Passageways: The Story of a New Zealand Family

by Ann Thwaite

Author Ann Thwaite's eight great grandparents all arrived in New Zealand between 1858 and 1868. Their family names were Harrop, Sales, Campbell, Brown, Valentine, Maxwell, Jefcoate, and Oliver. In this book, Ann Thwaite looks at her grandparents' reasons for migration, at how they fared once they settled, and at their participation in gold-digging, farming, road-making, school-teaching, and surveying. Both of her parents were graduates of Canterbury University and A.J. Harrop was a respected New Zealand historian. Ann explains how she and her brother David came to be born in England and how, early in World War II, they were taken to their New Zealand relatives for safety, returning to the UK five years later, with a deep love for the country. This highly readable family history is an engaging portrait of a brilliant and unconventional New Zealand/British family.

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Ann Thwaite is a British writer who is the author of five major biographies. AA Milne: His Life was the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (Duff Cooper Prize, 1985) was described by John Carey as "magnificent - one of the finest literary biographies of our time". Glimpses of the Wonderful about the life of Edmund Gosse's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.J. Taylor in The Independent as one of the "Ten Best Biographies" ever. Her biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett was originally published as Waiting for the Party (1974) and reissued in 2020 with the title Beyond the Secret Garden, with a foreword by Jacqueline Wilson. Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife (1996) was reissued by Faber Finds for the Tennyson bicentenary in 2009.