Family and Early Life
Smithyman was born in Te Kopuru, a milling and logging town on the Wairoa River near Dargaville, in the Northland Region in the far north of New Zealand. He was the only child of William "Bill" Kendrick Smithyman, an immigrant from England and a former soldier who had fought both in the Boer War and World War I and who had radical political sympathies. Before World War I, he had worked in sugar plantations in Fiji. The poet's father had also been a sailor and waterside worker but fell on hard times during the Depression when the poet was growing up. The father at some points had to work on relief gangs to earn money. His wife, Annie Lavinia Evans, was born in Christchurch. His parents managed a home for elderly men in Te Kopuru before moving to Auckland in the early 1930s. Some of Smithyman's poems, especially in Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (written in 1983-1984 and posthumously published in 2002) are about his father and other relatives from previous generations whom Smithyman had never met, including his grandfather, also named William Kendrick, born in 1829, who became a sailor, fought for the British Royal Navy in the Crimean War, traveled to Australia and India, then became harbourmaster at Ramsgate on the southeast coast of England.
The family moved to several communities in and around Auckland before settling on Boscawen Avenue in Point Chevalier, where the lonely boy read voraciously and attended Point Chevalier Primary School. There he became a lifelong friend of future poet and historian Keith Sinclair. Smithyman also attended Seddon Memorial Technical College (1935–1939) and Auckland Teachers' Training College (1940–1941), from which he earned a teacher's certificate. There his first stories and poems were published in the college magazine, Manuka, edited by Robert Lowry, who later became Smithyman’s first publisher.
In World War II, Smithyman served in the New Zealand Army artillery as bombardier (1941–1942), then as a quartermaster in the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1942 to 1945. His service in the armed services was spent in New Zealand except for a short period in 1945 when he was stationed on Norfolk Island, resulting Considerations, a sequence of poems later published in Landfall and after that in the 1951 edition of Allen Curnow's Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1950.
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