacon in 1844, having married beforehand, and moved to Hawke’s Bay where he undertook missionary and botanical expeditions. His relationships with local Māori, his church superiors and his wife deteriorated and he was suspended from his position in 1852 after the birth of an illegitimate son Wiremu. His wife and daughter left him and he was only partially rehabilitated later in life, playing a role in provincial politics. He was readmitted to the clergy in 1894.
Glenn Colquhoun (1964–) was born in South Auckland. Colquhoun is a doctor, a poet and a writer of children’s books. Much of his work, including an essay Jumping Ship (2004), draws on his experiences of living and working in the small Māori community of Te Tii in Northland.
James Cook (1728–79), explorer, first came to New Zealand in 1769 as commander of HMS Endeavour on a Royal Society expedition to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. He spent six months surveying both islands before moving on to Australia. He returned in 1773 on the Resolution, using Queen Charlotte Sound as a base for expeditions to the Pacific and into the Southern Ocean, leaving New Zealand finally in November 1774. He was killed on his third expedition in 1779 at Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i. His journals provide a record of all three journeys.
Nigel Cox (1951–2006) grew up in the Wairarapa and Lower Hutt. He worked as a bookseller, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and as Head of Communication and Interpretation at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In 1988 he was part of the group that founded the literary magazine Sport. His fourth novel, Tarzan Presley, experienced copyright problems in the USA from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate over its use of the name ‘Tarzan’. The Cowboy Dog, a New Zealand western, was published posthumously in 2006.
Ian Cross (1925–) was born in Masterton. He became a journalist, working for the Wellington newspaper the Dominion before taking up a fellowship at Harvard University
in 1954–55. His first novel, The God Boy, appeared in 1957. Cross has worked in public relations and as a journalist, broadcaster and arts administrator. He became editor of the Listener in 1973 and headed the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation from 1977 to 1986. His autobiography The Unlikely Bureaucrat (1988) is an account of a significant period in New Zealand public and political life.
Barry Crump (1935–96) was born in Papatoetoe. His first novel, A Good Keen Man (1960), based on sketches about his experiences as a bushman and deer and pig hunter, was a popular success and was followed by twenty more publications, all celebrating the outdoor, self-reliant life of the New Zealand male in which there is little sign of Crump’s late interest in Eastern religion and conversion to the Bahá’í faith.
[Thomas] Allen Curnow (1911–2001) was born in Timaru where his father was an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland, working as a journalist before entering St John’s Theological College in Auckland. In the early 1930s his poems, often ambivalent on religious themes, began appearing. Curnow decided against being ordained and returned to journalism in Christchurch. He formed a friendship with Denis Glover, then running the Caxton Press which published books of his poetry and later, in 1945, the groundbreaking Book of New Zealand Verse. In 1951 he was appointed to a position in the English department at the University of Auckland, where he taught until 1976. His introduction to The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse of 1960, in which he described himself as ‘piecing together the record of an adventure, or a series of adventures, in search of reality’, shaped critical practice for a generation. Curnow published little poetry in the 1960s but in 1972 he issued the brilliant, transformative sequence ‘Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects’ and continued to write and publish throughout the 1980s and 1990s until his death in 2001, developing what might be called a late voice. In these years he published widely in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. He was made a CBE in 1986, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1988, received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1989, and the Order of New Zealand in 1990.
Wystan Curnow (1939–), son of Allen, was born in Christchurch. He studied English at Auckland University, and gained a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. As a lecturer at Auckland University in the 1970s Curnow introduced notable young New Zealand writers to American poetry. He has been an influential champion of postmodern and avant-garde writing and art.
Ruth Dallas [pseud. of Ruth Mumford] (1919–2008) was born in Invercargill into a working-class family. Her early poetry was published in the ‘Little Pakehas’ Page’ of the Southland Daily News. Dallas attended Southland Technical College and during the Second World War worked for the army and also as a milk tester. In 1948 she was one of six new poets featured in Landfall and her first poetry collection was published in 1953 by the Caxton Press. By this time she was living in Dunedin and writing for the School Journal. Her novels for children, set in the pioneering past, appeared in the 1960s and 1970s and were widely popular. She was a close friend of Charles Brasch and worked with him at Landfall from 1962 to 1966. Dallas had a lifelong interest in Chinese philosophy and literature, reflected in her poetry and discussed in her 1991 autobiography Curved Horizon.
Dan [Daniel] Davin (1913–90) was born in Invercargill. His father worked for the railways and his upbringing was characterised by an intense Irish Catholic working-class culture. He went to Otago University, gained a degree in classics and was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He joined the British army at the start of the Second World War, serving in Greece, North Africa and Italy. Post-war, he published novels and short stories, worked for Oxford University Press and contributed to the New Zealand official war history. Although much of his writing is set in New Zealand, he never returned to live here permanently.
Leigh Davis (1955–2009) was born in Whanganui. He attended Auckland and Victoria Universities, studying economics and English. Davis worked for Treasury and the merchant bank Fay Richwhite before starting his own finance company, JUMP Capital. In the mid-1980s he was co-editor of the avant-garde magazine AND, where he issued provocative statements about local art practice. His first book of poetry was Willy’s Gazette (1983). In the 1990s and 2000s he continued to publish poetry under his Jackbooks imprint, characterised by innovative digital publishing and design. His Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life was published posthumously in 2010.
Kate De Goldi (1959–) was born in Christchurch. She published short stories in the late 1980s and in 1994 a short-story sequence, Like You, Really, under the name Kate Flannery. She has written children’s and young adult fiction, most notably The 10PM Question (2008), which won major awards in both adult and young adult categories.
Stephanie de Montalk (1945–) trained as a nurse and worked as a documentary film-maker. Her MA thesis in creative writing from Victoria University is a personal memoir of her great-uncle the poet Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk.
Rod Derrett (1930–2010) was a jazz guitarist in Christchurch in the mid-1950s, and performed at the 99 Club there. He moved to Auckland in the early 1960s where he recorded a number of Kiwiana classics on the Zodiac and the HMV record labels. Chris Bourke describes his ‘arch, rhyming, spoken verse’ as being like Allen Curnow’s Whim Wham set to music. From 1974 Derrett lived in Sydney where he taught music. In 2004 the Broadcasting Standards Authority declined to uphold a complaint that Derrett’s song ‘Puha and Pakeha’ encouraged the denigration of Pākekā, ruling it was ‘clearly humorous’.
Jean Devanny [née Jane Crook] (1894–1962) was born in Golden Bay into a large working-class family. Aged seventeen, she married Hal Devanny, a miner and trade unionist. The couple lived in Pūponga, Dunedin and Wellington and were both prominent in a variety of left-wing political organisations. Devanny’s 1926 novel The Butcher Shop was banned for obscenity by the New Zealand government, ostensibly because of its portrayal of animal cruelty, although it was probably the novel’s sexual frankness that was the cause of the censor’s disquiet. In 1929 the family moved to Australia where Devanny joined the Communist Party. She was expelled in 1941 for, according to her autobiography, sexual immorality, readmitted in 1944, left again in 1950 after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and joined again in 1957 after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. Devanny was an electrifying public speaker and published prolifically both fiction and non-fiction, occupying a place in the Australian as well as the New Zealand literary canon.
Alfred Domett (1811–87) was born in London, son of a ship owner. He attended Cambridge University and travelled widely. Returning to England in 1835, he trained as a lawyer and at the same time began to publish his poetry, part of a group of aspirant writers who called themselves ‘the Colloquials’. Robert Browning was also a member. In 1842 Domett immigrated to New Zealand, settling in Nelson where he edited the Nelson Examiner and from 1846 took on a variety of roles in national politics. He was briefly premier from August 1862 to October 1863. Domett was responsible for the introduction of free, secular compulsory education in New Zealand and the establishment of the General Assembly Library. In 1871 he returned to England, taking with him his vast poem Ranolf and Amohia, presumably written in his spare time, which was published there to modest acclaim in 1872.
Yvonne du Fresne (1929–2011) was born in Tākaka. When she was three her family moved to Palmerston North in the Manawatū, a community with strong Danish immigrant traditions. She trained as a teacher in Christchurch. Her collection Farvel and Other Stories (1980) established her as a writer on migrant communities and reached a wide audience through its adaptation for radio.
Marilyn Duckworth (1935–) is a prolific Wellington novelist and short-story writer, whose first novel was published in 1959. Born in Otahuhu, Duckworth grew up in England. The poet Fleur Adcock is her sister and both authors contributed to Duckworth’s essay collection, Cherries on a Plate: New Zealand Writers Talk About their Sisters (1996).
Eileen Duggan (1894–1972) wa
s born in Tuamarina, Marlborough, into an Irish immigrant family. She gained an MA with first-class honours from Victoria University College in 1918. After a brief period teaching she left because of ill health and supported herself by her writing. Duggan’s parents and sister died in the early 1920s. She lived in a Catholic hostel in Wellington where she met Julia McLeely, her companion for the rest of her life. Duggan had a regular column in the Catholic newspaper the Tablet under the pseudonym ‘Pippa’, and her poetry appeared in Christchurch newspapers the Sun and the Press and in the Sydney Bulletin. Her first volume, Poems, appeared in 1921. She became New Zealand’s most widely known and celebrated poet. She was not, however, represented in Allen Curnow’s anthologies, withholding her work because she objected to his editorial selection.
Maurice Duggan (1922–74) was born in Auckland into an Irish Catholic family. He grew up a sporty rather than a literary youth but in 1940 lost a leg to osteomyelitis which prevented him from following his friends into the army during the Second World War. Early in 1944 he became friendly with Frank Sargeson, both men living on Auckland’s North Shore. Duggan published in the literary journal Landfall from the late 1940s and his short stories were collected and anthologised from the mid-1950s. From the 1960s he worked as a copywriter for an Auckland advertising agency until alcoholism and ill health prompted his retirement.
Kate Duignan (1974–) is a Wellington novelist, short-story writer and poet. She is a graduate of Victoria University’s creative writing programme and her novel Breakwater (2001) is based on her MA thesis.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 145