Poets

Arthur Henry Adams was a journalist and author. He started his career in New Zealand, though he spent most of it in Australia, and for a short time resided in China and London.

Biography

Arthur Henry Adams was born in Lawrence, Otago, New Zealand, on 6 June 1872, the son of Eleanor Sarah Gillon and her husband, Charles William Adams, a surveyor and a talented astronomer.

Arthur attended Otago Boys' High School in Dunedin then onto the University of Otago, where he graduated BA in 1894. Although his major study was law, he was more interested in literature, and in 1893 supplied the composer Alfred Hill with a comic opera libretto, 'The whipping boy'. (This was never performed.) Another collaboration with Hill was the cantata Time's great monotone (1894).

In 1895 Adams abandoned law to become a journalist and joined the Wellington Evening Post , which was edited by his uncle E. T. Gillon. In the same year, he and Hill worked on a cantata, Hinemoa. Adams's text was an essential contribution to the work's popular success. In 1898, aged 26, he moved to Australia for the first time. For most of his life Sydney was to be his home. There he worked on the libretto of the comic opera Tapu , which - again with music by Hill - was a success on its production in Wellington in 1903 despite some inadequacies in the dialogue.

His first volume of poems, Maoriland, and other verses , was published in Sydney in 1899. It was welcomed by critics and some of its verses hav..