Author(s): Edmund Bohan

NZ Biography & Memoirs | Secondhand

It would be easy to make assumptions about someone like Philip Burdon. The product of a long line of landed gentry going back to the 14th century, and of well-heeled pilgrims on Canterbury's First Four Ships, brought up and educated as one of South Canterbury's privileged landowners, a distinguished old boy of Christ's College - and a self-made multimillionaire to boot. Burdon might appear to be the archetypical New Zealand Anglocentric conservative. The truth is very different. This man is also a committed republican, a businessman with an acute social conscience, a liberal politician who fought relentlessly against the right-wing idealogues of his own National Party, and not only slowed their extremist free-market reforms but convinced his causus that this philosophy must wear a human face. But this is more than the biography of a complex and interesting man. Historian Edmund Bohan has also created a fascinating, lively and important portrait of an extraordinary period in New Zealand's history. He has also written and published historical fiction and non-fiction, short stories and articles.