The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Lauris Edmond (1924–2000) was born in Dannevirke. She trained as a teacher, married a teacher and had children, a time during which her writing was a private hobby. During the 1970s she came to prominence as a poet, both popular and critically esteemed. Her work was part of the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence of women writers on the New Zealand literary scene, both in terms of her late blooming career and in the themes she dealt with in her poetry and in the three volumes of autobiography, published from 1989 to 1992. Edmond also wrote a novel, and was an anthologist and editor.

  Murray Edmond (1949–) was born in Hamilton and attended Auckland University, where he completed his PhD in New Zealand experimental theatre and where he now teaches in the drama programme. He has worked as a dramaturge for a number of New Zealand playwrights, was associated with the avant-garde magazine Freed, and is editor of the journal Ka Mate Ka Ora.

  David Eggleton (1952–) was born in Auckland to a part-Polynesian family, and grew up in both New Zealand and Fiji. He came to prominence in the 1980s as a performance poet in New Zealand and overseas, being named Street Entertainer of the Year in 1985 by London’s Time Out. He lives in Dunedin and is the current editor of the literary journal Landfall.

  Stevan Eldred-Grigg (1952–) was born in the Grey Valley. His father came from a wealthy Canterbury sheep-farming family; his mother from a poor workingclass family in south Christchurch. He attended Canterbury University and the Australian National University, where he gained a PhD in history. In addition to his works of fiction, he is the author of a number of works of social history.

  A.R.D. [Arthur Rex Dugard] Fairburn (1904–57) was born in Auckland into a family whose ancestors were among the first settlers. After an undistinguished education at Auckland Grammar School where he made friends with the young R.A.K. Mason, he found work as a clerk in an insurance office. In the late 1920s he began publishing articles in newspapers and his poems appeared in the anthology Kowhai Gold. Fairburn married in 1931 while in England. Returning to New Zealand in the depths of the Depression, he worked for a time on a relief gang. In 1938 his Depression poem ‘Dominion’ was published by the Caxton Press. During the Second World War Fairburn worked for the National Broadcasting Service and in the late 1940s was, fitfully, a tutor and lecturer at Auckland University College, teaching English and fine arts. His latter years saw him taking part in a number of public debates and political causes, many associated with Auckland’s North Shore where he had settled with his family in 1946 in Devonport.

  Fiona Farrell (1947–) was born in Ōamaru and educated at Otago University and the University of Toronto, where she gained a MPhil in 1976 writing on T.S. Eliot’s verse drama Sweeny Agonistes. She is a poet, novelist and playwright and lives on Banks Peninsula. Her 2011 work The Broken Book describes her experience of the Christchurch earthquake.

  Cliff Fell (1955–) was born in London, to a New Zealand father and an English mother, and has lived in New Zealand since 1998. He has an MA from Victoria University’s creative writing programme and teaches creative writing at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

  Sia Figiel (1967–) was born in Apia, Sāmoa and educated in Sāmoa, New Zealand and the USA. Her first book, Where We Once Belonged (1996), is said to be the first novel by a Sāmoan woman. She has published novels and poetry which have been translated into a number of different languages.

  Anne French (1956–) was born and educated in Wellington, and has worked for Oxford University Press and Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand as a publisher and editor. She began publishing poetry in the 1970s and her first collection appeared in 1987.

  The Front Lawn is the stage name of Harry Sinclair (1959–) and Don McGlashan (1959–) who gained wide popularity in New Zealand from their live performances, short films and recordings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, accompanied for a time by the actor Jennifer Ward-Lealand.

  A.P. Gaskell [pseud. of Alexander Gaskell Pickard] (1913–2006) was born in Kurow though his father’s work in the railways meant that the family moved around during his childhood. He won a scholarship to Otago University and attended Teachers’ Training College. Tuberculosis meant he was unfit for service in the Second World War, and he taught at a variety of schools, moving in 1960 to Fairfield College in Hamilton for the rest of his teaching career. From 1939 to 1962 Gaskell wrote a number of short stories, some of which were collected in 1947. He was a friend of Frank Sargeson who encouraged him and reviewed him positively but despaired of his failure to write anything after 1962, seeing it as symptomatic of a malaise affecting New Zealand literature as a whole.

  Maurice Gee (1931–) was born in Whakatāne and grew up in Henderson, then a country town on the outskirts of Auckland. Gee gained an MA in English from Auckland University in 1954. His fiction was published in Landfall from the mid-1950s and his first novel, The Big Season, appeared in 1962. In 1979 he wrote his first children’s book, Under the Mountain, and children’s fiction has been a parallel activity, many works being written for or adapted for television.

  Denis Glover (1912–80) was born in Dunedin and educated in Auckland and Christchurch, attending Canterbury University College where he excelled at study and sport and began his lifelong involvement in printing and typography. In 1935 he founded the Caxton Press which published all the major writers of the 1930s, including Glover himself. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, and returned to the Caxton Press in 1944 but was sacked for mismanagement. Problems with alcoholism were a feature of his later life, but his war memoir Hot Water Sailor was well received. He was active in the service of various arts organisations, and maintained a position in the public eye with a regular output of poetry collections and public performances.

  William Golder (1810–76) was born in Scotland and came to New Zealand in 1840 with his wife and children after his wife’s conversion to Catholicism meant he had to give up his teaching career. The family settled in the Hutt Valley where they farmed—it was Golder’s farming experience rather than his teaching that had been the basis for his acceptance as a settler. His collection New Zealand Minstrelsy (1852) is the first book of poetry to be published in New Zealand, Golder himself being printer and publisher, using what he called his ‘amateur press’. It was followed by other works—of celebration of the new colony and its landscape and satire of the shortcomings of its governance.

  A.A. [Alfred Augustus] Grace (1867–1942) was born in Auckland of Church Missionary Society parents who had lived in the Taupō area until the wars of the 1860s. Grace, the youngest of twelve, was educated in England and returned to New Zealand in 1887, marrying and settling in Nelson. He was a teacher, journalist, member of the local Masonic lodge and a city councillor. His prodigious output of short stories, novels, histories, guide books and folklore collections was read widely in New Zealand, England and Australia. Its use of Māori material was in line with popular taste but also was a reflection of family connections—both his parents’ missionary experience and his brothers’ marriages into Ngāti Tūwharetoa.

  Patricia Grace (1937–), Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa and Te Āti Awa, was born in Wellington. Grace trained as a teacher and initially published short stories in Te Ao Hou and the Listener. Her collection Waiariki (1975) is the first short-story collection by a Māori woman. Grace is an award-winning novelist, anthologist and biographer with an international reputation. She has written several popular books for children. She lives at Hongoeka Bay, Plimmerton, her ancestral land.

  Briar Grace-Smith, Ngā Puhi and Ngāti Wai, is an actor, playwright, short-story writer and screenplay writer who began her career working with the Taki Rua, He Ara Hou, Te Ohu Whakaari and Bats theatre groups in the mid-1990s. She has an MA in creative writing from Victoria University.

  Paula Green (1955–) is an Auckland poet, critic, anthologist and children’s author. She has a PhD in Italian from Auckland University and co-authored 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry with Harry Ricketts in 2010.

/>   H.W. [Harold] Gretton (1914–83) grew up in the Horowhenua where his parents were dairy farmers. He attended Victoria University College where he studied arts, and was a keen actor and an energetic member of the university tramping club. He worked as a journalist and a teacher. During the Second World War he served in the army in Italy where he wrote his lengthy poem ‘Koru and Acanthus’, contrasting the ruins of wartime Europe with his hopes for a New Zealand future. Gretton’s tramping songs have become part of the oral vernacular.

  George Grey (1812–98), possibly born in Lisbon, of a military family, went to Sandhurst and served in the army in Ireland before embarking on an exploration of Western Australia. He was appointed governor of South Australia in 1840 and governor of New Zealand from 1845 to 1853, leaving for the equivalent position in the Cape Colony, and returning for a second term from 1861 to 1868. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1875 and was premier from 1877 to 1879. In the manner of the early generation of colonial administrators, Grey was a fluent Māori speaker with an interest in recording the mythology, customs and beliefs of indigenous people. With the help of a group of young missionary-educated Māori, including Wiremu Te Rangikaheke, he collected a range of Māori materials—proverbial sayings, songs, legendary narratives—which he published in Māori and in English.

  Edith Searle Grossmann [née Edith Howitt Searle] (1863–1931) was born in Australia and came to New Zealand as a child. She was one of the first generation of New Zealand women graduates, gaining a first-class MA from Canterbury University College in 1885 and teaching at Wellington Girls’ High and Victoria University College before her marriage to Joseph Penfound Grossmann, a teacher and later university lecturer who was twice convicted of fraud. The couple spent long periods apart, not just when he was in prison. Grossmann was active in the suffrage movement of the 1880s and 1890s, and, in addition to her four novels and extensive journalism, wrote a biography of Helen Connon, the grandmother of James K. Baxter.

  H. [William Herbert] Guthrie-Smith (1862–1940) was born in Scotland and came to New Zealand as a young man. In 1882 he took over Tutira, a sheep station in Hawke’s Bay. Guthrie-Smith spent the First World War in London where he ran the gardens for a hospital. On his return he divided a portion of Tutira into smaller farms for returning soldiers. Although he wrote poetry and short stories, and published in local journals such as The Forerunner, his magnum opus was the natural history of his own farm, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, published in 1921, a scientific, cultural, historical and personal work setting out a detailed and thoughtful record of the changing post-European landscape.

  Rowley Habib [also known as Rore Hapipi] (1933–), poet, short-story writer and playwright, was born in Ōruanui near Taupō. His father was Syrian, his mother Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Habib attended Te Aute College, trained as a teacher and worked for the public service. He is one of the first generation of Māori writers in English, his stories and poems appearing in Te Ao Hou from the mid-1950s. He wrote a number of plays in the 1980s for the Te Ika a Maui Players, and his selected poems were published in 2006.

  Bernadette Hall (1945–), born in Alexandra, is a poet, editor, playwright and teacher who lives at Pegasus Bay, Canterbury. Hall was for some years a Latin teacher, and the editor of literary magazine Takahe and the poetry editor of the Christchurch Press. In 2006 she edited a collection of the poems of Joanna Margaret Paul.

  Dean Hapeta aka Te Kupu [The Word] (1966–) is a multi-media producer and performer of socio-political rap, poetry, music and video as leader of reggae rap band Upper Hutt Posse, formed in 1985, and as a solo artist. He recorded New Zealand’s first rap record E Tu (1988), a blend of US rap, hip hop and Māori influences. Recently completed projects include Ngātahi—Know The Links, a six-part ‘rapumentary’ on native and marginalised peoples’ street arts and activism, shot in twenty countries, and Upper Hutt Posse’s seventh album, Declaration Of Resistance.

  Michael Harlow (1937–) was born in the United States of Greek and American–Ukrainian background. He settled in New Zealand in 1968 after extensive travel. In the 1980s he was an editor of the Caxton Press poetry series and poetry editor of Landfall. He has collaborated as librettist with the New Zealand composer Kit Powell. A practising Jungian psychotherapist, Harlow now lives in Alexandra.

  Dinah Hawken (1943–) was born in Hāwera and lives in Wellington. She has worked as a psychotherapist, social worker and counsellor in New Zealand and the USA. She has an MA in creative writing from Brooklyn College, New York, and is one of the earliest New Zealand writers to formally qualify in this subject. She has taught a course in landscape writing at Victoria University, reflecting her interest in the relationship of conservation and the environment to literature.

  Henry Headley (1765–88) was born in Norfolk, went to Oxford but left after an unhappy love affair, returning in 1786 after he had married someone else. His precocious abilities were demonstrated in his 1785 work Fugitive Pieces and in what would now be called a critical anthology, Select Beauties of English Poetry, with Remarks (1787). He contracted tuberculosis and travelled to Lisbon in the hope the climate there might halt the disease, but died on his return.

  James ‘Worser’ Heberley (1809–99) was born in Weymouth in England and ran away to sea at an early age, arriving in Sydney in 1826. Whaling brought him to New Zealand and he settled at Te Awaiti, a whaling station in the Marlborough Sounds, where he lived with Te Wai (also known as Mata Te Naihi) of Te Āti Awa. The couple were married in 1841 by the Wesleyan missionary Samuel Ironside. Heberley was appointed Wellington harbour pilot by the New Zealand Company. He accompanied Ernest Dieffenbach on a number of his expeditions and was with him on his ascent of Mt Taranaki. Heberley’s nickname ‘Worser’ was said to come from his descriptions of the weather—‘worser and worser’—although it may have been an English form of the Māori ‘whata’.

  Noel Hilliard (1929–97) was born in Napier into a working-class family. He worked as a journalist, then a teacher in Wellington, becoming a socialist and briefly a communist, but leaving after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. His first novel Maori Girl (1960) has an autobiographical aspect, his wife being Ngāti Kahu and Ngā Puhi. He was a fierce critic of the lack of Māori representation in Curnow’s 1945 Book of New Zealand Verse, and worked with the photographer Ans Westra documenting rural Māori life. He was reconciled to the post-Stalin Soviet Union and in 1988 he and his wife were made cultural ambassadors to Russia by the New Zealand government and wrote an account of their trip there.

  M. H. [Montague Harry] Holcroft (1902–93) was educated at Christchurch Boys’ High School. He moved to Sydney to become a writer, publishing in literary journals and beginning an unsuccessful career as a novelist. In 1928 he set out to further his literary career in London, again without success. Holcroft returned to New Zealand in 1930, working as a journalist, editor and freelance writer.

  He made his name as the writer of popular essays on local culture, notably The Deepening Stream (1940). From 1949 to 1969 he was the editor of the Listener.

  ‘Hori’ [pseud. of W. Norman McCallum] is a fictitious Māori character invented by McCallum, an Auckland Pākehā commercial traveller. His ‘humorous’ but, from a contemporary perspective, racist columns were a popular feature of the Auckland Star in the 1950s and 1960s and were collected as The Half-Gallon Jar (1962) with illustrations by Frank St Bruno.

  Dylan Horrocks (1966–) was born in Auckland and received a BA from Auckland University. He began publishing strips in magazines in the 1980s and has an international reputation as a comics artist. He has written episodes of Batgirl, as well as other titles, for DC Comics. His New Zealand graphic novel Hicksville was published in Canada in 1998 and in 2010 in New Zealand.

  Keri Hulme (1947–), of Kāi Tahu and Orcadian Scots (mother Mary A. Miller) and Lancashire English (father John W. Hulme, born in Aotearoa New Zealand) ancestry, has persisted in writing things and painting things despite much official
discouragement. She continues committing hubris because of the glittery literary prizes she has won—and because she really enjoys her life. Family—friends—fishing—food—foundations—furtherance of life—what better ways to spend your time as a human?

  Sam Hunt (1946–) was born in Auckland and educated at St Peter’s College. As a young man he was befriended by an older generation of poets including James K. Baxter, and became widely known in the 1970s and 1980s as a performer of his own work in a variety of live and often ad hoc venues throughout the country, often in the company of his dog Minstrel, the subject of many of his verses.

  Robin Hyde [pseud. of Iris Wilkinson] (1906–39) was born in Cape Town, her family moving to Wellington when she was a baby. She attended Wellington Girls’ College and at the age of seventeen became a journalist for the Dominion newspaper—she was the author of ‘Peeps at Parliament’ under the pen name ‘Novitia’. Ill health and the still-birth of her illegitimate son resulted in a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital in 1927 but in 1929 her first collection of poems appeared. During this period she worked as a reporter, spurred by the need to support her son Derek, born in 1930. From 1933 to 1937 she was a voluntary patient at the Grey Lodge, a department of Auckland Mental Hospital, an environment which paradoxically she found most congenial to her writing, completing three novels, a collection of journalism and two collections of poetry while she was there. At the beginning of 1938 Hyde left for England but disembarked in China, then in the throes of the Sino–Japanese War, where she collected material for a book, Dragon Rampant. She arrived in England ill and without financial support and committed suicide there in August 1939.

  Witi Ihimaera [Smiler] (1944–), Te Whānau a Kai, Te Aitanga a Mahāki, Rongowhakaata, Ngai Tāmanuhiri, Ngāti Porou, Tūhoe, Whakatōhea, was born in Gisborne. The small Poverty Bay settlement of Waituhi, his family marae, features in many of his works. Ihimaera’s short-story collection Pounamu Pounamu (1972) was the first by a Māori author and his novel Tangi (1973) the first novel by a Māori author. In addition to writing short stories and novels, he has written operatic libretti and edited significant anthologies. Ihimaera has worked as a journalist, a diplomat and an academic and is now emeritus professor of English and creative writing at Auckland University.