Dr Susan Bulmer

Sue Bulmer (née Hirsh) was born in Ithaca, New York and grew up in California. It wasn’t until 1957, the year she arrived in New Zealand as a 24-year-old Fulbright scholar, that she got properly hooked on archaeology. Her earlier studies at Cornell University (BA) and the University of Hawaii (MA) were in anthropology. Sue had been introduced to field archaeology in Hawaii, and once in New Zealand she leapt into excavations in Auckland and field trips to the Coromandel. By all accounts, it was the music making and camaraderie as much as the excitement of digging that fuelled her enthusiasm. In 1958 she enrolled for MA studies in archaeology at Auckland University under Jack Golson, an early champion for Auckland’s volcanic cones and the only archaeologist on the university staff at that time.

In 1959 Sue began her pioneering archaeological fieldwork in the New Guinea highlands, initially in the company of her newly-wed husband, anthropologist Ralph Bulmer. In the years following their return to New Zealand in 1960, Sue had three children (Alice, David and Kenneth) in quick succession, delaying completion of her MA until 1966. The family spent another five years in Papua New Guinea. Sue’s research in Port Moresby became the basis of her PhD which she began in 1973 and completed in 1978, mainly to improve her chances of securing a position at a university or museum. Her marriage, however, was not a match made in heaven. She and Ralph divorced in 1980.

Outspoken and far-sighted, Sue was an independent scientist for most of her career, apart from 15 years at the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (now Heritage New Zealand) and the Department of Conservation from 1979 until her retirement in 1994. As the HPT’s first Northern Regional Archaeologist, Sue built up a team of more than 20 archaeologists and contract staff who carried out many site surveys in the Auckland region and brought a strong focus on archaeological research to the HPT’s role.

Sue first encountered Auckland’s volcanic cones in 1957 on a bus tour for university students. When Thor Heyerdahl visited the major Auckland maunga in 1965, he was surprised that none had ever been mapped. It was Sue who in 1978 produced the first archaeological map of Maungawhau, from survey work done by graduate students. Sue used to bring copies to our meetings and urge us to mark anything of historical interest we might be lucky enough to discover.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Sue completed a great many archaeological studies and papers on the Māori settlement of Tāmaki Makaurau, including pā sites on the cones, gardens on the volcanic fields, and early historic sites in downtown Auckland. She campaigned for preservation of the Ōtuataua stonefields and for World Heritage status for the Auckland volcanic cones a decade before DOC took up the cause. In 1981, when the summit carpark on Maungawhau was repaved, Sue carried out the only archaeological excavations that have ever taken place on the mountain. Her passion for Māori history and her recognition of the immense value of the maunga as cultural landscapes was far in advance of the local authority management ethos through those frustrating decades.