Poet to Stay in Dunedin

For the second time in one year, James K. Baxter, the New Zealand poet and playwright, has deferred leaving his native Dunedin to return to his adopted Wellington. And this time he will be staying here ‘for quite a while.’

The first person to win the University of Otago’s Robert Burns Fellowship for two successive years (1966 and 1967), Mr Baxter is nearing the end of his second year of the Fellowship. ‘But I’ve decided to stay here, at least for some considerable time,’ he said yesterday. ‘It’s certainly true to say that Dunedin itself influenced my decision – I happen to like the old place – but I also have family reasons for doing so.’ (Mr Baxter’s parents still live at his boyhood home near Brighton.)

He has already made his choice of employment for his prolonged stay in Dunedin: ‘It can be summed up as education and pastoral work for the Catholic Church.’ (Mr Baxter became a convert to Roman Catholicism several years ago.) Such work, he explained, will include teaching English and English literature to senior forms of local Catholic high schools, lecturing students for the priesthood at Mosgiel’s Holy Cross College, and working for the Catholic Education Centre in Dunedin. He will also continue to be a regular contributor of articles to the Catholic weekly newspaper, the Tablet, which is published in Dunedin. ‘In my high school teaching, I’d like page 434 to perhaps concentrate on New Zealand verse and possibly the romantic poets,’ Mr Baxter said. ‘I’ll also be looking after some work for the Catholic correspondence schools.’

School teaching will be no new experience for Mr Baxter, although it is some years since he taught at various schools in the North Island. During a varied career, he has also worked for the Department of Education in Wellington (where he lived before returning to Dunedin in 1966).

Mr Baxter (41) is married and has a son of fourteen and a daughter aged eighteen.

1967 (469)