Saturday 30 January 2010

A life snuffed out like a flame from a candle.

Cooper, Michael Campbell, Born Apr 14 1948 in Cust, Rangiora County, Canterbury, New Zealand, Died Mar 26 1967 on Mt Awful, Wanaka, Otago, New Zealand

I saw this stark record on a website this morning. A wave of emotions from sadness to guilt swept over me. This was a death I had somehow shut out of my life since I got the news two days later, on March 28 1967.

Michael Cooper was my cousin. I was 24 days older than Michael. Our paths crossed frequently on the athletic track, mountaineering scene and on the Otago Youth Council. Michael was a brilliant student at King High School in Dunedin, and then went on to Otago university. He died on Mt. Awful, Otago, New Zealand. almost 44 years ago.

Gillespie Pass and Mt. Awful where Michael Cooper died.

It was an early Easter weekend in 1967, and I went off with friends. Unbeknown to me, Michael had joined a group of mountaineers from the Otago University to go climbing up the Young Valley, their goal Mt. Awful. Mt Awful, a 2192-metre peak near Gillespie Pass, dominates the headwaters of the Young River. Its neighbouring peaks are Mt. Horrible and Mt. Dreadful.

At the end of the weekend of Michael death, I was elated after doing one of those then rare ascents of Mt. Huxley. Death somehow stalked us that long weekend. When walking up the Hopkins Valley we came across a memorial cairn to a group of young Otago climbers who died from rockfalls on Mt. Trent in 1938. We said a silent prayer as we walked by. When we were on our climb of Mount Huxley, Jim Cowie told me of a climber who had died on this part of the mountain some years earlier.

On our descent, my rope mate Graham Lockett fell and as he slid rapidly passed me, he cut my face open with a glance from his ice axe. Fortunately we were roped together and jointly, arrested the fall. But there was blood on the snow.
Bob McKerrow (l) Graham Lockett and Keith McIvor on the summit of Mount Huxley March 27, 1967. Photo: Jim Cowie

                                                       Mount Awful from Gillespie Pass.

While we were putting a camp in under Mount Huxley on March 26, 1967, and preparing for our big climb the following day, Michael had camped on a ledge somewhere under Mt. Awful, and as he walked along a ledge to get some water to cook the evening meal with, he slipped on some mountain tussock, and fell to his death over a rocky ledge and down a mountain face. Eighteen years old, academically bright, handsome, athletic and the world was at his feet. A life snuffed out like a flame from a candle.

Three days later when I arrived home elated having climbed Mount Huxley, “ My Mother hugged me and said, “ Michael Cooper is dead.” I was numbed.

In the conservative 50s and 60s, we were never encouraged to go to funerals and somehow I never really grieved for Michael.
Sadly for his father and mother, my Uncle Campbell and Auntie Mavis, they had lost their first son, Murray. His death was on the same website I visited this morning.

Cooper, Murray Campbell, Born Feb 15 1940 in Dunedin,, Otago, New Zealand, Died 1945 in Portobello, Dunedin, , Otago, New Zealand

"Grandfather Robert Kinnaird, my Mum's Dad," wrote Maxwell Cooper to me,  "was working in Port Chalmers and
returning on the ferry. Dad was in the air force in the North Island and Mum and Murray staying with parents.One night he came home and he looked for Murray, who usually met him at the ferry wharf at Portobello, and he couldn't see him. A few minutes later his body was found floating in the sea. 
Campbell and Mavis are dead, but one son, Maxwell survives.
The same year two other close friends who were emerging mountaineers died: Richard Tilley killed by an avalanche on Mt. Avalanche in Arthur’s Pass, and Howard Laing, in a car accident.

I remember writing a poem at the time about the deaths of friends on mountains. Perhaps that is how I worked through my grief:

All stones we learn as children
Are dead inanimate things
But stones falling on a mountain
Are alive with a death that sings

A stone's song is enchanting
Fit for mountain Kings
First it’s high, then low
Lachrymose from the strings

Monday 25 January 2010

Preparing for the floods in Jakarta in the coming weeks

It was an impressive day yesterday being with 1600 young Red Cross volunteers who were out on a disaster training day in Jakarta. With serious floods predicted for Jakarta in the coming month, the Indonesian Red Cross is in a high state of readiness. The new Chairman of PMI, Jusuf Kalla was there giving strong leadership and direction. Here are a few photos.

Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) tracked vehicles with rescue boats prepare for floods that can be expected in Jakarta in the next two months.

The PMI have highly trained helicopter rescue teams and a fleet of five helicopters.


The new Chairman of PMI, Jusuf Kalla


Bob (blue shirt) talking to young PMI volunteers at yesterday's practice.



Time for a snack and a bit of reflection.

Another rescue team resting.

The new secretary general of PMI, Budi Atmadi Adiputro (left) and myself. I look forward to working with Pak Budi. who has worked in disaster preparedness and response a long time.
One of eleven PMI water purification units. In times of flooding, clean water is essential for maintaining the health of affected people. At a Government disaster simulation ten days ago, with the President of Indonesia.


Sunday 24 January 2010

Haiti: Joe, the boy from nowhere

Haitian Red Cross psychological support volunteer St. Simon Magalie playing with Joe, laying at his hospital bed in the park outside the hospital. (photo IFRC)


The first time we saw four-year-old Joe was heartbreaking.

He was barely able to sit, wiping crumbs off the little cardboard mat that had become his home. He cleared a space to sleep, like his mother would have done, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped into a daze.

Joe came from nowhere. Someone noticed him lying naked on the ground and he was brought to the Norwegian Red Cross field hospital in the centre of Haiti’s shattered capital.

Mageli St Simon, a Haitian National Red Cross Society psychological support volunteer, started taking care of him. “His head was injured,” she says. “And he was sick, maybe malaria, maybe typhoid.”

Mageli started to interact with the sick child and, after a day or so, she’d got his name. She gave him a pen and paper, and he drew his mother and father.

Then she gave him a toy phone.

“He started speaking to his mother. I asked him what she was saying. He told me: ‘She says don’t look for me, I’m dead’.

"I don’t know how he knew, someone must have told him before he got lost.”

Three days on, Joe’s doing well. He's still sick, but is taking water and a little food. He draws us a cross. I tell him my name is Joe too, and he gives me a long, deep look.

He’s a beautiful, fragile little boy, with a slight squint that makes him look even more vulnerable; makes you want to protect him.

Mageli agrees. “You have to really know yourself before you know other people,” she says. “That’s why I take care of Joe, to know what he needs. I can’t give people any money, but I can help in my own way.”

If Joe has no family members who can take on the responsibility of caring for him, the little boy will go to an orphanage as soon as a suitable organization working with orphans can be found. And he’ll do fine. He’s a survivor.

Article by Joe Lowry IFRC. Joe arrived in Haiti four days ago and it continuing the brilliant media coverage started by Paul Conneally, who is now back in Geneva







Friday 22 January 2010

Recollections of Keith Murdoch

One of the most visited postings on my blog are the ones on Keith Murdoch. Here are some updated jottings on Keith. (photo right)

Keith Murdoch was my hero when I was a teenager. I was 17 and he must have been 23 when I got the chance to play with him. I must of played about five games with him that season, 1966.

He had represented Otago as a 20-year-old prop in 1964, then had a season with Ponsonby and one with Marist in Napier before returning to Dunedin. That was when I played with him. He was somewhat unfit and so he decided to start the season off playing for Zingari Richmond in the Dunedin second grade competition.
I remember that cold Otago winter of 1966, when we played on a frost covered ground against Eastern at Waikouwai-iti. I was a wing three quarter and my job was to throw the ball in at line out time. There was something unsettling about throwing into Murdoch, a hulk of a man who physical presence was magnetic. The first time I threw the ball in, it was crooked. Murdoch glared at me. The second time I threw it in off centre. Murdoch grabbed me by the shirt and said, “Next time throw the fuckin’ ball in straight.” The threatening look in his deep eyes convinced me to improve instantaneously, I improved and never threw the ball in crooked again to Keith Murdoch. I was 17 and not fully physically developed, and a couple of the opposition forwards picked on me and roughed me up. Murdoch must have seen it and said, “next time someone hits you, give me his number.”
A few minutes later, a prop with No. 14 on his back, punched me in a tackle. I looked at Keith Murdoch, and said " No. 14.” A few minutes later No. 14 was on the ground, half conscious, and cowering. No one picked on me for the remainder of the game. I had found a grumpy Godfather.

We had a great after match function, and after consuming huge quantifies of beer, Keith offered to drive me home in his olive green Mini Minor. Imagine a 130 kg hulk of muscle getting into a small mini. About 30 mins later, he didn't quite make a corner somewhere south of Cherry Farm and the car slid off the road into a grassy ditch. I offered to help Keith manhandle the car back onto the road. He glared at me with disdain. "Leave it alone boy" he said, "I'll do it myself." With that said, Murdoch lifted, bounced, wrenched and slid the mini up the side of a a 3 metre ditch, skewed it onto the road, straightened the car up like a city slicker straightening his tie, and wiped his hand on the back of his tight shorts.

We stopped at the Ravensborne pub for a few more jugs and Murdoch gave me a man-to-boy talk about how to play rugby.

A schoolmate, Nev Cleveland,told me recently he was a neighbour to the Murdoch family in Ravensbourne. Nev was the milk boy and remembers delivering 12 pints of milk to Keith's home daily. He told me that one Sunday morning about 7 am, he met Keith 'as pissed as a fart' crawling home on hands and knees. We both recalled Keith's older brother Bruce, a bricklayer, who was also a fine rugby player.


The famous Peter Bush photograph of Keith Murdoch leaving his hotel in Cardiff after being requested to leave the team.

I also have pleasant memories of drinking after games we played at Montecillo and walking through the southern cemetery, or driving to the nearest pub at the southern end of the Oval.. Wyndam Barkman, Frosty are some of the other players who come to mind. Murdoch was generally kind and protective of his friends and a pleasure to drink with. He choose his words carefully and added colour and zest to conversations.

Murdoch's career ended controversially and mysteriously. He scored the All Blacks' only try in their 1972 win against Wales in Cardiff, but later the same night was involved in a fracas and was sent home from the tour by All Black management, reputedly after pressure was brought to bear by the home rugby unions. Rather than returning to rugby in New Zealand, Murdoch virtually went into hiding, quitting his home and his sport and moving to the Australian outback where he has lived ever since.



A rare appearance ... Keith Murdoch in 2001. Photo: Getty Images


A play Finding Murdoch by Margot McRae, which premiered at Downstage Theatre, Wellington in June 2007, is about McRae's tracking down of Murdoch. She says of the media frenzy when he punched a security guard that "If there's a baddie it would be the media."


Writer John Haviland: wrote this about him " In 1979, Murdoch paid a brief visit to New Zealand, and was seen saving the life of a drowning toddler, by giving the child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for four minutes."
see link

Murdoch was often the subject of rugby talk, some of it about his not inconsiderable rugby ability, much of it about his behaviour. A favourite story was of Keith Murdoch towing a car up a Dunedin hill, clasping the tow rope in his teeth! I could believe it !

Selected for the South African tour of 1970, Murdoch, according to esteemed rugby writer TP McLean, suffered an ankle injury during a fight with friends of Springbok Piet Visagie. He was out of action for 10 games.
Later, his passion for the game and his unbelievable strength were emphasised when he played the fourth test in pain, then afterwards he was immediately whisked away to be operated on for appendicitis!

I am happy he is living a peaceful life in outback Australia.

Wednesday 20 January 2010

The brutal truth about giving to disasters ! Cash is needed !

The situation in Haiti is the worst I have seen for some years. For over 30 years I have worked in the frontline in times of major disasters, and you get so frustrated when all you have is junk in warehouses, and no cash to buy what the affected people want. Today I saw this article written by Edward Brown, relief director for World Vision, who debunks five myths around disaster relief.

1. Collecting blankets, shoes and clothing is a cost-effective way to help
The cost of shipping these items – and the time it takes to sort and pack – is prohibitive and entails much higher cost than the value of the goods themselves. World Vision has relief supplies already stocked in disaster-prone countries as well as in strategically located warehouses around the world that meet international standards and are ready to deploy as soon as a crisis strikes. Cash donations are the best, most cost-efficent way to help aid groups deliver these life-saving supplies quickly, purchase supplies close to the disaster zone when possible and replenish their stocks in preparation for future disasters.

2. If I send cash, my help won’t get there
Reputable agencies send 80% or more of cash donations to the disaster site; the rest is invested in monitoring, reporting and other activities that facilitate transparency and efficiency in their operations, as well as in sharing information with those who can help. Donors have a right and a responsibility to ask aid groups how they will be using those donations, and what will be done with donations raised in excess of the need.

3. Volunteers are desperately needed in emergency situations
While hands-on service may feel like a better way to help in a crisis, disaster response is a highly technical and sensitive effort. Professionals with specialized skills and overseas disaster experience should be deployed to disaster sites. Volunteers without those skills can do more harm than good, and siphon off critical logistics and translations services.

4. Unaccompanied children should be adopted as quickly as possible to get them out of dangerous conditions
Hearing about the specific needs of children often sparks a desire to adopt children who seem to have lost their families. However, early in a crisis, children need to be protected, but should remain in their home countries until authorities can confirm the locations of their family members and explore adoption possibilities within their own communities and cultures first.

5. People are helpless in the face of natural disasters
Even in the poorest countries like Haiti, people often reveal a great deal of inner strength and often show a resourcefulness that can save lives... While support and aid are necessary, the Haitian people are by no means helpless.

. So I implore you, we need you empathy, sympathy, support but not your hand-me-down clothes.




Tuesday 19 January 2010

Latest on earthquake in Haiti - 20 January 2010

Here is the latest from Paul Conneally who has graduated from sleeping on the back of an abandoned flatbed truck to a mosquito dome. Paul is one of our Red Cross comms people out there. He was joined by Joe Lowry last night.
Below Paul's postings, is another update from our President.

conneally more than 500 tonnes of aid mobilized + scheduled 2 arrive in the coming days #redcross #haiti
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Disaster response is a sprint but disaster recovery is a marathon says Bekele Geleta SG of International #RedCross in #Haiti 2day
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally people affected by this disaster will be full partners in #RedCross work 2 restore their homes, livelihoods + dignity ¦ http://bit.ly/5uaDzl
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Haiti is what happens when an extreme natural event occurs in the lives of people already frighteningly vulnerable ¦ http://bit.ly/5uaDzl
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally news in from Channel 4 journo friends ¦ town 2hrs west of PAP in dire need ¦ hosp destroyed ¦ 1000+ confirmed dead ¦ thx Ch4 we're on it


conneally
I should note that our basecamp has 150 #redcross international staff BUT we are more than 400 in #Haiti + 10'000 strong haitian redcross

conneally Response to #redcross appeal mind blowing ¦ it is really motivating for all of us here and we will make sure it makes a difference in #haiti
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally
I have graduated from sleeping on back of an abandoned flatbed truck to a mosquito dome - Heaven! Also had a wash yday + hotmeal 2day :o)
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Our basecamp now has 150 international #redcross specialists working with #haiti redcross staff + volunteers ¦ many more arriving evry day

conneally We have now landed 13planes ¦ today I saw turkish + iranian #redcrescent, mexico and german #redcross cargo offloaded ¦ 4 more planes 2morro
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Fact: poss 2 park 4 cargo planes in 1 hr in #haiti airport ¦ #redcross urgent aid is getting thru, the rest we take by road via Domincan Rep
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Lots of talk about US handling of airport ¦ let's get real ¦ US has increased #haiti airport capacity to 170% ¦ it's a massive contribution

conneally
Basic Health Care (treating wounds, first aid etc.) also now in many areas in PAP ¦ Finnish, German + japanese #Redcross doing gr8 work
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Relief distributions going well after a false start ¦ working with #Haiti #Redcross means we have really good contact with local population
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally #Redcross delivering fresh water now at half a million liters a day and rising ¦ that's 50'000 people a day getting good clean water #haiti
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Also visited 1of many mobile clinics, this 1in an area called Croix Depres. 1000's of people camped out being treated rapidly by our medics
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally Y'day I went all over PAP ¦ devastation downtown is beyond the usual descriptors ¦ the sight is heartbreaking, the destruction unforgiving.
about 1 hour ago from web

conneally #Redcross field hospl @University hospital in overdrive carrying out 300 operations a day; backlog of wounded significantly down #haiti
about 2 hours ago from web


conneally #RedCross basecamp #Haiti now has wifi! So back online! An incredible few days since last updates. Lottsa stuff moving in rite direction.
about 2 hours ago from web

Red Cross Red Crescent intensifies relief and plans for early recovery in Haiti
19 January 2010

The leaders of the world’s largest humanitarian organization are on their way to earthquake-devastated Haiti as part of a massive disaster response and recovery operation.

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) President Tadateru Konoé and Secretary General Bekele Geleta arrived today in Port-au-Prince to lead what is shaping up as one of the IFRC’s largest and most complex operations in recent memory.

“We must confront a natural disaster that is not only one of the biggest of the past decade, but is affecting one of the very poorest countries in the world,” says Konoé.

“Poverty is at the root of this catastrophe, and countless lives could have been saved by investment in quake-resistant buildings and other disaster risk reduction measures,” emphasizes Geleta.

“What we are seeing in Haiti is what happens when an extreme natural event occurs in the lives of people who are already frighteningly vulnerable, and the terrible human cost of this tragedy is only now becoming clear.

“The international community and humanitarian organizations such as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement must work together to tackle the survivors’ urgent needs and ensure that they can recover and move towards a safer future,” he adds.

President Konoé praised the Haitian National Red Cross Society for its brave and determined response in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s magnitude 7 earthquake, which is estimated to have affected as many as three million people.

“Haitian Red Cross volunteers were among the first to respond because they live within the affected communities,” he says.

“They too have suffered appalling losses. They are shocked and grieving. And yet their desire to help their fellow human beings takes priority. They are true humanitarian heroes and we are both proud of, and humbled by, their dedication.”

Konoé said that the Red Cross Red Crescent would use the experience it has gained from five years of post-tsunami recovery work to ensure that Haiti’s devastated communities not only receive the help they need now, but will continue to do so in the months and years to follow.

“The people affected by this disaster will be full partners in all Red Cross Red Crescent work to restore their homes, livelihoods and – most importantly – their dignity,” says the IFRC president.

“Disaster response is a sprint but disaster recovery is a marathon,” adds Geleta. “I will personally ensure that sustainable long-term recovery plans are at the heart of everything the IFRC and its partners do in Haiti.”

More than 400 Red Cross Red Crescent aid workers – including 180 from Caribbean and Central and South American National Red Cross Societies – have arrived in Port-au-Prince, with dozens more en route.

Sixteen emergency response units (ERUs) have also been deployed to Haiti with 11 having arrived as of 18 January. These include a 70 bed rapid deployment hospital that is now set up in the grounds of Port-au-Prince’s University hospital, two mobile basic health care units that can provide curative and preventative assistance to 30,000 people each, a Red Cross Red Crescent base camp, and two logistic units to facilitate the rapid arrival and deployment of aid.

So far, more than 500 tonnes of aid has been mobilized and scheduled to arrive in the coming days.

These efforts are part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement response, which also includes the ICRC. The ICRC has distributed medical materials for more than 2,000 patients to hospitals and to the Haiti Red Cross. More than 23,000 people have been registered on a special ICRC website that helps to reunite families without contact since the disaster struck. The ICRC has also contributed to Movement efforts to provide relief aid and clean water to thousands made homeless by the earthquake.

The IFRC is currently appealing for 105.7 million Swiss francs (103 million US dollars/73 million euro) to assist 300,000 people for three years. As more information becomes available, this appeal is expected to be revised">

Monday 18 January 2010

Latest Red Cross efforts in Haiti

The leading US general in Haiti has said it is a "reasonable assumption" that up to 200,000 people may have died in last Tuesday's earthquake.

Lt Gen Ken Keen said the disaster was of "epic proportions", but it was "too early to know" the full human cost.

Rescuers pulled more people alive from the rubble at the weekend, but at least 70,000 people have already had burials.

I am really proud that the Haitian Red Cross has responded so well and delighted
that Paul Conneally our communications guy, is on the ground in Haiti and is being joined by fellow Irishman Joe lowry today, Tuesday 19 January, 2010. Here is our lates update:

Operational highlights: 18 January

- Yesterday a Spanish Red Cross water and sanitation unit produced 120,000 litres of water that was then distributed by Red Cross volunteers to 24,000 people in six settlements across Port-au-Prince.

- It is estimated that in the coming days, the Red Cross Red Crescent will increase its capacity to produce and distribute water for between 200,000 and 400,000 people a day.

- A Norwegian and Canadian Red Cross rapid deployment hospital is now operational in the grounds of Port-au-Prince’s University Hospital. This 70-bed facility can provide assistance to about 200 wounded each day. A larger, 250-bed hospital will be operational later this week.

- Two mobile basic health care units are also in the field. These units, deployed by the German and Finnish Red Cross Societies, are designed to provide preventative and curative health care to about 30,000 people each. A third unit will arrive in the coming days.

- Relief distributions are planned to start today for 60,000 families. Each family will receive kits which include hygiene kits, kitchen sets, tarpaulins, mosquito nets and other items.

- So far, more than 500 tonnes of aid has been mobilized and is expected land in the coming days.

The IFRC has launched a preliminary emergency appeal seeking a total of 105.7 million Swiss francs (103 million US dollars/73 million euro) to assist 300,000 people for three years.

The ICRC, which was already present and active in Haiti before Tuesday's earthquake, works as part of the wider International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and cooperates closely with the Haitian Red Cross.

The ICRC is providing clean water to around 7,500 people in three makeshift camps. Latrines for around 1,000 people have also been built in the Delmas area. It has also provided materials to the Haitian Red Cross for the 10 first aid posts which have been set up around Port-au-Prince around the city. Six trucks carrying nearly 40 tonnes of ICRC medical supplies arrived on Sunday (17 January) with the supplies being distributed to local hospitals and clinics. A second ICRC rapid deployment team is expected to arrive in Haiti in the coming day or two to provide more forensics, tracing, nursing, communications and logistics support to staff already on the ground.

As of 18 January, more than 22,000 people had registered with the ICRC's special website, www.icrc.org/familylinks, which was activated on 14 January to help people searching for their loved ones.

Sunday 17 January 2010

Haiti earthquake, latest.

Judith Betrand, 10, attended by a Dominican Red Cross volunteer in Cite Soliel

Paul Conneally is at the cutting edge of reporting from the ground in Haiti by Twitter. Communications are bad and he is unable to get photos out by normal means, so he is using FLICKR. This gutsy, innovative Irishman is showing the world how to communicate, as only the Irish can. Here are his postings over the last 24 hours, starting from the latest one. Check it out first hand if you wish : http://twitter.com/conneally

conneally We have been on the go since 5am ¦ 22h30 now. Rest beckons. Thx 2 evry1 for following + 4 words of support. Much appreciated by all here :o)
14 minutes ago from web

conneally Spanish #RedCross also running 11 mobile water trucks constantly on the move, supported by both Dominican and #Haiti Redcross societies
16 minutes ago from web

conneally Spanish #Redcross continue to do gr8 work. Today, installed 2 ten thousand litre water bladders in hardhit areas with no water source #haiti
18 minutes ago from web

conneally #RedCross mobile clinics up + running. We are thinking 2 send them 2 same locations where we will distribute family kits. Good idea I think.
20 minutes ago from web

conneally HUH - University Hospital #haiti where we are now running field hospital. Situation dire, crowded with wounded + mortal remains #redcross
22 minutes ago from web

conneally Family kits incl hygiene items, kitchen utensils, blankets, mosquito nets, tarps, water purification tabs, jerry cans and buckets #redcross
24 minutes ago from web

conneally #haiti Steve McAndew is in charge of relief for #redcross tells me his team will reach 60'000 families with ready-made kits in one month
29 minutes ago from web

conneally Gennike my colleague from Trinidad + Tobago penned this report ¦ http://bit.ly/8gvW67 ¦ we will up our output as and from 2morro.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally We are also putting as many of our photos as we can get uploaded here http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifrc ¦ xtrmely diff to get images out
about 3 hours ago from web


conneally Staying positive. Focused on the reason we are here despite setbacks + obstacles. The human cost must remain our main focus #Redcross #Haiti
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally #Redcross President and Secretary General planning to visit PAP in the coming days to meet Haitian RC staff and see activities on the grnd.

<>

conneally PAP airport can only handle 4 planes an hour (or less) when we need a plane a minute. Massive bottleneck so Santo Domingo notta bad option.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Aid effort undeniably slower than we would want but the reality is what it is. No infrastructure. Little central control (govn. in a tent).
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally will now meet 2 brief on the days activities + a clearer picture will emerge from the dozens of #RedCross people working in PAP 2day #haiti
about 3 hours ago from web

-


conneally #RedCross has now managed to get 8 planes of relief + equip into #Haiti, only 3 of these thru PAP the others thru Santo Domingo.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally big focus is still on surgical care for the wounded, clean water and rebuilding the capacity of the Haitian #RedCross
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Trying 2 explain to media the need 2 focus on life-saving priorities in a situ where 3ml are in desperate need of support. #haiti #redcross
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Went to civil aviation building where many media are based. Was Live with Sky, ITN, ARD, BBC, NZ radio etc. etc. More than 40 interviews.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Haitian #RedCross (HRCS) offices + blood bank destroyed. Many staff still missing presumed ... lots of Haitians offering help HRCS.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Had the pleasure to talk @length with Mme. Gideon of haitian #redcross. Amazing lady. She tells me as many as 10'000 volunteers working now.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Big reinforcement of staff and equipment, relief items again today. We are more than 100 at base camp with one toilet which does not work!
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally We are not witnessing violence or rioting, the opposite. Calm Q's 4 water and relief items. Extremely harrowing scenes in the hospitals.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Spanish #Redcross doing amazing work providing clean water. 200k litres today, double that tomorrow and so on the next day. #haiti
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Norwegian colleagues putting up field hospital @ University hospital + our surgeons, nurses already working hard. Vital medicines given.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally Cite du Soleil is one of the hardest hit areas in PAP. Relief distributions and water distributions already underway. #haiti
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally People in our neighborhood Cité du Soleil screaming with fear and then sang and clapped till 6am. Incredible. We are in Cité du soleil PAP.
about 3 hours ago from web

conneally
Slept underneath the stars last night. Heavy aftershocks @ 4am.
about 3 hours ago from web

Saturday 16 January 2010

What can we do to help earthquake affected people in Haiti ?

It's amazing how Twitter takes you to the front line of disasters. Yesterday I signed up for Twitter as I wanted to be able to keep up to date with what's going on. My good friend and colleague Paul Conneally, head of our media department in Geneva, arrived in Haiti yesterday, and I am getting first hand accounts from him. He flew into Santa Domingo yesterday and drove accross the border into Haiti.

Having been in the front line of large earthqaukes before around the globe, I feel helpless being a spectator. But what can people like you and I do, who are not in Haiti ? I can sit back and feel good about the fact Red Cross is on the ground there, and doing a fine job. But I am a paid worker, and that's not a good attitude.
I went to church last night in Jakarta with my two boys, and Wayne Ulrich, the Red Cross disaster management coordinator in Indonesia, and his family. The Pastor spoke with such pain, concern and passion about those suffering in Haiti, and our responsibility as a church to reach out and help the people who have lost everything, who are trapped under buildings, who are in hospital, who are dying. We have opened a fund for Haiti and with a very large congregation, we will be able to support relief efforts in Haiti. But sadly, its takes a tragic event like this to put the spotlight on Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world.
To quote Paul Conneally, " For this to happen in any country would set it back a generation but to happen in Haiti, the most impoverished and under developed country in the world - well this was simply cruel and disproportionate. Almost impossible to get back up on your feet again. But Haitians are resilient people and arise they did though understandably still haunted by hurricanes. And now, to fall victim to a devastating earthquake is the cruellest of blows to this struggling nation. "

The Pastor last night, brought us together to pray for the rescue, survival and quick relief for all those affected in Haiti. My ten year old boy had tears rolling down his checks and was greatly distressed by what had happened in Haiti.

It brought back memories for Wayne Ulrich and I for he was our Operations Manager for the first month of the West Sumatra earthquake operation in October last year and we worked closely together throughout that tragic event.
We can feel from experience what the victins must be going through. It's a chilling thought.

I also saw a message Mauricio Bustamante who is our operations manager for Haiti. We worked together during the large Gujarat earthquake in India in 2001. He says “besides the deployed teams, trained Haitian Red Cross volunteers are also playing a vital role in saving lives, carrying out search and rescue operations in the areas most affected by the earthquake”. “But every aspect of Haitian society has been impacted in the past days, including civil society.

It was reassuring to get home last night and get Paul's notes on Twitter: I start with the most recent one. Remember he is sending them from a bus travelling on a bumpy road from the Domincan Republic to Haiti. I list the most recent message first:

1. Successfully crossed into #haiti. Heat and dust trucks with aid as far as the eye can see. Nearly there. Battery nearly dead!
Talking 2 team on ground. Fresh aftershocks causing lots of panic. No supplies for eating or drinking available. I hope I can stay connected.

2. Approaching #Haiti border soon. Meeting alot of traffic going in opp direction. "c,est horrible" cries a taiwanese man to me as he flees.

3. Still lots of interviews. Just did new york times. will b live on Sky after 6pm UK time. also in the loop now #haiti.

4.Just an hour away from #Haiti border now. 35 degrees outside + much more inside our locally hired vans. Slow but steady progress in hills.

5. Really excellent that we are getting capacity to assess needs and treat wounded

6. Now less than 3hrs from la frontera. Lots of media calling about our #redcross convoy with emergency medical and water/sanitation aid #haiti

7.. Just did live interview with Sky news about our #redcross heading twds #haiti. Loud and bumpy truck! Everyone eager to hit ground asap.

8. thx bob. This is 1 of those hugely difficult moments which also allows u to see the amazing global family of #redcross upclose

9. mobile field hospital can treat upto 200 seriously wounded people a day, says Brin from Norway. #haiti

10. mobile field 'hospital in a box' from norway can be up and running "in a matter of hours" according to head surgeon Brin Ystgard.

11. Extremely experienced #Redcross team of about 50 from norway, finland, denmark, spain, japan, canada. #haiti

12. On the road 2 #haiti now with about 50 #redcross aid workers and truck loads of relief incl. Field hospitals, water purifiers, surgeons etc

It is simply amazing to be travelling with Paul Conneally and seeing how aid workers get to the site. This is what the Red Cross is doing:

Haiti earthquake: With an eye to both short and long-term needs, Red Cross increases appeal to 100 million Swiss francs

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has revised and raised its Haiti appeal, and is now calling for 105.7 million Swiss francs (103 million US dollars/73 million euro) to assist 300,000 people for three years.

The appeal, which replaces the 10 million Swiss franc appeal launched on 13 January, maps out the response of the world’s largest humanitarian network. It includes a scaled up relief component. In the coming days and week, significant focus, for example, will go towards trying to reduce the risk of waterborne and water-related diseases.

“This revision reflects the need of Haitian communities for long-term and sustained support,” said Yasemin Aysan, Under Secretary General, disaster response and early recovery. “For many of these people, this earthquake has robbed them entirely of their limited means. For many of them, they need help to totally rebuild their lives.”

Examples of longer-term assistance potentially includes the physical reconstruction of homes and community infrastructure.

Relief operation continues, despite logistical challenges

This announcement comes as vital relief continues to arrive in the devastated city of Port-au-Prince. Yesterday (Friday 15 January), two planes laden with 22 tons of aid land arrived. Today (16 January) a convoy of aid supplies and personnel is travelling from Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) to Haiti.

In the coming days, the IFRC expects to have at least 14 emergency response units (ERUs) on the ground and operational, (for more information on ERUs click here). These will include two full-service ‘base camps’, designed to provide all necessary logistical and technical support for the initial relief operation.

The base camps will also act as a temporary headquarters for the Haitian National Red Cross Society. The organization’s offices were near-destroyed in the earthquake.

“Besides the deployed teams, trained Haitian Red Cross volunteers are also playing a vital role in saving lives, carrying out search and rescue operations in the areas most affected by the earthquake”, said Mauricio Bustamante, IFRC Operations Coordinator in Panama. “But every aspect of Haitian society has been impacted in the past days, including civil society.
“Part of our long-term plan is to support the National Red Cross to recover and to become a stronger organization in the months and years to come,” said Bustamante.


To make an online dontaion go to : internationally - http://www.ifrc.org/ or if you live in New Zealand : http://www.redcross.org.nz/cms_display.php?st=1&sn=13&pg=6551

All photographs supplied by IFRC. The photos depict the work of the Haitian Red Cross volunteers.

First New Zealand Woman to ski to South Pole

In this photo taken Friday, Jan. 1, 2010, the participants of Kaspersky Commonwealth all women South Pole expedition, pose with the expedition founder, CEO of Britain's Kaspersky Lab, Russian born Eugene Kaspersky, at base camp in Patriot Hills in Antarctica, after their 904-Km (562-miles) cross-country skiing expedition. Eight women from the Commonwealth countries of Cyprus, Ghana, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Jamaica and Britain took part in the ski expedition across Antarctica, arriving at the South Pole on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009. One of the eight, Kim-Marie Spence, 30, from Jamaica, was forced to quit the adventure after suffering frostbite just three days into the 40-day journey.

A Twizel woman who was part of an all-female expedition to ski to the South Pole has just returned home - mission accomplished.
Kylie Wakelin only got the call to go on the expedition in October but says it was a real adventure that also brought with it some unexpected pay-offs.
While Wakelin may be New Zealand’s first woman to ski to the South Pole she says she never set out to collect lofty titles.
“Really for me the journey was what it was all about and the relationship I've formed with the girls has been far more moving and significant for me than I thought it would be” she said.

Kylie Wakelin arrived at Christchurch airport yesterday afternoon, Friday 15 January 2010

When the initial squad of 16 began training in Norway last February it highlighted the huge task ahead.
Once they were underway the group of 8 quickly became 7 - one member was forced to pull out due to frost bite.
Wakelin said “That was a huge wakeup call for us and it was like this is serious stuff, you can't relent for 10 minutes because it's so cold” she said.
The dangers were also very real for Wakelin’s anxious mum Maye Dunn.
“It was a worry for a start but as she got into it we weren't quite so worried” she said.
Wakelin says while she was on the ice she dreamed of relaxing beach holidays and marmite on toast but she's already planning her next Arctic adventure


The team at the South Pole

Each woman has towed an 80-kilogram sled loaded with food, fuel and equipment for the past 39 days - skiing for six to 10 hours a day - to travel nearly 900 kilometres to the pole and mark the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth.
The group was airlifted from the pole back to their starting point, a commercial expedition base at Patriot Hills, before flying back to London via Chile.
The women will soon have their first showers since November 12, with each rationed to one baby-wipe tissue a day for hygiene.
Wakelin stepped in as New Zealand's representative in early October after the expedition's British leader, Felicity Aston, axed a New Zealand Army doctor, Major Charmaine Tate, 33.
Tate had trained for the expedition with the international team in Norway and New Zealand.
Aston said at the time that the "team dynamics weren't quite right, so I decided to change the personnel before the team got anywhere near the Ice".
Wakelin was selected after spending 16 years running Glacier Explorers' boat trips in the small lake at the foot of the Tasman Glacier and taking part in ski-touring and mountaineering expeditions, as well as working for the British Antarctic Survey.
Christchurch was an appropriate place for Kylie to arrive after her historic expedition.
Explorers associated with both Christchurch and Antarctica include Robert Falcon Scott who left from the port of Lyttelton to again try to reach the South Pole after his earlier attempt had failed. Terra Nova returned to the port in 1913 bringing news of the death of Scott and his four companions on their way back from the South Pole.

Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911 and later gave a popular public lecture in Christchurch. In gratitude to the Canterbury Museum for their help, he donated the penknife used to cut the flagstaff marking the South Pole; and Irishman Ernest Shackleton who first travelled to Antarctica with Scott but was invalided out and later tried again with his own expedition on Nimrod.

For people bought up in Christchurch during the 50s and 60s – a period of intense activity in the Antarctic – ‘Operation Deep Freeze’ and the early morning sound of DC3s heading ‘to the ice’ are part of our imbedded personal history and its seems highly appropriate the International Antarctic Centre should be sited there.
Monika Kristensen, the Norwegian glaciologist passed through Christchurch in 1986/87 en route to Antarctica with her dog team.

For me, I left Christchurch for Antarctica in October 1969 where I spent 13 months at the remote Vanda Station in the Wright Dry Valley. So Christchurch as a gate way to Antarctica has an emotional attachment for many of us who have spent time in Antarctica.

Congratulations Kylie for a wonderful achievement. We are immensely proud of you.

Friday 15 January 2010

Earthquake in Haiti

Paul Conneally my colleague and friend in Geneva should have arrived in Haiti by now. Here is his latest posting from his blog:

The news reached me as it happened, at around 23h00 Geneva time. Twitter and Skype burst into action and since then it has been non-stop (hence the delayed blog post altho I have managed to tweet a bit with the emphasis on sharing content).
I began this job in August 2008 and the first major disaster I was involved in was the horrendous suffering caused by the Hurricane season in 2008 which repeatedly battered Haiti and sparked off several fatal landslides. Four major hurricanes - Gustave, Fay, Hanna and Ike - cruelly emptied their cargo ontop of the population, stripping away 98% of the top soil and the rampaging waters killed more than one thousand people.


For this to happen in any country would set it back a generation but to happen in Haiti, the most impoverished and under developed country in the world - well this was simply cruel and disproportionate. Almost impossible to get back up on your feet again. But Haitians are resilient people and arise they did though understandably still haunted by hurricanes. And now, to fall victim to a devastating earthquake is the cruelest of blows to this struggling nation (interesting that we don't name earthquakes - surely they are worthy of such acknowledgement?).


From an operational point of view our local partners, the Haitian Red Cross, have been hit hard - buildings (where we also have our offices) damaged and personnel still missing. Nevertheless, their first instinct was to clear the rubble and set up an operational centre to tend to the wounded with emergency first aid and reinforce the search and rescue operation with their 2000 or so trained volunteers. Focus was also placed in parallel on getting operational, assessing the situation and coordinating the 'surge' capacity needed to boost water, shelter, food and medical activities.


It has been an incredible 36 hours or so. From a media point of view there is a level of interest of tsunami proportions. We have done interviews around the clock with all major news and media networks including CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera and BBC et al. We also managed to get some great photos out which were used widely on as leads on all major news networks and this morning we received these images from our first proper aerial assessment. The photos were taken by American Red Cross delegate Matt Merrick on the ground and I found them to be extremely intimate and compassionate, retaining full respect for the dignity of the people and not preying on gore and horror like so many others.

Our next big challenge will be to provide our national red cross and red crescent societies around the world with compelling content to support their national fund raising drives, as well of course to maintain and feed the media interest and help to tell the story of Haiti as honestly as possible. I am leaving in the next hours for Haiti via Santo Domingo and will do my best to post from their, certainly thru my Twitter account. At times like this you realize the privilege it is to have an opportunity to contribute to such an important humanitarian operation - I am especially looking forward to supporting, working alongside and learning from my colleagues with Haiti Red Cross. Stay Tuned.
PC
If you want to read Paul's blog, go to Favourite Blogs on my home page. Bob








Thursday 14 January 2010

Meeting with SBY, the President of Indonesia today.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, or SBY, President of Indonesia (left) Wayne Ulrich (centre) and myself (right) discussing disaster response in Indonesia. After our meeting, the President announced he is sending a rescue and relief team to Haiti, along with relief supplies, to support the earthquake victims.Photo: Ahmad Husein


After being totally immersed in disaster response and recovery for the last three and a half years in Indonesia, it was such a joy today to spend half a day participating in a high level disaster simulation exercise at Halim airbase in Jakarta. Police, Army, Airforce, key Government disaster agencies, rescue services, Indonesian Red Cross, private communication companies and many others, were there to practice disaster response, rescue and health services.
I always enjoy spending time with the volunteers that are the backbone of Red Cross. I was a volunteer in New Zealand with the Red Cross, and find my motivation is rekindled after spending time with them. From a practical point of view, training days like this ramp up your coordination and delivery skills.

But while the simulation exercise was going on, I couldn't help but think of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are awaiting the start of a global rescue effort in the wake of the country's devastating earthquake.
On the BBC this morning, the correspondents say the situation is increasingly desperate, with no coordinated rescue plan so far and aid only trickling in.

The search for survivors continues but rescuers have little lifting equipment and are often using their bare hands.

Tens of thousands are feared dead and up to three million affected. How lucky Indonesia is to have a President who ran a highly successful Tsunami operation and is be preparing for the next big disaster. Preparedness, training and testing your systems regularly is the key to improved disaster response. My thoughts and prayers are going out to all those affected and grieving families. I had the opportunity today to spend 3 or 4 minutes chatting with the President of indonesia today and he thanked the Red Cross for its efforts in the past and hoped we would continue to support the PMI and Government in terms of response preparedness. He also announced later that Indonesia was sending a rescue and relief team to Haiti, along with relief supplies, to support the earthquake victims.

The airforce performed some stunning rescues, Photo: Ahmad Husein
Wayne Ulrich (l) and myself with PMI water and sanitation volunteers
. We worked with them 3 months ago in the West Sumatra earthquake where they were providing half a million litres of quality drinking water daily. A great team.
Two new PMI amphibious vehicles that the PMI had on display.
Three days ago the Indonesian Red Cross Chairman, Jusuf Kalla, donated two helicopters to the PMI. This is brilliant as in a country where you have a disaster a day, helicopters give you immediate access and you can save so many lives. Photo: Ahmad Husein

Saturday 9 January 2010

Holiday reading

A boy and his donkey. Anjuman valley, Afghanistan. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I just got back from a holiday in Thailand where I had a chance to read all those books that have been piling up during the past year. The one that startled me the most was Greg Mortenson’s, “Three Cups of Tea. “ What a ripper. I criss-crossed Greg's footsteps in northern Pakistan and in Badakhshan, Afghanistan in the 90s and early this decade, but unfortunately we never met.

What Mortensin’s book did for me, was to reinforce, what I have written about a number of times before, that the US, EU countries and others of the so called ‘west’, abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviets pulled out in 1989.

The political vacuum and the scarcity of international aid, gave scores of disorganised Mujaheddin factions a chance to squabble for the spoils of Kabul between 1991 and 1996, and spawned the birth of the Taliban’s, refined modern terrorism, and gave Wahabiism the opportunity to establish Madrases and spread a warped brand of fundamentalism.

During the ten year war against the Soviet Union, the US and the west poured in billions of dollars to support the so called freedom fighters (the Mujaheddin), and even supported Osama bin Laden to fight against the Soviets. Almost to the very day the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the US stopped providing AID to Afghanistan.

Head of the Chamar Valley, Panjcher valley, Afghanistan. Photo: Bob McKerrow

I was in Kabul from 1993 to late 1996 and witnessed first hand the anarchy, poverty, starvation and death caused by lack of foreign aid. Fortunately the Red Cross, OXFAM, CARE, ECHO, MSF, MDM and other national NGOs were able to provide a basic level of life saving aid, but there was little money for the crucial development of schools and universities. Sadly, it took events of 9/11 for the US and west to finally engage again with Afghanistan.

But at what cost ? Today the US are spending US$ 57,077.60 a minute on the current war in Afghanistan

Contrast the hard-won US20,000 Greg Mortenson scrapped together for his first school in Pakistan in 1995.

The potter and his wife. Photo: Bob McKerrow


Another book I read during the holidaywas Don De Lillo’s, Mao II and I was struck by this comment:

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."

On the question: how do artists and terrorists relate to history?

He writes "There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

I think I will read comic books on my next holiday. This stuff is too heavy.

Tuesday 5 January 2010

Wit, war hero, boxer, sailor and legendary drinker

DENIS GLOVER

6 January, 2010.
I awoke about 3.30 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep because many of Denis Glover's poems were racing through my mind. Glover is the only New Zealand poet who has that effect on me because poems like "Sings Harry', 'Arawata Bill' and 'The Magpies' are riveting poems. The first two are poems about loners which I strongly idenfify with.

At 4.25 a.m. sitting at my desk, when the Muzziens were calling the faithful to prayer from the thousands of Mosques that dot Jakarta's landscape, I was googling Glover, and discovered this wonderful article on the life of Denis Glover from Kotare. It is a classic. Enjoy it.

Kōtare 2008, Special Issue — Essays in New Zealand Literary Biography Series Three: ‘The Early Poets’
Denis Glover, 1912–1980

by Sarah Shieff

Denis James Matthews Glover, renowned in his day as a wit, war hero, boxer, sailor and legendary drinker, remains one of New Zealand’s best-loved and most anthologised poets. Yet he tended to deprecate his own efforts at verse, regarding his work on behalf of other writers – as a printer, typographer and publisher – as an altogether more significant achievement. The Caxton Press, founded by Glover in Christchurch in 1936, occupies a signal position in New Zealand literary history.
In his fifteen years at Caxton, Glover directed a publishing programme of poetry, criticism and short fiction which did much to define ‘New Zealand literature’ both for its day, and for much of the rest of the century. From 1947, the Press also sustained Landfall magazine. Caxton publications were distinguished by their physical beauty, reflecting Glover’s passionate commitment to excellence in typography, design and production. His friend and fellow-poet Allen Curnow later commented that at Caxton, Glover ‘created and kept in being … a centre which, under his care, did more than any other to help good writing in New Zealand and to raise publishing and book production standards.’ (Curnow Penguin 320).

Denis Glover’s parents met in Dunedin. His father came from a family of affluent Irish drapers and merchandisers who emigrated to Wellington in 1884; within a generation, however, the family fortune had dissipated through bad investments, wayward children, and alcohol. The Glovers were nonetheless able to support Henry (Harry) Lawrence (b. Belfast, 1879), the fourth of eight Glover sons, in his desire to become a dentist. Harry qualified in August 1901; on April 8 1903 he married the artistic, widely-read and lively Eliza (Lyla) Jeannie Matthews (b. Dunedin, 1878), the only child of the staunchly Presbyterian James and Isabella Matthews (nee Miller) of Dunedin. Harry and Lyla produced four children: Coreen (b 1905), Henry Lawrence (b 1907), Denis (b 1912), and Brian (b 1914). The Glover marriage was not, however, a happy one. Harry Glover moved out of the matrimonial home when Denis was about six; thereafter, his father was almost entirely absent from his life and Lyla fell back on her own family for material and physical support until her second marriage in 1927. Glover’s memories of early childhood are dominated by the observance of cheerless Sabbaths in the home of his stern maternal grandmother Isabella Matthews. Isabella considered cards ‘the de’il’s book’ (Hot Water Sailor 14) and forbade whistling – except while picking gooseberries and blackberries – but did permit access to her library of theology and Scottish literature.

A bright and mischievous boy, Glover overcame ‘the boredom, the perfect horror’ (HWS 15) of Miss Lake’s Kindergarten by stealing the girls’ dolls and lighting fires in the empty section next door, and in 1918 started at Arthur Street School. On his first day he found himself promoted from Primer 4 to Standard 2: a fluent reader by the age of six, he had already declared a profound hatred for Robert Burns and fairy tales, preferring instead the Dickens, Walter Scott, Robert Browning, Swinburne and even the pious texts he found on his parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves. Although he excelled academically, Glover did not fit the role of the delicate swot in which his family preferred to cast him. Early lessons about fighting were learned in the ritualised warfare between the boys from Arthur Street School, and their deadly enemies from the Christian Brothers’ school down the road. ‘We would lie and wait for one another in gangs. If our gang was stronger than the Christian Brothers’ gang, well and good. We would inform them that it was their duty to renounce the Pope. If they wouldn’t do this we would bag their caps as loot of war and hide them…’ (HWS 17). In later life, Glover never shied away from physical conflict: ‘all boys must learn to fight, for to fight is your first acceptance of the world and leads to your acceptance by the world’ (17).

In 1923, Lyla moved to New Plymouth with her youngest children Denis and Brian. Here Glover spent the ‘bow and arrow stage of [his] existence.’ (HWS 29) At New Plymouth Central School he earned a reputation for playground fisticuffs and academic prowess: his name appears on the school’s honours board as dux for 1925. After school activities included paddling unstable home-made corrugated iron canoes on Lake Pukekura, and affirming the love of mountain-climbing already established in Otago: he made his first ascent of the ‘so-called mountain’ (27) Taranaki at the age of about twelve. Glover’s biographer Gordon Ogilvie comments that even at primary school, Glover was establishing a distinctive style for himself: ‘a saucy amalgam of intellect, non-compliance, pluck, candour and bravado which was to distinguish him to the end of his days.’ (Ogilvie 1999, 28)

Glover spent 1926 at New Plymouth Boys’ High School. There he made his name eating spotted dog, and prunes: ‘I think I held the school record with forty-nine.’ (HWS 31) As a boy scout he furthered his love of the outdoors and developed the leadership qualities that would single him out during wartime. He also made a first foray into publishing, single-handedly writing, printing and illustrating a magazine called Signal Fire, which he sold to his scout troop at a penny a copy. At school, compulsory cadet training brought his first encounter with real guns, military-style discipline, and military-style inefficiency. Only the army, it seemed, could deliver cut lunches twenty miles in the opposite direction from where the boys were expected to advance.

At the end of 1926 Lyla moved her family to Auckland. There Glover thrived in the expansive, rigorously academic environment of Auckland Grammar School. Although self-confessedly dismal at mathematics and science, he excelled in English, and had already begun writing short stories of his own, which he would read to his mother on their Sunday afternoon walks. At Grammar, Glover ‘fell in among people of rare talent’ (44), in particular his classmate Robert (Bob) Lowry (b. 1912), with whom he produced an unofficial form magazine entitled La Vérité. Glover’s friendship with Lowry – who would become almost as influential a figure in New Zealand printing and publishing as Glover himself – lasted until the latter’s death in 1963.

Late in 1928 the family was on the move again, this time to Christchurch. Glover spent his 6th form year at Christ’s College, where he witnessed organised bullying for the first time, was permitted to study Greek instead of the hated chemistry, and, despite his penchant for writing what he later described as ‘a vast quantity of very bad verse’ (55), earned the respect of his classmates for his swimming, cross-country running and boxing. In 1930, his last year at school, he was appointed a house prefect and won prizes in English, History and Latin. He also helped produce the school’s Harper House Chronicle, which, for the second term issue of 1930, could proudly proclaim its use of real type.

The following year, Glover enrolled in English, French, Greek and Latin at Canterbury University College. He took an intense delight in the intellectual and personal freedom offered by university. Glover was elected secretary of the Canterbury College Boxing Club, where he encouraged members to compete at an amateur provincial level and in exhibition bouts with professionals. He himself met the New Zealand welterweight champion Eddie Fail in the ring three times – only to be defeated three times. Glover did however win a New Zealand University Blue, later noting that he ‘got off very lightly’ in injuries sustained during fights: ‘nose, twice broken; ear, one, cauliflower; ribs, cracked, four – some of them twice; mallet fingers, five; dislocated thumb; one.’ (HWS65) Glover also climbed with the Canterbury Mountaineering Club at a time when a burgeoning interest in alpinism saw first ascents of many South Island peaks. Weekends spent in Arthur’s Pass National Park, in the company mountaineers of the calibre of John Pascoe (1908-72) and Rodney Hewitt, both Glover’s fellow students at Canterbury University College, provided inspiration for some of his finest poetry, including the ‘Arawata Bill’ sequence, and some of the ‘Sings Harry’ poems.

As a student, Glover supplemented his income by reporting on university life (mainly lectures and sporting activities) for the Christchurch Press. At the rate of a pound a column, he sometimes earned as much as £4 /10/- a week (HWS 76). Over the summer vacations he served as a reporter on The Press’s permanent staff. Intending a career in journalism, Glover also contributed to the Sun, the Free Lance, the Dominion, New Zealand Motor Owner, and the Canterbury College Review. He also became involved in the production of the Canterbury University College Students’ Association newspaper Canta, for which he interviewed George Bernard Shaw during the latter’s visit to Christchurch in April 1934.

Ironically, it was to be Glover’s involvement with student printing and publishing which put paid to his promising career in journalism. He had kept in touch with his old Auckland Grammar friend Bob Lowry, who had obtained a hand-platen printing press and some type, and had set up a press for the Auckland University College Students’ Association. There, in March 1932, Lowry produced the first edition of the short-lived but influential student literary magazine Phoenix, edited by James Bertram. Bertram had modelled his magazine on John Middleton Murry’s New Adelphi, and similarly sought to promote serious and progressive new writing. Over its four issues (March 1932-June 1933), Phoenix carried work by Bertram, Charles Brasch, D’Arcy Cresswell, Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Elsie Locke, R. A. K. Mason and Ian Milner, among others. Glover later described its list of contributors as ‘the catalogue of ships out of the Iliad’ (80). In April 1932 Glover visited Auckland for the universities’ Easter Tournament and renewed acquaintances with his old friend Lowry. Full of envy of Phoenix, he thought it was time that Canterbury did something similar. Glover bought a Kelsey hand-platen press; Lowry sold him some second-hand type, and encouraged him to familiarize himself with the work of typographers Eric Gill, Stanley Morison and D. B. Updike. After a battle with the conservative Canterbury College bureaucracy and the Students’ Association – who tried to claim right of veto over the content of any of the club’s publications – the Caxton Club Printing Press was established in October 1932, in a basement under the law students’ lecture room.

Glover had sold the idea of a Press to the university authorities on academic and pragmatic grounds: not only would it enable the study printing and typography, but it could also carry out most of the small printing jobs around the college. He even envisaged the expansion of the plant to the point where it might cope with all the university’s printing work. Glover was also aware, however, that ‘any young man with the means of disseminating opinion would be unworthy of his salt if he didn’t try to print something that would practically reform the world overnight’ (HWS 86). Glover and the nine other financial members of the Caxton Club decided to produce a magazine. The result was Oriflamme. Unlike James Bertram’s more literary Phoenix, Oriflamme was a vehicle for independent comment on social and political affairs. The first and only issue (April 1933) included ‘the usual undergraduate protests about everything’ (87); Glover contributed an essay entitled ‘Papology’ which attacked blind adherence to all ideologies. Much more sensationally, however, an article by J. P. S. (Patrick) Robertson entitled ‘Sex and the Undergraduate’ recommended ‘companionate marriage’ as an interim arrangement for young adults before legal marriage. The issue sold out in two hours. In the furore which followed, Oriflamme was denounced from ‘about seventeen pulpits’ (86), suppressed by the College Council, and Glover’s permission to use university premises was revoked. Glover appealed, and, following his apology to the College Council – ‘the crawl-down after the kick-out’ (89) – the Caxton Club was allowed to resume its activities on the condition that the title of its publication ‘be not Oriflamme’, that all its members should be genuinely students, and that its activities should ‘not discredit the college in the eyes of the community.’ (91). The Oriflamme scandal did however cost Glover his job at The Press.

Nothing daunted, Glover continued printing, publishing and writing. The independent, radical socialist weekly (later fortnightly) Tomorrow, edited by political cartoonist Kennaway Henderson (1879-1960), first appeared in July 1934. Glover was co-opted onto an editorial committee which included Henderson and Winston Rhodes, and remained a regular contributor of notes, verses, stories and satirical verses under his own name and various pseudonyms (including his favourite ‘Peter Kettle’) until the magazine’s forced closure in May 1940. In July 1934 Glover produced the anthology New Poems at the Caxton Club Press. Contributors included Lawrence Baigent, Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, R. A. K. Mason, Ian Milner, Glover himself, and Glover’s new friend A. R. D. Fairburn. Glover and Fairburn had become acquainted the previous year when Fairburn had submitted a poem to Sirocco, the equally short-lived successor to Oriflamme. Their high-spirited friendship lasted until Fairburn’s death in 1957.

Glover was becoming aware of the need for a career – in December 1934 he had become engaged to Mary Granville (1912-1976), a young Englishwoman he had met at a picnic in Christchurch earlier in the year – and decided to make another foray into professional journalism. Immediately after the announcement of their engagement, Glover moved to Wellington, where he had been offered a temporary contract as a junior reporter on the Dominion. The Oriflamme scandal, however, dogged his heels. His former employer at The Press made sure the Dominion knew of his reputation as a firebrand and Glover soon discovered that his Wellington appointment was not renewable. He returned to Christchurch to what he knew best: he and his partner John Drew, a friend from Christ’s College days, raised £100, bought a motor-powered treadle platen press and two designs of type (Garamond and Gill Sans Serif), and established the Caxton Club Press on a commercial footing in disused stables at 152 Peterborough Street. ‘It was all an adventure; first in learning how to print; second in getting what types we wanted, hitherto unknown in New Zealand; and third in publishing what we could of the work of New Zealand writers, while at the same time endeavouring to make some sort of living and still pay the rent’ (HWS 110). By the end of 1935, the Caxton Club Press had produced Another Argo (with one poem each by Curnow, Glover and Fairburn, plus a frontispiece by graphic designer, printer and typographer Leo Bensemann, who later became a partner at Caxton), Curnow’s Three Poems and Poetry and Language, and Glover’s Thistledown and A Short Reflection on the Present State of Literature in This Country. From the first, however, the commercial printing of stationery, menu cards, dance tickets, wedding invitations and church newsletters, plus printing books for other publishers, helped to make ends meet.

Glover and Mary were married in January 1936 and that year Glover took up an assistant lectureship in English at Canterbury University College, in order to supplement his meagre publisher’s income. (As the senior partner of the Caxton Club Press he initially drew 15/- a week; Drew, as junior partner, drew 10/-.) In 1936 the name was shortened to The Caxton Press and nine small books published, including R. A. K. Mason’s End of Day, Glover’s Several Poems, Ursula Bethell’s Time and Place, and Verse Alive, a collection of satirical verses reprinted from Tomorrow. Allen Curnow’s Enemies: Poems 1934-1936 (1937) was the last book printed in Peterborough St: in 1937 the Press relocated to new premises at 129 Victoria Street. In 1938 Glover resigned his position at the university in order to devote himself more exclusively to the Caxton Press.

At the time, one of the main venues for locally-written verse was the annual New Zealand Best Poems (1932-1943) edited by Christchurch journalist C. A. Marris. Although Marris had published Glover’s sonnet to Mary in the Best Poems of 1934, and also published the work of talented poets such as J. C. Beaglehole, Eileen Duggan, J. R. Hervey, Robin Hyde, Ian Milner, Gloria Rawlinson, Arnold Wall and others, Glover and his closest literary associates regarded Best Poems as the epitome of all that was bad in New Zealand poetry. The fey and sentimental verse which Marris tended to favour – and which A. R. D. Fairburn had memorably dubbed ‘the Menstrual School of Poetry’ (Letters 95) and Glover ‘feminine-mimsy’ (HWS 94) – owed its greatest debts of style to A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield and John Drinkwater. This style of verse also found a home in the popular anthology Kowhai Gold, edited by Quentin Pope and printed in England in 1930. The title of this anthology lent its name to the whole genre. Dora Wilcox’s epigram for Kowhai Gold shows the collection’s orientation towards an English audience, and displays the cloying tone which found so much disfavour with Glover and his contemporaries:

And as your Summer slips away in Tears
Spring wakes our Lovely Lady of the Bush
The Kowhai; and she hastes to wrap herself
All in a mantle wrought of living gold.

Glover found several modes in which to express his antipathy towards ‘[translated] Georgians and their hothouse tradition’ (Tomorrow, [30 Oct 1935]: 17). Glover the satirist found Marris’s perceived stranglehold on literary taste an irresistible target. In 1937 Caxton published his ‘The Arraignment of Paris’, a lively 214-line lampoon in iambic pentameters:

– But who are these, beribboned and befrilled?
Oh can it be the ladies’ sewing guild?
But no, they follow Paris – it is clear
these are his sheep, and he their pastor dear.
Our lady poets these: hermaphroditic
he is at once their guide, their friend, their critic.
And with them go a few who by their faces
should be in shoulder-straps instead of braces. (Selected Poems 7-8)

In his more serious verse, Glover expressed concerns a world removed from those of the authors of ‘Autumn, and the Trees’ or ‘A Vision of Clouds’ (Best Poems 1932). He and his contemporaries saw themselves as social commentators, who believed the vitality of their poetry lay directly in its ability to engage with the present, in all its complex uncertainty. In this they ‘shared their modernity’, in Allen Curnow’s phrase (Penguin xiv), with W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, who had begun addressing the conditions of the immediate present, from the social upheaval of the Depression and the impending civil war in Spain, to the drudgery of domestic life in suburbia.

Like their English counterparts, they were well aware that social concern alone did not make good poetry. Glover in particular admired the controlled verse forms chosen by Auden and Day Lewis, and noted how Auden’s half-rhymes and verse patterns approximated the stress of conversation, enabling ‘a natural expression for his emotions.’ (Canterbury College Review [1934]: 31) He also noted Day Lewis’s restrained use of what became known as ‘pylon’ imagery, in combination with the imagery of nature. Day Lewis’s interest in alliteration, internal assonance and repetition found an echo in what Glover called his own work, and the older poet’s ‘natural and unaffected poetic use of imagery drawn from the life around him’ (Cant Coll Rev 29) also came to characterize Glover’s poetic engagement with the physical world, particularly as it evolved through his later writing.

For Glover’s generation, then, the paramount requirement for poetry was that it should be local and specific, reflecting the facts of social and physical life in New Zealand; given their general antipathy to what they regarded as the sway of the ‘feminine’ in contemporary verse, their own writing was characterised by a certain muscularity of language and a preference for unsentimental subject-matter. The first stanza of Glover’s ‘Landing Field’ (1937) typifies the mood of this new poetic:

Sky voyagers find here their homing place.
Among the machines sun-lustrous and shining
or with blades that idle upon unhurried air,
airmen lounge easily, careless of earth,
whose daily wings search the invisible roof,
whose shadow glides over white mountain sides,
whose pitched propeller tunnels the cloud, loud engine
echoing strong above the old earth’s unheard song. (Selected Poems 17)

From the beginning, Caxton provided a venue for this poetry, which treated New Zealand’s immediate social and political circumstances with a new tough-mindedness, and a vein of cynicism. Glover’s ‘Centennial’ (1940), for example – while perhaps closer in tone to The Arraignment of Paris that to his later poetry – offers a wry commentary on the unreflective nationalism and self-congratulatory bombast which accompanied the 1940 centennial of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, under whose terms Māori ceded sovereignty to the British Crown:

In the year of centennial splendour
There were fireworks and decorated cars
And pungas drooping from the verandahs
– But no one remembered our failures.
The politicians like bubbles from a marsh
Rose to a platform, hanging in every place
Their comfortable platitudes like plush
– Without one word of our failures. (Selected Poems 39)

Although its print runs were of necessity small, Caxton catalysed much of the literary activity in New Zealand in the years prior to World War Two, and immediately following the outbreak of war. A catalogue of Caxton publications from 1935 (the date of acquisition of the power-platen) to February 1941 includes twenty volumes of poetry, five poetry miscellanies and six prose titles, among them Frank Sargeson’s short story collection A Man and His Wife (1940) and Monte Holcroft’s essay The Deepening Stream: Cultural Influences in New Zealand (1940). Eight publications under the heading of ‘Art and Typography’, which included Leo Bensemann’s exquisite Fantastica: Thirteen Drawings (1937), brought the Press’s output of local creative work to 39 volumes, apart from the commercial printing which kept the press in business.

Figuring largely in this literary foment was Glover’s close friend Allen Curnow. Curnow, born in Timaru and educated in Christchurch, left the South Island in 1931 to study in at St John’s Theological College in Auckland. The two first met in Christchurch at the end of that year while Curnow was visiting his family during the summer vacation. Curnow withdrew from his theological studies in 1934 and returned to Christchurch, having decided to make journalism his career. He and Glover renewed acquaintances, initiating a life-long friendship and one of the most fruitful collaborations in New Zealand literary history.

Glover’s friendship with Curnow played a coincidental but crucial role the composition of Glover’s most famous poem. One weekend late in 1941 Glover had driven up to visit the Curnow family at a holiday bach at Leithfield, north of Christchurch. On the way up, Curnow recalled, ‘Glover… got out of his little tin baby Austin in the middle of a wild nor’wester to have a pee by the roadside. There were magpies squawking everywhere. And when Denis arrived and came to the door of the bach he didn’t say anything at all except “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” - just like that.’ (Curnow in the New Zealand Herald, 29 July 1987). Before Glover’s arrival that day, Curnow had begun work on his own poem about the storm, prompted by the sound of a piece of roofing iron blowing in the wind. So as not to disturb him, Glover sat down to write. Curnow’s short, brooding lyric ‘Wild Iron’ has achieved almost the same iconic status, and is almost as frequently anthologised, as Glover’s ‘The Magpies’. Both poems frequently find their way into anthologies for children – Curnow’s for its Stevensonian evocation of a storm at night, Glover’s for its ingenuous tone and simple rhyme scheme, and its apparently cheerful chorus:

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said. (Selected Poems 31)

Only superficially naïve, however, this ‘cross between a ballad and a grim nursery rhyme’ (MacD. P. Jackson, Oxford History 438) laments the fate of small farmers in hard economic times - perhaps specifically the Depression of the 1930s, but also recalling the 1880s and 1920s, when oppressive financial conditions also made it difficult for farmers to stay on their land. Tom and Elizabeth begin their married life prepared to work hard under difficult conditions, but despite their best efforts, lending institutions – personified as an anonymous ‘mortgage man’ – have first claim on the farm’s produce and ultimately the farm itself. The final stanza brings the poem into the present: Tom and Elizabeth are long dead, and the magpies, who have watched it all, are now the sole guardians of the abandoned farmstead. Their chorus is as cruel and impartial as nature itself:

The farm’s still there. Mortgage corporations
Couldn’t give it away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies say.

Glover maintained that although the couple in ‘The Magpies’ had names, they were in fact ‘generalised’, representing all the small farmers whose suffering he had witnessed at first hand, on weekend visits to Mary at her older sister’s market garden at Belfast north of Christchurch, and also on university holidays spent mustering on a high-country sheep station near Lake Tekapo. ‘The Magpies’ first appeared in the Caxton anthology Recent Poems in 1941, along with ten other poems by Glover – including the first three poems of the ‘Sings Harry’ sequence – plus poems by Curnow, Fairburn and Mason.

Recent Poems was one of the last typographical works Glover completed at Caxton before leaving New Zealand on war service. Although as a student he had helped break workers’ strikes during the Depression of the early 1930s, he quickly came to share the left-leaning politics of many other Tomorrow contributors and, despite his pacifism, could not stand by and watch Fascism roll over Europe. In the end, he would count himself fortunate to have been one of a generation for which there was no escape from war.

Glover had done some sailing in Auckland, but it was in the company of his friend Albion Wright, whose advertising company had brought much business Caxton’s way, that his love of land-based sports gave way to a love of the sea. During boozy weekends spent sailing with the Banks Peninsular Cruising Club based at Lyttelton, first with Wright in his little cabin cruiser Annabel Lee and later with Torrie Turner in his motor-powered Storm, Glover learned much about the sea, met some colourful characters – including Mick Stimpson, a retired sailor living in Port Levy – and decided that if he had to go to war he would do so in the navy. But the navy didn’t want him: the only vacancies were for cooks and radio technicians. Neither occupation held much appeal for the action-loving Glover, who, at 28, was a volunteer, and hence able to choose his branch of the service. After a wait of many months, a vacancy opened in ‘Scheme B’, a programme under which New Zealand naval recruits were sent to the United Kingdom to train. ‘If they made the grade, they would be duly commissioned as temporary, acting, probationary, additional, not-to-join, sublieutenants on loan to the Royal Navy.’ (HWS 113) Glover left Christchurch in September 1941, leaving the Caxton Press – ‘by then the most distinguished printing and publishing firm New Zealand letters had known’ (Thomson 22) – in the hands of fellow pacifists Lawrence Baigent, Leo Bensemann, Dennis Donovan and John Drew, who had appealed their conscriptions and had, for the time being, been exempted military service.

Following a brief naval induction in Auckland, Glover and twenty-five other trainee officers of the Royal New Zealand Navy Volunteer Reserve sailed for England and commenced their training – with 5000 British conscripts – at the naval barracks H.M.S. Ganges at Shotley Gate on the Suffolk coast. After more training near Plymouth, Glover found himself aboard the brand new destroyer H.M.S. Onslaught, whose first commission was on Artic convoys to Murmansk. Later, after passing more examinations and completing a commando training course, Glover received his commission as sub-lieutenant and was promoted to commanding officer of a small commando raider based on the English Channel – ‘the most wicked stretch of water that any seaman could ever find himself confronted with’ (HWS 156). During the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, fourteen of the ships in Glover’s thirty six ship flotilla were lost outright; on the night of D-Day there were only six ships left fully operational. Glover’s craft was one of the few left relatively unscathed after landing its crew of commandos, picking up wounded from the sea, landing infantrymen from damaged vessels, and dodging mines and enemy fire. For his bravery on D-Day he was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross. Glover recounts his Navy experiences in Hot Water Sailor (1962; reprinted 1981). In a style that shifts easily between understatement, humour, and the blackly matter-of-fact, he recounts the tedium and horror of war. The shorter prose pieces ‘Convoy Conversation’ (1943) and ‘D-Day’ (1944) also reflect his casual disregard of physical danger, and his deep respect for bravery in others, friend or enemy.

Glover made the most of his shore leaves in London. In May 1942, not long after his arrival in England, he introduced himself to publisher, editor and poet John Lehmann of the Hogarth Press. Lehmann immediately took Glover’s ‘Harry in the Windbreak’ for The Tribune, of which he was then literary editor. The poem later appeared in the 1943 edition of More Poems from the Forces. Lehmann also introduced Glover to Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender, and to South African poet and novelist William Plomer, and in 1943 published ‘Convoy Conversation’ in Penguin New Writing 16. Glover, it seems, also made a strong physical impression on Lehmann, who later described him as ‘looking rather like Mr Punch in naval uniform, a man in a million, imperturbable and with a great sense of humour’ (Lehmann I am my Brother, 211). Glover also made a point of meeting book designers and printers including Stanley Morison and Oliver Simon, and spent some time with Dr. John Johnson, the printer at Oxford University Press.

There were also New Zealand friends in London during the war, chief amongst them D’Arcy Cresswell, with whom Glover often stayed, and Charles Brasch, who was in London on mysterious Foreign Office business. Walking on Hampstead Heath, Glover and Brasch laid plans for the foundation of Landfall magazine, ‘when and should the war end’ (HWS 173). The two had met in Christchurch before the war but in London they became firm friends; Brasch took Glover to chamber music recitals, and although they did not drink together – unlike Glover, Brasch was abstemious by nature – allowed him to sleep off drinking binges in his flat. Brasch admired him deeply, and accepted him as he was: ‘a surprising compound of poet, craftsman, wit and devil-may-care roisterer’ (Indirections 384). Their dream of a quarterly literary review came to fruition in March 1947 with the appearance of the first Landfall, edited by Brasch and published by Glover at the Caxton Press.

While staying in Brasch’s London flat, Glover met Brasch’s neighbour Dvora Natasha Elkind, with whom he fell passionately in love. Glover’s twelve-month affair with Elkind proved to be ‘the most passionate, tempestuous and enduring relationship of his adult life’ (Ogilvie 164). Mary remained ignorant of her husband’s many wartime infidelities and kept up a stream of adoring letters; although Glover responded to these in suitably affectionate terms, Mary does not rate a mention in his autobiography. He does, however, devote a brief paragraph to Elkind – the ‘very remarkable young woman’ who found time to take him round, and who spoke the most extraordinary English he had ever heard (HWS 174).

Glover was finally granted home leave in August 1944. He engineered – and later bitterly regretted – a break-up with Elkind and by mid-October 1944 was reluctantly back in New Zealand. His poem ‘Returning from Overseas’ expresses the feelings of pointlessness and gloom shared by many returning servicemen: ‘Somewhere home-coming elation/ Feels an old strangulation. Collect the levy book and look/ For familiar faces,/Go to reunion dinners/ And the races.’

Glover’s month’s leave extended to the end of 1944. In July 1945, still awaiting his discharge from the navy, he had a sea-chest made into which he could fit a small hand press in the event of being called back to sea. Before he could use his chest, however, his demobilization orders came through, and he was finally discharged on 23 September 1945, two months after the birth of his son Rupert (b. 28 July 1945). Glover doted on the child, who had been named after his commanding officer in the Royal Navy, but by late 1950 Glover’s marriage to Mary had deteriorated to the point where he moved out of the family home above Sumner at Clifton, and into ‘Careless Cottage’, nearby at Redcliffs. He was joined there by Khura Skelton (b. 1912) who remained his partner in a sometimes tempestuous relationship until her death in 1969.

For the last two years of Glover’s absence overseas, Leo Bensemann had been running the Caxton Press single-handed. He had managed to pay off the company’s debts, but had undertaken little new publishing. On his return to Christchurch, Glover threw himself into reorganising his printing and publishing activities, bringing insights he had gained while overseas. However the transition to civilian life was difficult and he found himself approaching his task with ‘slightly weary taste’ (HWS 178). Notwithstanding, these were amongst the Press’s best years: highlights included James K. Baxter’s Beyond the Palisade (1944), Allen Curnow’s germinal A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45 and Glover’s own The Wind and The Sand: Poems 1934-44 (1945). Although almost all the poems in the latter collection had been published previously, Glover excluded much of the satirical work on which his early reputation had been based in order to demonstrate his new seriousness as a poet.

That seriousness, which would come to characterize some of Glover’s best work, is perhaps most evident in the three ‘Sings Harry’ poems reprinted in The Wind in the Sand. The first of these poems introduces the persona of Harry, ‘singing’ to his old guitar. While in no way representing Glover himself, Harry acts as a kind of mask for the poet, allowing him to express an inner self he found it difficult or impossible to convey (without bathos) in his own voice. In ‘Song One’ Harry muses on the ephemerality of his own art; characteristically diffident, he likens himself to a fast-growing, shallow-rooted soft-wood:

These songs will not stand -
The wind and the sand will smother.
Not I but another
Will make songs worth the bother:
The rimu or kauri he,
I’m but the cabbage tree,
Sings Harry to an old guitar. (Selected Poems 57)

In the completed fourteen-poem Sings Harry sequence, published by Caxton in 1951, Glover finds a voice for some of the disillusionment and restlessness that marked his return to civilian life. Harry, like Glover’s later creations Arawata Bill and Mick Stimpson, is a masculine, rugged loner. All three commune with the sea and the landscape, if not in active flight from human company then at least content without it. While Glover was never a loner, these characters share their creator’s emotional reticence and, like him, place a high value on physical self-reliance. Harry – the only fictional character of the three – has left his home and family farm in his youth, and made his own way in a cold world. By turns morose, cynical, off-hand and regretful, Harry muses on his past, and on the transience of love, ambition and possessions. Harry’s lyrical insouciance finds characteristically poignant expression in ‘Flowers of the Sea’:

Once my strength was an avalanche
Now it follows the fold of the hill
And my love was a flowering branch
Now withered and still.
Once it was all fighting and folly
And a girl who followed me;
Who plucked at me plucked holly,
But I pluck the flowers of the sea,
Sings Harry,
For the tide comes
And the tide goes
And the wind blows. (Selected Poems 64)

Reviewing Sings Harry for Landfall, M. K. Joseph described the poems as ‘a landmark in New Zealand poetry. … With Harry around, the map [of New Zealand] is no longer empty.’ (Landfall 1952) The musical possibilities suggested by the ‘Sings Harry’ refrain appealed to Glover’s friend, the composer Douglas Lilburn, who in 1953 set six of the Sings Harry poems for male voice and piano.

Sings Harry was one of Glover’s last typographical works at Caxton. Although his feelings for the Press since his return from overseas had been ambivalent, he was in no mood to let the business slip through his fingers. Largely as a result of his own self-destructive tendencies, however, this was exactly what happened. Dennis Donovan had first joined the Caxton staff in 1937 as an office junior of independent means, with a love of printing and drinking to match Glover’s. At Glover’s request, Donovan returned to Caxton in 1949, after his own war service, bringing with him much needed capital. This enabled the Press to move to from its cramped premises to a large new building at 119 Victoria St, and to install a second fully automatic printing press. Glover’s initial pleasure at these developments was soon overwhelmed by his cynicism and despondency; professionally, his worsening drink problem and consequent unreliability were causing his business partners Donovan and Leo Bensemann considerable alarm. Added to this, from 1947 when he first became a member of the Royal New Zealand Navy Volunteer Reserve to his dismissal from the RNZNVR in 1953, Glover was involved with training recruits, necessitating frequent and often prolonged absences from work. Donovan – by now manager of Caxton – made Glover an offer he couldn’t refuse: Caxton would pay off Glover’s considerable debts in exchange for his few remaining shares in the company, and employ Glover on a salary. Donovan’s conditions were generous: as long as Glover arrived sober by 9.00 and worked until 12.00 he could do what he wished for the remainder of the day. Even this proved impossible for Glover. He would still turn up for work late, and drunk, so Donovan put him on an hourly rate. By November 1951 Donovan’s patience was at an end. He asked the secretary to make up Glover’s pay packet with an extra week’s wages, and dismissed him from the Caxton Press. Sings Harry and Other Poems – Glover’s most popular and successful collection to that date – was completed after his departure from Caxton.

Despite these personal and professional upheavals, the later 40s and early 50s were the most productive of Glover’s life as poet. Since 1949 he had been helping his friend Albion Wright at Wright’s rival Pegasus Press; freed of the business responsibilities he had found so onerous at Caxton, Glover was once again relishing his work as a printer and typographer at Pegasus. Early in 1953, Glover’s old climbing companion John Pascoe paid a visit to the Pegasus offices to tell Glover about his most recent transalpine climbing expedition. Their route from Lake Wanaka to the West Coast had taken them from the Matukituki Valley through the headwaters of the Arawata River, and on to Cascade River and Jackson’s Bay. At one stage they had followed the trail of stone cairns left by the legendary gold fossicker Arawata Bill, and had found a shovel they believed must have belonged to the old explorer.

Glover at once saw the potential of Bill’s story for extended lyric treatment. William O’Leary (1866-1947), the historical subject of Glover’s twenty-poem sequence, took his nickname from the isolated Arawata River in South Westland, where he spent nearly half a century doggedly searching for gold. Arawata Bill was a silent and solitary loner who lived his life away from the company of fellow beings: his most important relationships were with his shovel, his rusted gold-pan and his trusty pack-horse. Not even sure what he would do with a fortune should he find one, Bill used the search for gold as a pretext for the isolated life he enjoyed. He died in Dunedin in 1947, cared for by the Little Sisters of the Poor.

There is no narrative linking the ‘Arawata Bill’ sequence, but Glover nevertheless makes clear the shape and detail of Bill’s life. The first poem describes inhospitable alpine terrain; the second poem places Bill entirely at his ease there. The following poems suggest the way of life of the old prospector, who finally succumbed to a bed in town only when he was too ill to look after himself. The sequence concludes with a brief moral: the elusive gold lay buried in Arawata Bill’s own soul, where he was least aware of it. The poetry is strongest when the diction suggests Bill’s own plain language and optimism; it is at these moments that Bill gains the symbolic stature with which Glover hoped to endow him. Writing to Pascoe about his project, Glover told him how he had hoped O’Leary would come to represent ‘all the great unknown explorers, prospectors, even mountaineers, who have been looking for something intangible round the next bend’ (Ogilvie 286). The sequence took only a few months to complete and was published by Pegasus in July 1953. Both the Listener (17.7.53) and the New Zealand Herald (18.7.53) wrote editorials on the significance of the new work. Many critics saw Arawata Bill as Glover’s major achievement to date and the work became a poetic best-seller: the first edition, although it earned the author less than £18, sold out in less than a fortnight.

In the end, though, Glover’s drinking and consequent unreliability caused a terminal rift in his association with Pegasus Press. Quite aware that he had ‘made a mess of things at every point of the compass’ (HWS 193) he decided to take up his friend Anton Vogt’s suggestion of a fresh start in Wellington and in 1954 he and Khura moved north. As well as providing the couple with accommodation, Vogt – who had twice been published by Caxton – had arranged Denis a job as a copywriter for the advertising company Carlton Carruthers du Chateau and King. Although Glover came to admire his employers – he already held Lewis King in high regard, having known him in the navy – he despised his employment. After nine months he threw in the lucrative position having once again ‘smelt printing ink’ (HWS 200). This time the job offer came from Harry H. Tombs at his Wingfield Press, where, from Easter 1955 and for the following eight years, Glover worked as production manager and typographer. Although Tombs had already made a considerable commitment to the visual arts – in 1928 he had begun the influential journal Art in New Zealand – his taste in poetry was less certain: together with C. A. Marris, Tombs had been responsible for New Zealand Best Poems. Glover hoped to lift the standards of the Press’s poetry publication and typography, but by the time of his arrival at Wingfield Harry Tombs was less interested in publishing than in commercial printing. Glover found he had to turn down promising literary work (including a collection of Maurice Duggan’s short stories) in favour of commercial printing, advertising and magazine production.

Despite a degree of professional frustration at Wingfield, which led to his occasional involvement with Mervyn Taylor’s ambitious but short-lived Mermaid Press, Glover thrived in Wellington’s vibrant literary scene, then gravitating around James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson. Glover already knew many of the Wellingtonians personally, and had published the work of several, including Baxter, Johnson, Vogt and Alistair Campbell, while at Caxton. He also made friends with Maurice Shadbolt, Maurice Gee and Kevin Ireland, became involved in PEN (the New Zealand Society of Authors), and served on the New Zealand State Literary Fund from 1955 to 1958. In the latter capacity, he was instrumental in awarding Janet Frame the State Literary Fund grant which enabled her to travel to Europe in 1956. Glover’s involvement in Wellington’s literary life continued throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. In 1961 and 1962 he served as president of PEN, and in 1964 he was elected president of the Friends of the Turnbull Library. He held that position for two years at a time when the Turnbull Library’s independence was threatened by amalgamation with the National Library of New Zealand. Notwithstanding some noisy opposition, the Turnbull Library was brought under the administrative yoke of the National Library in 1966. Glover remained actively involved with the Friends until the mid 1970s.

In 1956 Glover and Khura moved out of central Wellington to ‘The Ranch’, a small rented house on a rough hillside section at Raumati South on the coast 50 km north of Wellington. From there they commuted to Wellington where they both worked – Khura as a statistician in the Department of Agriculture – and took it in turns to pay the rent. After an altercation with their landlord which ended up in court, they moved to another rented property north of Wellington in 1959. Their small stucco beach house at Paekakariki gave Glover the sea view he craved, and, equally importantly, was only a ten minute walk from the Paekakariki pub. Although always refusing to admit he was anything more than a social drinker, Glover would often call at the pub before seven in the morning.

Since Then, Glover’s first collection since Arawata Bill, appeared in 1957, published by Glover at the Mermaid Press and printed at Wingfield. Although the volume contains a few squibs and lighter pieces, the tone is generally darker than anything he had published previously, reflecting years of loss and personal defeat. ‘Winterset’, ‘The Old Soldier’ ‘The Men of Old’ imply that the best is over, triumph is short, and life is vainly lived in a world of paper and paste, while the oracular ‘Flame’ laments the nets society flings out to ensnare the spirit of youth. Since Then also contains ‘The Air’, a nine poem sequence commissioned but in the end not used by TEAL, the forerunner of Air New Zealand. This commission may have stemmed from the success of ‘The Coaster’ (1948), Glover’s verse script for Cecil Holmes’s National Film Unit documentary about the coastal trader MV Breeze, in turn a homage to the W. H. Auden/John Grierson collaboration ‘Night Mail’ (1936).

Since Then also contains ‘Towards Banks Peninsula’, an eight-poem version of Glover’s long elegy to Mick Stimpson. The third of Glover’s heroic loners, Henry Charles (‘Mick’) Stimpson had served in Queen Victoria’s navy before retiring on a small pension. He came to New Zealand as a merchant seaman, deserted in Auckland and drifted south to Lyttleton, from where he operated a small fishing boat. By the 1930s he had ‘swallowed the anchor’ at Port Levy, at the head of a deep bay near Lyttleton Harbour. There he subsisted on hay-baling, gardening, fishing and beach-combing. ‘Dirty Mick’ would walk over to Sumner from Port Levy to visit the Glover family at Clifton, often bringing gifts of fresh flounder; in turn, Glover would visit Stimpson at home, listening to his sailors’ tales. His death in 1947 was the occasion for Glover’s four-line ‘In Memoriam: H. C. Stimson’ (Glover later corrected this to Stimpson, when he found it to be the correct spelling). This tiny elegy exemplifies many of the strongest features of the sequence, in which Stimpson becomes imaginatively inseparable from the sea and landscape in which he lived. Its unforced diction, subtle assonance and unobtrusive rhythm endow the old salt with something of the stature of Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer:

You were these hills and the sea.
In calm, or the winter wave and snow.
Lie then peaceful among them,
The hills iron, the quiet tides below. (Selected Poems 67)

In ‘Towards Banks Peninsula’, Glover puts much of his characteristic reticence behind him and pays homage to the ‘old wrinkled warrior’ he perhaps regarded as a kindred spirit. The completed sequence, finally fifteen poems long, forms the bulk of Towards Banks Peninsula (1979). This series of love-poems to the sea and those who acknowledge her as their mistress was to be Glover’s last published collection.

The inevitable split with Harry H. Tombs occurred early in 1961. Glover had been off work for a few days with ‘a touch of pneumonia and pleurisy’ (HWS 227). On his return, he found that Tombs had discovered Glover’s invoice books for the Mermaid Press, which included details of the publication ofSince Then. Tombs accused Glover of trying to steal business, and Glover resigned in protest. He was out of work for a year, but enjoyed the respite: he read, wrote, sailed at Paraparaumu beach, tended his vegetable garden and drank with Khura and friends in the Paekakariki pub.

In January 1962 Glover applied for a job as printing tutor at the Technical Correspondence School (later Institute) on the grounds that the best place to ‘uplift the primitive face of New Zealand printing’ was at the grass roots, with apprentices (HWS 236). His reputation as a printer outweighed his reputation for unreliability, and he was offered the position. It involved providing course material for 90 commercial hand typographers scattered throughout the country, and marking their work. He held the position until June 1968 when his erratic attendance and drunken behaviour precipitated his suspension, but he was reinstated in June of the following year and departed for good – on his own volition – in July 1973. It was his last permanent position.

Enter Without Knocking (1964; reprinted in an enlarged edition 1971) appeared early in his stint as a teacher. Virtually a collected works to that point, the volume contains little new work: the blurb proclaimed that its author ‘enjoys talking, drinking and gesticulating’ but disliked writing and rhubarb. The book won the Jessie Mackay Award for Poetry in 1965, but met a mixed critical reception: by now, a younger generation of Auckland-based writers were asserting themselves as the arbitrators of New Zealand letters. Kendrick Smithyman (1922-1995) had given Since Then an unfavourable review in Landfall (Sept 1957); Charles Brasch gave C. K. Stead (b. 1932) the job of reviewing Enter Without Knocking for the same magazine. In the end Stead was unable to complete his review, commenting to Brasch that it had become too negative. Much later, parts of the review appeared in In the Glass Case: Essays on New Zealand Literature (1981). Although Stead found ‘oozy (or boozy) patches of sentiment, whimsy, banality’ in Enter Without Knocking, he also found ‘some of the sharpest scenes and some of the purest songs in our poetry’ (208-9).

Following Khura’s death in 1969 – a death probably hastened by her own alcoholism – Glover himself started drinking even more heavily and was hospitalised with pneumonia and pleurisy. The house in Paekakariki, which Glover had bought in 1964, was sold and Glover briefly moved in with his son Rupert, then living in Worser Bay, before setting up on his own in Hataitai, Wellington. Having regained some of his former strength, he proceeded to lay siege to the affections of Janet Paul, the widow and business partner of his old friend Blackwood Paul (1908-65). Booksellers and publishers Blackwood and Janet Paul Ltd. had, by the mid 1960s, overtaken Caxton as New Zealand’s leading publishers of poetry, and in 1968 Janet had published Glover’s Sharp Edge Up: Verses and Satires. Although in the end Janet could not return his affection, the experience gave Glover the basis for a late departure in his writing. To A Particular Woman (1970) and Diary to a Woman (1971), love poems to the unnamed Paul, chart the course of a love-affair of late middle age. Reviewing To A Particular Woman for Islands magazine, James Bertram commented that the collection was remarkable for a number of reasons: ‘it signals a fresh departure, a new impulse and a new tone of feeling in Glover’s writing. For the first time, in any such context, the poet has sought no protective mask: these are frankly ‘I-poems’… It seems clear that Denis Glover … has moved into a new phase of late development that may alter the whole perspective of his work’ (Islands 1972). The warm critical response to this new work encouraged Glover to make a second selection of love-poems. He published Diary to a Woman – which received equally favourable reviews – and several other volumes of his own and others’ verse at the Catspaw Press, which he established in 1970 to augment his income, and to enable him to once more indulge is passion for fine printing.

Glover had held out against Khura’s desire to marry, but prompted by his feelings for Janet, he now asked Mary for a divorce which she granted in 1970. (It would seem that Mary’s affection for Glover never diminished, despite his feckless behaviour towards her.) Gently rebuffed by Paul, however, Glover turned his attention elsewhere. In 1971 he met Gladys Evelyn (‘Lyn’) Cameron at a poetry reading, and within a matter of weeks she had accepted his proposal of marriage. Although ten years older than Glover, Lyn’s background as a teacher of speech and drama, and her own interest in writing, made her a fitting companion for Glover; of all his partners, she was the only one for whom Glover attempted to moderate his drinking. Lyn also fed her husband well, doing what she could to repair a body ravaged by years of dissipation. The stability she provided enabled a whole new outpouring of creativity.

Early in 1975 Glover made a long and successful poetry-reading tour of New Zealand with Hone Tuwhare, Sam Hunt and Alan Brunton. The same year he was awarded an honorary D. Litt by Victoria University of Wellington, made PEN’s president of honour, and awarded the War Medal of the Soviet Union. In November 1975 he and Lyn travelled to the USSR as guests of the Soviet Writers’ Union and the Novosti Press Agency. In his last five years, Glover produced seven volumes of new poetry including Clutha: River Poems and Come High Water (1977), Or Hawk or Basilisk (1978) and For Whom the Cock Crows (1978). Men of God, a short comic novel, also appeared in 1978; To Friends in Russia (poems written in the wake of his trip to the USSR) and Towards Banks Peninsula appeared the following year. He also undertook radio work, poems and reviews for papers and periodicals – including a flow of contributions which he called 'funniosities’ for The Dominion, and began revising his two-part autobiography Hot Water Sailor and Landlubber Ho! He completed a final Selected Poems a few weeks before his death, but it was left to his old friend Allen Curnow to prepare the manuscript for publication, and provide a memorial introduction.

On Thursday August 7 1980, moving house again, Glover tripped and fell down some steps and suffered internal injuries from which he did not recover. He was taken to Wellington Public Hospital along with some of his favourite books, and died there on 9 August. Some months later his ashes were scattered off Godley Head and Port Levy by his son Rupert and grand-daughter Pia, in the company of some of Glover’s friends from the Banks Peninsula Cruising Club.

Glover gave posterity the most engaging writing on the subject of himself. For Denis Glover’s Bedside Book (1963) he made a selection of his occasional prose – ‘things written at various stages of my headlong attempts to be alive.’ (BB 7). His two-part autobiography Hot Water Sailor (1912-1962; first published 1962) and Landlubber Ho! (1963-1980) were published together in 1981. Denis Glover: Selected Poems also appeared in 1981; a further selection, edited by Bill Manhire, appeared in 1995. Poets James K. Baxter, Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, Marilyn Duckworth, Rupert Glover, Kevin Ireland, Bruce Mason and H. Winston Rhodes paid tribute in verse to his life, work and friendship. Roger Hall’s play Mr. Punch: the Life and Poetry of Denis Glover premiered at Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre in 1989; Gary Henderson’s play Skin Tight premiered in Wellington in 1994. J. E. P. Thomson’s short but useful biography appeared in New Zealand Writers and Their Work Series (Wellington: Oxford, 1977); Gordon Ogilvie’s Denis Glover: His Life (Auckland: Godwit, 1999) is the standard work of biographical reference.

Links
New Zealand Book Council

New Zealand Literature File University of Auckland

Paper by Bill Manhire refers to ‘The Magpies’

New Zealand Navy History

Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

Books
Thistledown. Christchurch: Caxton Club Press, 1935.

Short Reflection on the Present State of Literature in This Country. Christchurch: Caxton Club Press, 1935.

Six Easy Ways of Dodging Debt Collectors. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1936.

Three Short Stories. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1936.

What are New Zealand Authors Writing? Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1936.

The Arraignment of Paris. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1937.

Thirteen Poems. Christchurch: Caxton, 1939.

Till the Star Speak. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1939.

Cold Tongue. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1940.

A Specimen Book of Printing Types. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1940.

A Catalogue of Publications from the Caxton Press, Christchurch, up to February 1941. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1941.

D-Day. Christchurch: Caxton, 1944.

The Wind and the Sand: Poems 1934-44. Christchurch: Caxton, 1945.

Summer Flowers. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1946.

Printing Types: A Second Specimen Book of Faces Commonly Used at the Caxton Press, Christchurch, New Zealand. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1948.

Sings Harry and Other Poems. Christchurch: Caxton, 1951; second edition 1957.

Arawata Bill: A Sequence of Poems. Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1953.

Since Then. Wellington: Mermaid Press, 1957.

A Clutch of Authors and a Clot. Wellington: Denis Glover, 1960.

Hot Water Sailor. Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1962.

Denis Glover’s Bedside Book. Wellington: Reed, 1963.

Enter Without Knocking: Selected Poems. Christchurch: Pegasus, 1964; second enlarged edition 1971.

Sharp Edge Up: Verses and Satires. Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1968.

Myself When Young. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1970.

To A Particular Woman. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1970.

Diary to a Woman. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1971.

Wellington Harbour. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1974.

Dancing to my Tune. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1974.

Clutha: River Poems. Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1977.

Come High Water. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1977.

Men of God. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1978.

Or Hawk or Basilisk. Wellington: Catspaw Press, 1978.

For Whom the Cock Crows. Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1978.

To Friends in Russia. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1979.

Towards Banks Peninsula. Christchurch: Pegasus, 1979.

Hot Water Sailor and Landlubber Ho! Auckland: Collins, 1981.

Editions and Collections
Denis Glover: Selected Poems, selected by Glover, introduced by Allen Curnow. Auckland: Penguin, 1981.

Denis Glover: Selected Poems. Ed. and intro. Bill Manhire. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995.

Produced Scripts
The Coaster, short film. Verse Commentary by Glover. New Zealand National Film Unit, 1948.

They Always Float at Sea, radio drama. NZBC, 1966.

The Magpies, short film. Produced by Martyn Sanderson. New Zealand: Ripoff Productions, 1974.

Recordings
Sings Harry. Poems by Glover, music by Douglas Lilburn. Terence Finnegan (tenor) and Frederick Page (piano). Kiwi Records, 1961.

Sings Harry. Poems by Glover, music by Douglas Lilburn. Robert Oliver (tenor) and Milton Parker (guitar). Kiwi Records, 1977.

Arawata Bill and Other Verse. Read by Glover. Kiwi Records, 1971.

Mick Stimpson. Short film. Includes interview with Glover. Directed by Rupert Glover and John Laing. New Zealand: Ripoff Productions, 1974.

Musical Scores/Settings
Cleveland, Les. The Great New Zealand Songbook. Guitar and voice settings of Glover Sings Harry (‘The Casual Man’) and Arawata Bill (‘A Question’). Auckland: Godwit Press, 1991.

Lilburn, Douglas. Sings Harry: tenor voice and piano. Words by Glover. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1966.

Lilburn, Douglas. Sings Harry: for baritone voice and piano. Words by Glover. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1966.

Lilburn, Douglas. Sings Harry: tenor and guitar. Words by Glover. Wellington: Waiteata Press, 1991.

Lilburn, Douglas. The Magpies. Words by Glover. Unpublished ms., 1954. Dunedin: Otago University Extension Dept.

‘The Six Volts’. ‘The Magpies’. The Hills are Alive. Braille Records CD BRAI 9, 1990.

Other
Motoring, vols 1-6. Edited by Glover. Christchurch: Canterbury Automobile Association, 1931-1937.

Oriflamme, no. 1. Edited by Glover. Christchurch: Canterbury College Caxton Club, April 1933.

Sirocco. Edited by Glover. Christchurch: The Caxton Club Press, July 1933.

New Poems. Selected by Glover and Ian Milner. Christchurch: The Caxton Club Press, 1934.

Another Argo. Poems by Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn and Glover. Christchurch: The Caxton Club Press, 1935.

Verse Alive. Selected by H. Winston Rhodes and Glover. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1936.

Verse Alive Number Two. Selected by H. Winston Rhodes and Glover. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1937.

A Caxton Miscellany Poems by Lawrence Baigent, Allen Curnow, Peter Middleton, Robin Hyde, A. R. D. Fairburn and Glover. Christchurch: Caxton, 1937.

Recent Poems by Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, R. A. K. Mason and Glover. Christchurch: Caxton, 1941.

Book: A Miscellany Nos. 1-9. Edited by Glover. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941-47.

Poetry Harbinger: Introducing A. R. D. Fairburn (6 foot 3) and Denis Glover (11 stone 7). Poems by A. R. D. Fairburn and Glover. Auckland: The Pilgrim Press, 1958.

Cross Currents: A Selection by Denis Glover of Sonnets by Merrill Moore, 1903-57. Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1961.

Quaffers’ Gazette, nos 1-22. Edited by Glover. Hamilton: Waikato Breweries Ltd., 1962-66.

Selected Periodical Publications - Uncollected
‘Poetry and the Present,’ Canterbury University College Review (1934): 29-32.

‘Pointers to Parnassus: A Consideration of the Morepork and the Muse’. Tomorrow (October 30 1935): 16-18.

‘Poetry out of its Pram.’ Tomorrow, 28 October 1936: 20-23;

‘Communists and Soviet Policy.’ Tomorrow, 10 January 1940: 155-158.

‘Convoy Conversation.’ Penguin New Writing, 16 (January-March 1943): 15-21.

‘New Zealand Books and their Availability: The Publisher’s Point of View.’ New Zealand Library Association: Proceedings of the 16th Conference (1947): 48-49.

‘Typography and the Librarian,’ New Zealand Libraries 10 no. 11 (December 1947): 225-230.

New Zealand Libraries, 11:1 (Jan-Feb 1948): 48-49.

‘Some Notes on Typography.’ Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand, 5 (1949): 165-172.

‘Verse Commentary for a Film.’ Landfall, 3: 2 (June 1949): 170-176.

‘Thoughts in the Suburban Tram.’ Landfall, 5: 4 (December 1951): 265-267.

‘The Doorknob.’ Here and Now (May 1952): 20.

‘Outlook for Poetry.’ New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, 5 (1955): 9-11.

‘The New Zealand Literary Fund.’ Landfall, 23: 3 (Sept 1969): 273-282.

‘The Nag’s Head Press.’ Islands 1: 1 (Spring 1972): 53-54.

Tribute to Charles Brasch. Islands, 2: 3 (Spring 1973): 244-245.

‘A Fair Go.’ Islands, 7: 2 (Nov 1978): 211-212.

Bibliographies
Johnson, Olive. Denis Glover: A Catalogue of His Separately-Published Work. University of Auckland, 1960.

Biographies
Ogilvie, Gordon. Introducing Denis Glover. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1983.

Ogilvie, Gordon. Denis Glover: His Life. Auckland: Godwit, 1999.

Thomson, John. Denis Glover. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1977.

References
Bertram, James. Review of To A Particular Woman. Islands, 1: 1 (Spring 1972): 71-73.

Blackburn, Adrian. ‘Long View Over Literary Scene’ (interview with Allen Curnow). New Zealand Herald, July 29 1987, II: 1.

Campbell, Alistair. ‘Glover and Georgianism.’ Comment, 21 (October-November 1964): 23-33.

Friends and Neighbours: Denis Glover at Paekakariki. Ed. Frances Cherry. Wellington: F. Cherry and Caryl Hamer, 1996 [pamphlet].

Curnow, Allen. A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-45. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1945.

Curnow, Allen. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. London: Penguin Books, 1960; Auckland: Longman Paul, 1966.

Curnow, Allen. Introduction to Denis Glover: Selected Poems. Auckland: Penguin, 1981.

Curnow, Wystan. ‘Two New Zealand Poets: the ‘Man Alone’ Theme in the Poetry of Denis Glover and Kendrick Smithyman.’ Queen’s Quarterly, 74: 4 (1967): 726-737.

Daalder, Joost. ‘Denis Glover and the Craft of Poetry.’ Pacific Quarterly, 5 (April 1980): 151-165.

Edmond, Lauris. ‘Anti-romantic: on Denis Glover.’ Affairs (March 1973): 18-21.

Fairburn, A. R. D. The Letters of A. R. D. Fairburn. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Glover, Denis. The Magpies. Illust. Dick Frizzell. Auckland: Century Hutchinson, 1987.

Jensen, Kai. Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1996.

Joseph, M. K. Review of Sings Harry and Other Poems. Landfall, 6: 3 (Sept 1952): 239-242.

Futschek, Lisa. ‘Lilburn’s ‘Magpies’: A manuscript rediscovered in Otago’. Canzona, 14 (1991): 56-57.

Kidman, Fiona. ‘Denis Glover: New Age Elizabethan Man.’ Insight 80, Radio New Zealand Sound Archives: TX 2334-35.

Kowhai Gold: An Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Verse. Ed. Quentin Pope. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930.

Manhire, Bill. Introduction. Denis Glover: Selected Poems. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995, pp. 11-22.

McCormick, E. H. New Zealand Literature, A Survey. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Milner, Ian. ‘Denis Glover and the Caxton Club.’ Islands, 4: 3 (Spring 1975): 265-270.

McNeish, James. ‘A Visit to Denis Glover.’ Quote Unquote, 30 December 1995: 17-19.

McQueen, Harvey. ‘Denis Glover, 1912-1980.’ Landfall, 34: 4 (Dec 1980): 317-319.

Roddick, Alan. ‘A Reading of Denis Glover.’ Landfall, 19: 1 (March 1965): 48-58.

Russell, Peter. ‘Man Alone: Douglas Lilburn’s Sings Harry in Context’. Music in New Zealand, 21 (1993): 28-33.

Shieff, Sarah. Magpies: Negotiations of Centre and Periphery in Settings of New Zealand Poems by New Zealand Composers, 1896 to 1993. PhD Thesis, University of Auckland, 1994.

Simpson, Tony. The Sugarbag Years. Auckland: Penguin, 1990.

Smithyman, Kendrick. Review of Since Then. Landfall, 11: 3 (Sept 1957): 262-263.

Stafford, Jane. ‘Masculinism and Poetry: a Note of Warning’. Landfall NS, 4: 2. (Nov 1996): 261-270.

Stead, C. K. ‘Denis Glover: The Colony Lives On’. In the Glass Case. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1981.

Sturm, Terry. ‘New Zealand Poetry and the Depression.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2 (December 1966): 124-137.

Thomson, J. E. P. ‘Time and Youth in the Poetry of Denis Glover.’ Landfall, 21: 2 (June 1967): 192-7.

Papers
The main repository of letters and manuscripts – 170 folders of letters, manuscripts, diaries, etc. – are held as the Glover Papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, MS Papers 418. The University of Canterbury (Registry and Macmillan Brown Collection) holds student data and material pertaining to the Caxton Press and Landfall. The Hocken Library, Dunedin, holds some correspondence and manuscripts. Further collections of letters, papers, and photographs are held in private hands.

Thanks to Victoria University.