MARY ANNE SALMOND
Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond is one of New Zealand's most outstanding scholars, having shown a remarkable ability to sustain an excellent record of academic achievement throughout her professional career. Her work is interdisciplinary, straddling Social Anthropology, History and aspects of associate fields such as Navigation and Linguistics; it also absorbs cross-cultural perspectives in European, Maori and Pacific Island contexts, and it is her exceptional ability to represent the dynamics of these encounters that is most admired by her peers.
Her first three books bridged Maori and Pakeha cultures at a time when such writings were rare. Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings, Amiria: The Life Story of a Maori Woman, and Eruera: Teachings of a Maori Elder were landmark contributions to Maori ethnology and still remain outstanding exegeses of Maori learning and tradition. Her next books, Two Worlds and Between Worlds, provide vivid accounts of the early contact history between Maori and European colonisers, presenting the experiences in terms of both cultural perspectives. Her recent work focuses on Captain Cook's voyages in the South Pacific, again addressing the cross-cultural dynamic between British and Pacific cultures.
Dame Anne's record of service is broad. She has been a member of the Board of the Museum of New Zealand; a member of the Advisory Committee to the Minister for Research, Science and Technology; a member of the FoRST Board; and Chair of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust since 2002. In 1996 she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, for services to New Zealand History; in 2004 she earned the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement; and this year she was invited to give the prestigious Hakluyt Lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London. She is also, as all observers testify, a brilliant communicator to both academic and public audiences.