Alfred Domett (20 May 1811 – 2 November 1887) was the fourth premier of New Zealand, a close friend of the poet Robert Browning and author of the epic poem Ranolf and Amohia, a South Sea Day Dream. Born in England, he emigrated to New Zealand in 1842 and remained there for a further thirty years, holding many significant political posts.
Domett "is said to have been born on 20 May 1811" at Camberwell Grove, Surrey, and records show he was baptised on 4 November 1812 at Bermondsey; the sixth child and fourth son of Nathaniel Domett, a ship-owner. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, but left the university in 1833. Domett spent 1833 to 1835 travelling in the United States, Canada and the West Indies. Spending the winter of 1833 in Upper Canada, he gained some experience in surveying and conveyancing. Returning to England, he entered at the Middle Temple on 7 November 1835, and was called to the bar on 19 November 1841.
Domett emigrated to Nelson, New Zealand, on the Sir Charles Forbes, departing Gravesend on 1 May 1842 and arriving in Nelson on 22 August with 187 settlers. The following year, a broken leg possibly saved his life as it prevented him from accompanying Captain Arthur Wakefield (1799–1843), the founder of the Nelson settlement and a younger brother of the New Zealand Company's principal architect Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), to a confrontation with local Māori beside the Wairau River. On 17 June 1843, Wakefield, twenty-one other settlers, and four Maori were killed in the Wairau Affray.
The aftermath of the Wairau incident resulted in the emergence of Domett as a public figure in Nelson. Governor Fitzroy investigated the affray and concluded that while the Māori who killed those who surrendered needed rebuking, the fault actually lay with the New Zealand Company. A public meeting held by angered settlers, asked Domett to take their case to the Colonial Secretary in Auckland where he said that the Company's claim to the land had been valid and that Pākehā killed were "innocent victims to Māori savagery". In response to the Secretary's reply that under the Treaty of Waitangi, Te Rauparaha was entitled to deny the sale of the land, Domett rubbished the Treaty, questioned the "rights of the aborigines to land, of the capabilities of what they cannot avail themselves" and suggested that the colonists should gather their forces together and defeat the natives.
He was editor of the Nelson Examiner from c. 1843 to 1845 and was again editor, briefly, in 1857. He published a supplement to the paper concerning the Wairau Affray in 1843, and continued to write occasional contributions for that paper. Published in London was a "Petition to Parliament for the recall of Governor Fitzroy, together with a Narrative of the Wairau Massacre. 8vo. 1844–46." Domett's experience of representing the wishes of local settlers in the aftermath of what is now called the Wairau Affray, made him a critic of the policies of Fitzroy, but his "masterly" petition is seen as an even greater criticism of local authorities.
Domett married a widowed schoolteacher, Mrs Mary George of Wellington, on 3 November 1856. She had two sons, John (Johnny) George who joined the Colonial Forces and was killed during Te Kooti's War, at the Battle of Te Pōrere near Tongariro, and James George. In his epic poem “Ranolf and Amohia”, Domett speaks of his stepson John as “young, kindly, chivalrous". Alfred and Mary had a son, Alfred Nelson Domett.
During his tenure as Colonial Secretary of New Munster, which he held from 1848 to 1853, Domett published the extensive Statistics of the province of New Munster, New Zealand, from 1841 to 1848, in which he revealed his vision of "a free, secular and compulsory elementary education for the colony's children".
In June 1850 he published The ordinances of New Zealand passed in the first ten sessions of the General Legislative Council, A.D. 1841 to A.D. 1849, which had required extensive sorting of ordinances from the 1840s.
In his free time, he devoted himself to completing the poetic epic Ranolf and Amohia, which was published in London in 1872. A small volume of poems appeared in 1877. He continued to adjust Ranolf and Amohia. In 1883, a revised edition of Ranolf and Amohia was printed with the subtitle "A dream of two lives", indicating the sustained bicultural conception, albeit from a Victorian and British-educated point of view, of this poetic project.
Domett's first volume of poetry was published in 1832. Another book of poems, the "more technically proficient" Venice, appeared in 1839. Domett contributed poems to Blackwood's Magazine, one of which, A Christmas Hymn, attracted some attention locally. During the ten years he lived in London, he became the intimate friend of Robert Browning, of whose poem "Waring" he is the subject. In that poem, Browning expresses regret for Domett's sudden disappearance from London, and speaks of Domett with emotion: 'How much I loved him, I find out now I've lost him'. In the poem Browning asks what has become of his friend, but believes he will achieve much in far-off lands:
Was lost here but it rose afar!
An account of the friendship between the two men appeared in The Contemporary Review for January 1905, by W. H. Griffin. Thereafter, with the approval of Browning's son, Frederic G. Kenyon edited correspondence between and relating to Browning and Domett, after the 1904 auction purchase of the letters by Reginald Smith, head of publishing firm Smith Elder and Co.
The epic Ranolf and Amohia, a South Sea Day Dream (1872, new edition 1877), includes details of both European and Māori life, and is by far the best known of his works. Flotsam and Jetsam (1877) is dedicated to Browning. More than a century after its publication, literary critic Patrick Evans commented: "Like a stranded whale, the poem lies rotting on the beach of New Zealand literature, an embarrassment that no one knows what to do with."
He continued to write poetry all his life, in the style of rhyming panegyrics such as An Invitation, with its allusions to the sub-tropical flora and threatened inhabitants of countries such as New Zealand:
And if weary of mists you will roam undisdaining
To a land where the fanciful fountains are raining
Swift brilliants of boiling and beautiful spray
In the violet splendour of skies that illume