Joseph Ivess

Joseph Ivess (8 February 1844 – 4 September 1919) was a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. He had an association with a large number of newspapers.

Joseph Ivess was born in Askeaton, County Limerick, Ireland in 1844. His parents were John Pope Ivess and Anne Southwell. The family emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1852. Ivess attended Barnett's Grammar School in Emerald Hill. His father became a police sergeant. In 1864, he married Sarah Ann Reddin at Castlemaine, Victoria. In 1866, he worked on the staff of the Bendigo Independent. A photograph of Ivess with his family shows nine children.

On his arrival in New Zealand in 1868 he began work as the manager, and perhaps printer, of the New Zealand Celt at Hokitika. It is hardly surprising that an Irishman emigrating from Melbourne to New Zealand would land at Hokitika. The West Coast gold fields were at that time full of fellow countrymen and shipping routes made that coast a natural landfall. Ivess probably found employment rapidly as the manager of the New Zealand Celt, the Irish Catholic Party's newspaper whose proprietor John Manning was charged with seditious libel for erecting a memorial to the Fenian martyrs of Manchester in the Hokitika Cemetery. It may have been in this heady political atmosphere that the seeds of Ivess's political ambitions were planted and nurtured. By 1870 Ivess had definitely established a printing business at Hokitika in partnership with George Tilbrook, as shown by advertisements in the first issue of the Tomahawk (5 March 1870) and subsequent issues. This heavily satirical weekly and its successor, the Lantern, must also have encouraged Ivess in his political aspirations, for they relied on criticism of local and national political events for their effect. Even at this early stage in his career Ivess demonstrated a propensity for attracting legal action, being named as a defendant in a libel action in the Tomahawk (16 and 30 April 1870). To be fair, Ivess was not alone among newspapermen in being sued frequently. Conservative libel laws were retained in New Zealand long after they had been redrafted in England and resulted in frequent lawsuits of which Ivess attracted his fair share.

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