I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived [1].
Those who
come to this website for quality writing and research are always in good hands
if the article that piques their interest is the creation of Viv Edwards, an
occasional contributor since 2011. Viv
died on 9 June 2026.
Elsewhere on
this site you can find her characteristically modest explanation for her self-taught
skills in reporting the past: “History sparked my interest, after finding an
old Hospital Board report on the 1918 influenza epidemic, while nursing at
Auckland Hospital. This led to several articles, talks and researching other
topics.”
Vivien was
always one for understatement. Her
output over her lifetime was prodigious.
She never seemed to stop working.
As a mature student, she graduated B. Sc in biological sciences, a
disciplined achievement for the working mother, by that stage, of two sons.
Her first
and early career as a nurse culminated when she became a nursing tutor. Some of her alumni were at her memorial
service, and spoke warmly of her abilities to communicate technical information
in a way that never lost sight of the human dimension. She adapted that to many different subject
areas in her lifetime.
For
instance: she was the author of "Winkelmann: Images of Early New
Zealand" (Benton Ross, 1987) and "Battling the Big B: Hepatitis B in
New Zealand" (Dunmore Publishing, 2007). The two books could not be more
different. The first is a beautiful art hardback
in large format, dealing with nineteenth-century challenges of photography. It met the technical challenges of
twentieth-century book production so well, it won the 1988 Book of the Year prize
in that category. The second is a
contemporary account of health reform efforts led by Dr Alexander Milne. His work is much cited in on-line journals but
it takes 27 Google search listings before Viv’s work shows up. Hers is not a scientific report; it is an
eye-witness story – a ‘first draft of history’ - of just how hard it was to deal
with an unacknowledged epidemic [2].
Book of the
Year award, 1988. Photo courtesy of Trevor Hoff
After
leaving nursing in 1984 Viv made her living as a freelance writer for over 20
years, working for trade and professional magazines such as NZ Forest
Industries Magazine, NZGP (the periodical for general practitioners), Management,
NZ Business, The Transportant, Pharmacy Today, Safeguard, Her Business, NZ Pine
International, Sea Spray, Bits and Bytes, Uno (Waikato and Bay of Plenty), and
the Shed. Every article was clipped and
meticulously filed - in scrapbooks; her early journalism pre-dated the World
Wide Web although she was quick to see its benefits and adapted fast.
Blogs for
Tauranga Historical covered things that caught her fancy. You can search for her articles on -
- Oliver Macy Quintal (July 2011). Pursuing this early lawyer’s past took her and her partner Trevor to find his grave on Norfolk Island.
- Hannibal Marks, Harbourmaster (July 2014). One of the many maritime tragedies of Tauranga’s past: he drowned here.
- Tauranga Hospital’s Roof Garden (Feb 2019). Viv took the photos to illustrate this article. Her eye for colour and form is evident.
She also
wrote a personal memoir of her nursing days for the Historical Review [3]. A 50-year history booklet written for New
Zealand Lumber, 'History in Motion: Evolution of the NZL Group 1949-1999”, was aptly
named; history never stood still for her.
Perhaps her
most telling achievement was the long effort to publish the story of Mary
Sutherland, the first woman forestry graduate in the world. At some point in
her magazine-article work she opened a long-ignored filing cabinet at the
Forest Institute and discovered a trove of papers relating to Mary. Although her memorial plaque is in Whakarewarewa
Redwood Forest, Viv knew there was more to explore.
For several
years she researched and wrote Mary’s story.
A Path Through the Trees was published in 2020 and in 2021 won the
Ian Wards Prize “for making substantial imaginative and exemplary use of New
Zealand archives and records.”
This is a
fitting accolade for Vivien’s professional competence. She had advanced bibliographical skills; she
was a capable indexer; she was also a warm and insightful interviewer whose
personal communications gleaned information that otherwise would never have
come to light. Before the internet,
before and during the advent of the personal computer, she had a knack for the
research process and collecting and managing large amounts of information.
She was also
a tiger for the truth, who doggedly pursued her hunches. Mary Sutherland first saw the light of print
in 2011, as an entry in the Tauranga Library’s 2011 Memoir and Local History
Competition. If Trees could Talk: the Whakarewarewa
Redwoods was the title of the essay [4]. It was to be a long time before the book itself
showed up. For this and all these other reasons, Tauranga Historical can be
very proud of her.
References
[1] David
Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods, Ticknor and Fields,1854. At the
memorial service my eulogy concluded with a fuller passage from this work,
which can be found at https://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/walden-or-life-woods
[2] The book
is now out of print but can still be borrowed from Te Whatu Ora’s library in
Tauranga.
[3] Historical
Review, Vol 70, No. 1, May 2022: Vivien Edwards, Nursing at Tauranga in the
1960s
