Grande dame in all but name

Christine Cole Catley, at 83, has an awesome amount of

Christine Cole Catley said she would be intoxicated by the time I went to see her in the late afternoon. Actually, and what a shame, she hasn't had so much as a glass of wine, but she seems intoxicated nevertheless.

I suspect she always does, although it might be amusing to see her after a glass or two. Or perhaps not. She is quite formidable - in the sense of being unstoppable - even stone-cold sober. She's 83 and is, she says, in constant pain from her polymyalgia rheumatic arthritis and has the energy of ... I was about to say somebody half her age, but even that is not quite right.

I haven't met anybody of any age with her amount of bounce. At one stage she sings her audience a dreadful little ditty written by "this terribly dotty piano teacher", who lived in the same hostel as Cole Catley when she was a student at Canterbury University.

The song had "terrible clashing chords and it went something like this: 'Christine is so enthusiastic and lives her life, pom, pom, in such a whirl, pom pom. Darting from one thing to another, such a something or other little girl'."

She belts this out merrily. It is nice to think that once you're in your 80s the concept of being self-conscious in front of strangers ought to be ridiculous.

I am supposed to be interviewing her about her book, Bright Star: Beatrice Hill Tinsley, Astronomer. Supposed to be. But her family - who have flown in from Los Angeles and Australia for the book launch and her gonging on Tuesday when she receives her DCNZM - sit in. Her son-in-law has decided to film the experience, presumably for the family annals, despite my protests. All of which has the peculiar effect of not being an interview at all, but a performance of a one-woman show.

Another difficulty is that Cole Catley was once a journalist, then a teacher of journalists, so she is prone to saying that I can't put this or that in and "Sweetie, I'm trusting you". Partly, too, she doesn't want to give away the plot of her book, or - because it is a biography - for me to put in anything she hasn't and which she thinks will cause the family of Beatrice Tinsley more pain than is necessary.

You can see why Cole Catley was drawn to this story. Tinsley, described in the blurb as "New Zealand's least-known great" was a professor of astronomy at Yale.

She did pioneering work into the origins of the universe. She was, says James Gunn, professor of astronomy at Princeton, on the flyleaf "the architect of galaxy evolution and stellar populations, and the importance of interactions in galaxies".

She worked in a tiny, abstruse field of physics. She was probably a genius and she died at the age of 40, in 1981, of melanoma.

It is fair to say Cole Catley fell in love with her subject, with all that the description entails: admiration, exasperation, a longing to understand the loved one's intellect.

Biographer and subject are at first glance an unlikely pairing. Cole Catley said no when she was first asked by Beatrice's father, Edward, to write his daughter's story. The biographer's background is in the arts, not in science.

When she decided she would take on the project (published through her own publishing house, Cape Catley) she went to the library and "the first book I got out was from the children's section. It had a title something like The Skies above Us."

In 1985 Cole Catley, still thinking her answer was no, popped into a gathering at Yale designed to honour Beatrice. She thought she could take some notes and hand them on to whoever became the astronomer's biographer. There, "Beatrice came alive."

Now here she is, 21 years on, relieved to have the thing finished and having had a whole new world to learn along the way.

"Of course. It has been extraordinary. We are such tiny, little grains of sand. You cannot get your head around the immensity of all these galaxies. I had no idea. Who was that elderly ... aah, Dame Edith Sitwell, she was terrified when somebody tried to explain to her the huge size of the cosmos."

The Prime Minister will launch the book today. I ask Cole Catley how she managed this and she says - in her best "sorry, boring old teacher" manner which doesn't stop her doing it repeatedly - "Oh, very good question."

The answer is a long one, as her answers tend to be because she's lived for a very long time and knows everyone.

Douglas Lilburn was at her 21st birthday party; she knew Frank Sargeson well and administers his trust. She was great friends with Michael King; a painting on the wall of Cole Catley and baby Sarah is by another friend, Rita Angus.

Anyway, the long answer to the Clark question goes something like what follows, with the inclusion of ellipses because she does not, when talking, do narrative in straight lines.

"Well, I've been a Labour Party supporter ever since I left my dearly loved National Party parents on their conservative farm in the Rangitikei ... I had observed, this is going to sound silly, but I actually have been observing Helen Clark when she was quite young ... before she became Leader of the Opposition ... and I could see this was going to be an important book, never mind that I'm writing it, because Beatrice's story is so important, I thought the person to launch it is Helen Clark. Because to my mind, there are a lot of similarities and ... just as Beatrice is a woman after my own heart, oh, not just feminism, of course, but that's important to me, too, so I felt she would be [important] to Helen Clark."

I'd thought, actually, she might have been a Commie because I'd figured out she must have known my grandfather, whose cronies were mostly commies. She did know him, they were journalists together on the Labour paper, the Southern Cross, but she says - in best, crisp, teacher fashion again - that she was most certainly not a Commie.

"I used to go to the Communist Party for lunch, up Cuba St, because they had good ham in their sandwiches. And I really loved the sign they had up on the wall which meant a great deal to me - 'From each according to his' - never mind her - 'according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.' I thought: that's it. But I'm not going to sign up to the party because I wanted to decide on issues myself."

As a sign to live by, it seems to have served her well. And in return, for her services to literature, she gets her gong. It's a big one, as gongs go: a DCNZM in the Queen's Birthday honours.

"I said 'Gosh. It's about as high as you can get.' And come the morning, it was in the papers [and] there was the new Governor-General and then there was me. They didn't write and say, 'You've got the second-biggest one going and how about that?' No, and they didn't say: 'This used to be a Dame'."

What a shame. She would have rather liked that. "I think I would." She was born to it, really. She has those round, polished vowels. She has the mannerisms down pat.

"Sweetheart," she says to a daughter, "how about putting yonder kettle on? I would adore one, even if it's instant coffee."

I told her she should get her friend Helen to bring back the dame - just for her. Not that she really needs the title. She's been playing the role for years.