Kiwis in Captivity

1947

Special Collections QL696 A63 R638 1947

Napier: Hawkes Bay Art Gallery and Museum

The last six months of Gibbings’s Pacific trip were spent in Eastbourne in Wellington. Patience Empson, his wife’s sister, had joined him in Fiji in May 1946 to act as his companion and secretary. In Wellington they wrote up and fact-checked Gibbings’s South Pacific notes for his next book Over the Reefs (1948). Although only in New Zealand for six months Gibbings made a huge impact on the artistic and academic communities in the country. He gave a number of broadcasts and lectures – one at the University of Otago on conservation – and his exploits were frequently featured in local newspapers. He is even credited with increasing New Zealand’s ‘interest in Neo-Romantic print-making’ (Ross, 2006). This monograph was written after he visited F.D. Robson at the Napier Acclimatization Farm where they were breeding kiwi.