Publisher's Synopsis
This book family finds Whitbread-prize winning biographer Ann Thwaite exploring her own remarkable Anglo-New Zealand family. Ann's eight great grand-parents all arrived in New Zealand between 1858 and 1868. Their family names were Harrop, Sales, Campbell, Brown, Valentine, Maxwell, Jefcoate and Oliver. This is a social history as well as a family one. The starting point was the author's attempt to discover why those great grand-parents all made the decision to undertake that dangerous voyage under sail to the far side of the world. What did they do when they got to New Zealand? How did someone who had worked as a railway guard in England become a prosperous farmer at Pareora, near Timaru? Why did the daughter of a fourth son, born in a Scottish castle, die in a miners' hotel in Reefton? How was it that a sailor's occupation on his marriage certificate was shown as gold digger? Ann Thwaite was lucky to have, on her mother's side, two unpublished memoirs that were surprising in their candour, and the diary of a settler killed in the Taranaki Land Wars. Her father's history was almost totally unknown, for reasons that became apparent as it was unearthed. The core of the book is the story of Ann's own parents, Hilda and Angus, who met as school children in Hokitika, went to Canterbury University College together, but did not marry until years later in London. There they founded the long-running New Zealand News and Angus Harrop researched and wrote about New Zealand's colonial history. Their children, Ann and her brother, David, were born in London but in 1940 made their own dangerous journey across the world to spend the war years separated from their parents but safe in New Zealand. The book ends with their return to England in 1945 with a deep love for New Zealand, a love that animates Ann's story. The previously unexamined family archives, from a family that rarely seems to have thrown anything away, and David's internet researches, were full of the sort of surprises that any biographer relishes. The book is lavishly illustrated with over 300 images in the text: family photographs of course, but also an 1892 examination receipt, Waitaki Boys' High wartime certificates, postcards, a 1921 theatre programme, a 1932 dinner menu with Lord Rutherford of Nelson in the chair, book jackets and so on. Appropriately Ann Thwaite and her brother, David Harrop, now live on opposite sides of the world, in the two countries so richly evoked in Passageways: the story of a New Zealand family.
