Remembering Michael King

If my guests have read a New Zealand history book, it is likely to be

– which has been released in a new 20th anniversary edition.

Apart from the addition of ‘Aotearoa’ to the title, an introduction by Sir Tipene O’Regan and

a biographical essay by Jock Phillips, the book is the 2003 one.

Michael died in a car accident within a year of the publication of his book. He was a loss to

the historical community, as a hard-working role model who produced a swift, smooth

narrative and a generous colleague.

He had worked as a reporter at the Waikato Times newspaper in Hamilton, where I worked

long after he had gone on to do a PhD, teach journalism and produce books. I attended his

University of Waikato continuing education seminar on writing history. He told us to have

chronological, biographical and thematic folders. I started my research on Ettie Rout around

that time – and followed his advice.

One day around 1990, I was walking down Wellington’s Willis Street and Michael was

walking up. He called out: ‘I’ve got something for you’. He was writing a biography of Frank

Sargeson and had found a short first-person piece about Ettie Rout by a World War I veteran

who had met her in Paris. I use it on the first page of the introduction for Ettie: A Life of

Ettie Rout (Penguin, 1992) which won a New Zealand Book Award.

Before setting out on my next book, the oral history, Convent Girls, I visited Michael, who

was living in a house on the Coromandel peninsula, and we went on a beach walk while he

gave me more good advice. My book came out in 1994 and sold 12,500 copies – nothing like

the 300,000 copies in many editions, but a bestseller that went into multiple editions.

The re-issue of his book begs a question that Philip Matthews has explored on Newsroom

recently: how would Michael have updated his book 20 years on had he had the chance?

History is a culture war (newsroom.co.nz)

I think he would have updated his views on women’s suffrage in the light of my 2021 New

Zealand Listener article, which pointed out that Kate Sheppard and the Women’s Christian

Temperance Union, of which she was the franchise superintendent, had been given far too

much credit for the New Zealand Parliament’s breakthrough in parliamentary democracy by

giving women the vote in 1893.

Like other male historians, Michael was persuaded by Patricia Grimshaw’s Women’s Suffrage

in New Zealand, which argued that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was the main

factor in suffrage success. He thought that the WCTU had pushed Vogel into introducing his

1887 bill, which would have given women the vote and allowed them to stand for Parliament

had it passed. He described the bill’s failure as that of the WCTU ‘to secure the passage of a

women’s suffrage bill’.

The WCTU had nothing to do with Vogel’s bill. Neither did any other woman, apart from his

wife, Mary Clayton. He told her in a December 1886 letter that if women would back it, the

bill would pass. They didn’t – and it didn’t. I’d love to have had the opportunity to have that

conversation with Michael.