The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  R.A.K. [Ronald Allison Kells] Mason (1905–71) was born in Auckland and brought up by his aunt in the Waikato. He went to Auckland Grammar where he made friends with A.R.D. Fairburn, and then worked as a tutor in a private college. His first collection of poetry, The Beggar (1924), was not a critical or commercial success, although two poems appeared in an English anthology and the story of Mason throwing a pile of remaindered copies into the Waitematā Harbour is perhaps apocryphal. Mason wrote little poetry after 1933; instead he concentrated on social activism—left-wing journalism in publications such as Tomorrow and The People’s Voice and plays in support of left-wing causes. He held a variety of positions in the trade union movement and the left-wing press. He was the first president of the New Zealand–China Society and visited China in 1957.

  Rachel McAlpine (1940–), born in Fairlie and educated at Canterbury and Victoria Universities, is a poet, novelist, playwright, anthologist and editor who came to attention in the mid-1970s as part of the new interest in women’s writing. She has written non-fiction works on professional writing and the internet.

  Sue McCauley (1941–), novelist and playwright, was born in Dannevirke and grew up in rural Hawke’s Bay. She worked as a journalist and advertising copywriter and wrote for radio and television in the 1970s. Her first novel, Other Halves (1982), the semi-autobiographical story of a relationship between a Pākehā woman and a younger Māori man, was both popular and controversial, and was made into a film directed by John Laing (1984).

  Greg McGee (1950–) was born in Oamaru and educated at Otago University, completing a law degree in 1972. At university he played rugby, becoming a junior All Black and trialist for the All Blacks. This experience informs his highly celebrated 1980 play Foreskin’s Lament which dramatised the power of rugby at a time when sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa had become central to debates about New Zealand politics and culture. In addition to his involvement in live theatre, McGee is a scriptwriter for television and film.

  Cilla McQueen (1949–) was born in Birmingham, arriving in New Zealand aged four. She gained an MA from Otago University in 1971. She has been a teacher and has continued writing, publishing and performing poetry for four decades. She was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2011.

  O.E. [Osman Edward] Middleton (1925–2010) was born in Christchurch and worked in a wide range of manual occupations, reflected in the range of characters in his fiction. He served in the army and air force in the Second World War, and in the 1950s and 1960s, with encouragement from Frank Sargeson, began publishing short stories in Landfall and the Listener. As a young man, Middleton was diagnosed with a condition which led to his becoming blind. For the last three decades of his life he wrote in Braille.

  Karlo Mila (1974–) is an Auckland poet of Tongan, Sāmoan and Pālagi descent whose work has appeared in local and international anthologies. A Well Written Body, a collection of poems illustrated by and written in concert with artist Delicia Sampero, was published in 2008.

  David Mitchell (1940–2011) was educated at Victoria University and Teachers’ Training College, moving to Auckland in 1964. His Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (1972) was and is the quintessential expression of the local variety of 1960s and 1970s counter-culture. Mitchell is widely remembered for his readings and performances and his association with the Poetry Live readings at the Globe Hotel in Wakefield Street, Auckland, in the early 1980s. His selected poems, Steal Away Boy, appeared in 2010.

  Ronald Hugh Morrieson (1922–72) was born, lived and died in Hāwera in a house built by his grandfather. His family was musical and, after his father’s early death, his mother supported herself and her only child by teaching the piano. Morrieson’s education was inhibited by his poor health. He intended to study law at Auckland University but returned to Hāwera after a few days, overcome with homesickness. He was unfit for military service and worked at a variety of jobs, including as a freezing worker, while playing in jazz bands and teaching music. His first novel, The Scarecrow (1963), published in Australia, was well received, except by the citizens of Hāwera who saw themselves reflected in its dark narratives. But illness, exacerbated by alcoholism and the death of his mother, led to his decline and premature death. His growing posthumous reputation did not prevent the local council demolishing his house and replacing it with a fried chicken outlet.

  Paula Morris (1965–), of English and Ngāti Wai descent, was born in Auckland but has largely lived outside New Zealand—in the USA and the UK—since 1985. A graduate of the creative writing programme at Victoria University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has published six novels and a story collection, and edited the 2009 Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories.

  John Mulgan (1911–45) was born in Christchurch. His father Alan was a journalist, his mother one of the first women MAs at Auckland University. Mulgan attended Auckland University, then Oxford, graduating with a first in English in 1935, and took up a position at the Clarendon Press. At the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the army and was posted initially to Northern Ireland and then to the Middle East. In 1943 he was transferred to Greece to a unit supporting the Greek partisans. He was awarded the Military Cross. In 1945 he worked briefly in Athens but committed suicide while on leave in Cairo. His single novel, Man Alone, was written while he was in Oxford. Its publication in 1939 was obscured by the start of the war and the destruction of most of the book’s stock in the London Blitz. Report on Experience, a memoir, was completed near the end of his life and the manuscript was posted to his wife in New Zealand.

  John Newton (1959–) is a poet, critic and cultural historian. Newton taught in the English department of Canterbury University and now lives on Waiheke Island. His work The Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune was published in 2009.

  Apirana Ngata (1874–1950), Ngāti Porou, was born in Te Araroa to a prominent family, concerned for his Māori as well as his European education. He went to Te Aute College and then to Canterbury University College. In 1893 he became New Zealand’s first Māori graduate and in 1896, now at Auckland University College, the first Māori law graduate. Ngata’s poem ‘A Scene from the Past’ won the Canterbury College Dialectic Society essay prize in 1892. It was published in the Christchurch Press and Auckland Star and included in a commemorative volume celebrating the 1901 visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall. Ngata was a member of the Polynesian Society, and their habit of scholarly preservationism is reflected in his collection of waiata, Nga Moteatea (1928), and his efforts to revive and support Māori performing and decorative arts. In 1905 he became member of Parliament for Eastern Maori, a seat which he held until 1943. He was Native Minister from 1928 to 1932, and was knighted in 1927.

  Gregory O’Brien (1961–), poet, painter, essayist, anthologist, art historian and curator, was born in Matamata and now lives in Wellington with his wife, the poet Jenny Bornholdt. His career is illustrative of and has contributed to the close relationship between art and literature in modern New Zealand culture.

  Chris Orsman (1955–) was born in Lower Hutt, and gained an MA in architecture. In 1998 he was one of the first writers to be awarded the Antarctica Arts Fellowship, an experience anticipated by his 1996 collection South. He is the co-founder of Pemmican Press which produces elegantly designed and bound books of new poetry.

  Geoff Park (1942–2009) was an ecologist and research scientist whose PhD from the Australian National University was on forest nutrient cycling. During a 1986 fellowship at the Stout Research Centre he began researching his acclaimed ecological history of New Zealand, Ngā Uruora—The Groves of Life (1995). The heir of H. Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira, Park’s work melds his scientific and ecological background with an awareness of the landscape’s human culture and history.

  Bill [also known as W.H. (William Harrison)] Pearson (1922–2002) was born in Greymouth, the setting of his 1963 novel Coal Flat, and was educated at Canterbury and Otago University Colleges and Teachers’ Training Co
llege. In the Second World War, despite his sympathy for conscientious objection, he served in the Middle East. After the war, he remained in England until 1959, when he was appointed to the English department of Auckland University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1986. Coal Flat was Pearson’s only novel but he was influential as a critic, literary historian and essayist. His essay ‘Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist’ (1952) set the agenda for local cultural critique for the next two decades, and he was one of the first to pay critical attention to Māori and Pacific literature.

  Emily Perkins (1970–) was born in Christchurch, and grew up in Auckland and Wellington where she attended Bill Manhire’s creative writing course at Victoria University and the New Zealand Drama School Toi Whakaari. In 1995 she moved to London where her next two novels were published. She returned to New Zealand in 2004. Perkins has been presenter of television book programmes The Book Show and The Good Word, and lives in Auckland.

  Roma Potiki (1958–), Te Rarawa, Te Aupōuri and Ngāti Rangitihi, was born in Lower Hutt and educated at Wainuiomata College and now lives at Paekākāriki. Potiki is a poet, playwright, actor, artist and arts administrator. The refrain of her poem ‘and my heart goes swimming’ became the title of an anthology of New Zealand love poems edited by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien in 1996.

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–39) was born in London to a wealthy family, was a star at Eton and Cambridge, worked as a journalist, trained as a lawyer and entered Parliament as a Tory MP. He opposed the Reform Bill, which would have abolished his constituency, a classic ‘rotten borough’ he had purchased for £1000, although he subsequently served as MP for Great Yarmouth and for Aylesbury. He died of tuberculosis, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it, ‘best remembered for what he might have become had he not died young’.

  Chris Price (1962–) was born in England, her family immigrating to Auckland in 1966. She attended Auckland and Victoria Universities, gaining an MA in creative writing. From 1993 to 2000 she was the editor of Landfall, worked as an arts administrator, and now teaches creative writing at Victoria University.

  Jacob Rajan was born in Malaysia of South Indian descent and came to New Zealand as a child. He gained a BSc, trained as a teacher and attended the New Zealand Drama School Toi Whakaari. The trilogy of plays, Krishnan’s Dairy, The Candlestickmaker and The Pickle King, which he both wrote and performed, was produced by his company Indian Ink, comically enacting Indian and New Zealand cross-cultural relations.

  William Pember Reeves (1857–1932) was born in Lyttelton into a wealthy and well-connected family. In 1867 he went to England to train as a lawyer but ill health forced his return. He worked as a shepherd, rejected law for journalism, and in 1885 became editor of the Canterbury Times. He was elected to Parliament in 1887 and from 1892 held a number of ministerial portfolios. In 1896 he was made New Zealand agent-general (later renamed High Commissioner) in London. Here he made extensive friendships in radical, socialist and literary circles—his wife Maud was active in the Fabian Society and the suffragette cause. In 1908 Reeves was replaced as High Commissioner and became director of the National Bank of New Zealand and director of the London School of Economics. In the manner of many of his generation, the demands of his various professional occupations left time for his own writing: poetry, short stories and the first seriously regarded history of New Zealand, The Long White Cloud—Ao Tea Roa (1898).

  Harry Ricketts (1950–) was born in London. He studied English at Oxford University, lecturing in Hong Kong and Leicester before taking a position in the English department of Victoria University in 1981. Ricketts has published poetry and non-fiction, including a biography of Rudyard Kipling and a study of the First World War poets. He is the co-author with Paula Green of 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (2010).

  Frank Sargeson [pseud. of Norris Frank Davey] (1903–82) was born in Hamilton into a strict Methodist family, trained to be a lawyer but left for England in 1927. He travelled, read and began to write a novel. He returned, novel unfinished, in 1928 and took a job as a clerk. In 1929 he was convicted on a charge of ‘indecent assault on a male’ (homosexuality was illegal in New Zealand until 1986) and given a suspended sentence. From 1931 he lived in his family’s bach at Takapuna on Auckland’s North Shore, grew vegetables and began publishing, often in the left-wing Tomorrow, the short stories and sketches now central to the New Zealand literary canon. The 1950s were not as productive, though he wrote a number of plays, and enjoyed significant friendships, notably with Janet Frame who lived in a shed in his back garden while she was writing her first novel. But the 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in his reputation with short stories, a novel, novellas and volumes of autobiography, all attracting a wide readership. William Satchell (1861–1942) was born in London, son of a senior civil servant with literary interests. Satchell went to Heidelberg University but did not finish his degree, and instead returned to London where he tried unsuccessfully to become a publisher. In 1886 he immigrated to New Zealand and settled in the Hokianga where he married into the Bryers, a prominent Pākehā–Māori family. With the title to his land in doubt, the family moved to Auckland in 1892 where Satchell became a member of the Auckland Stock Exchange. He was able to fund a short-lived magazine the Maorilander out of the proceeds, published a collection of his poems and the first of his four novels The Land of the Lost (1902), set in the gumfields of Northland. Unwise investments led to the family having to move to Kōpū near Thames in 1917 where Satchell worked as a clerk for a timber company. His best-known novel The Greenstone Door (1914) suffered initially as its sceptical view of Pākehā nationalism did not accord with the mood at the beginning of the First World War.

  John Savage (1770–1838), a ship’s surgeon, visited New Zealand from 1805 to 1806 and recorded his observations in Some Account of New Zealand; particularly the Bay of Islands, and Surrounding Country; with a Description of the Religion and Government, Language, Arts, Manufactures, Manners and Customs of the Natives which was published in London in 1807. Some of his source material probably came from Moyhanger or Moehanga, a young Māori who accompanied him on his return to England.

  Erik Schwimmer (1923–), anthropologist and editor, was born in Canada and educated at the Universities of British Columbia and Toronto. He lived in New Zealand between 1940 and 1964. From 1951 to 1960 he was the editor of the bilingual journal Te Ao Hou. The magazine was the place of first publication for many of the writers who in the 1960s and 1970s were central to the Māori renaissance.

  Anna Seward (1742–1809), the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, grew up in the cathedral close of Lichfield. Her father was a clergyman of literary tastes and she was a precocious child. She was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, knew Samuel Johnson, and had an intense though brief friendship with James Boswell while he was writing Johnson’s biography—she felt the finished product too flattering. Unmarried, Seward cared for her elderly parents, wrote to a wide range of correspondents, and published poetry—her ‘Elegy on Captain Cook’ was widely praised and Louisa: a Poetical Novel, in Four Epistles went through five editions in 1784–85. Sir Walter Scott edited a posthumous three-volume edition of her poetry and six volumes of her letters appeared in 1811.

  Maurice Shadbolt (1932–2004) was born in Auckland, went to Auckland University and worked as a journalist and for the National Film Unit. Among his prolific output is a group of novels that shifted the way local literature conceived of the relationship between the real and the imaginary: Strangers and Journeys (1972), The Lovelock Version (1980), and his trilogy on the New Zealand Wars (1986–93). His play Once on Chunuk Bair (1982), which expresses the nationalism of the 1980s in terms of the ANZAC experience of the First World War, was widely influential, in performance and on school and university syllabuses.

  Iain Sharp (1953–) was born in Glasgow and came to Auckland at the age of eight. He completed an Auckland University PhD and now works as a librarian in the Grey
Collection of Auckland Libraries. In addition to four volumes of poetry, he has published a study of the library’s special collections and a biography of the artist Charles Heaphy.

  Peter [Pita] Sharples (1941–), Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngai Te Kikiri o te Rangi, and Ngāti Pahauwera, was born in Waipawa. He attended Te Aute College and Auckland University where he taught in the departments of anthropology and education. In 2004 Sharples became co-leader of the newly formed Māori Party; in 2005 he was elected member of Parliament for the seat of Tāmaki Makaurau, and after the 2008 election he became Minister of Māori Affairs.

  Kate Sheppard [née Catherine Wilson Malcolm] (1847–1934) was born in Liverpool and came to New Zealand in 1868, settling in Christchurch where she married Walter Allen Sheppard. In 1885 she became a founding member of the New Zealand Women’s Christian Temperance Union which formed a franchise branch to agitate for votes for women two years later. After a national campaign the Electoral Act was passed on 19 September 1893. Sheppard was elected president of the National Council of Women, sometimes called the Women’s Parliament, in 1896, wrote for its journal The White Ribbon and travelled widely. Walter died in 1915 and in 1925 Sheppard married William Lovell-Smith, author of Outlines of the Women’s Franchise Movement in New Zealand.

  Keith Sinclair (1922–93), poet and historian, grew up in Auckland and served overseas in the Second World War, returning to complete his MA and PhD at Auckland University. He was appointed to its history department where he stayed until he retired, teaching a generation of New Zealand historians. Sinclair profoundly influenced mid-twentieth-century conceptions of nationhood, not least through the medium of his 1957 History of New Zealand. He published five volumes of poetry, many with historical subjects but others reflecting his political persuasion which led him in 1969 to stand as a Labour candidate.