Passageways

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 Ann Thwaite was lucky to have, on her mother's side, two unpublished memoirs that were surprising in their candour, and the diary of a settler killed in the Taranaki Land Wars.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".

ISBN 1877372676   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781877372674 (What's this?)   Pages 368 Publisher Otago University Press   Volumes 1 Imprint Otago University Press   Published in Dunedin Format Paperback   Height (mm) 240 Publication date 16 Mar 2009   Width (mm) 170 DEWEY 929.1072093   Academic level General

		Family passages		6
		Acknowledgements		7
		Family tree showing descent from my great-grandparents		10
Introduction		The jigsaw puzzle of the past		11
Pt. 1		Discovering Our Roots
		Family tree: my father's mother's family		14
1		Mainly about the Campbells and the Browns		15
		Family tree: my father's father's family		34
2		Mainly about the Harrops		35
3		Despair and hope in Hokitika and Waitaki		61
		Family tree: my mother's mother's family		88
4		Mainly about the Hoggs, the Olivers and the Jefcoates		89
		Family tree: my mother's father's family		112
5		Mainly about the Valentines and the Maxwells		113
		Family tree: my mother's own family		136
6		The headmaster's daughter		137
7		Choosing partners		163
Pt. 2		Together, Apart, Together
8		Remembering, not forgetting, New Zealand		201
9		A strenuous pair		227
10		Out of harm's way		259
11		The last lap		289
		Afternote		319
		Notes		321
		Bibliography		333
		List of Illustrations		337
		Index		341

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