The tunnel is named after W.H. Homer who, with G. Barber, discovered the saddle, and who later urged the construction of a road and tunnel to link the Upper Hollyford Valley with the Cleddau.

by R.L.W.

The Homer Tunnel, some 60 chains long, pierces the Main Divide at the head of Hollyford Valley; it is 11 miles from Milford Sound, to which it affords the only road access. In 1889 W. H. Homer discovered Homer Saddle at the head of the Hollyford Valley and suggested the possibility of a tunnel through the ridge below the saddle. The idea of a through-road and a tunnel was later proposed by J. Cockburn to the Southland Progress League in 1929. Excavation was started in 1935 and the tunnel pierced in 1940. Work was suspended on the road and tunnel during the Second World War, and in 1945 a very large avalanche severely damaged the eastern tunnel portal. Work was resumed after the war and the tunnel was officially opened for road traffic in 1953.

The tunnel, which has a slight gradient towards the western portal, is in itself a spectacular sight, and visitors find much to see during stops at either portal.

(1904– ).

Prime Minister.

A new biography of Holyoake, Keith Jacka appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Keith Jacka Holyoake was born at Scarborough, near Pahiatua, on 11 February 1904, the son of Henry Victor Holyoake, a storekeeper, and of Esther, née Evis. He was educated at Hastings, Omokoroa (Tauranga), and Brooklyn (Motueka). A keen sportsman, he represented Motueka – Golden Bay in rugby and Motueka in tennis and was also an enthusiastic cyclist. He has had diverse experience of farming, including dairying, fruit, hops, and tobacco growing, and, in later years, of sheep and cattle raising in the Dannevirke district. In Motueka he had been most active in all progressive movements, including six years on the Cawthron Institute Trust Board. For seven years he was Dominion vice-president of the Dominion Council of the Farmers Federation, which became Federated Farmers of New Zealand, and he represented New Zealand farmers at the First World Conference of Farmers in London, 1946. From this conference was established the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. In 1955 he was president of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation Conference at Rome. Concurrently with these activities was his parliamentary career which began when he won Motueka in a by-election in 1932 as a Coalition (Reform Party) candidate. He was then the youngest member of the House. Except for a break from 1938 to 1943 he has been in Parliament ever since, but from 1943 as member for Pahiatua. He became Deputy Leader of the Opposition (National Party) in 1947 and Leader and Prime Minister in 1957 for a brief period following the retirement of Sir Sidney Holland. With the return of the National Government in 1960 he again became Prime Minister. He was created Companion of Honour in 1963.

The Hollyford River rises in the southern Darran Range, 8 miles south-east of Milford Sound, and flows south-east, east, and north for 45 miles to the west coast at Martins Bay. For the first 30 miles the river flows in a deep, glaciated valley between the Darran Mountains on the north and west and the main divide on the south and east. Below the Pyke junction the river discharges into Lake McKerrow, which separates the Darran Mountains from the Skippers Range to the north-east. From the outlet of Lake McKerrow the river follows a meandering course for 2 miles to the sea at Martins Bay. The major tributary is the Pyke River, which flows south from the main divide east of Big Bay for 25 miles to join the Hollyford 4 miles above Lake McKerrow. Both the Hollyford and Pyke Valleys are excavated along a major fault line, which continues south across a low pass in the main divide into the upper Eglinton Valley. The ranges bordering the Hollyford and Pyke Valleys are composed of hard volcanics, intrusives, and greywackes of late Paleozoic age. Small infaulted slivers of Tertiary coal measures are found locally in both valleys, which are covered in luxuriant rain forest up to 3,500 ft.

The Southland runholders McKellar and Gunn were the first Europeans to view the valley from a vantage point above the Eglinton-Hollyford divide, but the valley had been discovered, and was frequently traversed, by Maori parties. The first Europeans to explore the valley were P. Q. Caples, who walked from Lake Wakatipu to Martins Bay in early 1863, and James Hector, Otago provincial geologist, who made the return journey in late 1863. A branch of the Te Anau – Milford road now extends down the valley for 10 miles connecting with the pack track to Martins Bay, Awarua Bay, and the upper Pyke Valley. The only permanent settlements are the tourist camp at Deadmans, close to the end of the road, and a cattle station at Martins Bay. The valley is a popular scenic, tramping, shooting, and fishing resort. It was named in 1863 by the explorer P. Q. Caples, after a place near Tipperary, Ireland.

by George William Grindley, M.SC., New Zealand Geological Survey, Lower Hutt.

D.SC., F.R.S. (1881–1945).

Botanist, churchman, university teacher.

A new biography of Holloway, John Ernest appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

John Ernest Holloway, the son of John Holloway, bank manager, and Anna, née Thorpe, was born on 12 February 1881 at Christchurch and was brought up in Nelson, attending the Bishop's School (1891–95) and Nelson College (1896–1900). He shared his father's interests in the Anglican Church and in natural history and microscopy and, while a resident scholar at St. John's Theological College, attended Auckland University College. He graduated B.Sc. in 1904 and M.Sc. with a thesis on Lycopodium in 1905, working under A. W. P. Thomas. With a diploma of L.Th., he was ordained deacon in 1907 and priest in 1908 and held curacies in Hawera (1907–08) and Wanganui (1909). In 1909 he married Margaret Brenda North, daughter of the Rector of Wentnor, Shropshire. From 1909 to 1911 he worked in England, partly in slum parishes in London, but mostly as curate at Barnsley, Yorkshire. Spare time study of the rich carboniferous flora of the South Yorkshire coalfields deepened and widened his interest in the groups related to Lycopodium and he made a remarkable collection of fossils from the “coal-balls”. With typical modesty he did nothing to bring himself to the notice of British botanists.

On his return to New Zealand he was appointed Vicar at Oxford, where for three years he was near enough to Christchurch to derive encouragement from Leonard Cockayne and Charles Chilton and to use, at times, the laboratory at Canterbury University College. His first paper on Lycopodium had been published in 1909 and he now pushed ahead with an investigation of all 11 New Zealand species, including their prothallial stages. After his transfer to Hokitika, where he was vicar from 1916 to 1921, this work continued and was extended to the genus Tmesipteris, for which, by 1921, he had provided “a wonderfully complete account of the embryogeny”, an entirely new contribution to knowledge of the Psilotaceae. In Westland also, urged on by Cockayne, he studied filmy ferns, abundantly represented in the rain forest there. Parochial work involved many long journeys by motor cycle and he came to know the extensive flora of Westland intimately. The search for material, especially the small and partly buried prothalli, meant strenuous and exacting field work, and certain laboratory studies could be made only at Canterbury College during hurried mid-week visits between Sunday services. Recognition came with the award of D.Sc. in 1919, the Hutton Memorial Medal in 1920, and fellowship of the New Zealand Institute in 1921, but the double demands of parish and botany had exhausted his rather slight strength. He had to rest for some months before being appointed vicar at Leeston in Canterbury, where for two years he was again near to Dr Chilton's laboratory.

In 1924 Holloway became lecturer in charge of the botanical department of the University of Otago, but he continued to conduct services in Dunedin, often in the cathedral. The “one-room, one-man” botany department, with small numbers of students, produced a series of good investigations, many of them reaching publication, but conscientious teaching and direction of research meant that his own studies progressed only slowly. Cultures of filmy fern prothalli were tended for up to 10 years before they and the young sporo-phytes were described. Two most important works belong to this period: in Phylloglossum he published the first figures of the prothallus and antheridia, and he showed also that the facts established for Tmesipteris held for Psilotum; later American studies on more numerous specimens growing spontaneously in greenhouses have amply confirmed his results. He was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal and Prize in 1930, and was president of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1939–40. “His election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1937 was the appropriate recognition of the original work that had entered into the fabric of morphological botany”.

Teaching at Otago was interrupted by a trip to England in 1939, via the United States, South Africa, and Australia, with brief meetings with many famous botanists. In 1944 he lost his wife, whose help had made possible his continuous research. His own failing health forced him to retire in 1944 and he died in Timaru on 6 September 1945. His family consisted of three daughters and two sons.

Dr Holloway's personal influence was widely spread by reason of his parish and teaching activities, and many stories testify to his ability to generate affection wherever he went. His students were devoted to him and a number became professional botanists, including his son, John Thorpe Holloway, of the New Zealand Forest Service.

Holloway's fame will always rest on his work on the Pteridophyta. He used New Zealand plants, especially those of groups less well represented in older countries. He began with the plants in their natural habitats and displayed extraordinary skill and patience in locating, collecting, and growing the minute prothalli that were the basis of his most spectacular successes. His technique with notoriously minimal equipment yielded preparations that have been permanently preserved at Glasgow University as evidence of his discoveries. Rigorously interpreted, his results were reported against a world-wide background of evolutionary processes and theories. W. H. Lang wrote of his two papers on Tmesipteris: “They are classics in the importance and novelty of their subject matter; in the meticulous care with which each point is demonstrated and the complete reliability of the presentation of the results, and in the concise and adequate comparisons made with other plants, recent and extinct”. The same writer completes his review of Holloway's researches by saying: “Some of his work filled the last gap left in the comparative story of the life-histories of the Vascular Cryptogams, the main lines of which had been laid down in the middle of last century by a busy Leipzig bookseller (Hofmeister) working as an amateur botanist in his ‘spare time’… There are other parallels between them. Both were above all discoverers of new facts and described them so clearly and convincingly as to make it hardly necessary to discuss them at length. Holloway's work on the Vascular Cryptogams, though more limited in scope, has the same marks of permanence as that of his great predecessor”.

by Lucy Beatrice Moore, M.SC., Botany Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Lincoln.

• Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 5 (1947) (with bibliography), Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Vol. 76 (1946) (Obit)
• Cawthron Lecture 1936 – Links in the New Zealand Flora With the Remote Past, Holloway, J. E. (1937).

(1893–1961).

Prime Minister, 1949–57.

A new biography of Holland, Sidney George appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Sidney George Holland was born on 18 October 1893 at Greendale, Canterbury, the fourth son of Henry Holland, later Mayor of Christchurch and a member of Parliament. In 1898 the family moved to Christchurch where Holland was educated in the primary and secondary departments of the West Christchurch School. He left school at 15 to enter the employment of a hardware firm, but later worked in his father's firm as an accountant. After the outbreak of war he joined the Army, entering camp in December 1915 and going overseas as a second lieutenant in the New Zealand Field Artillery with the 17th reinforcements in September 1916. During the Battle of Messines in June 1917 he became seriously ill and was invalided home to be discharged in the following November. After a long period of convalescence he entered business with his brother, eventually extending his activities, becoming a director in several companies and taking a leading part in provincial business and political organisations. Holland senior entered Parliament as the representative of the Christchurch North electorate in 1925 and the son was his secretary and organiser during the three campaigns he fought. Just before the 1935 election, however, his health forced him to retire and his son was given the National Party nomination, to become the only new face among the 19 who remained after the Labour victory.

During the next few years he was a backbencher, but his shrewdness and dexterity in the cut and thrust of party warfare, combined with his vigour and good-humoured determination brought him into favour with the younger members of the National Party. After the 1938 election dissatisfaction with Hamilton, the leader of the Party, increased, and in 1940 it was clear that to make any impression on the electorate it was necessary to have a leader untainted by the party's depression policies.

Hamilton was also handicapped because, like Coates, he was a member of the War Cabinet, while Holland was able to campaign vigorously against Labour's domestic policy. In November 1940 at the party caucus he was elected leader with a majority on the first vote. In June 1942 Holland became a member of the war administration as Minister in Charge of War Expenditure and deputy chairman of the War Cabinet. The joint control of the war effort ended a short time later when the Director of Publicity refused to allow the publication of a statement of Holland's on war expenditure, and there was trouble about the treatment of the Huntly coal miners illegally on strike. Holland has been criticised for his part in ending the joint War Cabinet, but the majority of supporters of both parties were not in agreement with the arrangement. Party relations became normal and Holland set about rebuilding his party.

The split between the older and newer groups, which ended after the 1943 election, gave the latter a large majority and allowed Holland to get on with the task of rewriting the party policy, not as a negation of that of the Labour Party but on the basis that a system of aggressive free enterprise was preferable to State regulation. In the years prior to the 1946 election, Holland did everything to raise the party status in the eyes of the public but the Labour Party was returned with a majority of four. In 1949, however, the National Party gained 46 seats and Holland became Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. He quickly set about removing the remaining controls which had been retained since the war. Some difficulties resulted, partly due to his optimism and partly from the fact that business moved quickly when State control was dropped; but he learnt his lesson and some controls were retained. He called for greater production and did everything to see that it was brought about.

Within two years of assuming office, Holland was involved in the two most controversial acts of his administration, the abolition of the Legislative Council and the waterfront strike. The abolition of the Council had been first mooted in 1946, and in 1947 and 1949, as Leader of the Opposition, Holland had introduced a Bill to bring it about. In 1950 he packed the Council and with the National majority in the Lower House passed the Abolition Act. He has been criticised for not replacing the old Upper House with another, but more powerful, body. This was difficult without asking the Lower House to give up some of its powers. To date, however, single-chamber government has worked comparatively well.

The waterfront strike began in February 1951 when the Waterside Workers' Union withdrew its labour in a wage dispute. After a few days the Government declared a state of national emergency and used all its powers to break the strike. While Sullivan, the Minister of Labour, took charge of the negotiations, Holland was generally responsible for the Government action. He saw the struggle as one to decide who was to rule the country, and one to which there could be only one satisfactory answer. His handling of the strike was strongly criticised by the Labour Opposition when Parliament met. But he quickly and shrewdly took up the challenge when he dissolved Parliament and used the issue as one on which to fight the election. The result was most satisfactory for his party and showed that his actions generally had the country's approval. As Minister of Finance he was favoured by increasing prosperity though he had to face two balance of payments crises. These were due partly to inflation and partly to the relaxation of controls over imports.

His budgets were orthodox and the later ones reduced the proportion of the national income going to the State in taxation. In 1954, after the party had been returned with a somewhat reduced majority, he dropped the portfolio of Finance. The strain of office, however, continued to take its toll and during 1957 signs of deterioration in his health were obvious. At the National Party conference he nominated K. J. Holyoake as the new leader and shortly afterwards resigned the post of Prime Minister to remain in the Holyoake Cabinet without duties until after the general election.

He was nominated to the Privy Council in 1950 and appointed C.H. in 1951. On his retirement he was created G.C.B.

He lived quietly in Wellington for much of his retirement and for some time showed signs of improved health. During 1960 he suffered a stroke from which he did not completely recover. He died in Wellington on 5 August 1961.

Holland, though a New Zealander in every way, had a profound respect for the country's ties with Britain and the Empire and for maintaining its affection for the Queen and the Royal family. It was a source of great pride to him that the first visit of a ruling monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, to New Zealand took place during his term of office, marred though it was by the Tangiwai disaster.

As a young man, Holland was a keen sportsman, playing hockey for his province. He was later a leading referee and managed the New Zealand representative hockey team which toured Australia in 1932.

In 1920 he married Florence Beatrice Drayton. There were two sons and two daughters by the marriage.

Holland was a forthright man of great sincerity, widely respected for his frank and friendly manner. Though he could and did delegate work, he was a strong leader ruling his party with a firm hand. He proved himself a good administrator, sensitive to public feelings, but towards the end was disappointed to find the popularity of his party declining. He did not possess Fraser's knowledge of standing orders but he was a good Leader of the House, while his tact and obvious sincerity did much to soothe ruffled feelings. Despite his belief in the principles of private enterprise, he was not a deep political thinker definitely committed to party doctrine. Rather he was a practical New Zealander who looked at a problem and found what he thought was the most satisfactory solution regardless of politics. The result was that he was regarded as travelling down the middle of the road, leaving much of Labour's work untouched to the disappointment of some of his supporters.

Probably Holland's greatest work was the reshaping of the National Party to the changed political situation that resulted from the economic depression and the work of the Labour government. He gave the party a mission and moved it to a position somewhat to the left of that which it had held previously, and more in keeping with the feelings of the electors.

by James Oakley Wilson, D.S.C., M.COM., A.L.A., Chief Librarian, General Assembly Library, Wellington.

• Evening Post, 5 Aug 1961 (Obit)
• The Times (London), 7 Aug 1961 (Obit).

(1868–1933).

Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

A new biography of Holland, Henry Edmund appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

H. E. Holland was born on 10 June 1868 at Ginninderra, New South Wales, a few miles from Canberra. His father, Edward Holland, worked a small farm in the district and later became a building contractor. Young Harry attended a provisional school at Canberra and the Ginninderra public school; at the age of 14 years he was apprenticed as compositor on the Queanbeyan Times. His life in Australia was harsh and marked him with a certain bitterness and inflexibility. Shortly after his marriage in 1888 (to Annie McLahlen), he was for several years unemployed. This experience, combined with his voracious reading (especially Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Marx), the influence of early associates, and the economic and political environs of Sydney in the nineties converted him to a socialist viewpoint. It also caused him to leave the Salvation Army, to which he had been hitherto a devoted adherent. He spent the next 20 years of his life – until his departure for New Zealand in 1912 – editing various left-wing journals, organising unions, and engaging in political agitation to the left of the Australian Labour Party. In this period he was twice imprisoned; in 1896 he served three months for publishing a libel in his journal The Socialist, and in 1909 he was sentenced to three years for sedition, for inciting a crowd of men during the Broken Hill mine strike. He was released, however, after serving five months.

A picture of Holland the radical was given by Tom Mann, in 1908: “… a sturdy well filled man who looks about forty years of age with an interesting face, clean shaven, a delightful smile which comes seldom, a voice pitched rather high, his speech tumbling from him spurred on by the press of matter, impatient of the delay caused by applause, as full of his subject at the close as at the beginning of his effort, hammering with relentless force on point after point …”. In 1911 his health deteriorated and he suffered a knee infection which left him partly crippled. The following year, at the invitation of the Waihi Miners' Union, he came to New Zealand at the time of the Waihi mine strike. The New Zealand Labour Party Movement at this juncture was divided into two camps – the “moderates” represented by the trades councils and their Labour Party, and the “militants”, represented by the Federation of Labour and its weaker political associate, the Socialist Party. Holland's sympathies, of course, were with the “militants”. But the vigorous and novel methods used by the new Reform Government to defeat the Waihi strike frightened all sections of the Labour Movement and led, in 1913, to a serious attempt to attain unity. It was at the Basis of Unity Conference in January 1913, at which he represented the Socialist Party, that Holland first had opportunity to make an impression on the New Zealand Labour Movement.

Perhaps in consequence he was appointed editor of the Federation's paper the Maoriland Worker that year, a position he held until 1918. Shortly after his appointment, in the course of the 1913 strike, he was convicted of sedition and sentenced to his third term of imprisonment. Holland's ability in Court, which had been displayed as a union advocate in Australia and sometimes, because less judiciously, to his own disadvantage in self-defence, was again exemplified on this occasion and his Speech from the Dock, a defiant and dignified statement of his socialist beliefs, was subsequently published as a pamphlet. After his release, in September 1914, he stood for Wellington North in the 1914 general election as a candidate for the Social Democratic Party, but he was well beaten.

As editor of the Maoriland Worker during the First World War, Holland placed a socialist interpretation on the origins of the conflict, regarding it as a struggle between rival capitalist classes. He was an outspoken opponent of conscription, believing it to represent not only an intensified effort to prosecute an unjust and unnecessary war but also a means by which the governing class sought to coerce the workers and to destroy the growing strength of the socialist movement. The belief of Holland and some of his colleagues that the war was evidence of an international crisis in capitalism and, more specifically, that the unpopularity of wartime exigencies would make the New Zealand Government extremely vulnerable, was an important ingredient in their efforts in 1915–16 to secure unity in the Labour Movement.

Holland attended the Joint Conference in July 1916 at which the New Zealand Labour Party was formally established. In March 1918 he unsuccessfully stood for Labour at a by-election in Wellington North. A few months later, in June, when P. C. Webb was obliged to forfeit his seat as a military defaulter, he was elected for Webb's constituency of Grey. In the first session of 1919, Holland was elected Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, after a contest with James McCombs. The voting resulted in a tie and Holland won on the drawing of lots. In the subsequent 14 years, he led the Labour Party in five successive (and unsuccessful) general elections. From time to time, when Labour was the larger of the opposition parties and after the formation of the Reform-United Coalition in 1931, he was also Leader of the Opposition. As such, he died at Huntly on 8 October 1933, after he had collapsed at the funeral ceremony for Te Rata Mahuta, the Maori King. He was survived by his wife, five sons (a sixth died in infancy), and two daughters.

Almost throughout his leadership and certainly until the onset of the depression, Holland's chief tactical concerns were, first, to drive the Liberals and the Reform Party together in order to establish Labour as the only real alternative governing party; secondly, to win for the Labour Party the full support of the whole trade union movement. His fear of the role of the Liberal alternative was justified by Sir Joseph Ward's remarkable victory in 1928 – although had Labour won that year it might well have been denied the long tenure of office which followed after 1935.

The second question is more complex. Holland had to contend in the 1920s initially with the hostility and later with the aloofness of a new industrial organisation, the Alliance of Labour. It was one of his most consistent purposes to persuade the unions of the Alliance to affiliate with the Labour Party and, further, to win the votes of the members of those unions. He expounded the concept of “full unionism” as denoting support for the Labour Party in the political field and membership of and support for the union in the industrial field. The trade unionist who did not support the Labour Party might be an industrial unionist but he was a “political non-unionist”. It was to the failure of all trade unionists to support Labour that Holland attributed the 1928 defeat. As leader of the party he also spoke regularly in rural centres and he was a strong supporter of the “usehold” land policy. But one senses that, especially after the virtual abandonment of that policy in 1927 for the more popular refrain of cheaper credit, he was less interested in the need to broaden the base of Labour's support beyond the cities than were some of his politically more astute colleagues.

He was deeply interested in international affairs and often projected on to the international scene a partisan and rather oversimplified view, based on his domestic socialism. But despite his conspiratorial interpretation of capitalist crises, he sometimes showed a better grasp of the problems of the post-war world and a more mature conception of the developing Commonwealth relationship than did his more conventional adversaries on the opposing benches. It was the shock of Holland's international approach, the antithesis of “my country right or wrong” which most sharply marked him (and his party) as radical. The Reform Party counted it an advantage in an election advertisement to call Holland “an internationalist”. Massey, of course, was a patriot.

Holland was not, strictly speaking, an orthodox Marxist or a “scientific socialist” although he had read very widely and Marx had strongly influenced his thinking. He accepted the class struggle and, conditioned perhaps by the bitterness of his experiences and by a passionate temperament, he exhibited an often irrational militancy. But he came to believe that the aspirations of the working class could best be attained by the conquest of political power. The revolutionary socialist of earlier days gradually evolved into a democrat and a parliamentarian. He retained, however, a tendency to see issues too simply in terms of black and white and his emotional, often uncritical, attachment to a series of minority causes was reflected in his speeches and in his numerous pamphlets. As Leader, he exercised a stern discipline over the Parliamentary Labour Party, even prescribing appropriate reading for its members. In Parliament and on the platform he was a commanding figure, clear and compelling, armed with an apparently inexhaustible fund of knowledge and tending, with his metallic voice, to crush more than to persuade his listeners. He was not the man to allay the doubts of middle-class voters. While discontent was not openly expressed, there was some restiveness in the party in the later twenties and a feeling that a more astute, more varied, and less sectarian approach was necessary in order to win wider support.

Although Holland had considerable personal charm, he was never “popular” in the usually accepted sense. His dogmatism, his relentless logic, his lack of humour, and his disinclination to compromise did not win him public acclaim or private affection; rather they inspired respect or fear. Yet as he mellowed in the New Zealand political environment – aided, to some degree perhaps, by a sense of personal fulfilment – and as New Zealand became more accustomed to the presence of “extreme Labour”, respect came to outweigh fear, and often admiration replaced respect. His qualities of character and intellect, his triumph over ill health, his breadth of knowledge, and sensitivity of mind, spirit, and expression, well exemplified in his verse, commended themselves to his colleagues and percolated gradually into public opinion. His sudden death on 8 October 1933 inspired a wave of posthumous public affection and brought him tribute never given during his life.

Holland remains a great figure in New Zealand Labour history. But it may be doubted whether, had he lived, he could have equalled the success which Savage achieved in the later thirties. For essentially Holland's politics and leadership were of the era of the minority party.

by Bruce Macdonald Brown, M.A., New York Office, Department of External Affairs.

• Standard, 6 May 1937
• New Zealand Worker, 8 Nov 1933
• “The Life Story of H. E. Holland”,Standard, 31 Oct 1940–13 Feb 1941
• The Rise of New Zealand Labour, Brown, Bruce (1962).

The following days are observed as public holidays throughout New Zealand: New Year's Day, Second day of January, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day, Sovereign's birthday, Labour Day, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day.

The custom of holding public holidays on a Monday, if it so happened that they fell on a Saturday, apparently began in New South Wales and South Australia. According to a statement made in 1907 by Sir J. G. Ward, New Zealand was then prepared to approve the adoption of this practice.

Christmas and New Year Holidays

The Public Holidays Act of 1955 states that when Christmas Day and New Year's Day fall on a Friday, the observance as a holiday of Boxing Day and the second day of January is transferred to the following Monday, and when Christmas Day and New Year's Day fall on a Saturday and Sunday their observance as a holiday, together with that of Boxing Day and the second day of January, is transferred to the following Monday and Tuesday.

Anzac Day

Anzac Day is observed as a holiday only on 25 April and its observance is not transferred to any other day.

Sovereign's Birthday

Under the Sovereign's Birthday Observance Act of 1952, the birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second is observed as a public holiday not on her birthday, which is 21 April, but on the first Monday in June.

Labour Day

Labour Day is observed on the fourth Monday in October.

Provincial Anniversary Days

Provincial Anniversary Days are on the following dates: Auckland, 29 January; Canterbury, 16 December; Hawke's Bay, 1 November; Marlborough, 1 November; Nelson, 1 February; Otago and Southland, 23 March; Taranaki, 31 March; Wellington, 22 January; and Westland, 1 December.

But the holidays for these days are usually observed on the following Monday where this day falls on Friday or later, or on the preceding Monday where it falls on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. In some places the holiday is taken on a local show day; in others it has been transferred to the day before or after Easter regardless of the date of the anniversary. Thus the significance of the day has been lost.

Waitangi Day

According to the Waitangi Day Act of 1960, 6 February is to be observed as a national day of commemoration and thanksgiving for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Waitangi Day may be observed in any locality as a public holiday provided it is a substitute for any other – for example, a provincial anniversary day. At present, with the exception of Northland, it is not observed throughout New Zealand as a public holiday.

by John Sidney Gully, M.A., DIP.N.Z.L.S., Assistant Chief Librarian, General Assembly Library, Wellington.

(1902– ).

Editor, New Zealand Listener.

A new biography of Holcroft, Montague Harry appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

p>Montague Harry Holcroft was born at Rangiora on 14 May 1902 and educated at Christchurch Boys' High School. Going to Australia in 1921, he worked at several occupations, at the same time writing stories, articles, and essays for most Australian newspapers and magazines. Returning to New Zealand in 1926 he became for a short time subeditor of the Weekly Press, Christchurch, but still feeling the need of broader experience he went to London in 1928 for two years, travelling in France and North Africa. Back in New Zealand, he again wrote as a free lance till he joined the Southland Times, Invercargill, in 1937, as leader writer, becoming editor in 1946. Three years later he succeeded Oliver Duff as editor of the New Zealand Listener. From 1948 to 1954 he was a member of the National Commission for UNESCO, a member of the New Zealand Literary Fund Advisory Committee, and president of P.E.N. (New Zealand), 1957–61. He was the winner of the Centennial Literary Competition in 1940, and of the Hubert Church prize in 1945 and 1946. His publications include The Deepening Stream (1940), The Waiting Hills (1943), The Timeless World (1945), Discovered Isles (1951), Dance of the Seasons (1952), and Eye of the Lizard (1960).

This north Westland river, with its main branches, drains a 20-mile length of the main alpine divide; it is about 40 miles long. Before leaving the Southern Alps the Hokitika River is joined from the east by the Mungo River, of similar size, and then from the south by the Whitcombe River, which is actually larger than the Hokitika itself. None of these rivers has a low saddle at its head, although the Whitcombe saddle (4,025 ft) from the upper Rakaia was considered as a possible route from Canterbury in gold-rush days. To the west of the Alps the Hokitika River and its eastern tributary, the Kokatahi River have formed the Kowhitirangi-Kokatahi alluvial plain, one of the larger and more fertile plains of Westland. Where the river leaves the plain at Kaniere, 3 miles from the sea, it passes through one of the main alluvial goldfields of the 1860s. At that time the bar at the river mouth, always difficult for ships to negotiate, was the scene of many wrecks; the harbour is no longer used.

by Richard Patrick Suggate, M.A.(OXON.), D.SC.(N.Z.), F.R.S.N.Z., New Zealand Geological Survey, Christchurch.