Give Your Thoughts Life: William Colenso’s Letters to the Editor
Compiled by Ian St George
Otago University Press – rrp $65.00
Orchid enthusiast and Wellington general practitioner Ian St George found his life took an unexpected turn when he began to research the work of William Colenso, an early botanist who had described some of New Zealand’s native orchids. He says he ‘found a man whose life was a continual quest for meaning’ and admits that he became obsessed with finding out as much as he could about the early missionary and his achievements.
Colenso ‘was a polymath: a renaissance man who at one time boasted the best library in the colony [New Zealand]’. He arrived in 1834 as a printer-missionary, printed New Zealand’s first books, explored much of the central North Island hinterland, botanised at every opportunity, was fluent in Maori and defended the rights and equality of Maori, and later became a public servant and politician, dying in 1899.
The author of several books on orchids, including one on Colenso’s botanical collecting, St George has now produced a collection of Colenso’s letters to the editor. From the 1850s, Colenso wrote hundreds of letters to the editors of New Zealand’s emerging newspapers. Many of these are lost but St George has compiled more than 200 of them in Give Your Thoughts Life: William Colenso’s Letters to the Editor. The title is taken from a letter Colenso wrote to the correspondence column of the Hawkes Bay Herald in 1859, in which he advised his fellow citizens, ‘ ... you have the Press, both open and free: use it. Give your thoughts life; let all good measures be brought forward, discussed, and well ventilated.’
While Colenso wrote mostly for local Hawke’s Bay readers, he was a national celebrity for his opinions. One correspondent to the Wanganui Herald in January 1882, similarly sympathetic to the plight of Maori, tellingly signed himself, ‘COLENSO’S GHOST.’
Provincial newspaper columns were the ‘public spheres’ of their time, places for geographically separated individuals to contribute opinions to the debates of an immature democracy. Equally, they were the vehicles for passionately held views of bigots egged on by unscrupulous editors eager for exciting copy. Many of Colenso’s public letters were answers to (or were met by) equally forthright editorials or published letters from contemporaries.
Says Ian St George, ‘Colonial politics were argumentative, fervent, destructive and nasty – and the rants of opinionated, self-styled experts are thrilling in their vehemence. If William Colenso was alive today, he would be blogging. No question.’
Ian St George is a general practitioner. He came to Colenso studies through his interest in native orchids. He has edited Colenso’s Collections (2008) and is editor of eColenso, the newsletter of the Colenso Society.
And coming from Otago University Press in January:
William Colenso - His Life and Journeys
A.G. Bagnall and G.C. Petersen, edited by Ian St George
Colenso was perhaps the most interesting of New Zealand’s early public figures. He established the first printing press and printed the first book, 5000 copies of the New Testament in Maori, in 1837. He also printed the Treaty of Waitangi. His Authentic and genuine history of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1890) is regarded as the most reliable European account from the time. Throughout his life, he defended the rights and equality of Maori.
Determined to expand the activities of the mission, Colenso undertook major journeys around New Zealand. He was also a revered botanist and political figure, intensely involved in public life. William Colenso: His Life and Journeys is the most comprehensive biography of this forceful individual, deserving this new edition.
Paperback, 500 pp rrp. $60