Christine McKelvie "Chris" BULL DCNZM QSM [1695]

  General Notes:

Chris was granted a Scholarship to New Plymouth Girls High School, then a Scholarship to Canterbury University, graduating BA, MA English. Chris has distinguished herself in the field of literature, as a journalist, writer and publisher.
Her publishing house Cape Catley has specialised in works by NZ writers and poets.Chairperson of the Sargeson Trust she lives in the Marlborough Sounds (1999)

Christine Mckelvie Bull
Year 1946
University Canterbury
Degree M.A.
3rd Class Honours
New Zealand University Graduates 1870-1963

Some memories from Chris.
When I was older, eleven or twelve, I got on his (Tom) big heavy bicycle which was hard to manage. How I longed for a bicycle as well as my pony! One evening I was cycling across the pipe bridge about 5pm when men were streaming out of factories on their bikes. There we all were, cycling over in single file, when I bumped into the man in front of me. The domino effect! I don't think anyone was too angry. Once I rode right along the harbour, nearly to Wellington. A dangerous but exhilarating excursion although in the early 1930s there were mostly other bicycles, not cars, on the road.

Obituary.
Dame Christine Cole Catley, the noted publisher and writer, has died at the age of 88.
The journalist and columnist had been diagnosed with lung cancer in June and died in Auckland on Sunday.
Born in 1922, she grew up on a Rangitikei farm and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury University.
She became pregnant in her MA year - 1944 - and, true to her independent outlook, kept her child, becoming what a friend called "the original solo mum".
She would later become co-founder of Parents Centre New Zealand and had a family of three children.
After her marriage to writer John Reece Cole ended in the 1960s, she provided for her family by holding down several journalism jobs, at one time using eight different pseudonyms in various newspapers.
She headed Wellington Polytechnic's School of Journalism for seven years.
In the early 1970s she and her second husband, Doug Catley, moved to the Marlborough Sounds. There, she bought The Picton Paper and publishing company Cape Catley New Zealand.
Doug Catley died in 1981 and Dame Christine herself became ill three years later with chronic fatigue syndrome. She spent two years recovering in England, then returned to revive her publishing company.
Christine Cole Catley established and chaired the Frank Sargeson Trust, was the executor of the writer's estate, served on the Broadcasting Council and was a Radio New Zealand columnist.
Not solely a publisher, she wrote several books including Bright Star, the biography of New Zealand astronomer Beatrice Hill Tinsley.
She had begun writing her autobiography and her family said on Sunday that it expected to be published some time in the next year.
In September 2010, she spoke to Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme about her life of reading and writing, and about working on her autobiography.
She accepted the title of Dame in 2009. Dame Christine is survived by her three children and six grandchildren.
Radio NZ 21 Aug 2011

Obituary.
Christine McKelvey Cole Catley. DCNZM, QSM.
19 December 1922 '96 7 August 2011.
Christine Cole Catley, legendary woman writer, publisher and social changer, told amusingly irreverent stories about herself that she would have appreciated being included in her obituary. One of the many was about the catalyst for her journalism career. She liked writing and often won prizes for her work at school in Taranaki. She was a self-possessed little girl with a well-developed sense of fun and the story goes that she, aged about fourteen, and her classmates where on a picnic near the mouth of a river when she got covered in mud. She took her bathing suit off and hooked it around her feet while she sluiced herself. "When I bent down to pick it up it was on its way to Australia. This was 1937. I tried to creep up the beach unnoticed with my bare bottom," she said in an interview last year when she was nearly 88 and had just been awarded one of the country's richest literary prizes, a $35,000 CLL award to write her autobiography, partly finished. The upshot of the lost togs incident was at the local paper carried a story about it, the headmistress was furious, Cole Catley decided she could have written a funnier story, offered her services to the paper, and they tapped into her talent. An outstanding journalist was on her way. She would have liked this story in her own obituary because it fitted the way she had taught many journalism students how to write obituaries.
"Not that there is any one way to write an obituary, they should understand", she wrote in a Sunday newspaper tribute following the death of her close friend, writer and historian Michael King. "But if they possibly could, they should look for the small human things which would make readers smile in recognition, even if those same readers had never known that person."
Her early home life was the incubator for the tenacious attitude that led Cole Catley to forge a path that was about 20 years ahead of other achieving New Zealand women and led her to become the matriarch of the New Zealand publishing business and to be awarded, in 2006, the Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.
Her parents, Alan and Eileen Ball, encouraged the children to do what they wanted to do and to do it well. Her father, though he was a strong farmer, made no differentiation between men's and women's work. Cole Catley later said she was "shocked to find out in the world that things like flower gardening where women's work" Cole Catley's beautiful mother, trained as a teacher, had been born without a right arm and it had not stopped her riding, farming and bringing up her big family. She was also adamant that her girls needed to be able to earn their own living, forward thinking in an era when marriage generally stamped out any ambitions women might have had.
Cole Catley created an extraordinary life for herself, though she put its satisfying turns down to "extraordinary good luck" and "chance". She knew how to make the most of her opportunities. She left New Plymouth Girls High School in 1940 with a scholarship to Canterbury University, where she edited the student newspaper and graduated with an M.A. Thereafter she was in the forefront of much social and cultural change. She was a tutor in charge of New Zealand's first journalism training course and insisted on half the trainees being women. The course produced some of the country's foremost women journalists. Early in her career she worked on The Press in Christchurch and the Southern Cross newspaper in Wellington and was one of the first women correspondants at Radio New Zealand. She established the ABC's office in Indonesia. She was the country's first television critic and was eventually appointed to the Broadcasting Council. She knew writers like King, Janet Frame, Denis Glover, Alan Curnow and Fay Weldon. Frank Sargeson and made her his executor and she started the Sargeson Trust which she chaired until her death.
She co-founded the Parents Centre, responsible for the accepted presence of fathers at births, among other things. She gave workshops in writing at Victoria University.
Cape Catley the publishing company she set up with her second husband, Doug Catley, in 1973, became known for its high standards, it sometimes daring work and its distinguished list of authors. Some of them, like King, had been taught by her.
The pinnacle of her own creativity was possibly Bright Star the biography of the leading New Zealand woman astronomer Beatrice Tinsley. The two had, at quite different times, been at the same secondary school and both graduated from Canterbury University. Tinsley's father believed Cole Catley was the only person who could write the scientists story. It was published in 2006.
Cole Catley had hoped to publish until she was ninety and then travel. She worked until a few weeks before her death from lung cancer. Two books she had been focusing on with her daughter-in-law Jenny Cole, will soon be published. One is "Speaking Frankly" gathering Sargeson's lectures together. In April she toured for the last time promoting The Price of Bacon, with Cole, who joined the company three years ago, and author Jeanette Aplin. Cole Catley's last book launch, of Johanna Emeney poetry was in July.
She may not have lived to travel in her 90s but she had travelled without regrets through learning, teaching and loving right to the end of her long life.
Ref: The Press Christchurch 27 August 2011. Diana Dekker.

  Other Records

1. Christine McKelvie Bull: Photos from her life.
An infant c1923, with her brother Ian (Mac) c1928/29, her days in journalism

2. Cape Catley Publishing: Christine Barkers Company.

Chris married John Reece COLE [1696] [MRIN: 560] in 1948 in Wellington NZ. (John Reece COLE [1696] was born in 1916 and died in 1989.)

Chris next married Douglas CATLEY [1697] [MRIN: 561] in 1970. (Douglas CATLEY [1697] died in 1981.)