Olive Smithells
Olive Frances Smithells (born Olive Frances Whitta) was a New Zealand dancer and health educator. She was born on 24 October 1920 in Christchurch to Stephen V. Whitta and Margaret Ewing Whitta; her father was from Cornwall. Olive trained as a physical education teacher at Christchurch Teachers’ College from 1938 to 1940.
She taught and lectured in health and physical education at Wellington and Dunedin Teachers’ Colleges, and later at the University of Otago. Olive edited the Bulletin of the New Zealand Physical Education Society, which later became the Journal of Physical Education New Zealand. She wrote Fatness, Figures and Fitness (1967) and Look After Your Back, Streamline Your Front (1970), and co-authored Individual needs in physical education (1974) with her husband, Philip Smithells.
Olive joined the Wellington New Dance Group from 1945 to 1948, performing with Philip Smithells, Rona Bailey and Edith Sipos. Their works included Hiroshima (1947) and other pieces such as Monotony Chorus, The Dance of Two Women, and Sabotage in a Factory. A documentary about the group, Dance of the Instant: The New Dance Group, 1945–1947, appeared in 2009.
She married English-born professor Philip Ashton Smithells in 1944, five days after his first marriage ended. They had three sons. Both were Quakers and pacifists. Philip helped found the University of Otago’s School of Physical Education, and Otago’s Smithells Gymnasium is named in his honor. Philip died in 1977, and Olive was widowed. Olive Smithells died in Dunedin on 7 June 2007, at the age of 86.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 04:33 (CET).