(1807–87).

Soldier and colonial Governor.

A new biography of Browne, Thomas Robert Gore appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Thomas Gore Browne was born on 3 July 1807, the son of Robert Browne, J.P., D.L., of Morton House, near Buckingham, and Sarah Dorothea, second daughter of Gabriel Steward, M.P., of Nottingham and Melcombe, Dorset. Browne's father was a colonel of the Buckinghamshire Militia and his youngest brother, Edward Harold, was later Bishop of Winchester.

In 1824 Thomas Gore Browne was commissioned as an ensign in the 44th Foot Regiment, from which he exchanged to the 28th Foot in 1828. In 1832–35, as a captain, he served as aide-de-camp to Lord Nugent, High Commissioner in the Ionian Islands, where he acted for a tune as colonial secretary. As a major in the 41st Regiment he took part in the First Afghan War in 1842 and commanded the regiment for a short period. When Sir John England's force was repulsed at Haikalzai (in what J. W. Fortesque, the historian of the British Army, called “a foolish and most unnecessary little reverse”) Browne covered its retirement by forming square and beating off the Afghan horse. During the retirement through Khyber to India, Browne fought in the rearguard which was continually harassed. Fortesque was critical of Browne's superiors and wrote that “everything in this wretched campaign was of a piece, and from beginning to end it brought nothing but disgrace”. Browne, however, had fought bravely and was promoted to brevet lieutenant-colonel and awarded the C.B. On returning to England, Browne became lieutenant-colonel of the 41st Regiment. In 1851 he retired on half pay and was appointed Governor of St. Helena. Of his first governorship the Dictionary of National Biography can find nothing to say but that he improved the water supply.

In 1854 he married Harriet, daughter of James Campbell, of Craigie, Ayrshire, and in the same year he was appointed to succeed Sir George Grey as Governor of New Zealand. He arrived here in September 1855 to begin what he might, not unreasonably, have expected to prove a peaceful and not too strenuous office. Grey's optimistic dispatches had created the pleasant delusion that the worst problems of racial relations were solved, and that the Maoris and settlers were “insensibly forming one people”. Browne had been instructed to introduce responsible government, thus satisfying the demand of many leading settlers, and he was told by a newspaper that he would have nothing to do but to smoke his pipe and keep his temper and a good cook. But things proved otherwise, for during the interregnum since Grey's departure in December 1853 racial relations had begun to deteriorate. In some parts of the country, Maoris were complaining of the unscrupulous methods adopted by the Land Purchase Department, under Donald McLean, in buying Maori land. There was a growing antilandselling movement among the Maoris, and in Taranaki a feud had broken out between those Maoris who wished to sell and those who opposed selling land.

Responsible government was introduced in 1856, the colonial Ministers controlling domestic affairs, but Browne retained in his own hands, as the Imperial representative, the responsibility for administering Maori affairs, including Maori land purchases. Publicly he wrote that, since the Governor was responsible for the peace of the colony, he must have authority in Maori questions, but his real reason, expressed privately, was suspicion of the intentions of the settlers. This division of authority led to continual friction between Browne and the E. W. Stafford Ministry (2 June 1856–12 July 1861), especially when it became clear that the Imperial control in fact lay in the hands of McLean, the Native Secretary and Chief Land Purchase Commissioner, to whom Browne gave virtually unrestricted confidence and delegated his responsibility.

Because the House of Representatives was reluctant to grant funds for a policy administered by Browne and McLean, and McLean declined to administer measures introduced by the Ministers, almost nothing was done to extend the hopeful Maori policy of Grey. Indeed, Browne's only noteworthy measure of Maori policy was to relax restrictions on the sale of gunpowder and ammunition to the Maoris. Racial tension steadily increased; fighting among the Taranaki Maoris continued; the anti-landselling movement grew in strength; and in June 1858 the great tribes of Waikato, Taupo, and the central North Island elected a Maori King, to prevent land sales and to symbolise their antagonism to European settlement and their growing sense of nationalism.

Government policy was to ignore the King movement, confident that it would collapse, but the opposition to land sales could not be disregarded. The Maoris still owned most of the North Island, and Browne became convinced that the Europeans coveted this land and were determined to get it (as he wrote), “recte si possint, si non, quocunque modo [sic]” (fairly, if possible, if not, then by any means at all). On the other hand, he was convinced that only the violence of a few Maori extremists prevented the majority from selling adequate land to meet the settlers' needs, and this pressure of anti-landsellers (or “land leaguers”) he determined to resist. In 1858 he wanted to buy some land offered in the Waikato despite the opposition of the King party but was dissuaded by his advisers.

In Taranaki there was a danger that settlers would intervene in the Maori feud on the side of the “land sellers”, who were in a minority, and in 1858 the Government decided to treat Maoris fighting on European land as rebels. In March 1859 Browne announced this policy to a meeting of Maoris in New Plymouth, and added, on his own account, that while he would buy no Maori land without an undisputed title, he would not permit non-owners to prevent the rightful owners from selling to the Government. At once a Maori called Teira (Taylor) offered to sell land near the mouth of the Waitara River, but his right to sell was disputed by his chief, Wiremu Kingi (Te Rangitake), a leader of the anti-landselling Maoris. McLean and his assistant, R. Parris knew that this offer was impending, but had not informed Browne, whose words unintentionally sounded like an invitation to Teira, and who was taken aback by so immediate a challenge to put his precepts into practice.

Browne accepted Teira's offer, subject to proof of his title, but the investigation of ownership conducted by McLean and Parris was a sham. From the first, Browne and his advisers assumed that Kingi had no rights to the land, and regarded him as challenging the sovereignty of the Queen, but subsequent inquiries have shown beyond doubt that Kingi had not only the right, as the chief, to forbid the sale of communal land, but also had certain hereditary and personal claims to parts of the land in question. These were ignored by malice or undiscovered by carelessness, and in November Teira was paid an instalment. In February 1860, when officials commenced a survey of the land, they were resisted and the first Taranaki campaign began.

Though early in 1860 Browne had hoped, while intimidating Kingi, to avoid war, he grew more bellicose (the Maoris called him “Angry belly”). By mid-1861, after a truce had been arranged in Taranaki, he wanted to invade the Waikato to punish tribes that had joined in the Taranaki fighting, but was prevented by the alarm of the local General Assembly and the British Government. Grey was sent back to New Zealand and Browne was soon appointed Governor of Tasmania (1862–68) where he made little mark, and lamented that Governors were “silently dropping into the position of Consuls”.

Browne was awarded the K.C.M.G. in 1869. In 1870–71 he temporarily administered the Government of Bermuda. He died in London on 17 April 1887, survived by his wife and several children. He was a brave, religious, honest, and simple man, more suited to the quick decision of battle or the quiet society of his wife's musical evenings than to acting amidst the complexities of racial relations on a colonial frontier. His intentions towards the Maoris were the best, but he could match them neither with understanding nor affection; he had no liking for the smells of the pa, and he was unable to mix socially with the Maoris. His policy towards the disaffected Maoris jumped from long hesitancy to ill-considered action, and having made up his mind, he was too inflexible to change it or to admit the possibility of error; he “hoped and expected to put an end to many Maori difficulties by a vigorous and decisive act”. When Kingi would not yield, Browne acted like an exasperated man. He was, in New Zealand, well out of his emotional and intellectual depth.

by Keith Sinclair, M.A., PH.D., Professor of History, University of Auckland.

• Gore Browne Papers (MSS), National Archives
• The Origins of the Maori Wars, Sinclair, K. (1957).

(?–1841?).

Timber trader.

In partnership with two other prominent Sydney merchants, Thomas Raine and David Ramsay, Browne owned the Horeke timber and shipbuilding yard where Enterprise, New Zealander, and Sir George Murray were built by David Clark between 1826 and 1830, and where for a time Browne himself managed the timber side of the business.

After the bankruptcy of the firm in 1830 Browne recommenced timber operations at Mahurangi in 1832 either in partnership with Ranulph Dacre or on his account, moving, in 1835 or 1836, to Mercury Bay, where a stone wharf and New Zealand's first water-powered sawmill were erected in 1838. S. McD. Martin wrote that Browne was “in a great measure entitled to the credit of having established the timber trade in New Zealand”. But difficulties in fulfilling his contracts – spars for the navy and sawn timber for the Sydney market – drove him further and further into debt. He became a prey to religious melancholia and was placed in the care of a Mrs Swayne at the Bay of Islands, where he died either in late 1841 or early 1842.

by Ruth Miriam Ross, School Teacher and Authoress, North Auckland.

• O.L.C. files (MSS) National Archives
• The Old Whaling Days, McNab, R. (1913)
• New Zealand, Martin, S. McD. (1845)
• Historical Records of Australia, Watson, F. (1914–25).

(1860–1903).

Educationist.

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

On 9 December 1886, at Lichfield Street, Christchurch, Brown married Helen Connon (1860–1903), who was herself a notable personality in the academic life of Canterbury. She was born in 1860 in Melbourne, the eldest daughter of George Connon, a contractor, and Helen néée Hart. Her parents brought her to New Zealand at an early age and her mother, recognising Helen's obvious ability, encouraged her in every way. Eventually she attended Canterbury University College where, in 1880, she gained her B.A. She thus became the second woman to graduate from a British university – the first being her friend and later colleague Kate Evansne Edger. In the following year she gained an M.A., with firstclass honours in English and Latin. From 1882 to 1894 she was Principal of Christchurch Girls' High School, where her modern curricula and teaching methods made the school widely known. After her retirement in 1894 she visited Europe three times with her husband. Helen Macmillan Brown died on 22 February 1903 at Rotorua. Her name has since been perpetuated in Helen Connon Hall, a hall of residence for women students at Canterbury University, and in the Helen Macmillan Brown Bursaries.

• Short History of Canterbury College, Hight, J. and Candy, A. M. F. (1927)
• The University of New Zealand, Beaglehole, J. C. (1937)
• Life of Helen Macmillan Brown, Grossman, E. S. (1905).

(1846–1935).

University teacher and writer.

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

Macmillan Brown was born in 1846 at Irvine, Scotland, the son of a ship owner. He was educated at the Irvine Academy and at the University of Glasgow, where he gained first-class honours in mental philosophy and was awarded a Snell exhibition for five years. This enabled him to proceed in 1869 to Balliol College, Oxford, but he did not complete his course there for health reasons. In 1873–74 he worked in the geological survey of Scotland.

In 1875 Brown became one of the three foundation professors at Canterbury University College, his subjects being classics, English, and history. He soon showed exceptional ability at improvising to meet the difficult local conditions, and in his elementary courses in Greek and Latin “employed methods so original and effective that members of these classes were within a couple of years able to translate at sight from a wide range of literature”. Understandably the task of teaching full courses in the classics and in English, while at the same time offering help to students who wished to take philosophy and history, became too burdensome. Hence in 1879, encouraged by the great popularity of his English courses, Brown obtained the assent of the college to his becoming professor of English alone, though he still had history and political economy as “subsidiary interests”. In the teaching of English he again showed freshness and originality and was able to teach his students to write good English by a very effective, practical method, while at the same time stimulating them by his philosophical approach to literature. Unfortunately his health in 1895 obliged him to resign his chair. His former students established a university memorial prize in English composition to which, characteristically, he contributed £200 himself.

Brown had served as a member of the Royal Commission on Higher Education (1879–82); as a result of its recommendations all connections between the university and post-primary schools were severed, and new colleges were later established at Auckland and Wellington. He was a member of the Senate of the University of New Zealand from 1879, becoming Vice-Chancellor in 1916. In 1923 he was elected Chancellor in succession to Sir Robert Stout and retained this position until his death on 18 January 1935.

As a writer Brown's first enterprises were related to the needs of his teaching. He published an account of English literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and six studies of individual authors (Shakespeare, Shelley, and Carlyle), based on his course notes which were always very much in demand. In retirement he had leisure to develop certain wider interests. These first took the form of two works of fiction, published under the nom de plume “Godfrey Sweven”. Riallero (1897) has Swift's imagination (but not his bitterness) and uses his method of a voyage to imaginary islands (“The Archipelago of Exiles”) to satirise some tendencies in contemporary New Zealand. This was followed by Limanora (1903). Both books were too long (420 and 711 pages) and too elaborate to be popular but are often ingenious and repay perusal. Brown also wrote on education and in 1914 an account of travel in the Dutch East Indies.

His three books on Pacific anthropology are probably his most considerable literary work and constitute a massive contribution to learning, based on what had become the major interest of his latter years. Brown travelled widely throughout the Pacific area, taking many interesting photographs and building up an extensive collection of artefacts from many different islands. Maori and Polynesian (1907) stresses the Caucasian element in the Maori people. The Riddle of the Pacific (1924) grapples with the problem of the Easter Island statues and script. People and Problems of the Pacific (1927) surveys in two large volumes the peoples of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia and examines the evidence of their origins. It is perhaps regrettable that Brown had time to study Pacific problems only at the end of a full and busy life, as, though he achieved much in his books, marshalling formidable armies of facts with undismayed vigour and an admirable tenacity, he worked in a field where others were destined to achieve more permanent results.

Brown's generosity to university education was not limited to the unstinted dedication of his time. In 1920 he gave £1,000 to provide bursaries for students at Helen Connon Hall. In the same year his service as relieving professor of English at Otago was marked by his donation of £250, the interest to provide an annual prize for English composition. In 1923 he gave the same sum to Canterbury College for a similar prize. By his will Brown left his anthropological collection and his library to Canterbury together with provision for its upkeep. He also left money towards a library building and for the foundation of a school of Pacific studies.

Although Brown's career was in some degree shaped by the needs of his time, yet his versatility is remarkable even in an age when New Zealand's university education was struggling into existence on derisively slender resources. His whole career is evidence of the exceptional demands made on our first generation of university teachers and Brown's response was perhaps the most generous and wholehearted of that indefatigible generation. “He was the dominating personality in the first twenty years of the College life, and his energy and enthusiasm never flagged.” He was always able to find time to help students individually and kept up a close and friendly relationship with those he taught. His writings show him as a man of great gifts, of considerable intellectual power. He achieved distinction in several unrelated disciplines.

by David Oswald William Hall, M.A., Director, Adult Education, University of Otago (retired).

Also known as Bevan-Brown (1854–1926).

Headmaster.

Charles Edmund Bevan Brown was born in 1854 at Camelford, North Cornwall, the son of the Rev. William Robert Brown, a Methodist minister, and of Eliza, née Pearce. He was educated at the Louth and Bristol Grammar Schools and, in 1873, won an Oxford Leaving Scholarship. In 1874 he gained an open scholarship to Lincoln College, where he was a contemporary of H. H. Asquith, Herbert Gladstone, George Curzon, and Oscar Wilde. He studied classics and, in 1878, took second-class honours in Literae humaniores. While at Oxford he was influenced by Jowett, Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. The latter almost destroyed his faith in religion. Later, however, he became an Anglican. From 1879 Bevan Brown was assistant master at Manchester Grammar School, but in 1883, when T. Millar resigned the headmastership of Christchurch Boys' High School following a disagreement with the Board of Governors, Bevan Brown was selected to succeed him. At first, partly because many parents sympathised with the former headmaster and partly because of his successor's inexperience, the school declined in numbers; but after 1886, when the new headmaster's abilities began to be appreciated, the rolls increased once more. From 1883 until 1920 Bevan Brown remained at Christchurch Boys' High School. In 1899 the New Zealand Government offered him the position, which he declined, of Inspector-General of Schools; a few years later, however, he became president of the Secondary Schools' Conference. During the First World War Bevan Brown presented a pocket Bible to each of the 800 old boys who served overseas and corresponded regularly with them. He retired in December 1920. During his early years at Christchurch Boys' High School the pupils surreptitiously nicknamed him “Balbus”—from an example he often quoted in his Latin classes. The name stuck and, when he retired, the old boys presented him with a silver trowel on which were inscribed the words of the old tag Balbus inurum aedificavit (“Balbus has built his wall”). During his last years Bevan Brown was a semi-invalid. He was an ardent supporter of the Young Citizens' League; but, apart from attending the meetings of that body, he seldom appeared in public.

In 1884, at Exeter, England, Bevan Brown married Annie Allen, daughter of Augustus Cridland. He died at Dunedin on 14 June 1926, being survived by his widow and three sons.

Bevan Brown believed that the principal aim in teaching should be to build character and that scholastic attainment was not the only criterion of a person's educational standing. He attached immense importance to religion and religious observance and personally superintended the instruction of his senior classes in that subject.

by Bernard John Foster, M.A., Research Officer, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.

• Christchurch Boys' High School Magazine, Jubilee Number 1881–1931
• Sun (Christchurch), 15 Jun 1926 (Obit)
• Press (Christchurch), 15 Jun 1926 (Obit).

(1820–1901).

First Superintendent of Taranaki.

Charles Brown was born in London in 1820, the only son of Charles Armitage Brown (1786–1842), and Abigail O'Donohue, an Irish peasant woman, in whose care he spent his infancy.

Charles Armitage Brown had been engaged in the Russian trade, but when this fell away he entered the post-Napoleonic European literary world, where he became a close friend of such figures as Keats, Hood, and Walter Savage Landor. On Keats' death he took his son to Italy, settling in Florence until 1834, when considerations of young Charles' education necessitated a return to England. They settled at Plymouth, where Charles senior became interested in the Plymouth Company, editing their journal, until finally, in 1841, father and son emigrated to New Zealand in the first ships sent out by the Company, Charles arriving on the Amelia Thompson, and his father a few weeks later on the Oriental. Charles brought the machinery for a small sawmill, which he lost no time in erecting and, with his father, formed the firm “Charles Brown and Son”, one of the first business enterprises in Taranaki. On his father's death a few months later, Charles took his place as one of the political leaders of the colony. He was returned to represent New Plymouth in the New Ulster Legislative Council in 1852 and, on proclamation of the Constitution Act soon afterwards, was elected first Superintendent of Taranaki Province, holding this office from 16 July 1853 to 13 December 1857. He envisaged his role as Superintendent to be that of an officer, representing the whole body of electors, in whom was centred the executive power of the province. As such, he deemed it to be his duty to act, if necessary, as a check upon the majority view of the Provincial Council whenever he considered this not to reflect the best interests of the province. As first Superintendent, Brown was responsible for instituting the provincial system of government in Taranaki, and it was generally conceded that he acquitted himself well in the task.

He was elected to the House of Representatives on 8 November 1855 as member for Grey and Bell, and sat until 16 August 1856, when he retired to contest the Superintendency. During the session he became Colonial Treasurer in the short-lived Fox ministry (May–June 1856). As the time for the provincial dissolution approached, the proprietors of the Taranaki Herald decided to oppose Brown's candidacy and he was defeated by George Cutfield. He then founded, and became principal proprietor of, a new paper, the Taranaki News, a weekly whose first issue appeared on 14 May 1857. Brown managed this paper until he went on active service in 1860. He had become captain of the Taranaki Militia in 1855 and, when the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers were formed in 1859, he was appointed senior captain of the regiment. He served in the campaign following upon the Waitara Purchase, seeing his first action at Manutahi, and led the local colonial troops, who, with British Regulars under Colonel Murray, were sent to relieve settlers endangered at Omata, in the Waireka engagement (March 1860). Although inexperienced in military affairs, Brown distinguished himself by undertaking to relieve Jury's farm, where many of the wounded were concentrated, and Governor Gore-Brown promoted him to the rank of major in recognition of the feat. One of his junior volunteer officers in this engagement was H. A. Atkinson.

Brown continued his political career concurrently with his military service. He regained the Grey and Bell seat in 1858, when he defeated F. D. Bell, and held it until his militia service claimed his full attention. He represented New Plymouth town in 1864–65 and in 1868–70. He was again Superintendent of the province (1861–65), and represented New Plymouth in the Provincial Council (1866–69), (1874–76). He contested the Superintendency in 1873, but was defeated by F. A. Carrington. In his second Superintendency he originated and carried out the scheme whereby the Government authorised a £200,000 loan to compensate Taranaki settlers who lost their property during the war. After the war Brown carried on business in New Plymouth. For many years he was in partnership with John Duthie (who later founded the Wellington hardware firm, and became a member of the House of Representatives) in an ironmongery firm “Brown and Duthie”. He also held Lloyd's agency for Taranaki. When he retired from business, he utilised his wide knowledge of the Maori language and customs as an interpreter in the New Plymouth Police Court. When returning home from interpreting a case on 2 September 1901 he was struck by a train on the Devon Street railway crossing and killed.

Brown married twice; in 1851, to Margaret Joy Horne (who died in 1875), daughter of an early Taranaki settler; and in 1881 to Jessie, daughter of W. Northcroft; and by these he had five daughters and two (twin) sons. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Brown later joined the Church of England, in which faith he raised his family.

Although lacking the higher education enjoyed by many of his political contemporaries, Charles Brown succeeded by his caution, sound commonsense, and perseverance to one of the most important administrative positions in the colony. His greatest work belonged to the early days of colonisation, when his ability as an administrator and as a militia officer contributed significantly to the prosperity of the province in which he spent most of his life. He came to New Zealand when Hobson was Governor, and lived to see the liberal era of Richard John Seddon; his long life encompassed those of Atkinson, Ballance, Vogel, FitzGerald, and many other notable figures whom he knew personally.

by Bernard John Foster, M.A., Research Officer, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.

• Taranaki Provincial Gazette (1853–56)
• History of Taranaki, Wells, B. (1878)
• Taranaki Herald, 3 Sep 1901 (Obit).

(1803–84).

Pioneer missionary.

A new biography of Brown, Alfred Nesbit appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

Alfred Nesbitt Brown was born at Colchester on 23 October 1803. At the age of 20, having decided to become a missionary, he abandoned the study of law and trained, first, in the home of the Rev. Edward Bickersteth, and then in the Church Missionary Society's newly opened Training Institute at Islington. He was ordained deacon on 10 June 1827 and priest on 1 June 1828. In the following year he married and, shortly after, sailed for New Zealand, arriving at Paihia, after a short stay in Sydney, on 29 November 1829. He was the third ordained minister in the country. Brown never returned to Britain and spent the remaining 55 years of his life working in the mission field.

Brown stayed at Paihia for four years, taking charge of the school for European children, but by 1833–34 the mission began to emerge from its first struggle to survive and, for the first time since Hongi began his raids, the missionaries started systematically to explore the country as a step towards expanding their activities. In October and November 1833 Brown, with Henry Williams, Fairburn, and Morgan, went up the Thames Valley and reached Matamata pa, where they were hospitably received by the Maoris and their chief Te Waharoa. Returning, they selected Puriri as a mission site. In February 1834 Brown and James Hamlin sailed from the Bay of Islands to Kaipara Harbour and, from there, walked south to the Waikato. Hongi's raids had left almost unoccupied the region which Brown and Hamlin traversed; consequently there were no canoes in which to cross rivers. Their food supply rapidly diminished and had to be augmented by fern root, the stems of palm trees, and tawa berries. On 19 March they came to the Waikato River, which they ascended as far as Ngaruawahia and then crossed to Whaingaroa (Raglan) and south to Kawhia. From Kawhia they travelled east to the headwaters of the Waipa River, down the Waipa by canoe to Ngaruawahia, and on down the Waikato to its junction with the Maramarua. Going up this river and overland to the north-east they came to the Firth of Thames and, from there, reached the newly established mission station at Puriri. This journey took nearly five months and was one of the finest in the history of the mission. Another followed in August 1834, when Brown and Wm. Williams returned to the Waikato and Tauranga to select a site for a permanent mission station. The site chosen was at Matamata pa, and there Brown began work early in the following year.

Less than a year later a skirmishing war broke out between the Maoris of the Tauranga district and those of Rotorua. Brown did his best to prevent or limit the hostilities, but eventually it was decided to abandon the Matamata station. Before settling with his family at Tauranga in 1838 Brown accompanied Marsden when, on his last visit to New Zealand, he sailed around the North Island in the Rattlesnake, commanded by Captain Hobson. At Tauranga missionary work was still distracted by the endemic warfare; only towards the end of 1844 was there peace between the Rotorua and Tauranga tribes and, for the first time, Brown had a comparatively peaceful district in which to work. Peace, for Brown, was not an unqualified blessing. Renewed European settlement, he believed, exposed the Maoris to inevitable degradation and misery. Moreover, after Bishop Pompallier's visit to Tauranga in March 1840, he feared that his own work would be imperilled by the arrival in the district of Roman Catholic missionaries; the “unremitting assaults of Popery” left Brown angry and bitter.

Brown was created Archdeacon of Tauranga on 31 December 1843 and thereafter spent about four months of each year on visits around his archdeaconry, which included the Rotorua and Tarawera areas, as well as the vicinity of Tauranga. In 1850 he told Bishop Selwyn he had to walk 700 miles to administer the Lord's Supper to 800 communicants. His energy and devotion could not disguise, however, the gradual decline in the success of the mission. By the 1850s, in spite of the steady development of church organisation, the number of converts was decreasing and there appeared to be a marked deterioration in the religious behaviour of the Maoris. The Maori wars of the sixties seriously crippled the work of the mission. In 1863 the Theological Training and Boarding School, started only two years before, had to be disbanded and was never reassembled. The mission house at Tauranga became a refuge for all the European women in the district and, during the battles of Gate Pa and Te Ranga, Brown tended the wounded, comforted the dying, and buried the dead, both Maori and Pakeha. For a short while, in July 1863, Brown was driven from his station to Auckland. After hostilities ceased, settlers came to occupy the confiscated land and the district was never a wholly Maori one again. For a long time the influence of Hauhauism kept the Maoris in an unsettled state, and Brown's last years gave him little hope for the future. He died on 7 September 1884.

In his work Brown contended with poor health; he was a very bad sailor and, in the 1840s, he suffered painful eye trouble. In 1845 his only son Marsh died at the age of 14 and Brown, deeply torn, wrote Brief Memorials of an Only Son and founded a scholarship in his memory at St. John's College, Auckland. His wife, Charlotte, who with his daughter Celia had helped him to run his Maori schools, died in 1855. Five years later Brown married Christina Johnston.

It was Brown's ambition “to live & die a humble missionary”. He opposed suggestions that he should be made a bishop and worked unobtrusively at his station. He was uncompromising and bigoted, suspicious of the “liberal spirit” of the times and rigidly self-righteous. Respecting few of his contemporaries in New Zealand, he did not have many friends, though he valued his association with William Williams. Yet Brown could show kindness and a certain scholarly charm and, in the wars of the 1860s, his integrity and impartiality were displayed in an extraordinarily difficult and distressing situation.

by Timothy Holmes Beaglehole, M.A.(N.Z.), PH.D. (CAMB.), Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Victoria University of Wellington.

• A History of the Church Missionary Society, Stock, E. A. (1899)
• Bay of Plenty Times, 9 Sep 1884 (Obit).

(Carmichaelia spp.).

This genus of brooms, on first acquaintance, appears quite out of keeping with New Zealand vegetation; yet species are found in many types of habitat throughout the country. Thirty-eight species are in fact endemic, and there is only one other species in the genus, C. exsul, which is found in Lord Howe Island.

The plants are mostly broom-like shrubs which are almost leafless. When leaves are present, they occur on young plants or on plants growing in the shade, and are small and insignificant. Stems on the other hand are mostly flattened, green and, in some species, up to half an inch wide; they therefore take the place of leaves. Habits of the species differ greatly. Some are bushy plants, some mat plants, while others are almost tree-like with bushy heads. Flowers are mostly small, purplish, are single or borne in simple or branched racemes and, since the genus belongs to the Papilionaceae, they form pods. These present some of the main diagnostic features separating the species, many of which are difficult to identify, a difficulty that is added to by possible hybridisation.

C. arborea is the tallest growing species reaching heights of 15 ft. It has narrow compressed branchlets about one-tenth of an inch across. Confined to the South Island, it occurs in shrubland or along forest margins mainly west of the divide. A species with showy flowers and half-inch-wide branchlets is C. williamsii, confined naturally to a few spots in the North Island but now widely cultivated. It is an attractive garden plant. Several species are found in forest openings along stream and river banks or lake shores. Some occur widely, while others have local distributions only. Thus C. aligera is principally a North Auckland species found along forest margins. C. sylvatica is known only from the Waipoua River in Waipoua Forest. Five peculiar species are almost mat-forming plants growing in dry situations. Four of these occur on dry river terraces and in tussock grassland east of the South Island Main Divide, while the fifth, C. orbiculata, grows on the Volcanic Plateau of the North Island.

Three closely related genera of native brooms are Corallospartium, Notospartium, and Chordospartium. Corallospartium crassicaule is known as the coral broom because of the deeply grooved branchlets, while N. torulosum or pink broom is cultivated for its prolific flowering habit.

by Alec Lindsay Poole, M.SC., B.FOR.SC., F.R.S.N.Z., Director-General of Forests, Wellington.

(1850–1931).

Surveyor and administrator.

A new biography of Brodrick, Thomas Noel appears in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography on this site.

T. N. Brodrick was born in St. Mary's Parish, Islington, London, on 25 December 1850, the son of Thomas Brodrick, banker and agent, and Mary Ann, née Potts. Brodrick came to New Zealand with his parents in 1858, and later was apprenticed to G. F. Richardson. In April 1877 he joined the Lands and Survey Department as assistant surveyor for South Canterbury, being also rabbit inspector and road surveyor. He was then stationed at Banks Peninsula, later transferring to Invercargill.

Thomas Brodrick became District Surveyor for South Canterbury in April 1888, with headquarters at Timaru. One of his mountain surveys there included the discovery and mapping of a new route to the West Coast, from Lake Ohau to Paringa. He also mapped the Mueller, Murchison, Classen, Godley, Richardson, and Tasman Glaciers, and on the latter he built the Malte Brun and Ball huts. In 1895 he was transferred to North Canterbury, and in 1904 subdivided the 57,000-acre Flaxbourne estate in Marlborough. In July 1906 he became chief surveyor and land officer at Gisborne, and a member of the Tairiawhiti Maori Land Board; Commissioner of Crown Lands at Hawke's Bay, May 1909; at Wellington, August 1910; and at Canterbury, 1912. He was appointed Under-Secretary of Lands, and head of the Lands and Survey Department in August 1915, and directed the returned servicemen's land resettlement scheme, in which he acquitted himself so successfully that he was awarded the O.B.E. In addition to his official duties, he was a member of the New Zealand Air Board, the State Advances Board, and the Land Purchase Board. On his retirement in 1920, he was made a Companion of the Imperial Service Order. He died at Martinborough on 12 July 1931. On 30 March 1881, at St. Peter's, Akaroa, Brodrick married Helen, daughter of Justin John Aylmer, the Resident Magistrate, and by her he had two sons and one daughter.

• Evening Post, 14 Jul 1931 (Obit)
• Dominion, 19 Jul 1931 (Obit).

(Griselinia littoralis).

This is a common hardwood tree throughout the mixed and beech forests of the North, South, and Stewart Islands from lowland altitudes to subalpine scrub. The specific name littoralis, meaning coastal, is really a misnomer since the tree is principally found away from the coast. It grows to heights of about 30 ft or somewhat more, and has a short gnarled trunk dividing into many branches and a wide spreading crown. The leaves are broad and rounded, thickish and somewhat glossy on the upper surface. They are especially relished by browsing animals in general, cattle, goats, and deer. Deer will in fact readily eat the yellowed leaves as they fall from the crowns and they will reach as high as they can for fresh leaves. The flowers are very small, and male and female are borne on separate trees. The fruit is a small, dark purple drupe.

There are only about eight species in the genus Griselinia. The distribution of them is interesting, since six are confined to Chile and two, including G. littoralis, to New Zealand. The other native species is a handsome large-leaved tree, G. lucida or puka, which occurs throughout lowland forest both in the North and in the South Islands. The thick, rounded leaves are from 4 to 8 in. long, very unequally sided at the base and glossy above. This species frequently grows as an epiphyte on tall trees when it sends down long roots which grow to the soil and sometimes reach a thickness of 6 in.

by Alec Lindsay Poole, M.SC., B.FOR.SC., F.R.S.N.Z., Director-General of Forests, Wellington.