Frederick Sinclaire (1881–1954) was born in Papakura of Irish emigrant parents and educated at Auckland University College and at Oxford, where he became a socialist and a Unitarian. He took up an appointment as a Unitarian minister in Melbourne in 1907, joined the Victorian Socialist Party and wrote for the left-wing press, activities that forced him to resign from his ministry in 1911, becoming instead minister of the Free Religious Fellowship, a position he held until the mid-1920s. In 1917 he was appointed principal of the Victorian Labor College. He taught at Melbourne University and the University of Western Australia, and in 1932 was appointed professor of Canterbury University College, where he had a regular column, ‘Notes by the Way’, in the left-wing journal Tomorrow.
Elizabeth Smither (1941–), poet, short-story writer and novelist, was born in New Plymouth where she still lives. Smither has worked as a librarian and a journalist. She was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003.
[William] Kendrick Smithyman (1922–95) was born in Te Kopuru, near Dargaville. His family moved to Auckland where he went to Teachers’ Training College. He served in the armed forces in the Second World War, though based in New Zealand. His early poetry was included in the 1951 edition of Allen Curnow’s Book of New Zealand Verse. In 1946 he married the poet Mary Stanley and from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s he taught at primary and intermediate schools in the Auckland region. Although he never completed a university degree, Smithyman was a senior tutor in the English department of Auckland University from 1967 to 1987, and his study of New Zealand poetry, A Way of Saying (1965), is a key work in New Zealand literary criticism. A book-length poem, Atua Wera, a meditation on the career of the Ngā Puhi prophet Penetana Papahurihia, was published posthumously in 1997.
Mary Stanley (1919–80) was born in Thames, went to Auckland University, then trained as a teacher and married. Her husband was killed in the Second World War. In 1946 she married the poet Kendrick Smithyman. The couple had three sons. Stanley published her poetry in the Listener, New Zealand Poetry Yearbooks, and Landfall and in a collection, Starveling Year (1953).
C.K. [Christian Karlson] Stead (1932–), poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and critic, gained an MA from Auckland and a PhD from Bristol University. His celebrated critical work on modernism, The New Poetic (1964), was based on his PhD thesis. He has taught in the English department of the University of Auckland where he is now emeritus professor.
A.G. [Alfred George] Stephens (1865–1933), critic and editor, was born in Toowoomba, Queensland, largely self-educated and as a young man worked on a variety of provincial newspapers in Queensland and New South Wales. In 1894 he became the sub-editor of the Sydney Bulletin where he developed the ‘Red Page’, a section of literary reviews, poems and essays that became the most authoritative voice in Australasian literary matters. Stephens left the Bulletin in 1906, and attempted intermittently and largely unsuccessfully to establish a rival publication, the Bookfellow. He worked briefly for the Evening Post in Wellington in 1907, returning to Sydney in 1910.
Douglas Stewart (1913–85), poet, short-story writer, playwright, essayist and editor, was born in Taranaki, worked as a journalist and moved to Sydney in 1938 where he became the editor of the Bulletin in 1940. In 1961 he took on the position of literary editor at the publishers Angus & Robertson. Stewart’s work is notable for a series of verse plays written in the 1940s, and for his anthologies of nineteenth-century Australian bush ballads.
H. [Henry] Butler Stoney (1814–94), possibly born in Ireland, came to New Zealand in 1860 with the 40th Regiment as major and paymaster and took part in the Taranaki War of 1860 to 1861. His novel Taranaki: A Tale of the War (1861) is the first novel published in New Zealand. It was Stoney’s second work of fiction, and he had also previously written three works of travel writing. The 40th Regiment returned to England in 1866 but Stoney remained, living in Auckland and engaging in various kinds of unsuccessful business concerns. He was elected to the Northern Division of the Provincial Council in 1872.
J.C. [Jacqueline Cecilia] Sturm (1927–2009), Taranaki and Whakatōhea, was born in Ōpunake, gained a BA from Canterbury University College, the first Māori woman ever to graduate, and an MA from Victoria University in 1950. Sturm married the poet James K. Baxter in 1948. From the late 1940s her poetry and short stories had been appearing in student publications, and in 1955 Te Ao Hou published ‘For All the Saints’. She became a regular reviewer for and contributor to Te Ao Hou, as well as other publications, although her stories were not collected until 1983. Baxter died in 1972. Sturm published little during the 1970s but in 1996 her poetry collection Dedications gained widespread notice for its mix of tolerance and reproach.
Robert Sullivan (1967–), Ngā Puhi, is a graduate of Auckland University and worked there for a time as Māori Studies Librarian. In addition to his poetry, he has written a collection of Māori legends for children with illustrations by Gavin Bishop, and is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary Polynesian poetry. From 2003 he taught creative writing at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and now teaches at Manakau Institute of Technology.
Wiremu Tamihana Tarapipipi Te Waharoa (?–1866), Ngāti Haua, was born at Tamahere. Tamihana took part in the wars of the 1820s and 1830s. He was taught to read and write in Māori by the Church Missionary Society at Matamata and was baptised in 1839, although Edward Shortland believed he had accommodated rather than replaced his original religious beliefs. Nonetheless, under his authority the settlements of Te Tapiri and later Peria were run in accord with the Ten Commandments. Tamihana was a key supporter of the establishment of the Māori king and used the King movement newspaper Te Hokioi e Rere Atu Na to argue for the King-ite cause. He attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to mediate between Māori and the government in the wars of the 1860s and during the land confiscations that followed.
Alice Tawhai, of Tainui and Ngā Puhi descent, is the author of three short-story collections: Festival of Miracles (2005), Luminous (2007) and Dark Jelly (2011).
Apirana Taylor (1955–), Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau ā Apanui and Ngāti Ruanui, is a poet, short-story writer, novelist, actor, playwright and children’s author, known for the live performance of his work. His 1972 poem ‘A Sad Joke on a Marae’ is an often anthologised lament for the culturally dispossessed.
Mary Taylor (1817–93) was born in Yorkshire and attended Roe Head School where she met the novelist Charlotte Brontë. Taylor’s family are portrayed as the Yorkes in Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley. In 1842 Taylor’s brother William Waring Taylor immigrated to New Zealand and Mary followed him in 1845, settling in Wellington where she bought a piece of land in Cuba Street and opened a draper’s shop. Mary Taylor returned to Yorkshire in 1859. Many of her letters to Brontë survive, though only one of Brontë’s letters to her. Mary Taylor’s novel Miss Miles, or a Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago, which she had been writing while she was in Wellington, was published in London in 1890, and is an expression of her resolutely feminist belief in the necessity of women’s economic independence.
Te Horeta [‘Taniwha of Coromandel’] (?–1853), Ngāti Whanaunga, described meeting James Cook when the Endeavour visited Mercury Bay in 1769. Lieutenant-Governor Robert Wynyard arranged for his account to be recorded in 1852. Charles Heaphy published a version in Chapman’s Magazine in 1862 and John White has two versions, seemingly by two different people, in his Ancient History of the Maori (1887–90). Te Horeta fought in the inter-tribal warfare of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was involved with the early timber trade, and knew Samuel Marsden, travelling to Sydney with him. He was named Te Taniwha because of his swimming prowess, but settlers in the Coromandel goldfields called him ‘Old Hook Nose’—for reasons clear in Charles Heaphy’s portrait of him. He was baptised six weeks before his death in 1853.
Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke (?–1896) was born near Rotorua, receiving his European education from local Church Missionary Society missionaries Thomas and Anne Chapman. From the l
ate 1840s Te Rangikaheke lived in Auckland, assisting the governor George Grey in the collection of materials concerning Māori language, history, mythology and culture. He lived in the governor’s house and there is evidence of a close collaborative relation between the two men, Te Rangikaheke being the sole or joint author of over 800 pages in the Grey Collection of the Auckland Libraries. Grey’s 1855 Polynesian Mythology is heavily indebted to his knowledge. Te Rangikaheke returned to the Rotorua district in the early 1860s, holding a number of public appointments. He was a supporter of the Crown in the wars of the 1860s and stood unsuccessfully for election in 1875.
Greville Texidor (1902–64) was born in Wolverhampton into an artistic and literary family. Her mother was a New Zealander who had come to England to study art, and the young Greville modelled for Augustus John. She toured as a chorus girl, married and in 1933 moved with her Spanish husband to Tossa de Mar, an artists’ colony on the Costa Brava. During the Spanish Civil War Greville, now divorced, joined an anarchist militia and worked for relief organisations with her partner, later husband, Werner Droescher, arriving in London at the start of the Second World War. Droescher was German and the couple were interned. Texidor’s mother’s friends, including John, effected the couple’s release and they were able to immigrate to New Zealand in 1940. They became friends with Frank Sargeson and other North Shore literati and Texidor wrote a number of short stories and a novella. She disliked New Zealand and moved to Australia in 1948.
Edward Tregear (1846–1931) was born in England of Cornish ancestry. When he was twelve his father lost his money and died, and the family immigrated to New Zealand in 1863. Tregear joined the Auckland Engineer Volunteers and fought in the wars of the 1860s, winning the New Zealand War Medal. He worked as a surveyor, road-maker and saw miller, waited miserably for the woman he loved to obtain a divorce, and wrote poetry. During this time he began his lifelong study of Māori language and culture which culminated in his eccentric work The Aryan Maori (1885). He was a founder member of the Polynesian Society and edited the society’s journal for eleven years. In the latter part of his life, finally married and living in Wellington, he held a number of senior positions in the public service, and was an advocate of labour reform.
Chris Tse (1982–) is a writer, actor, musician and film-maker. Born in Lower Hutt, he studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in creative writing. His writing has been published in numerous journals and in AUP New Poets 4.
Brian Turner (1944–), poet, essayist, anthologist, journalist, environmentalist and sportsman, lives in Central Otago, a landscape central to his writing. Turner has worked in publishing but has also been a customs officer, a rabbiter and a saw miller. He was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2005.
Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008), Ngā Puhi, was born in Kokewai, Northland. His family was poor and transient and he had little formal education, though his bilingual home gave him a familiarity with a range of Māori literary and rhetorical forms. In 1939 he was apprenticed as a boiler-maker on the railways. He joined the Communist Party but left in 1956 after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising. He remained active in the trade union movement and knew the poet R.A.K. Mason to whom he showed his early work. Tuwhare published in Te Ao Hou, after an initial ban because of his Communist Party affiliations. His first poetry collection, No Ordinary Sun (1964), was a phenomenal success and his poetry was widely read throughout his life, fuelled by his public performances and his engaging public persona. Tuwhare was an organiser of the first Māori writers’ and artists’ conference in 1974 and took part in the Māori land march in 1975. From the late 1960s he was based in Otago, living in a cottage at Kaka Point from the early 1990s. He was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2001.
Julius Vogel (1835–99) was born in London. His mother’s family was Jewish, his father’s had come from the Netherlands. At fifteen he left school and worked in his grandfather’s city business and trained at the Government School of Mines as an assayer, immigrating to Australia in 1852 to try his skills in the goldfields. He worked as a journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor but, with Victoria in recession, he moved to New Zealand in 1861, settling in Dunedin and founding the country’s first daily paper, the Otago Daily Times. After a time in provincial politics he joined William Fox’s government as colonial treasurer and from 1873 to 1875 was premier, favouring economic expansion and increased immigration. In 1876 he was made agent-general in London; in 1884 he returned to New Zealand and stood for the electorate of Christchurch North, becoming colonial treasurer for Robert Stout. He was leader of the opposition after the 1887 election but retired and returned to England the next year. His novel Anno Domini 2000; or, Woman’s Destiny, possibly written under the influence of his wife Mary’s suffragism, was his retirement project and was published in London in 1889.
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), architect of planned settlement, did not in fact come to New Zealand until 1853. His theories of colonisation were developed in the 1820s when he was serving a sentence in Newgate Prison for the abduction of a fifteen-year-old heiress. A Letter from Sydney (he had never been to Sydney), published in the Morning Chronicle and then as a book in 1829, argued for a ‘sufficient price’ for colonial land to subsidise emigration. The New Zealand Association was established in 1837 and its first ship, the Tory, left for Port Nicholson in 1839. Although he was elected the member of Parliament for the Hutt in 1853, Wakefield’s New Zealand political career did not prosper. He resigned after an illness in 1855 and, chronically depressed, withdrew from political and even from social life.
John P. Ward was, as he put it, ‘Warder and Interpreter’ to the prophets Te Whiti and Tohu after they were arrested at Parihaka in November 1881. Under ‘honourable restraint’ so that they might come to recognise the ‘power and accomplishment of the Pakeha’, the pair, accompanied by Ward, were taken on a tour of the South Island where they were shown museums, cathedrals, factories, printing presses and other instances of Pākehā progress. Ward records their reactions and the conversations he had with them. The pair were released in March 1883.
Jean Watson (1933–) was born in Whāngārei and lives in Wellington. Her first novel Stand in the Rain (1965) can be read as a woman’s version of Barry Crump’s A Good Keen Man (1960). Watson is a follower of Vedanta philosophy, an influence in her subsequent fiction. In the late 1980s she founded an orphanage in southern India in partnership with an Indian couple. She writes about the experience in Karunai Illam: Story of an Orphanage (1992).
Ian Wedde (1946–), poet, novelist, anthologist and critic, was born in Blenheim and spent time as a child in what is now Bangladesh and in England. Wedde went to Auckland University, travelled overseas and returned to New Zealand in 1972. He is the co-editor of The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1985) and has worked for Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand. He is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate.
Peter Wells (1950–) is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, anthologist, cultural historian, memoirist, biographer, playwright and film-maker who lives in Napier. His work is often concerned with secret histories: he was co-editor of an anthology of New Zealand gay writing, and his latest work is a study of William Colenso.
Albert Wendt (1939–) was born in Apia, Sāmoa, and educated in New Zealand. From 1965 to 1988 he taught in Sāmoa and in Fiji where he was professor at the University of the South Pacific. His first novel, Sons for the Return Home (1973), was made into a film in 1979, directed by Paul Maunder. Since 1988 Wendt has been professor and emeritus professor of English at Auckland University.
Dora Wilcox (1873–1953), poet and playwright, was born in Christchurch and attended Canterbury University College. She was a teacher in Australia and then travelled to England. Wilcox’s work appeared in the Bulletin and in Alexander and Currie’s 1906 New Zealand Verse, the titles of her two books of poetry, Verses from Maoriland (1905) and Rata and Mistletoe (1911), epitomising la
te colonial literary style. In England, Wilcox married a Belgian university professor and served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War, returning after her second marriage to Australian art historian William Moore to live in Sydney.
Damien Wilkins (1963–) was born in Lower Hutt and educated at Victoria University and at Washington University, where he received an MFA in creative writing. In 1988 he was part of the group who founded the literary magazine Sport. Wilkins is a poet, short-story writer, novelist, anthologist and essayist, and teaches in the creative writing programme at Victoria University.
George Phipps Williams (1846–1909), engineer and poet, was born in London, trained as an engineer under Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the great public works architect of modern London, and immigrated to Christchurch in 1869. His obituary says he ‘was responsible for a water-supply system at Waimakariri, tramways at Westport, and other works’. He also co-authored a collection of verse, Colonial Couplets (1889), with his friend William Pember Reeves.
Phillip Wilson (1922–2001) was born in Lower Hutt and served in the air force in the Second World War, a subject he returns to in his short stories and novels. He worked as a journalist for the Listener and is the author of two studies of the New Zealand writer William Satchell.
Alison Wong (1960–), poet, short-story writer and novelist, has lived in New Zealand and China and now lives in Australia. Born in Hastings, she has a BSc in mathematics and works as an IT analyst. She is a graduate of Bill Manhire’s creative writing class. Her first novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (2009), traces the Chinese presence in New Zealand history and culture.
David McKee Wright (1869–1928) was born in Ireland, the son of a Presbyterian missionary. Wright trained as an engineer. Aged seventeen, he was sent to New Zealand for health reasons. Here he worked as a shepherd and continued writing poetry, an activity his evangelical parents had disapproved of. He began publishing in the mid-1890s and was included in Alexander and Currie’s 1906 New Zealand Verse. A Congregationalist preacher and supporter of temperance, his ballads extol the virtues of rural station life as opposed to the corruption of the town. He lived in Oamaru, Wellington and Nelson, earning a precarious living lecturing, preaching and freelance writing. His newspaper the Nelson Times, later Te Rauparaha, was short-lived. Wright’s Maoriland style is apparent in the poems he published in the Sydney Bulletin in the 1900s as ‘Maori Mac’. In 1910 he moved to Sydney and became editor of the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ in 1916.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 149