Complaints from those in and out of Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

By GILBERT WONG

They might have been contemporaries but it is unlikely that celebrated brothel keeper Flora McKenzie and Cardinal McKeefry were ever close.

But there they sit, cheek by jowl, in the latest volume of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

The alphabet confers a stringent egalitarianism rarely seen in public life. The great and the good, the notorious and infamous, the high achievers and grand failures, all reside in strict order as the mammoth project shepherded by the History Group of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage reaches as close to the present day as it can for some years.

Volume five covers the years 1941 to 1960, a period when New Zealand culture began to assert itself.

The names featured give a rapidfire shorthand to the times - Oswald Mazengarb, Bill Sutch, Freda Stark, Whina Cooper, Norm Kirk, Johnnie Smith, Charles Upham, Tex Morton, James K. Baxter, Bruce Mason and Colin McCahon - these are among the 613 people determined by an editorial team led by general editor Dr Claudia Orange as notable New Zealanders representative of these two decades.

Orange, a historian, took on the job from Bill Oliver in 1990. It comes with giddy responsibilities. She has taken calls from the dismayed relatives and friends of those she has and has not included, applying pressure for their own motives.

Orange, who commutes between Auckland and Wellington says, "I always say, 'Yes, you may be completely right but at the end of the day as general editor I have to make a decision.' The general editor does have a degree of power that is a little frightening but you have to do it. You are the only one who has the overview, over the series and volume."

Inevitably with this volume she expects more of those calls. Many of those featured leave contemporaries - friends, family and enemies - who have their own viewpoint of the personalities featured. Orange and her team have scrupulous checking systems before an entry is approved for publication, vetting the work of the more than 1200 contributors.

They must be fastidious because the series is designed to shape a baseline, a wide-ranging reference work that future scholars and all New Zealanders will rely on to represent much that was important about our society.

With volume five, the team takes a breath, but only a short one.

The series only features the deceased. Orange says they will slow the commissioning of biographical essays while they wait for the years to catch up with their subjects.

Meanwhile the team will stay busy. With Millennium Commission funding, they will embark on making the whole series available online.

Orange is excited at the possibilities a website presents.

Video and audio and still pictures will enhance the depth of the research for the online Dictionary of New Zealand Biography that Orange and her team hope will be up and operating by 2002.

"Imagine hearing Winston McCarthy or Aunt Daisy, or Rob Muldoon's cackle," she says. Living history in action.