Review Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit by Peter Gibbs

This review was written by Peter Gibbs and published in the Nelson Mail on 7 September 2011

Complete account of a potter who touched hundreds of lives.

In 1973 I was a young maths teacher at Glenfield College in Auckland, moonlighting as a pottery night class teacher at Rangitoto College.  My enthusiasm wasn’t quite matched by my skills or knowledge, but I was learning as I went.

Earlier that year I’d sold my car and did the daily commute to school by motorbike, but one weekend in spring I found myself on a bus to Whangarei, so I could borrow my father’s car. In the seat next to me was a young woman from the West Coast called Evelyn Hewlett.

She told me she had an aunt who was a potter and lived in Whangarei and she was going to pay her a visit.  She didn’t exactly know where she lived, but thought she’d find out when she got there.

An older aunt making pots suggested to me some fussy earthenware fired in an electric kiln in a genteel suburb like Kensington, so I offered to drive her there once I got my hands on the car.

How wrong I was.  We found Yvonne Rust at Tahunatapu Point, across the bay from the Parua Bay pub. She was a large booming woman, immediately welcoming.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – she lived in one of those half round corrugated iron haysheds closed in at the ends, with a kitchen at one end and a couple of beds along the side.  Right through the middle was a huge trolley-loading two-chamber diesel fired kiln built by her mate, Coromandel potter Barry Brickell and at the end, looking over the bay, was a line-up of kick-wheels.

As I gaped around the building I found some brochures advertising Yvonne’s summer schools, and that’s where I finished up the following January.

I didn’t necessarily subscribe to all of her ideas – Yvonne often had extreme and pedantic views – but I loved her enthusiasm and the experience the whole thing provided. In fact I liked it so much I went back and worked with Yvonne in the May and August school holidays of 1974.

The following January, I was back for even longer, as I became one of Yvonne’s assistants (along with potter Ian Smale), working for food, helping out with the students, tinkering with some experimental wood kilns (I still have one pot from those firings) and having a great time.  t was to be my introduction to a new life, because I had resigned my teaching job in order to have a trial run as a professional potter.

Later that year, 1975, I followed in Yvonne’s footsteps, leaving everything behind I knew and setting up a pottery from scratch in Onekaka, Golden Bay, just down the road from Greg Barron, who had helped out as Yvonne’s assistant the year before I did.

A few months ago, a review copy of the book, Yvonne Rust – Maverick Spirit, landed on my desk. I knew a little of Yvonne’s life as a teacher and motivator, both before and after my experiences in Parua Bay, but this well-researched book by Theresa Sjoquist is a cradle-to-grave account of her life.

Parts of the book are in Yvonne’s own words, other sections are contributed from some of the hundreds of people who came under her spell.  The author has linked all these parts together, sometimes jerkily. Occasional news of other world highlights give some context to the times.

It’s a big read, but it conveys thoroughly a sense of Yvonne’s strong views and stubborness – and her unwillingness to be diverted from something she believed in.

She touched people everywhere, from her birth in a Maori community in the far north to Christchurch, where she was educated and later taught, to the West Coast, where she slaved to teach unemployed miners how to use their natural resources of clay and coal, then on up to Northland and the pottery, the trust at the quarry – always pushing for people to utilise their hands and their raw materials.

Finally her retirement, first to Opua, then later back to the coast, where she painted thousands of vigorous works.

In the book’s pages, I met many people from my past, including Evelyn Hewlett, who had a much more central role in Yvonne’s life in later years.

This lavishly illustrated book is a fitting tribute to the life of a great New Zealander.

Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit – Fully illustrated e-Book