Remembering the renowned New Zealand writer, who died on February 5, 2025.

The Stopover

When the trout rise like compassion
It is worth watching

when the hinds come down
from the hills
with a new message

it will be as well to listen.

– Brian Turner

Poet, environmentalist, sportsman, journalist, biographer, and playwright Brian Turner ONZM has died at the age of 80. As Turner said in his expansive and moving conversation with John Campbell at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021: “I’ve had a full life.”

Turner was a major New Zealand writer: for many, the Otago landscape is inextricable from Turner’s descriptions of it. Turner was a poet capable of extracting the multiplicity of that land as well as the nature of its birds, its fish, the various characters that inhabit it. For his poetry (he published 14 collections) he won the Commonwealth Prize in 1979, was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 1984; he won the Montana Book Award for Poetry in 1993, was writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury in 1997, was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2003 – 2005, and was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry in 2009. As a playwright he won the John Cowie Memorial Award for Playwriting in 1985. His journalism appeared in the New Zealand Listener, North and South, Metro, Sunday Times, National Business Review, The Independent, Evening Post, The Dominion, the Otago Daily Times, The Press, Fish and Game New Zealand. In the 70s he won the Dulux Prize for Sports Journalism. He wrote biographies of All Blacks Anton Oliver and Colin Meads.

As a sportsman, Turner played hockey for New Zealand in the 1960s, climbed mountains, and was a noted, veteran cyclist. With his brother Glenn Turner (the former New Zealand cricket captain), he wrote cricket books. Their other brother was golfer Greg Turner. The boys grew up in Dunedin: Brian Turner was born there in 1944 and lived for most of his life in the South, most latterly in the tiny community of Oturehua, in the Ida Valley. In Michelle Langstone’s vivid profile of Turner in The Spinoff in 2021, Turner says: “We had an upbringing the like of which I can’t imagine many other people had the good fortune to have had. They [his parents] both brought us up in ways that I have deep gratitude to them. When Dad got his two week holidays they carted us all over the South Island. We went to the Milford Sound, the Eglinton Valley, and I got keen on trout fishing in the Leith and all around it. So in the weekends, on the Sunday, we would go through inland Otago and so on, and I just loved Central Otago and the tussock grasslands.”

Turner’s close relationship to the land led to a passionate environmentalism. He campaigned all his life to protect the mountains, rivers, and landscapes that, as he said to Langstone, gave him “[…]room, space. A sense of freedom. I can do what stimulates and pleases me greatly. It reminds me of what a wonderful place we have and live in.” In 2006 Turner was among a group of friends who founded the Central Otago Environment Society. The website hosts some of Turner’s work, including this beautiful reflection on the Upper Manuherikia Valley (first published in The Listener in 2014.) “To me the burly hills and mountains that I live near are ever-interesting, everchanging throughout the seasons,” he writes in the piece. “In the mornings they are fresh and wonderful
and in the evenings mesmeric and consoling.”

Turner was diagnosed with dementia in 2021. A statement from Turner’s family said he died peacefully on Tuesday morning after visits from friends. His beloved partner Jillian Sullivan was with him.

“I am content with all sorts of things,” said Turner to Campbell in 2021. “I’m not haunted […] I think I know what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ll break the regulations here and there. But I don’t see it as all that wrong.”

Tributes from friends and colleagues of Brian Turner

Owen Marshall: In 1981 I held a fellowship at Canterbury University. I wrote a collection of stories and submitted them to various publishers.  Only Brian Turner, then editor at the publisher John McIndoe, showed any interest. It was the start of a friendship that lasted almost 45 years and one that I value highly. Through Brian I came to know Grahame Sydney and I especially enjoyed working on the books that we three did together.  

Brian excelled in both the physical world and also that of the mind. A New Zealand hockey rep, a noted mountaineer and expert fly fisherman, a cyclist of renown, he was also a great reader, thinker, activist for the natural environment and one of our finest poets.

I recall him coming to visit us in Timaru, sometimes with his racing bike on the car, sometimes with a trout he had caught on the way. He loved the outdoors and many of his finest poems are tributes to nature, especially as experienced in his beloved Central Otago. Brian had a complex and subtle character and was something of a chameleon, equally at home with sporting mates in the pub, or at a poetry festival. He disliked affectation and pretension. His emails to me usually began with the laconic – ‘Gidday’. He liked to laugh, but was always aware of darkness in life.

Beneath his sometimes gruff exterior was a personality of  great sensitivity and insight. He was reticent about his personal life in conversation, and fully revealed himself only in the poetry. In 2011, writing about his collection Inside Out, he said that three of the themes constant in his work were “love, longing and loss.”  He also said “I think that the closer you get to sentiment without becoming sentimental the more affecting and powerful poetry is.”

Brian won many awards and deserved them all.  He was a good judge of people and issues and fought for those he believed in. He suffered from dementia towards the end and I’m grateful to Grahame, and Brian’s loving partner Jillian Sullivan, for keeping me in touch with him when he found it difficult. Like many others I’m fortunate to have had him as a friend. I miss him, but the poetry lives on for us all.

Richard Reeve: Brian was a friend of about 30 years standing. His life well-lived as a poet standing for the deeper value of things, the poetry of water, mountains, private moments alone with the world, in the face of the “infernal machine” of modern life, has been exemplary for writers in the south, including for the present poet. We will all miss him immeasurably, and remain hugely thankful for his literary, philosophical and environmental leadership. He stood up for all of us. RIP Brian.

Wake

i.m Brian Turner (1944–2025)

The wind, the rain, the hail, the snow, is a cliché.

Ice squinting on a peak, water broken on the stones of a lakeshore, are clichés.

The limbs of a boxthorn is a cliché.

The news is pretentious. Drowned refugees.

The sun rising behind the hills. 

The stars are a fraud. 

I wake to a frosted morning. No birds sing.

Tired things. 

The door hinges that need to be replaced, mould on the window sill, are tired events. Tired actors.

The world is universally dull. Life. Death becomes ever more clichéd with every death.

Loss is a cliché. Language is a cliché. 

The icy depths of space are a cliché.

Breath. warmth. The sun. Soft touch. Soft colours. 

I wake over and over again to the day beginning, ending, beginning.

When will it stop? I ask. Will anything intervene?

Never. Until it does. 

– Richard Reeve

Fergus Barrowman: Brian, who I knew a little but not well, got in touch in I think 2000 to say that after ten years he had a new poetry manuscript but no publisher, the excellent Dunedin firm John McIndoe Ltd being no longer in the game. Might we be interested? 

Taking Off was the first book we published together, and a theme that emerged very early in the editorial conversation, and persisted through four more books, was his irritation at being pigeonholed as a regional poet. He knew he was – and as a veteran publisher himself he knew that his publisher was not going to be shy in saying so – but he also knew he was much more than that. We agreed that Sarah Maxey’s cover design, based on an atypical side detail in Grahame Sydney’s magnificent painting ‘Fog at Stan Cotter’s’, expressed the situation perfectly.

I will miss Brian’s warmth, wit, vulnerability and unabashed crankiness – especially as unleashed on a crisp winter’s day in Oturehua – and I am grateful to have had a part in presenting and conserving a body of work that fully expresses those and his many other qualities.

Grahame Sydney: It’s such a pity that one has to die before the praise and applause for a life’s contributions and achievements are assembled for all to see in a neat memorial package: Brian would have privately – secretly – loved to read the extensive listing of his own accomplishments through his 80 years, not that he would have let on … a hesitant smile perhaps, a bit of a mumbly grunt, but nothing more. As he so often said, “Self praise is no recommendation.” And any form of “skiting” was unacceptable behaviour in the Turner family. Alf [Turner’s father] saw to that.

But there was so much to skite about, had he been inclined. The family Audrey and Alf shaped, three boys raised in a state house in a Dunedin hill suburb, are an extraordinary trio in anyone’s language and rightly celebrated in New Zealand for their sporting brilliance. Glenn and Greg are better known champions in their fields, but BT was no mean athlete himself – he played hockey for New Zealand, cricket at a high level, ran marathons and was obsessed with road cycling for much of his life. He loved the mountains, climbed Mount Cook with PhilipTemple, amongst many other conquests, was a happy yachtsman and highly skilled fly fisherman. A knowledge of sport in all its forms, and a competitive driving instinct runs in the Turner veins, along with a natural, cunning feel for strategy.

Brian was immensely proud of his brothers and family, and I’ll throw two thoughts into the obituary observations:

1) that the working class family origins in the state house gave rise to a determination to prove that they could rise above that hard scrabble foundation – not poor exactly, but certainly not privileged. There were precious few luxuries and hardly a book in the house. Alf’s stubborn message to his sons was that hard work and  bloody-minded determination to make the most of one’s natural abilities through incessant practice would pay off. It did, for all three.

2) While gratified with his brothers’ international successes and fame, I suspect that BT was motivated to be at least their equivalent – if not in sport, then in literature – and it drove him to become The Writer, The Poet, the Voice for the natural environment. When in the late 1990s he shifted from Dunedin to Oturehua, a small sleepy drive-through village in the Ida Valley, I watched him slowly assume the persona of that Whitmanesque, romantic Man Alone anchored in the landscape he loved and nourished by the simple inspirations Mother Nature served up every day: the Ida Valley became his Walden Pond.

Brian was the first-born, arriving when his father was serving in the forces in Italy during WWII. There was a streak of culture in Alf, and Brian discovered the beauty of words early on. They became his profession. When I first knew him in the 70’s in Dunedin he was an editor, a publisher, and a fledgling poet. The first to publish the short stories of the Waitaki Boys High history teacher Owen Marshall, amongst other discoveries, his enthusiasm in his support of fellow writers  never faltered.

He was an enigmatic personality in many ways: kind, thoughtful and generous, wry and dry in humour, given to longer silences as the years accumulated, and mild natured most of the time. Anger only  broke through when he saw abuses of the natural environment. But he was also secretive about some aspects of his behaviour, and in the “dog box” of his small Oturehua home he cared little for order, tidiness or the trivialities of daily routines.

Brian was a loyal, supportive mate. He appreciated and admired the achievements of his many friends, was scurrilously dismissive of pretension, of any vanity, of status-seeking in whatever form it appeared; and (no skiting, remember) he loathed any form of arrogance, especially when it inflicted irreparable damage to  natural habitats, rivers and landscapes. He was constantly alert to the brevity of life and the insignificance of man compared to the infinite wonder of the earth, seasons and skies. His little red notebook, tucked in his top shirt-pocket, was a constant in his life. Observations, thoughts, phrases  overheard and the wisdom of others were recorded year after year, notebook after notebook, and ever the working writer, thousands of unpublished poems accumulated in his desk drawers.

The cruel onset of dementia in his final few years drained his sensitive, acute brain of so much: memory went, as did any idea of a future. He lived moment to moment, obsessed with gathering firewood, his cluttered world of books little more than wallpaper, and when he could no longer get out on the bike and “Cane it” to the point of nausea, as he invariably loved to do (you hadn’t tried hard enough if you didn’t throw up at the end of a race), in his depleted imagination he was still out there daily, showing every other bastard that he still had it … still hoping to win a National title … triumphant in the face of the hard stuff.

Ella Borrie: Brian Turner is one of Otago’s great poets. He was a renaissance man – accomplished in many ways – but I know him as one of my writing heroes. Landscape is a constant presence in his work. He understood how to capture Central Otago with sparse and sure language that echoed the place’s immense skies and hills. His poems often feel like proverbs; quiet excavations of larger truths. Brian Turner was a skilled and wise writer whose poems felt like a conduit for understanding the world more fully. I keep his books on my bedside table and his work will always be instrumental to my creative life. Words from his own poem Through seem fitting to farewell one of Aotearoa’s best poets:

More tributes to be added as they arrive.