Hilary Baxter: Nothing humdrum about Hilary

Hilary came from illustrious literary stock. Her parents, James K. Baxter and Jacqueline C. Baxter (née Sturm) were both prominent poets, while her paternal grandparents, Archibald and Millicent Baxter, were renowned pacifists. She described herself as ‘descended, through her mother, from the Taranaki and Whakatohea tribes and, through her father, from the MacMillans of the Western Highlands; [with] a strong affinity with these ancestral ties.’ (Back cover, The Other Side of Dawn, 1987). 

Soon after Hilary’s birth on 18 June 1949, her father wrote to his parents: ‘She seems so fragile and small that I am afraid to touch her. It is a great privilege to have a child to look after.’ (McKay, 1990, p. 121). 

In 1952, renowned painter and family friend, Colin McCahon, gifted a painting of Mary with her child, Jesus, to the Baxter family to mark the McCahons becoming Hilary’s godparents. Baxter reciprocated with a poem dedicated to the painter: ‘To Colin McCahon.’ (Simpson, 1995). 

In 1949, the same year that Hilary was born, Jacquie completed her B.A. A couple of years later, in 1952, Jacquie gave birth to John and gained a M.A. in Philosophy (first class honours), thought to be the first degree of its kind awarded to a Māori woman. This balancing of motherhood and study was no small achievement for a woman in postwar New Zealand. At the same time, Jim Baxter was completing his B.A. at Wellington’s Victoria University and his teacher’s qualification certificate at Wellington Teachers’ College.  

When Hilary was born, the Baxters lived in a cold flat in the Lower Hutt suburb of Belmont. A move to Wellington followed, first to Wilton, then the purchase of a home in Ngaio in 1956. By then, Jim’s alcoholism was taking a huge toll on his family until he stopped drinking through AA in the mid-1950s (conversation with John Baxter, 2020).  

In ‘Daughter’ her father describes giving Hilary a shoulder-ride after picking her up from playcentre:  

You’d ride like a jockey up Messines Road  

Thumbs in my eyes …  

A red-suited penguin!

(J.K Baxter, Collected Poems, 1979, pp. 354-5).  

Hilary harks back to this happier time in one of her own poems, ‘Reminiscence’: 

I remember as a child  

my father would carry me  

high up on  

his shoulders or head  

I would suffocate  

in the red knitted jumpsuit  

and father wearing 

his old gabardine coat  

He would gallop through 

the Karori bush 

with me precariously above  

across the paths banks  

lost streams  

made of wet brown leaves

(The Other Side of Dawn, 1987, p. 20). 

By 1957, Jim and Jacquie had separated. But a year later, Jacquie took Hilary and John to India on a P&O Liner where they reunited with their father, who had a visiting fellowship with UNESCO. Back in New Zealand, at age 12, Hilary was removed from Onslow College against her will and sent to Marycrest, a Catholic boarding school for ‘wayward’ girls near Ōtaki. Monthly visits were permitted, and her parents would usually take her out on those Sundays. But Hilary’s unhappy experience at Marycrest affected her for the rest of her life. Her brother recalls Hilary as a ‘lovely and protective older sister,’ at least until the time she left for boarding school. After then, he felt that he had lost her or, at least, the sister to whom he had once been close (conversation with John Baxter, July 2020). 

Throughout her life, Hilary maintained a lively correspondence, including with old family friends such as the composer, Douglas Lilburn. Between 1964 and 1966, she wrote several letters to Lilburn. The first, written at Marycrest, addressed him as ‘Dear Godfather’ and thanked him for his Christmas gift of £5, which she had used to buy some ‘chunky, tan-coloured wool to knit a jumper for myself.’ (Lilburn’s correspondence, 26 August 1964).

In a later letter, Hilary, by then living in Dunedin, asked the composer in his role as ‘her godfather and a bachelor’ for a loan: ‘I’ve managed to incur several debts at different dress stores in Dunedin…and if I don’t finish paying before Christmas I’ll be definitely brought up in court… I’m too scared to tell Dad and Mum about all this and anyway I know he wouldn’t help me out.’ (Lilburn’s correspondence, 4 December 1966). Two collect telegrams followed seeking an urgent loan of £30, addressed to Lilburn’s workplace at Victoria University’s Music Department (Lilburn’s correspondence, 28 December 1966). In a terse reply, the composer asked her to refrain from any more financial requests, reminding her of the help he and Charles Brasch had already given her.  

Spending beyond her means became a lifelong pattern for Hilary. Down on her luck and with debts mounting, she would approach friends and acquaintances for a loan. Sometimes, she held true to her guarantee of repayment. But even many of those sympathetic to her plight eventually became irritated, and sometimes even alienated, by these requests.  

When she was 17, Hilary rejoined her family in Dunedin where her father held Otago University’s Burns Fellowship. A brief stint at St. Philomena’s Catholic Girls School as a day pupil was abandoned for a series of boyfriends and adventures. Around this time, Hilary underwent a harrowing and life–changing experience: she was gang raped by a group of bikies in an event which caused significant and lasting trauma (conversation with John Baxter, July 2020).  

Despite her transitory and challenging early life, Hilary’s spirit remained strong. Fearless about expressing her beliefs, she did not shy away from society’s rejects. In his eulogy, the publisher Roger Steele, describes how ‘Hilary was attracted to society’s outcasts and the downtrodden’: 

During the 1960s, she ‘half-adopted a wild-child persona, but to an extent had it thrust upon her. She was a product of the ’60s — when a new order was emerging, and it was time to challenge the old. She was a rebel, with a cause.

(Roger Steele, eulogy for Hilary, 2013).  

In 1968, Hilary gave birth to a daughter, Stephanie Te Kare Baxter. Soon after, she was admitted to the Waikari adolescent mental health unit where she was given several doses of LSD: an experimental treatment being carried out in Dunedin at that time. This ‘therapy’ led to religious hallucinations. It was also the beginning of her involvement with the psychiatric services, according to her brother. 

Hilary had just turned 19 when Stephanie was born. In a poem entitled ‘Lioness,’ her mother describes how Hilary, a former bikie, transformed into a protective mother. Like a lioness, she was ever alert to signs of danger (Dedications, 1996, p. 42). Jacquie brought up Stephanie, formally adopting her when s]he was two years old. In 1970, Hilary gave birth to a son, Stephen Joseph, but later finding herself unable to cope, gave him up for adoption; a source of great sadness for her (conversation with John Baxter, July 2020). 

Jim Baxter died of a coronary thrombosis on 22 October 1972, aged 46. A devastated Hilary was 23 years old at the time. 

The year after her father’s death, Hilary wrote a poem entitled ‘October 1972’ dedicated to him: 

My joy is a tribal joy 

My loneliness is strong loneliness  

and my sorrow 

is pathways of flowers 

leading to the river  

where the taniwha moves  

And the moreporks called  

for a barefoot father  

My father  

disciple of the Māori Christ  

I hear an old man singing  

and there is sunlight in his hair

(The Other Side of Dawn, 1973, p. 32). 

The Poet 

Hilary began writing at 14. In the 1960s, her poems were published in university and counter-culture magazines, including Earwig and Salient, which published ‘North Winds Blowing’ and ‘For You Know Who’ in 1969.  

Her only collection of poems, The Other Side of Dawn, was published in 1987 by the Wellington-based Spiral Women’s Collective. Her brother, John, illustrated its cover (The Other Side of Dawn can be read online through the Christchurch Art Gallery here.

Spiral editors, Juliet Raven and Jane Bowron, describe how Hilary – ‘a grandmother, occasional writer, labourer and traveller’ – ‘[spoke] for voices that are seldom heard in our community: “the people of the invisible dark.”’ (The Other Side of Dawn, p. 3). Among them were the junkies of Auckland’s Grafton in the 1960s and the world of New Zealand’s bikie gangs, written from an insider’s perspective. Hilary’s trajectory away from her literary lineage towards being a poet in her own right is described thus: ‘She sees what she has written as recalling many stages of her life to date; moving out from the shadow of her literary background and parentage: – the writer J C Sturm and the late poet-playwright, James K Baxter – into her own creativity.’ (The Other Side of Dawn, back cover).  

Following her death, the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA) paid tribute to Hilary: ‘The poems show the influence of American minimalist and free verse forms of poetry such as the Beat Movement of the 1950s that used Asian forms like Zen haiku and the I Ching/Book of Changes.’ (‘Tribute to Hilary Baxter’, 2014, p. 13). 

The Wanderer

Eternally restless, Hilary lived in many parts of Aotearoa and Australia: Dunedin, Auckland, Cape Rēinga, the Whanganui River, and Darwin. She also worked on prawn boats in Western Australia and as a cleaner, labourer and barmaid.  

By 1987, when The Other Side of Dawn was published in Wellington, she was living in Darwin, having developed ‘an unexpected attachment’ to this northernmost Australian city. Several poems evoke the strange mix of intensity and listlessness of life in the extreme heat and humidity of Australia’s far north and the foreignness of its ‘stingers and sea wasps’ and ‘the great wondrous Timor Sea’ (‘Darwin’, The Other Side of Dawn, p. 49). 

She dedicates one poem to Johnno, her then Australian lover and father of her third child, Jesse. The last verse of ‘For Johnno’ reads:  

And sultry nights incognito 

Nights derelict at the pub  

Nights the roughest  

I have known and I  

A wanderer from way back

(The Other Side of Dawn, pp. 44-45). 

Jesse was born in 1989 in Sydney. Soon after, Hilary moved into a special unit for women suffering postpartum depression. Here she was able to bond with Jesse in a way that had not been possible with her previous two children (conversation with John Baxter, July 2020). 

Despite her peripatetic life, Hilary reported that, ‘[h]er feelings for Aotearoa are, however, very strong. She knows there will, one day, be a final homecoming.’ (The Other Side of Dawn, back cover). And indeed, there was: to Paekākāriki where, off and on, she spent a significant portion of her adult life.  

For a time, Hilary, Johnno and their young son, Jesse, tried to make family life work in Paekākāriki. On summer evenings, they would often sit on the seat at the end of Ocean Road watching the sea, with Jesse in his pushchair. These weathered-looking parents, who had both led unmistakably hard lives, and their young son seemed an unlikely but poignant trio. No matter the strength of her feelings, motherhood was never going to be smooth sailing for Hilary.  

Johnno worked briefly as a conductor on the Wellington trains, where he soon became known for his cheeky, Ocker manner. On boarding the train, many female passengers, whatever their age, were surprised to learn that they looked ‘as fresh as a bunch of spring flowers’ or some other such kindly meant flannel. 

Paekākāriki: Hilary’s final perch

The Paekākāriki seascape – dominated by Kāpiti Island and, to the south, the sloping hills of Pukerua Bay – was a strong reference point for Hilary. This was where her mother, brother, daughter, and whānau  lived.  

One of Hilary’s poems ‘May she at the heart’ refers to Paekākāriki:  

May she at the heart  

Of your true dream move 

So, I, in the dark shunting  

Paekākāriki night  

Turn no more to the candlelight

(The Other Side of Dawn, p. 34). 

The ‘dark shunting Paekākāriki night’ conjures up the heavy goods trains that run past the village, a frequent occurrence in those days before trucks carried much of the freight previously taken by train. Until 1983, Paekākāriki was also the end of the electrified line, a noisy shunting yard where train carriages and engines were regularly unhitched and reassembled.  

‘Hils’, as she was sometimes known, was a distinctive feature of the Paekākāriki landscape. I first met her in the mid-1970s when she was living in a cottage on a steep section at The Parade’s southern end. She arrived, the worse for wear, at my friend’s house late one night and began to recite her poems while swigging from a bottle of gin. She herself possessed tons of bottle and was a powerful, larger-than-life performer. That night, she told of how when she was young, her father, in a fit of rage, once dragged her by the hair through the house. 

Rain or shine, Hilary strode along the seafront from various rented abodes in the village. These frequent walks from home to the shops or the hotel usually involved picking up any rubbish on the way, an indication of her care for the local environment. Hilary also had a keen awareness of, and empathy for, the less fortunate in society, those who had been washed up and abandoned by the tide, like the plastic, cans and litter she collected on her walks. This heightened social awareness harked back to the strongly held pacifist and communal Māori values on both sides of her family. 

Her living conditions were usually lean. Many a local has a story of Hilary approaching them for a small loan for food or to use their phone to call Jesse in Australia. Trans-Tasman toll calls were costly then, and her requests were often met with refusal.  

Hilary was a regular traveller on the ‘unit’ between Paekākāriki and Wellington. In later years, she took to hitchhiking to Paraparaumu to do her shopping, often appearing lost in the bright lights of Coastlands mall. Several Paekākāriki locals have stories of picking Hilary up from the main road, where she would stand with her thumb out, tall and long-legged in her leather jacket and jeans. Biblical references peppered her effusive thanks for these rides. Jesus, she proclaimed, was central to her life. 

Paekākāriki poet Apirana Taylor tells of Hilary in her earlier, wilder, bikie days. Once they were busted for smoking dope on their return from the Māori Artists and Writers Hui, held at Tauranga’s Hūria Marae in 1980. When confronted by the police, Hilary flew into one of her eloquent and litigious rants concerning their individual rights, as well as the general oppressions of society. Apirana was amused to witness the attending police officers beating a hasty retreat, having been verbally whipped by this virago. He described, ‘the impressive dignity and calm of the Māori elders who came to the police station. It was worth getting in trouble just to hear Hilary in full flight.’ Once charges were laid, Hilary harangued Matiu Rata of the Mana Motuhake Party for months to have these lifted, to no avail (conversation with Apirana Taylor, July 2020). 

Paekākāriki local Paul Callister describes Hilary calling out to him across Ocean Road on a grey and blustery northerly day. Apologising profusely for putting him, ‘a man of facts’, wrong about the date of Jesus’ second coming, she proffered, ‘in the spirit of seeking forgiveness,’ a revised and, this time, certain date. Another Paekākāriki resident recalls Hilary crossing The Parade to talk and pulling open her leather jacket to show a bottle of clear–coloured fluid nestled in its inner pocket. This, she claimed., contained ‘what one might suspect to be gin, but is actually water.’ Whatever the bottle’s contents; the smell of alcohol was inescapable for Hilary struggled with alcoholism for most of her life.  

A complex and often confronting personality, Hilary tended to polarise people. Yet many also felt strangely protective towards this unique, far-sighted, articulate, but afflicted, character. Once you got beyond the often-chaotic surface there was a deep humanity, intelligence and kindness to Hilary. 

Hilary had huge hurts and losses in her life. One of these was losing Jesse to his Australian dad, Johnno, followed by years with little or no contact. Hilary’s formidable litigious energies were useful once again, and many an unsuspecting local was regaled with the details of her case to have Jesse returned to New Zealand through the Hague Convention. Another crippling blow came in 2009 with Stephanie’s sudden death, in her early forties. A couple of months later, Jacquie died. Already ill, Jacquie was heartbroken at the death of her treasured granddaughter who, by then, had also become her main caregiver.  

The Other Side of Dawn includes Hilary’s poem to Jacquie:  

The moon lowered itself  

round and gold hugely  

to your window  

Let you see its caverns of ice  

And you knew  

that in watching 

too long it would  

burst through the window  

to take you back.’

(‘To My Mother,’ The Other Side of Dawn, p. 10).  

Rising house prices and the changing nature of the village meant that Hilary could not afford to live in Paekākāriki. Kind friends put her up and, for a brief period, she camped out at the corner of Wellington and Ocean Roads using a borrowed tent, cooking gear and raincoat. In early 2012 she found a small flat in Ocean Road, but, not long after, she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and given only a short time to live. After a cut on her leg became infected, sepsis set in. Hilary died, aged 64, in Wellington Hospital on 19 November 2013.  

On her death, Hilary achieved her wish to reunite with her tribe:  

Oh people of my ancestry 

remember your Arohanui 

Your brown dove 

Astray in a strange land 

one day of cold 

I will return to the tribe 

never leave again

(‘I sing to myself’, The Other Side of Dawn, p. 46). 

Paekākāriki’s St Peter’s Hall overflowed with mourners at her memorial service held a week later, on 25 November 2013. Her son Jesse came from over The Ditch and spoke movingly of his happiness at reuniting with his mother, and of his love for her.  

Hilary’s strengths were enormous. But her life was mostly one of struggle of the kind that would have overwhelmed most people: 

‘[H]er early loss of innocence, encounters with violence, the loss of children, brushes with mental illness — she wrestled with stuff and demons most of us never have to. But no matter what life threw at her, she would always get up the next morning ready to face the next challenge. She was undefeatable, until the end.’

(Roger Steele, ‘Eulogy for Hilary’, 2013). 

Jack McDonald, Hilary’s grandson, read an affecting elegy penned by Paekākāriki poet and friend, Michael O’Leary. It concludes:  

Through the dark forest of your 

imagination, and the light 

Of your Lord leading you towards and 

away from the abyss 

It’s difficult to say, but we all loved you 

in our own way.

(‘Sonnet to Hilary Baxter’, Michal O’Leary, 2013).  

In sum, there was nothing humdrum about Hilary. She stood out in every way. 

Hilary is buried at Whenua Tapu Cemetery in Pukerua Bay.  

Thank you to John Baxter and Roger Steele for their contributions. 

References 

Baxter, Hilary. (1969). ‘For You Know Who.’ Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 16.  

Baxter, Hilary. (1969). ‘North Winds Blowing’ Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 16.  

Baxter, Hilary. (1987). The Other Side of Dawn. (eds) Juliet Raven and Jane Bowron. Wellington: Spiral. 

— ‘Darwin.’ The Other Side of Dawn. pp. 49-50. 

— ‘For Johnno.’ The Other Side of Dawn. pp. 44-45. 

— ‘May She at The Heart.’ The Other Side of Dawn. p. 34. 

— ‘North Winds Blowing’ The Other Side of Dawn, pp. 28-29. 

— ‘October 1972.’ The Other Side of Dawn. p. 32. 

— ‘Reminiscence.’ The Other Side of Dawn. p. 20. 

— ‘To My Mother.’ The Other Side of Dawn. p. 10.  

Baxter, James K. (1979). ‘Daughter’, Collected Poems. (ed.) J. E. Weir. Wellington: Oxford University Press, pp. 344-345. 

Baxter, Hilary. (1987). Kōmako. A bibliography of writing by Māori in English. https://www.komako.org.nz/person/54 (retrieved 2 Nov. 2019).  

Lilburn’s correspondence with Hilary Baxter, 26 August 1964 – 28 December 1966, Douglas Lilburn papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. 

McKay, Frank. (1990). The Life of James K. Baxter. Oxford University Press: Auckland. 

O’Leary, Michael. (2014). ‘Sonnet to Hilary Baxter.’ Quarterly Newsletter of PANZA. Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa. Winter 2014. Vol. 5, Issue 2. p. 13. https://poetryarchivenz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/poetry-notes-winter-2014.pdf (retrieved 7 Feb. 2019). 

Simpson, P. (1995). ‘Candles in a Dark Room: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon’. Journal of New Zealand Literature, 13, 157–188. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20112267 (retrieved 2 Nov. 2019). 

Steele, Roger. (2013). ‘Eulogy for Hilary Baxter.’ Delivered at Hilary Baxter’s funeral, St Peter’s Hall, Paekākāriki, 25 November 2013 (unpublished). 

Sturm, Jacqueline C. (1996). ‘Lioness.’ Dedications. Wellington: Steele Roberts, p. 42. 

‘Tribute to Hilary Baxter.’ ‘Poetry Notes.’ Quarterly Newsletter of PANZA. Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa. Winter 2014. Vol. 5, Issue 2. p. 13. (unattributed editor). https://poetryarchivenz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/poetry-notes-winter-2014.pdf (retrieved 7 Feb. 2019).