Women From New Zealand

"I don't want to hear my voice... It is in the past. When I'm teaching young singers and hearing beautiful young fresh voices, I don't want to put my voice next to theirs."

"Painting reduces me to tears and misery: peaks of ecstasy, depths of disillusion..."

"To Dorothy Kate Richmond, 1903: "Come to Tetuan. Come—catch the next steamer, cancel all engagements, chuck the studio let everything go to the winds only come without a moment's delay and value for yourself all the dreams of beauty colour and sunshine...""

"1895: "I am slowly settling down to an oldmaidship, and I have only one prominent idea and that is that nothing will interfere between me and my work.""

"1912: "I was born in Dunedin; we were an English family in a Scottish settlement.""

"It is one of the tragedies of leaving Home—New Zealand is too far away—it ceases to be real. New Zealanders like myself cannot help becoming de-nationalized—they have no country—it is sad—but true ... Art is like that—it absorbs your whole life and being. Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That is my conception of genius—vitality.""

"To her mother, 1921: "Don't let N Zealand wait to put up a memorial tablet to my memory—let her help me now whilst I am working at work that I hope will live after me.""

"But au fond-deep in my work-I am steadfast and steady as a rock... My present work is consistent-I shall sink or swim by it-I think swim-."

"In describing a town in Morocco, Tétouan: "The whiteness and pearliness of the town simply defies you-you can't get it pure and brilliant enough and the shadows drive one silly-you race after them , pause one frenzied moment to decide on a blue mauve yellow or green shadow-when up and over the wall and away and the wretched things gone for that day at least and you are gazing at a glaring blank wall and wondering why on earth you ever started to sketch it.""

"...I had served my apprenticeship and was now a cool, ruthless, potential record-breaker."

"Ted, if you love me, lend me the lower wings from your Moth."

"I have experienced the cool, rarefied atmosphere of the Olympic heights where the famous dwell in lonely solitude."

"I was able to fly from England to New Zealand in the fastest time in the history of the world...I think I can say this is the very greatest moment of my life."

"...would not even consider it until I had attained my ambition, for I was determined to try again."

"There have been times when the loneliness has been so intense that I have longed for the sound of a human voice or the sight of a ship, or even a tiny native village, to dispel the feeling of complete isolation that one feels when flying alone over the sparsely inhabited tracts that comprise such a great area of the earth's surface."

"...my only company the roar of the engine as I winged low over the ocean like a solitary bird... I might have been the only person in the world."

"But England to Naples in a day is no mean feat for any man, let alone a girl without any previous long-distance experience."

"If I go down in the sea...no one must fly out to look for me."

"the intoxicating drug of speed, and freedom to roam the earth."

"How bitter-sweet it all was, I reflected — flying about the world, visiting these great cities, meeting many people, making many friends, then having to fly off again."

"March 2024: "I had very good teachers, I had very good coaches, teachers, managers, everything. But most of all, I had a singing teacher who was Hungarian, and she went through the war. I remember I brought her a loaf of bread once and she said 'Kiri, I once had only a raw onion and your bread has reminded me of what I went through during those times of trying to escape.' So she had that drive, whether it be the war or me, but that sort of thing was in her along with [Hungarian-British conductor] Sir Georg Solti who once again, was in the war and escaped as well. So I had two people who were survivors and they made sure that I was going to also do this job and make it, not survive it but make it. And they were always driving me, driving me constantly.""

"To her brother, August 1940: "My aspect of the family talent, or curse? has taken the form of a deep intellectual experience, a force which has given me no rest or peace but infinite joy and sometimes even rapture.""

"When she came back into the parlour again she was wearing that yellowish raincoat, that hat whose hearse plumes nodded over its sticky straw, that grey alpaca skirt. I first defensively clutched my hands. It would have been such agony to the finger tips to touch any part of her apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had promised to bring her to him."

"She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or drooped a dull gold head. And as that she was nearer to him than at any other time. That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured. He […] watched the white figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the grey steps and assume their greyness, become a green shade in the green darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee."

"Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf and crush it and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look.” (I did not say that I had seen her, for indeed this Margaret I had never seen.)"

"Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the wholesome endearing heaviness of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff."

"As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lit here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. Surely she must see that this was no place for beauty that has been not mellowed but lacerated by time, that no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers."

"Then, one April afternoon, Chris landed at the island, and by the first clean quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could imagine that it would be so. He was so wonderful when he was young; he possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. […] [F]rom his eyes, which though grey were somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness, and this soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy."

"Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open country and at the end of every street rise the green hill of Harrow and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stand little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who could not do as they liked."

"An art historical approach is too concerned with artistic genius, oeuvres, innovation and technical excellence."

"I am interested in the material legacy of photographs by early woman photographers in New Zealand museums and archives (or the lack thereof), and the question of how to rethink curatorial concerns that have been formed by histories that have excluded, not only work relating to New Zealand, but the work of women."

"Traditional historical methods that could be applied to a history of women and photography related to New Zealand are unsuitable and unrealistic tools to analyse types of photographs women tended to make and the circumstances of their production."

"Mitchell, Lissa (November 2015). "Recovering Pieces: Finding an early history of women and photography in New Zealand". Love Feminists. Retrieved 12 April 2025."