Young Logan Campbell

To earn a reputation as a colonial pioneer it is helpful to outlive your contemporaries. Among those present in New Zealand in 1840, its year of annexation, few survived Sir John Logan Campbell who died in 1912 at nearly ninety-five. Known as 'the father of Auckland' from his longevity and his benefactions, he made sure of his fame by publishing in 1881 Poenamo , an account of the pioneer days which did much to create a myth of purposeful nation-building. He also left a quantity of manuscript auto- biographies and business papers from which a less consistently heroic story might be deduced; but Professor R. J. C. Stone is the first scholar to work through them fully. This volume follows Campbell's career to the age of forty. Born in 1817 the son of a younger son of an indigent Scottish baronet, he qualified in medicine, emigrated in 1839 to New South Wales, disliked the atmosphere of convictism, and moved to New Zealand in 1840 just in time to be present at its creation. He turned storekeeper in partnership with the bustling William Brown whose abundant energies drove him from phrenology to politics.