Gabrielle Muir

Ngāti Kahungunu

1954 -

Gabrielle Muir was born in Wellington and was educated at Titahi Bay North Primary School, Porirua Primary School, Mana College and Marlborough Girls’ College. From 1975-1987 she lived in Australia. On returning to New Zealand she studied at Massey and Victoria Universities and attended Bill Manhire’s Creative Writing Course 252 at Victoria University in 1991. In the late 1990s she began working full-time at the National Archives and is completing her double major at Victoria part-time. Gabrielle has won a number of writing awards including PEN’s Young Writer Award for Poetry in 1974. She was placed second in the Newcomers Section of the Mobil-Dominion Sunday Times Short Story Competition in 1991 and received the Readers’ Digest-PEN-Stout Research Centre Fellowship in 1992. In 1994 Gabrielle was awarded the QEII Arts Council New Writer’s Bursary and was a recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary. She writes poetry and short stories. She has written under the names Gabrielle Louise Muir and Gabrielle Bridger and currently lives with her husband and youngest son in Wellington. She has another son living in Wellington and a daughter in Auckland.

Biographical sources

  • Correspondence with Gabrielle Muir 10 Dec. 1992, 4 and 11 Feb. 1998.

    Fiction

  • "Real Names." SPORT 8 (Mar. 1992): 29-34.
  • In this story a child raised by her grandmother reveals her unhappiness living with ‘the Old Lady’ and her longing to be reunited with her mother. This story, tinged with humour, highlights different relationships - some strained, some lost and some fraught with expectation.
  • "In the School Holidays." Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing. Comp. and ed. Witi Ihimaera. Contributing ed. Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D. S. Long. Vol. 3: Te Puāwaitanga O Te Kōrero: The Flowering. Auckland, N.Z.: Reed, 1993. 169-176.
  • A poignant story of a solo mother’s ambivalent feelings for her children’s father and the children’s discovery of ongoing closeness between the separated parents.
  • "A Dream of Mokuwhenua." Landfall 187 2.1 (May 1994): 109-113.
  • In this story the narrator addresses her mother and recalls a time in her childhood when they visited a marae at Mokuwhenua together. The narrator remembers the idyllic setting of the marae, the killing of a moray, her mother’s inexplicable disappearance and her return hours later when the narrator was rescued from a drunken brawl. The writer depicts the story from a child’s perspective of events that it did not understand and the child’s sense of alienation from her mother.
  • "The Gorse Thicket." Sport 12 (Mar. 1994):25-33. Rpt. in Mutes & Earthquakes. Bill Manhire’s Creative Writing Course at Victoria. Ed. Bill Manhire. Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria UP, 1997. 95-104.
  • The young speaker, sent away from her mother and brother to live with her Nana and younger sister, longs to be reunited with her mother. It is not until Nana is hospitalised that the speaker finally returns home to a preoccupied and busy solo mother. In the children’s largely unsupervised world the speaker has to find her way to school through a sinister gorse thicket and it is in this thicket that the younger sister falls victim to her brother’s abuse.

    • Poetry

  • "Grandfather Montgomery." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 67.
  • The speaker tells of her ambivalent feelings of love and anger toward a grandfather she never met.
  • "All the Lovely Boys and Girls." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 67.
  • The young speaker mourns the loss of youth and innocence snatched away by ‘The Nightmare hand of Age’ and by ‘men and boys...heavy with the burden of ...lust’.
  • "A Question of Honesty." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 68.
  • A poem suggesting that regardless of the intentions of ‘Young Pride and Love’ in reaffirming their friendship, they are merely pawns on the chess board of capricious fate.
  • "Okarito." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 68-69.
  • The speaker retains in her memory a glimpse of Okarito beach, the heron and old Nolan the goldminer.
  • "Wind - For Buckwheat." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 69.
  • A poem exploring the impact of wind on the natural world.
  • "All About Summer." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 69-70.
  • With the coming of summer the speaker wants to relish every moment of daylight.
  • "Picton - Sunday Night." Gabrielle Bridger. Young Writing - a P.E.N. Anthology. Ed. Lauris Edmond. Wellington, N.Z.: Brick Row Publishing for P.E.N. New Zealand, 1979. 70.
  • The speaker reflects on the solitude of a late night walk through Picton on a Sunday night.
  • "Tōtara Dreaming (On His Birthday)." Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing. Comp. and ed. Witi Ihimaera. Contributing ed. Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D. S. Long. Vol. 3: Te Puāwaitanga O Te Kōrero: The Flowering. Auckland, N.Z.: Reed, 1993. 167.
  • A tribute to Joe who is likened to a young tōtara tree on his ninth birthday.
  • "Nana." Gabrielle Louise Muir. Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing. Comp. and ed. Witi Ihimaera. Contributing ed. Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D. S. Long. Vol. 3: Te Puāwaitanga O Te Kōrero: The Flowering. Auckland, N.Z.: Reed, 1993. 168-169.
  • The speaker berates her deceased grandmother whom she senses comes to haunt her house on windy dark nights.
  • "This Love." Kapiti Poems 7. Ed. Meg Campbell, Helen Durey and Maxine Montgomery. Pukerua Bay, N.Z.: Rawhiti Press in association with Whitireia and Daphne Brasell, 1994. 84.
  • The speaker wishes that her love was as potent as in former times when her lover could be drawn ‘through storms, or crowds’ to ‘where [she] lay waiting’.