W.H. Oliver

Profile
W.H. Oliver is an historian, editor, biographer, teacher, and poet. He was general editor of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography for six years from 1984 – 1990. In 2008 he was honoured in the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, Non-Fiction.

Selected published works
Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954, 1957; The Story of New Zealand, 1960; Challenge and Response, 1971; Out of Season: Poems, 1980; James K. Baxter: A Portrait, 1983; Oxford History of New Zealand, 1981 (co-edited with Bridget Williams), 1981; Looking for the Phoenix: A Memoir, 2002; W.H. Oliver: Selected Poems 1946-2005, 2005.

Publishers Bridget Williams Books www.bwb.co.nz Victoria University Press www.victoria.ac.nz/vup

Biography
W.H. Oliver was born in Fielding in 1925, the son of Cornish immigrants. He graduated from Victoria University in 1951 with an MA in History and from Oxford University in 1953 with a DPhil in History. He lectured at Canterbury and Victoria Universities on his return to New Zealand (1954-1963) before becoming inaugural professor of history at Massey University in 1965. He was made an Emeritus Professor in 1983.

In the same year Bill Oliver was appointed general editor of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. This project began in 1983 with an imaginative initiative from the Department of Internal Affairs. Five volumes were planned, with each volume containing around 600 biographies of famous and representative Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders. Although the Dictionary gives due place to pre-eminent figures of the past, it also contains biographies of many people who did not achieve national standing, but whose importance was in a specific regional, tribal, ethnic or social context.

Oliver was founding editor of the quarterly review Comment (1959-1963 and 1978-1982) and editor of Landfall (No’s 42 and 43) for six months in 1957. In the same year his poetry book Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954 won the Jesse Mackay Poetry prize. These poems are set in New Zealand and England.

He wrote the first biography of New Zealand’s foremost poet, James K. Baxter: A Portrait, which traced the life of James K Baxter from his early days in Otago to his final years spent in a remote community on the Wanganui River.

Oliver also edited The Certainty of Doubt: Tributes to Peter Munz, 1996 (with Miles Fairburn) and contributed to Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past: A New Zealand Commentary, 2001.

Looking for the Phoenix is W.H. Olivers' moving, elegantly written, sometimes painfully honest memoir. He reflects on the decades of his own life — as well as of his Cornish immigrant parents — and some of the key aspects of the history that has shaped him. This book was a finalist in the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Biography category. Vincent O’Sullivan described it as “An aesthetic achievement of a kind that memoirs seldom approach”.

Author photograph courtesy of Victoria Birkenshaw.