Forget Rutherford, Hillary, Snell. Many of our best and brightest are famous in fields that may not grab the headlines, writes David Cohen is Part II of the Listener’s Kiwi exceptionalism feature. You can read Part I here.
Katharine Birbalsingh, David Rozado, Christopher White. Ring any bells? Possibly not. These are people from New Zealand whose intellectual and creative work tends to be better known abroad these days than in their country of birth or long-term residence.
New Zealand isn’t exactly shy when it comes to celebrating local achievement. Yet, there’s a swag of locally born or based game-changers, including the self-taught variety, who aren’t so widely recognised in 2025.
Here, in alphabetical order, are 15 of our best dark horses, past and present. Most readers will probably recognise a few names, but you’ve almost certainly not heard of all of them.
Annette Baier
Improbable as it seems, New Zealand has been home to two of the world’s great experts on the legacy of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who’s best known for his influential system of empiricism and is sometimes referred to as the greatest philosopher of all time.
The first, Karl Popper, was the Austrian-born refugee scholar who crushed out The Open Society and its Enemies while based at the University of Canterbury. Vying for top honour though is the late Annette C Baier, whose guides to Hume’s work are widely considered definitive. A feminist thinker, she leaned into Hume’s ideas to argue that men and women have complementary value systems. Men take their cue more from ideas about justice, whereas women proceed more from notions of trust, “a notoriously vulnerable good, easily wounded and not at all easily healed”.
Queenstown-born Baier spent much of her career at Oxford and the University of Pittsburgh, and may not be as widely known in the land of her birth as she deserves. Yet she remains one of only a handful of Kiwi philosophers to have made a global mark.
Katharine Birbalsingh
From her base at Michaela Community School in Wembley, London, New Zealand-born, Oxford-trained Katharine Birbalsingh has been dispensing a version of educational tough love that has long had conservative commentators such as Douglas Murray in her thrall. Even the liberal Guardian grudgingly admitted her status as the UK’s “strictest head teacher” makes her a touchstone for the debate over best-practice learning methods.
In her native Auckland, however, the 51-year-old is largely unknown, perhaps because she was raised mainly in Canada. The famously strict school (no IT lessons or staring at your mobile, thank you, just French and Shakespeare, or off to the isolation room for you!) she co-founded in a deprived part of northwest London regularly achieves twice the national average in GCSE (Year 11) exams. More than eight out of 10 sixth formers, half of whom are Muslim, go on to one of the elite UK universities known as the Russell Group.
“In other words,” marvelled Murray in The Spectator, “if you have a huge amount of cash and want to send your child to an expensive private school in Britain, you’d be better off saving the money and moving to Wembley.”
Denis Dutton
When Denis Dutton died in 2010, the University of Canterbury professor of philosophy was quite well known for his provocations on the media front, but less appreciated for his more enduring work in creating the fabulous “Arts & Letters Daily” site. An internet addict from early on, Dutton also realised the new technology’s commercial possibilities long before PayPal and Substack.
Surfing the net in the upstairs office of his family home in Christchurch in the late 1990s, he hit on a formula for creating a thinking person’s guide to the intellectually sparkiest online reads on offer. It may seem unremarkable in 2025, but it was startling a quarter of a century ago. The single-page site rolled out (and still does) using regularly updated, annotated links in a design that mimics 18th-century English broadsheets. A “daily reading list,” the transplanted Californian called it, and the success he enjoyed showed it had many takers.
While the idea of an online site consisting entirely of links was not exactly new (porn sites had been doing it for years), its use in a highbrow context was out of the box. So was the degree of international enthusiasm for it – 2.5 million views a month, mainly from the US and UK, in a world where online academic adventurers usually measured unique readers in the hundreds.
James Flynn
The late Jim Flynn was not an obvious enigma, although he probably remains the only New Zealand scholar to have had an enigma named after him. The Flynn effect, as it was dubbed in Richard J Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, related to a paradox the University of Otago political scientist first noticed while doing spare-time research into IQ scores.
When Flynn looked at the data from 20 nations for the raw scores (as opposed to the final ones calculated to ensure an overall average of 100) he noticed something strange. Each successive generation seemed to be getting better and better IQ results, up by 25% in some cases. Yet it’s not as if today’s kids are getting smarter and smarter. Why? Wendy Williams, a research scientist at Yale, called this “one of the great unanswered questions of our time”.
George Hudson
“Oh, daylight saving time,” also referred to as daylight saving, daylight savings time or that bloody time again. According to a recent Gallup poll, 54% of Americans want to end the practice of changing the clocks twice a year. This Kiwi writer recently had dinner overseas with three Alaskans, when the conversation was long on denunciations of the practice, and almost dared not tell them where he was from for fear of reminding them where it all started.
Then again, even most New Zealanders don’t know that daylight saving originated here. The whiskery entomologist George Vernon Hudson is credited with first proposing the time method, suggesting a two-hour shift forward in spring in an 1895 paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society. Daylight saving was eventually instituted in 1927, discontinued after World War II but reinstated in the mid-1970s. If the fate of a recent petition for us to join the ranks of the non-daylight saving African and Asian nations is anything to go by, it’s booked to be here for a while yet. The petition attracted just 20 signatures.
Ross Ihaka
Speaking te reo is cool, but how about developing an entirely new language, which, for want of a better name, we might call te R?
Along with fellow statistics professor Robert Gentleman of Canada, University of Auckland statistician Ross Ihaka came up with the programming language known as R in the late 1990s. The lingo has since been adopted in the fields of data mining and bioinformatics and is popular around the world for statistical and data analysis.
Is there anything cooler than that? Well, yes, actually. Every new-version release of R has a name referencing the Charles Schulz classic Peanuts cartoon, “because everyone in statistics is a P-nut”.
Norma Mcculloch
In 2003, the erstwhile “home economist” Norma McCulloch was recognised as one of the top 10 women inventors in the world by the Global Women’s Inventors and Innovators Network. Thirty-five years earlier, the Liverpool-born innovator came up with a hand pump to take the air out of freezer bags, allowing food to keep better in the freezer and helping blameless home cooks avoid freezer burn.
Arriving here in the early 60s, she appeared on TV advising housewives on the new art of freezing food and writing cookery books. But she was largely forgotten by the early 2000s when her “Breath of Life” hand-held resuscitator picked up 12 international awards at a time of paranoia about Aids and hepatitis B transmission. The device – two plastic cylinders that draw up to 800ml of air into a person’s mouth, with a two-directional valve to let air out when they start breathing again – offered an alternative to traditional mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It may even save your life: the resuscitator was used by Hato Hone St John and even the United Nations. She died in Nelson in 2010.
Hamish McKenzie
Some years ago, this writer received a call from the San Francisco-based Kiwi – at the time a relatively little-known media figure dividing his time between looking after his baby and being one of three people road-testing an obscure platform called Substack. The big idea he wanted me to sign up to would allow media types to bypass traditional news operations and instead get readers to pay directly to access their work. Or rather, as McKenzie might put it, a portal designed to “unlock new value for all types of creators, giving rise to an economy where creators, rather than platforms or advertisers, are in charge”.
Eight years on, you’d be hard-pressed to find many working journalists around the world who haven’t tried their hand – with sharply varying degrees of success – on the platform. Substack’s last reported value was close to NZ$1 billion, though in the land of his birth, McKenzie remains as little known as ever.
Dorothy Moses
“Women’s journalism” has in one way or another been in the wider culture for the past couple of hundred years. For a long time, its longevity was apparently vouchsafed by female journalists confining their work to celebrity hatches, matches and dispatches and household tips.
If anyone helped shift the ground rules and put local women’s writing on the international journalistic map, it was Dorothy Moses. Born in Auckland in 1912 but US raised, Moses started out with the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in the late 1950s as its Wellington correspondent, interviewing The Beatles, Richard Burton and Jimmy Carter. Without changing the essentials (she covered every royal tour of the country until 1990) she helped change perceptions of what female readers did and didn’t want to read, rendering wider subjects with felicitous style and a fine sense of detail. Her political dispatches from the US for Wellington’s Evening Post, including military-themed pieces, remain journalistic pearls.
David Norton
Victoria University of Wellington has produced its share of impressive authors and lexicographers over the years, but only one who formally edited The Bible.
A one-time cabbie from Cambridge, Norton went on to get his PhD at the English city’s famous university before decamping to New Zealand and eventually producing an entirely new edition of The Bible, replete with thees and thous, hithers and whithers, for the same institution’s venerable press.
Long after Eleanor Catton, Keri Hulme and CK Stead have become literary footnotes, Norton’s entirely re-edited edition of the King James Bible – the first of its kind to be unveiled since 1873 – will continue to be studied and admired by divinity students and theologians alike.
The emeritus professor and former head of Victoria’s School of English, Film and Theatre says he’s now “about four-fifths” of the way through a new work about Jane Austen. Which also soundeth jolly exciting.
Eve Poole
New Zealanders of a certain age may recall Eve Poole from occasional appearances on agony aunt TV show Beauty and the Beast, and a fading number of others in Invercargill will remember her as the city’s mayor from 1983 until her death in office nine years later. Considerably less appreciated – other than among some Jewish archivists abroad – is the fact Poole was the recipient of one of the best-ever political insults/compliments from the late local MP and city councillor Norman Jones, for having bought nothing but “culture and emotion” to Southland. And much else besides.
Not only was Poole relatively unusual as a female New Zealand mayor in her time, she was probably the most multilingual of any of them to the present day. She was fluent in her native German, as well as French and Hebrew and, of course, English. She was also an actress, speech therapist and educator for the disabled.
Not bad for a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi-era Germany for mandatory Palestine, where she met future Kiwi husband Vernon Poole, a tank commander stationed in the region, who brought her home to Southland.
Nigel Richards
Nigel Richards is a man of many words
– and a man of even fewer words. The reclusive Malaysia-based Kiwi doesn’t do interviews, and as the Bobby Fischer of Scrabble, prefers instead to let his letters speak for themselves.
Which they undoubtedly have. In 2007, the self-educated Richards became Scrabble’s world champion, a feat he repeated in 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019. He is, as well, a five-time US national champion, eight-time UK Open champ, 11-time winner of the Singapore Open and 15-time winner of the world’s biggest Scrabble championship, the King’s Cup, in Bangkok.
By most reckonings, the Christchurch-born professional who started playing the game only in his late 20s is the most mind-jamming exponent of Scrabble since it was invented in New York during the Great Depression.
Oh, and despite not speaking French, he became the first Anglophone to win the French World Scrabble Championships. Despite having spent only nine weeks studying the lingo, memorising most of the language’s 390,000 words during the time, he cleaned up in the 2015 competition.
As one commentator marvelled, it’s like the world of Scrabble is divided between this Kiwi savant on one side and basically everyone else who has ever played on the other.
David Rozado
Did you know that “woke” culture might be on the way out? It’s official, according to The Economist, which recently pressed into service the impressively methodical findings of a globally obscure Otago Polytechnic associate professor of data science to make the case.
Since about 2015, David Rozado’s research has included tracking trends in media usage of words and expressions used to denounce prejudice – such as racism, sexism, homophobia – and social-justice associated terms, such as diversity, inclusion, equality.
(By the way, did you know the guy who first used the word “gender” in the contemporary sense was the New Zealand-born sexologist John Money?)
Rozado decided to put them to the rigorous test by microscopically analysing trends in news media language since the 1970s. In all, he has sifted through nearly 100 million news and opinion articles from 36 nations on the “woke” phenomenon that has excited so much debate.
He discovered a slackening enthusiasm for terms that denounce prejudice and increasing prominence in the use of anti-woke terminology.
Although he accepts it’s something of an open question whether more tolerant language really is on the decline, it’s hard to think of a more internationally relevant linguistic finding in these Trumpian times.
And, Rozado tells the Listener, he’s now looking at other hot-button issues such as the political leanings of ChatGPT.
Beatrice Tinsley
In scientific circles, the late Beatrice Tinsley is recognised as the “Queen of the Cosmos” but in the land where she came of age, the more usual response might be a scratch of the head. Sure, the late Dame Christine Cole Catley wrote a tip-top book about Tinsley, and the author’s daughter, Nicola Scott, has said she wants to make a movie about the late scientist. Yet household-name status still remains more anticipated than actual.
That’s a shame, because the Canterbury-educated Tinsley’s work has had a profound influence on what scientists know about nothing less than the origin and size of the universe.
She polished off a PhD on the “evolution of the universes” at the University of Texas in just two years with a 100% grade. She ended up with a professorship at Yale University in 1978.
Sadly, the year of her acceptance into the Ivy League institution she was also diagnosed with the melanoma that would kill her four years later.
She continued to publish until shortly before her death, in 1981, producing more than 100 influential scientific papers. As her biographer Catley put it in Bright Star, she’s the theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist whose work keeps on “opening doors to the future study of the evolutions of stars, galaxies and even the universe itself”. Not bad for a clergyman’s daughter from New Plymouth.
Christopher White
Auckland-born White recently started working as a music educator at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London – but for this writer, on assignment at the time to review a show for the Listener, the most enduring image of him was on stage in Limerick, Ireland, jitterbugging on saxophone alongside the legendary Van Morrison.
Impressive stuff for a guy who started out in the 1990s playing with the late, great Rodger Fox. Then he moved to London, hitting the live circuit, where, in 2010 he was talent-spotted by Morrison. The two continue to work together. As well as the concerts, the two collaborated on the just-released album of Morrison standards reinterpreted some years ago by White with big band arrangements.
How rewarding an experience is it working with the reputedly prickly Morrison? It can be “tough”, White told the Listener in an email exchange. “But he will give you chances and if you make the most of it and deliver, then there is a certain amount of stability.”
What’s really helped him, he says, is getting to understand music through the prism of Morrison. “It’s fascinating going through all his recordings, as we all have to do when we come into the band, and listen to the ‘imperfections’ in the performances – unexpected odd time signatures and strange form structures.
“Having now recorded on quite a few albums of his, it’s clear now that none of those things really matter. He has had a long career so likes to keep things fresh, and us on our toes.”