Obituary: Historian and biographer set a high standard & More News Here

Frances Ann Porter (nee Fyfe): historian; b May 2, 1925; d April 3, 2022

Frances Porter’s prize-winning biography of colonist and correspondent Jane Maria Atkinson (1824-1914) begins with a joke. Page one opens quoting from a letter written in 1842 with directions to its recipient (Jane Maria’s brother) to “burn this at once”.

Of course the letter was by no means burnt and survived within the intensive manuscript collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. It was right here the place Frances Porter spent a lot of her time, as a main historian of her technology, producing a permanent physique of labor on Aotearoa New Zealand within the Nineteenth century.

Porter’s biography of Atkinson, Born to New Zealand, was printed in 1989. It received the NZ Book Award for non-fiction and went into a number of editions. Before this work, Porter had produced The Turanga Journals, 1840-1850, Letters and Journals of William and Jane Williams, Missionaries to Poverty Bay (1974). The e-book’s 659 pages present an enormously wealthy canvas of life on the East Coast at a essential time within the transition from mission to Te Hāhi Mihinare (the Māori Anglican church).

Two volumes on historic buildings of New Zealand: North Island (1979), and South Island (1983) adopted, together with A Sense of History (1978). These works introduced life to locations and buildings within the wake of legislative tooth offered by the 1954 Historic Places Act in opposition to continued destruction.

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The work of Porter and others drew consideration to histories that had been to be valued in New Zealand, an retro and certainly in some ways radical notion on the time to a Pākehā society inclined to suppose their nation didn’t have a lot historical past.

After Born to New Zealand, her magnum opus, Porter labored with Charlotte Macdonald to provide My Hand Will Write What My Heart Dictates: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-century New Zealand, as revealed to sisters, household and buddies (1996).

In 2002 she wrote Away from Home, the historical past of Victoria House, the poorer cousin to Victoria University’s men-only Weir House. There had been many extra articles, chapters and entries for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

Porter had been a 17-year-old resident at Victoria House in 1943. Although her mom initially opposed her want to attend college in wartime Wellington, Frances was insistent. Born in Hawera in 1925, the one baby {of professional} dad and mom, Frances Fyfe was intellectually gifted, and discovered an pleasure in concepts, books and the lifetime of the thoughts that lasted her entire life.

She relished her college years, recalling asking one lecturer on the finish of time period, “What shall I read?” She was one in all an exuberant and proficient group of scholars who discovered a love of historical past finding out with Fred Wood and J C Beaglehole​ at what was then Victoria University College within the Nineteen Forties. That group included Mary Boyd, Ruth Ross, June Starke, Ruth Guscott and Nancy Taylor.

In her research, she thrived on the chase concerned within the discovery of analysis; she put to glorious impact a coaching in deep archival immersion: sitting with the historic individual or occasions of their time, comprehending their world view – nonetheless totally different it is perhaps – and then bringing the instruments of clarification, context and story-telling to the historical past the historian created. She additionally paid a lot of consideration, as a pupil, to “how the lecturers put words together”.

She got here to be an exemplar of that craft. After a decade or in order spouse and mom (she married George Porter, architect and long-term Wellington metropolis councillor with whom she had three youngsters, Hilary​, David and Gillian​), she returned to historic analysis when she turned 40. She did so solely of her personal volition, working independently relatively than in a common job or to contract.

Porter’s authorial voice was her personal: assured, cautious, inventive. Perhaps the independence of her place enabled her to forge that particular, direct, voice – one alert to dwelling historic topics in a full spherical of humanity. There is an invigorating high quality to her writing (as there was in her individual); her sentences communicate to us immediately; she isn’t astringent, however she doesn’t give us pastel and blur, however daring hues and sturdy traces. And individuals alive on the web page.

Frances Porter was recognised for the appreciable corpus and excellent high quality of her work with an honorary doctorate from Victoria University in 1993. Her work continues for use, referenced, cited, learn, forming a part of the core work on Nineteenth-century New Zealand, relied on for high quality of its scrutinising and authentic scholarship, loved and admired for its skilful writing.

In her later years she turned an lively member of the St Andrew’s on The Terrace Presbyterian church in Wellington, supporting its place as an activist presence within the metropolis and in international points together with marriage equality and local weather change.

She is survived by her daughter Gillian, three granddaughters and 9 great-grandchildren.

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