Photo composite , McKay Family Collection
Mac McKay – he disliked the Christian name Cyril – was born in 1900 and raised in Wellington in a sturdy Anglican family . Educated at Wellington College , McKay joined the Government Service at the age of 17 . Before he was 20 he headed off to Samoa as a junior clerk in the New Zealand Administration . Thus began a love affair with the islands that lasted his whole life and saw him only return to New Zealand reluctantly in 1943 .
One of Mac ’ s unpleasant duties as a new arrival in 1920 was to participate in the processing of a large number of German citizens in Samoa who were deported from the islands in the wake of the German defeat in the First World War . This unhappy episode may have had an emotional impact on McKay and shaped his response to similar events many years later .
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