The volume, range and originality of Robin Hyde’s writing has only recently been recognised. In 10 years she produced 10 books of poetry and prose as well as countless published and unpublished articles and letters. She offered a piercing personal vision of an inner life, yet also conveyed a strong sense of place and an understanding of the historical forces that shaped her world.
When she died, the Christchurch Press commented that her ‘grip of facts added to an intimate knowledge of European politics and statesmen…had placed her in the front rank of women journalists’. She also excelled as a woman mountaineer.
New Zealand journalist, writer and Girl Guide commissioner
An influential Auckland citizen with a reputation as a compelling speaker, writer, administrator and social activist
Among the Press staff ‘Miss E.’ was known for her professional thoroughness, enthusiasm, vitality, generosity and patience. She held firm convictions about the role women should play in society, and set a sterling example by being associated with nearly 250 social welfare and women’s organisations during her career.
Her letters to her mother, later published, give an invaluable picture – sensitive, sharp, witty – of the challenges, discomforts and pleasures of life in the very early days of the colonial settlement in New Zealand.
Cherry Raymond was a broadcaster, journalist and opinion-leader, and a household name during the 1960s and 1970s when few women achieved such prominence in the media. Although she particularly campaigned on women’s issues, and often on topics which were controversial or taboo, her interests were broad, and she played an important role in raising the profile of mental illness in New Zealand.
The distinguished writer and journalist Christine Cole Catley was one of New Zealand’s leading independent publishers of the late twentieth century. She was co-founder of the Parents Centre movement in the 1950s, and an influential teacher and shaper of broadcasting policy.
In 1962, she was invited to become the first artistic director of the Australian Ballet. She was to hold the position until retirement in 1974, returning for a year in 1978.
Lauris Edmond was 51 when she began to publish poetry, and quickly won attention as a voice that was both mature and fresh. She is now recognised as one of the best New Zealand poets of the late twentieth century, a compelling voice for women, an exquisite poet of the epiphanic moment, and a writer who left Wellington some of its most distinctive verbal evocations.