A Canterbury University scholar has attributed to Māori writer J.C.Sturm a poem published in a university magazine 70 years ago lamenting the effect of colonisation on Māori.

Professor Paul Millar, who is Sturm’s literary executor and is preparing an edition of her Collected Works for publication, says the poem Brown Optimism leapt to his mind when National MP Paul Goldsmith claimed that on balance colonisation was good for Māori.

He says it says something about our progress as a nation that a poem a young Māori woman wrote seven decades ago protesting colonisation still reads as an immediate response to a politician in 2021.

The unsigned poem dates from the time in the late 1940s when Sturm was a 20-year-old student at Canterbury University College, and before her marriage to poet James K Baxter.

In a later poem, Loco Parentis, Sturm described the experience of being the only Māori among Pākehā through the first decades of her life, as always ‘being out of step, place, tune, joint’.

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