The welcome - and essential - donations helping Victoria University

Saturday, 16 May 2026

Philanthropy is helping Victoria University thrive, not least a surprise $13.5m bequest from a mysterious trailblazing female scientist. Tim Pankhurst reports.

On a typically balmy Wellington summer day in 2023, Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University’s Foundation administration office received an astounding call.

On the line was a lawyer from London offering details of a bequest – a staggeringly large one.

His £800 an hour brief was to wind up the estate of Dr Aola Richards. Its main feature was a bequest of $13.5 million to the university where she became the first woman in New Zealand to gain a PhD in biological science – in 1958.

Her field was entomology where she had established a reputation as the foremost expert on wētā. She was so dedicated she once spent seven weeks in the darkness of the Waitomo caves studying the giant fearsome-looking insects.

That feat was headlined in The Press (July 14, 1955): Girl Braves Depths of Caves to Study Wetas. It noted Miss Richards had “only water rats, 15-inch wetas and 10-inch spiders for company”. The rats were as big as small cats and the furry black jumping spiders were three inches across.

Richards, who died in London in 2021 aged 91, is a woman of mystery. She never married, had no dependents and the source of her wealth is not clear. She may have inherited money but was known to have invested in Queensland property. Her father, David Richards, was a mathematics professor from Wales and her mother, Hinemoa, (nee Hopkins) studied law at the then Victoria College. They divorced soon after Aola’s birth in 1927.

Her unheralded bequest was a huge boost to the university foundation, which supports staff and students with research, scholarships and grants.

Such philanthropy is increasingly important in the face of reduced government funding for the tertiary sector and caps on student fees and numbers.

Victoria’s foundation has built its asset base to $135m, its dividends applied to numerous projects and individuals in helping meet the institution’s twin aims of delivering research and educating students.

“Universities are places where you give people with talent the opportunity to do extraordinary things on a long scale for the benefit of the country,” vice-chancellor Professor Nic Smith says.

The foundation has become “disproportionally important” to meeting those goals. It also serves as a conduit for rich and deep connections with alumni worldwide.

“It highlights the value of the institution and what a privilege it is to be part of it,” says Smith, who is about to take up the vice-chancellor role at Auckland University where he was an engineering undergraduate.

He leaves a Victoria University in good heart ‒ its finances have stabilised to the extent of returning a small surplus and enrolments across its three campuses are at a near peak boosted by increased numbers of international students.

“Wellington is coming out the other side of a really difficult time,” Smith says. “We have reconnected with local government, established an incubator, bring students on to campus and rebuilt connections with Wellington schools.

“The university is an enormous asset to the city, bringing in close to 20,000 mostly young, talented, ambitious people. As a student city, few would rival it.”

The university foundation had another significant payday in February this year when $5m was received from the George Mason Charitable Trust. Dr Mason ONZM, who died in 2024 aged 94, donated millions to environmental research from royalties from a chemical production company he established. His bequest is to support multidisciplinary research into the natural environment. Previous gifts included an underwater vehicle for Victoria’s marine ecology team.

“Higher education institutions are navigating shifting enrolment patterns, policy changes affecting the movement of international students and economic pressures tied to the cost-of-living crisis,” says Sue Cunningham, president and chief executive of the international Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

“Against this backdrop, philanthropy is not just welcome, it is increasingly essential.”

A council survey of 34 tertiary institutions across Australasia found $915m was raised in 2024.

This total included $12.6m raised by Victoria’s foundation from 993 donors. The majority of donations were relatively modest – 79% gave less than $1000 and some were as little as $20.

The foundation is overseen by the university administration, with an independent chair and voluntary trustees. On Thanking Day, foundation members phone every donor and thank them for their contribution.

Several retirees have commented that they enjoyed free university education and now see how tough it is for their grandchildren to study and work part-time to pay fees and living costs, that is if they can find work in a straitened economy. That is their motivation for wanting to contribute.

The Victoria foundation has a medium term target of $200m. The University of Auckland, the country’s largest, has a fund of nearly $1 billion. Otago University has around $240m. Waikato, Massey and Lincoln hold much smaller amounts.

The totals are chump change to the world’s most prestigious universities. Harvard tops the philanthropic league with a foundation fund of around US$50 billion, enough to run a small country.

The student union is also represented on the foundation advisory board, currently by its president Aidan Donoghue, a B.Com graduate majoring in taxation and political science.

He had previous experience with board meeting procedures but that was dealing with thousands of dollars rather than millions.

“The trustees have varied and storied backgrounds with lots of letters after their names and then it’s just Aidan from the student union.” But he says he was not intimidated. “A lot of effort was made to make me feel welcome. I appreciate being a student rep on such an important board.”

He aims to make a meaningful contribution in discussions around the handling of bequests and investment decisions. Funds are invested in a wide range of asset classes with the managers required to return annually the inflation rate plus 4%.

Students take a close interest in ethical investment and have objected to profiting from fossil fuels.

The pragmatic foundation approach, confirmed at its March meeting, is to phase out such investments contributing to global warming, while recognising that it is impractical to do so overnight when so many products are based on oil derivatives. That even extends to the condoms, which rely on oil-derived materials to preserve latex and silicone-based lubricants, freely available at the student union campus office.

“I’d rather compromise than stand on principle when ultimately there is no way forward,” Donoghue says.

Students are doing it hard in the current depressed economy with rising costs and jobs, part and fulltime, hard to come by. The union office on campus operates a food bank that currently assists 70 to 100 students a week. Once a fortnight orders became weekly, and now twice-weekly.

Donoghue says foundation-funded scholarships can be life changing but he wonders whether the scope could be broadened to benefit all students.

The foundation has gone some way to broadening its scope in launching a winter energy grant programme to assist with the extra cost of warming cold flats.

Dame Kerry Prendergast, a formidable fundraiser, previously chaired the foundation and has separately raised $27m for a National Music Centre in collaboration with the university’s expanded School of Music, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Wellington City Council.

Vice-chancellor Smith says she has almost single-handedly revived the music connection with the city.

One or two may have crossed the road when they saw Prendergast approaching but most are happy to give if they have the means. Chief among those are Verna and the late Denis Adam, who have donated $4m in addition to significant other arts support; Sir Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh with $2m; and $2m each from the Lloyd Morrison and Macarthy trusts and Lotteries Commission.

Fundraising of $3m continues with the sale of seat naming in the Adam Auditorium catering for music education and performance.

“I’m a great believer that the arts help us,” Prendergast says. “It’s about your soul. Yes, you’ve got to have good infrastructure and warm places for people to live in and jobs. But when all that’s done, you’ve got to have things that are good for people.

“I love this city with a passion. Through the good times and the bad, I can only see opportunities.”

The National Music Centre will be anchored in the refurbished, long awaited Wellington Town Hall, complementing the rebuilt Central Library and City Gallery on Civic Square, restoring the heart of the city.

Meanwhile the Richards bequest, the largest ever gifted to Victoria University by some margin, is being put to good use.

“The biological and economic impacts of introduced pests, as well as the changing climate on the wide range of insects in Aotearoa New Zealand has never been more important,” according to Professor Janet Pitman, School of Biological Sciences head.

“Dr Richards’ support will enable the continued development of experts within Aotearoa to help safeguard and conserve the diversity of our insect populations.

“Her gift will also be used for the benefit of New Zealand’s primary production, including the role that insects play through food production, soil health and biocontrol.”

In 2025 the Dr Aola Richards Entomology Fund supported varying native insect investigations.

“I have been living my dream since I was awarded the Aola Richards postdoctoral fellowship, doing the research I love, training postgraduate and undergraduate students and getting to work at a university that is very dear to me,” says Research Fellow Dr Rory Little.

He has set up a Bugs, Drugs and Biosynthesis Lab to study insect-associated bacteria. His team is investigating finding new antibiotics that could be useful to humans or other animals.

“Many insects have specialised bacteria living on or within them that make useful chemical molecules, such as vitamins or antibiotics,” he says. “Aotearoa New Zealand is home to over 18,000 endemic species of insects but we know almost nothing about the kinds of chemicals their associated bacteria make.”

The team has been collecting bugs around the Wellington region to isolate bacteria from the specimens and screen them for antibiotic production. They are also sequencing the bacteria’s DNA, looking for genes that might encode the enzymes that produce antibiotics.

Sydnee Acraman was another to benefit from the Richards fund. She applied a summer research scholarship to collecting insects at Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush, creating a bacteria library as the starting point for her Master’s project.

Sam Dilday’s PhD research focuses on the major threat to honey bees in New Zealand – the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor). Beekeepers have noted that some pesticide treatments have become less effective over recent years, suggesting the mites may be developing resistance. They have a devastating impact on the industry, responsible for over 50% of all winter hive losses in some seasons as they feed on bee larvae and adults.

Dilday is evaluating the accuracy of a common test beekeepers use to determine resistance and examine the mites for any genetic or physical explanations for this change.

“This scholarship has been extremely important as it was the defining factor that led me to Victoria to pursue a PhD,” she says. “Without it, I wouldn’t be here.”

Another PhD student, Juanfra Guisado Chavez, was studying invertebrates in his native Spain when he first learned about wētā.

“I was impressed because invertebrates are often neglected in worldwide conservation efforts,” he says. “But here the wētā was considered an iconic species with a rich history of research, much of it led by Dr Aola Richards.”

Chavez conducted fieldwork at Zealandia, discovering that wētā help regenerate forests by dispersing seeds after eating native fruits, unusual behaviour for an insect as birds or mammals usually disperse seeds. He found that seeds germinate faster after being consumed by wētā and presented his research at an international conference in Hawaii.

“I am very grateful to have received the scholarship funding,” he says. “It has let me study the incredible biodiversity in Aotearoa, connect with outstanding researchers and learn about Māori culture and knowledge, while continuing Dr Richards’ legacy.”

Jonathan Sylvester is contributing to our understanding of native insects from a different perspective. His Master of Laws dissertation investigated the Resource Management Act’s impact on endangered native species. He aims to work as an environmental lawyer advocating for insect conservation and biodiversity protection.

Pitman has revelled in allocating the Richards bequest funds to talented emerging researchers. “It is wonderful to see the same passion for entomology that Dr Richards had being passed down through future generations of scientists at Te Herenga Waka,” she says.

Richards was a star pupil at Samuel Marsden Collegiate before completing a Master’s in zoology at Victoria.

On graduating, she worked at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’s plant diseases division in Auckland before moving to the University of New South Wales’ school of biological science where she worked for 33 years.

She published more than 80 papers. Her most cited works are on the life history and feeding biology of beetles and wētā. A cave wētā species was named for her in 2018: Miotopus richardsae. She became attached to these ancient insects, sometimes literally, and was the first person to rear them from eggs.

Richards was drawn to the deep, dark places where her prized insects dwelt and was one of the pioneers of Australian speleology (caving). She co-founded and edited the journal Helictite devoted to the study of caves and caving in Australasia.

She was appalled that on her retirement her position was not filled. That was to prove an expensive decision for the university. She directed her estate be equally split between Victoria University and not the University of NSW but rather Sydney University ‒ $13.5m to each. She donated most of her extensive insect collections to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and retired to London to pursue interests in opera, painting and music, keeping her hand in with some study at the British Museum of Natural History.

New Zealand, as a young country without great institutional wealth, does not have a tradition of philanthropy but many are grateful for the opportunities higher education has given them in life. Recent bequests have included gold and a residential property on a prime site above Karaka bays.

And there is always the prospect of that special call. “I represent the estate of …”

Tim Pankhurst is journalist, former newspaper editor and a Victoria University Foundation trustee