AUGUST 3 2019 LISTENERPH
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The past is
our country
An “ill-tempered” letter to the Listener got the writing career
of one of New Zealand’s most influential historians, Jock
Phillips, off to a flying start. by CLARE de LORE ● photograph by HAGEN HOPKINS
A
t Christ’s College in 1960,
John Oliver Crompton
Phillips and his classmates
were set an assignment to
write their own obituary.
At 13, he expected to have
a very different life from
the one that has taken him to national
prominence.
In his well-preserved obituary, in tidy
handwriting, Phillips is ambitious and
confident about life. He becomes a farmer
after representing New Zealand in cricket,
but his stellar sporting career is cut short
by injury. He earns a royal honour for
his contribution to the meat industry. He
lives to what must seem, to his teenage
self, a ripe old age – he is dead, at 63,
mourned by his wife, four children and
nine grandchildren.
Phillips, now 72, has lived well past his
imagined lifespan and taken a different
career path.
His father, Neville Phillips, was
professor of history at the University of
Canterbury. His mother, Pauline (née
Palmer), was a university graduate who
came from a Hawke’s Bay farm-
ing family. Academic and farming
influences were all around him:
at his Christchurch home and on
his mother’s family farm during
summer holidays with his parents
and two sisters.
Phillips studied at VictoriaUniversity in Wellington, then in the US
at Harvard University, where he met his
first wife, Phillida Bunkle, a feminist and
academic and later a two-term MP, while
they were both postgraduate students.
They have two children, Jesse and Hester.
After they divorced, Phillips married Frida
Susan Harper in 2000.
He recently published his memoir,
Making History: A New Zealand Story,
which covers his conservative Anglophile
childhood, his growing awareness of, then
immersion in, New Zealand history and
the Listener’s role in starting his writing
career.Were you almost destined to become a
historian?
My father always had lots of history
books, and our house was a place where
visiting historians, people from Can-
terbury’s history department and lots
of history students would come. I was
brought up in that world and, almost
without thinking about it, became
interested in history. I gravitated towards
reading about history, but it wasn’t NewZealand history, it was all British history.
My father didn’t believe New Zealand
had a history worth looking at, and that
became part of my world view.You spent time in the UK in your teens, then
later studied in the US. What part did the
two countries play in your becoming a New
Zealand historian?
I spent a year in England when I was
about 16. When my parents returned to
New Zealand, there was a chance for me
to stay on and go to Oxford or Cam-
bridge, but I decided I wanted to live in
New Zealand. When I did my degree at
Victoria, I found I gravitated towards US
history, which seemed a great relief from
British history, which was full of aristo-
crats and their politics. American history
had so many wonderful characters and
was so democratic in its instincts. And
while I was living in the US, it was people
there asking me about New Zealand that
shamed me into going to the basement
of a library at Harvard and finding this
wonderful collection of New Zealand his-
tory books.- Jock Phillips with a Canterbury
Volunteers parade helmet. 2. As a
toddler. 3. As a Christ’s College new boy
in 1960. 4. Aged 17.
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