Ruth Miriam Ross, 1920-1982

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XVI, Issue 1, 1 May 1983, Page 54

Ruth Miriam Ross, 1920-1982

A. G. Bagnall

The death on 31 August last of Mrs Ruth Ross at her home in Weymouth, Manurewa, after a long struggle against cancer ended all too soon the contribution to New Zealand history of one of its most brilliantly individual devotees. As Ruth Miriam Guscott, the daughter of Wanganui parents of farming background, she first attended a private school, Clifton House, at the top of the Avenue close to the family home, in part still standing as the office of the Waitotara County Council. At Wanganui Girls College she was head prefect and proxime accessit to the dux, before going to Victoria University College in 1939. Although she did not complete a degree during her three years’ attendance she majored in history, interest doubtless aroused by the calibre of her teachers, despite the lack of New Zealand content in the course. Her ability, power of concentration and lively open personality certainly impressed Professor F. F. W. Wood, a staunch friend, and Dr J. C. Beaglehole on whose recommendation she took up a position in the Centennial Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs.

As part of the centennial celebrations J. W. Heenan, Undersecretary for Internal Affairs, had seen the possibility of commemorating the event by a series of substantial historical publications. Beaglehole, the influential adviser throughout this formative period, has said that the translation of the Branch into a ‘sort of editorial-historical-typographical-literary-public relations office’ was a Heenan inspiration. This wider responsibility certainly helped it to survive the war years as the Historical Branch although to a regrettable demise at the end of the decade. The appointment of E. H. McCormick under the bland title of Secretary to the National Historical Committee set the standard and tone for much of the programme with its precariously mobile team of youthful university trained ‘historians’ which included J. W. Davidson, R. I. M. Burnett, Ruth Fletcher, Mary Boyd, Nancy Taylor, R. R. Cunninghame, O. S. Meads, F. Lingard and others.

The dilemma of the programme’s most ambitious project, the historical atlas, was that to enable the basic facts to be established before mapping, fundamental research had still to be undertaken. Hence the recruitment of so many keen gladiators behind whom were soon looming draughtsmen—at least one —poised to sketch the outlines and inscribe legends for events still locked in unexamined source material. When Ruth Guscott joined in January 1942, coincidentally on the

same day as Janet Wilkinson, better known in later life as Janet Paul, the difficulties of completing so lengthy a programme had been compounded by the disappearance of most males ‘for the duration’. Ruth was at first working on the pre-1840 settlement maps with Ruth Fletcher, an experienced survivor but herself about to depart to Broadcasting. For the eager young recruit, the task was a progressive unfolding of exciting panoramas, largely in manuscript. The chains had already been unlocked from the official records in the Police cellars, but six weeks after her first day the discovery, to her, of the Old Land Claims files in the Lands and Survey Department safe was the subject of an enthusiastic memo to Heenan whose close interest in the Branch was heightened by the fresh exhilaration of one with an approach as original as his own. The tightly packed folders copied from them, with associated notes, were to be the core of her scholarly armoury for the next forty years.

It was but one of a range of sources which she was to master within the next two years. But what took her beyond the reach of a keen intelligence and an emotionally charged curiosity? How did she do it? Who taught her—or for that matter any of the others? Casual references in the past by the present writer to a Beaglehole kindergarten sparked a forthright response. Yes, he was an occasional respected presence but transmitted little except encouragement. Techniques, sources and something of the basis of judgement were learned by each lively intelligence from older colleagues; in Ruth’s case, she later claimed, from Ruth Fletcher and Frank Lingard. Others confirm this continuous pooling of knowledge which I (as a putative historian in the wings on an associated project) can endorse in acknowledging my own debt at this period to Bob Burnett.

Despite the difficulties of wartime travel, even within New Zealand, Ruth’s apprenticeship included two visits to new territory. The first to Gisborne in 1943 led to significant meetings with local historians, the inevitable conflicts of detail and an abortive assault on Maori Land Court records, all summarised in a thirteen page memo. A year later in February 1944 it was to Auckland and places north. The prime purpose was to searchjustice Department Court records at Russell for which Heenan prepared the ground with his colleague B. L. Dallard. These files were the only disappointment of the trip but at least it was possible to examine some Land Court records in Auckland to the extent of picking up points overlooked by Percy Smith. However, the Bay of Islands and places west were the focal centres for the events in the twenty-four-month-old paper chase. March the first was but one significant day when under the

guidance of Mr Schmidt, father-in-law of a young engineer J. R. Lee, also shortly to be met with, she walked round Okiato. Then followed Hokianga and Rawene in rain. First impressions under a grey sky were tinged by an almost subliminal brightness—she thought it gloomy, over-powering, dingy, a backwater —‘but I was fascinated as I have been fascinated by no other place in New Zealand and I want to go back’ —but just for a few weeks, equipped for all weathers —‘to live there would be hell’. Another ten years were to pass before the fulfilment of domicile.

Meanwhile she had married a brilliant young solicitor, Rex W. Burnard, who within a year was to die from Hodgkin’s disease. She was bruised, halted by this tragedy; the Branch itself turned sour. In the last year of the war, between VE and VJ days, plans for a comprehensive national war history programme with a body to service it came to fruition. When she transferred to it, ‘old boys’ such as E. H. McCormick now Chief War Archivist and J. D. Pascoe as Illustrations Editor were already there. At the year’s end she and lan Ross, a returned serviceman and journalist, married.

During the following year, 1946, her last in Wellington, when she and lan were living at Mahina Bay, her book New Zealand's First Capital appeared. It was a spin-off from her historical atlas research, in form really an extended paper which Heenan and Beaglehole, fittingly, saw published. It shines with the confident frankness of discovery, races through the unravelling of a complex series of interlocking chains of fact relating to the purchase by Hobson of a Clendon building as a would-be Government House. As an outstanding example of historical reconstruction it demonstrated for the first time the possibilities of our own records and the importance of their preservation, to the extent of footnotes highly critical of their handling by her academic betters. Its curious dismissal by Eric Ramsden, the journalistic doyen of Maori affairs in Wellington, may have cut more deeply than she admitted. There were plans for a Maning biography or at least a volume of Maning letters, but for a long time no sequel. In any case lan had completed the Auckland Teachers College rehab course and Auckland became their home with, for Ruth, a husband and children as the first priority.

Friends ensured that her skills would not rust or be overlooked and there followed a lengthy induction with School Publications which led, firstly, to the bulletin, ‘European Trade and Settlement in New Zealand before 1840’, followed two years later by The Journal of George Simmonds, a careful reconstruction in the form of a boy’s diary set in the Bay of Islands during the years 1838 to 1840; and from the same sources, Early Traders, a series of set pieces on Captain Kent, a Maning land purchase, and Messrs Brown and

Campbell at Coromandel and Brown’s Island. Of wider implication was her bulletin on the Treaty of Waitangi, her first groping enquiry which was only to reach its maturity some twenty years later. The presentation of the text, hammered out through a series of lively exchanges with James K. Baxter, briefly filling an unusually orthodox role on the Branch’s staff, was from the Maori point of view as far as she was then able to reconstruct it. It is now difficult, when reading this account centred on a secondary meeting at Mangungu on 12 February 1840 of which there are several European versions, to appreciate the massive background knowledge distilled into the forty-eight pages, largely of dialogue. In its preparation, too, in the frustrated questioning of possible Maori informants, she groped with the difficulties arising from the many meanings implicit in some of the Treaty’s wording to both Maori and Pakeha.

Once established in Northland a more rewarding exercise was, one afternoon, to spread out the pages of the facsimile on the floor surrounded by local Maoris to identify those of the signatories who might be known to them. This study and the bulletin itself prompted a consequential proposal that she should write the introduction to a new edition of the facsimile volume which unleashed new energy —more questions, with disturbing implications beyond the range of current orthodoxy. To Beaglehole’s soothing counsel that no historical revision was necessary, there was a snort, a toss of the head, and eventually a few low-key paragraphs of recapitulation of the background to the Treaty by Turnbull’s Librarian, C. R. H. Taylor.

However, long before this perennial question was revived, the family had moved to Northland for lan’s service in three schools, for eight years in all. It was first Motukiore, Horeke, from May 1955 for five years, thence south to Rangitane Maori school, Pouto, at the north head of the Kaipara Peninsula, for three and a half years, and finally Punaruku District High School, Oakura, before the return to Auckland from 1964. Just before this a foothold was acquired in Weymouth on an inlet of the Manukau which led to the purchase of a neighbouring section and the building of a home in a much loved setting.

It was at Motukiore that her years of research blossomed, where she came to know Ngapuhi and members of associated tribes as individuals and, in turn, was accepted on the marae. How different, too, the realities of residence from the impressions of eleven years before. ‘lt is quite incredible how lucky we have been. . . Life here is governed by the tides. . . The people here are wonderful.’ But even her meticulous geographical description required further interpretation, certainly in the attenuated form given much later in

‘The Autochthonous New Zealand Soil’. Her elaboration of the setting had other overtones. Beaglehole in mid-1954 had sent her a copy of his address The Ndw Zealand Scholar, which provoked a splendidly rhetorical outburst of indignation and protest largely against the over-intellectualised posturing in the current literary deep analysis of what was a New Zealander. The writer still recalls his impressions on first reading this eruption of autobiography, family folklore and declamation signing off on the twelfth page ‘Yours in affection, respect, gratitude and dissent’. The Margaret Condliffe lecture with its muted treasons has been thrice printed. The arpeggios of truth in the counter-blast call for posterity to be given at least one opportunity to follow them. Back in Auckland there were still historical problems; she had reluctantly consented in 1959 to serve on the Northland Regional Committee of the Historic Places Trust —‘Be it on your own heads —whatever happens you will have brought it on yourselves’—and from 1962 to 1970 was a co-opted member of the Trust Council. Nevertheless this kind of committee work without the stimulus of an immediate practical task was not her forte and she was at her best as a member of the Buildings Classification Committee whose task was as far as possible to assess and grade the known candidates for recording or preservation throughout the country. From 1972 until 1980, when the first phase of the task was completed, she made an invaluable contribution.

She had qualified for this assignment as a knowledgeably aggressive participant in the debate on the restoration of Waimate North Mission House. This led on to her personal triumph in the refurnishing of Pompallier House when the building was taken over by the Trust from the Department of Internal Affairs in 1965. Physical restoration had been completed in the 1940 s when incorrect assumptions were made about its purpose in the first years of the Catholic Mission. Now, after a thorough re-examination of the evidence and the banishing of some legend, the building was refitted to represent, as far as possible, its original purpose as the printing house for the Mission. Only those who shared or suffered with her the months of intensive research, explication, exhortation or criticism when the plea of other commitments seemed to mark sheer dilatoriness, can appreciate the concentrated dedication which she brought to a problem close to her. The guide-book to the house which she prepared shows a little of the wide range of sources used to check every point or to locate possible items for display. It was this task which led to a renewed acquaintance with the Church itself and a checking of the Marist archives as far as they were then available. She had been in touch with Father Peter McKeefry from her first Auckland visit; later, when Coadjutor

Archbishop of Wellington, he encouraged her to approach Bishop Liston in Auckland for access to specific documents. Surprisingly to some, in April 1969 all went well. She was shown a volume of assorted records labelled ‘Pompallier administration’—‘Treasure trove indeed. . . The old Arch seems pleased that I’m having fun with it. . . We get on rather well’. As part of her Pompallier House research she had earlier met Father E. D. Simmons, then editor of Zealandia for which he had written a number of historical articles, when a mutual respect was rapidly engendered from vigorous discussion. With Bishop Delargey’s appointment there followed approval for a joint programme for the cleaning, sorting and listing of the diocesan records. Ruth, although not a trained archivist, as always was a rapid learner and her system, with Simmons’s linguistic and Church background, enabled the task to be completed largely between 1972 and 1974 —so far as she was concerned a voluntary labour in the interests of historical research generally as well as of the Church.

Concurrently she completed the first draft of her research report for the Trust on the Melanesian Mission Museum at Kohimarama, to be published in a much extended several times rewritten form almost concurrently with this obituary. It was to be her only book-length production, twenty-seven years after Okiato. The perceptive award at the end of 1975 by the University of Auckland of the Arts Faculty Senior Research Fellowship for the years 1976-78 was warmly received by all who knew anything of her work and standards. Regrettably the kneading up of the Melanesian text into an acceptable form took more time than expected to the detriment of her projected socio-religious history of mid-nineteenth-century Auckland; all that we shall have are the memories of the latest titbits she found from time to time in the Colonial Secretary’s papers—discoveries in the fashion of Robert Carter —served up with morning tea during the occasional Wellington visit.

She was inevitably involved in the North Island volume of the Trust’s Historic Buildings of New Zealand, the Northland Maori churches being a particular challenge. The three weeks preliminary journey with lan through the region saw a tempo of field work reminiscent of that over thirty years earlier; the finished section particularly, with that on the two Waitangi marae, was her last statement on a recurrent theme.

It was characteristic of her monumental thoroughness that just as Pompallier led on to the arrangement of the Catholic archives so the Melanesians led to a closer association, with Anglican Church records at St John’s College and more particularly in the Diocesan Office where she held a part-time position on an assignment for the

Auckland Church Property Trustees until the onset of her illness. In 1978 at St John’s she gave one in the series of commemorative Selwyn lectures, and a further series of lectures on church history at the College during the following year. She suffered fools less gladly than most and dealt harshly with those she thought to be dishonest in the use of material or in for a quick kill. At the same time her personal judgements were not immutable. There were of course many constant friends and deep loyalties; few there are who have not at some stage been castigated but even fewer condemned for ever. In a sentence, her professional life—and if this much abused category could in its strictest meaning be applied to anyone it was to Ruth M. Ross —was a conscious demonstration that the really important themes can only be mastered by living with them for a long period—in complete rejection of current book production conventions, the publish-or-perish syndrome or the two-years-a-topic aspirations of the young turks. The loss to her family and friends is New Zealand’s in that she was not given a last quinquennium to carry her vision and spirit through some of the rooms she had discovered in our past.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1946 New Zealand’s First Capital. Wellington, Dept of Internal Affairs, 1946. 74p., front., 4 plates, maps. 1952 ‘The Material of History: European Trade and Settlement in New Zealand before 1840’. Wellington, School Publications Branch, Dept of Education, 1952. p. 113-143, illus. inside front cover. (Post-primary School Bulletin, v. 6, n 0.7). 1954 The Journal of George Simmonds. Wellington, School Publications Branch, Dept of Education, 1954. 40p., illus. (Primary School bulletin). Review of Early Conflicts of Press and Government, by G. M. Meiklejohn, Landfall, v.B, n 0.2 (June 1954) 136-138. 1955 Early Traders. Wellington, School Publications Branch, Dept of Education, 1955. 40p., plates on 41. 1957 Review of A History of New Zealand Life, by W. P. Morrell and D. O. W. Hall, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, 8 (1957) 109-110.

1958 Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Illus. by E. Mervyn Taylor. Wellington, Govt Printer, 1958. 48p., illus. First issued as a Primary School bulletin, 1958. 1962 ‘On the Writing of History’, Northland Magazine 18 (April 1962) 5-11. Conflicting sources for the date and place of De Thierry’s birth. ‘Mangungu Cemetery’, Northland Magazine 20 p. 21-26; 22 (April 1963) 27-37. 1963 Biographies of De Thierry, T. McDonnell and F. E. Maning in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A. H. McLintock. Wellington, Govt Printer, 1963. v.2, p. 394-395, 357-358 and 400-402. ‘Waitangi-1840’, Northland Magazine 21 (Jan. 1963) 7-14, 68. 1964 ‘Was itjane?’, Northland Magazine 26 (April 1964) 23-24. Note about her father’s unsuccessful courtship of a Miss Mander. 1966 ‘The Church of St John the Baptist, Waimate North’, Northland Magazine 33 (Jan. 1966) 27-29. Ko e Turiti i Waitangi. Wellington, Islands Education Division of Dept of Education for Dept of External Affairs, 1966. 56p. Translation into Rarotongan of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

1969 ‘The Autochthonous New Zealand Soil’, in The Feel of Truth, ed. by P. Munz. Wellington, Reed for the Victoria University of Wellington, 1969, p. 49-59. 1970 A Guide to Pompallier House. Wellington, Govt Printer, 1970. 42p., plates inch ports, on 21. 1972 ‘Te Tiriti o Waitangi’, New Zealand Journal of History 6 (Oct. 1972) 129-157. 1978 Clendon House, Rawene. Wellington, New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 1978. 13p. (their Publication n 0.9). Review of Sovereign Chief, by J. D. Raeside, Archifacts 4 & sns (March 1978) 110-111. 1979 ‘Old Kororareka: New Russell’, ‘Waitangi Treaty Houses’, ‘The Maori Church in Northland’, and (with Patricia Adams) ‘Hokianga Homes . . .’ in Historic Buildings of New Zealand: North Island, ed. Frances Porter. Auckland, Cassell, 1979. p. 30-37, 46-53, 54-67 and 22-29. Review of Archives in New Zealand, by Wilfred I. Smith, New Zealand Journal of History 13 (Oct. 1979) 205-207. 1983 Melanesians at Mission Bay (at press).