Sir Mountford Tosswill Woollaston
(April 11, 1910 - August 30, 1998) New Zealand
Artist
"Toss" Woollaston was born in Toko, Taranaki, and decided at the age of five that he wanted to be an artist. He moved to Nelson in the 1920s to protect his parents from the shame of his conscientious objection to military training. In Christchurch, studying painting, he gardened for Ursula Bethell who introduced him to D'Arcy Cresswell. In Dunedin, he became a close friend of Rodney Kennedy.
He survived as a Rawleigh's travelling pharmeceutical salesman until 1966, when he was able to support himself by painting alone. His paintings are generally large, with broad strokes in muted, earth colours, many of the same scenes near his Mapua home. Charles Brasch called him "one of the first to see and paint New Zealand as a New Zealander."
After turning the honour down twice, he was knighted in 1979 "to prevent it going to some popularity monger."
He was notably honest about his sexuality, freely allowing part of his autobiography Sage Tea to be used in an anthology of gay writing. He saw himself a "a sexually fluid being" who had been more homosexual than heterosexual in his youth. He he tells of meeting an older man on a walk between Rona Bay and Days Bay, who invited him to walk over the ridge:
"When we came to Butterfly Creek we both felt the need to make water. We had listened to the riroriro singing in the silence of the bush and the creek rattling over its stones before we confessed this need to each other and turned away politely to do it. Or at least, I had. But when I turned to him again, he was still exposed, and invited that we should introduce our penises to each other - just a touch - so that they should be friends as well.
Just that, and no more.
With boys my own age I had done so much more.
Yet this shocked me more.
Perhaps because of his age? (As I have said, he seemed to be about as old as my parents.)
While I hesitated, my mind rushing about to see if I could find any justifiable, non-hypocritical reason for refusing, he waited patiently. When I couldn't and complied, he was satisfied.
We began our walk back. It was much more silent, with what I had to digest. I might even have been disappointed after all at the extreme gentleness of our contct, being used to so much more violence and excitement. If I was, the question remained below the level of articulation. The ground between us was changed and I hadn't rejected him. We were going to have a friendship.
[When he told the aunt and uncle with whom he was staying in Lower Hutt that he] was going into Wellington the day after next (his next day off) to see my new friend, and saw them exchange glances full of meaning, I wondered whether they were going to warn me.
(But of what? The vices of the city?)
They didn't quite manage it. I saw the thought die in their eyes before it could become words on their lips.
[He stayed with the man (a writer and part-time accountant with the Wellington City Milk Department) for a week the next time he was in Wellington, and introduced him to his aunt who said,] "I didn't think much of the little man. If he ever shows the slightest sign of familiarity, drop him like a hot potato."
From: Sage Tea, p. 137
In 1927 he and his lover Ossie (19) stayed with Norman Gibson and Roy Ayling, sharing a double bed in their farmhouse on the slopes of Taranaki.
In 1936 he married. When he told his intended whife, Edith, he was bisexual, her reply was that they both needed a couple of stiff whiskies. He had three sons and a daugher. While Edith was still alive he met the former US Ambassador Anne Clark Martindell, and after Edith's death they become lovers, until his death.
© 1995-2002 Queer History New Zealand
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