but not uncritical portraits of both women, deftly weaving oral testimony with documentary archive material, thereby revealing as much of the times in which Te Puea Herangi and Whina Cooper lived (and which they sought so much to influence) as of themselves. King's later biography Frank Sargeson (1995) deploys the same skill for lively narrative, coupled with access to the Sargeson archives and correspondence, as well as to numerous friends and enemies whose recollections flesh out the heroic narrative of the birth of Pakeha literature in New Zealand, in which Sargeson was as significant to his culture as Te Puea and Whina were to theirs. The Sargeson biography, together with the eagerly awaited edition of Sargeson's salty correspondence which is to follow it, climaxed King's work of the 1980s and 1990s, when he shed the mantle of being champion and chronicler of exclusively Maori figures and culture. Those decades saw him account for his own ethnicity in Being Pakeha and tackle the wider question of the nature of Pakeha New Zealand cultures. As with his Maori writings, King answered these questions by studying representative figures: Sargeson; E.H. McCormick; Andreas Reischek, the Austrian naturalist of King's The Collector (1981); and King himself. His interest in the lively yet typical life made him an ideal contributor to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography , for which he wrote the life (among others) of Tommy Solomon, the so-called 'last of the Morioris'. This led further to the revisionist history Moriori: A People Rediscovered