But as a teacher, and especially as a mentor and arts activist, few can equal her achievements.
I have been waiting for this biography for some time, being aware that an attempt at autobiography had been made but abandoned, and Theresa Sjoquist's effort captures very well the complicated personality of one of our country's remarkable women. The book does, however, have some troubling faults, of which more later.
Rust was an only child. Her father was a teacher for most of his life in pre-war remote Northland and Waikato Maori schools, which were among the poorest and most primitive of their kind in the so-called developed world.
He was highly regarded and respected by the tangata whenua, won their hearts and worked extremely hard to improve their lot. Rust's mother, however, was a sensitive, cultured woman who never really settled to life in the backblocks, but with whom Yvonne enjoyed a close, loving and lifelong friendship.
While the marriage relationship eventually collapsed due to Gordon Rust's infidelity, the couple remained together.
Yvonne attended high school in Te Awamutu, near where the family had moved just before the war while Gordon taught at Parawera Native School, and in 1940 she moved to Christchurch to attend the School of Art at Canterbury University College, intending to follow a teaching career.
Fortuitously, her ambitions coincided with the Beeby/Tovey reforms, which introduced specialist arts and craft education to our primary and secondary schools, and Rust proved early what a fine teacher she was.
But her restless spirit, a character trait all her life, meant she wandered - holding jobs at Palmerston North Girls' High School, Hastings High School, Wellington Technical College and Christchurch Girls' High School over quite a short span. When her parents retired to Christchurch, she joined them and took a job with Adult Education Extension. Her task was to teach pottery, jewellery and embroidery in country areas all over the northern half of the South Island.
In 1956, she helped organise the first national pottery school, held in Christchurch, and from this emerged the idea for her own private craft school, which she opened in Springfield Rd in 1957 and later shifted to the St Albans end of Colombo St. I am happy to count myself among her early students, having spent a couple of years attending life-drawing classes.
Rust kept her self-funded and unsubsidised school running after-hours from her teaching jobs, and anyone who knew her in those days cannot fail to remember her extraordinary energy, commitment and determination, as well as her inspiring - if autocratic - personality.
The names of students or participants who passed through her craft centre make up a who's who of New Zealand arts and crafts, especially in pottery.
Her hospitality was legendary, as was her generosity - and many ratbags took advantage of it.
The high point of this period in her life was the attendance at the craft centre of the man regarded as the world's greatest potter of the time, Shoji Hamada.
Her story to this point is well covered by Sjoquist, helped in large part by Rust's own autobiographical notes, which she has artfully incorporated into the text.
By the mid-1960s, the craft centre had unravelled: short of money and lacking any official support, Rust was also on the verge of a breakdown from overwork, and after her mother's death, she was especially bereft.
Typically, she decided to abandon everything in Christchurch and go where she knew she could find good clay, to the West Coast.
There, while teaching at Greymouth High School, she set up another craft centre. It lasted until 1971, when she moved back to Northland, setting up yet another studio and teaching centre and building her own home.
Over the years, Rust taught literally thousands of people to make pots, to embrace her philosophy of low technology using local natural resources, and to make a distinctively local art.
She had no system of teaching, as I recall, other than demonstration, but, far more effectively, she encouraged her students to express themselves without interference or influence - providing guidance when needed to solve technical problems but, essentially, leaving everyone to find their own ways of expression.
Rust retired to Opua in 1984 and it was probably fortunate that she did, for in 1988 Roger Douglas and Co, virtually overnight, destroyed the flourishing local craft-potting industry by lifting sales tax on imported pottery (thus enabling the flood of cheap, Asian-produced factory ware to flood the shops). Pottery studios collapsed all over the country.
Rust lived on her national superannuation and painted - her first love. Eventually, she returned to the West Coast, where she died after a succession of illnesses. She never married, her relationships with men seeming to be doomed by one exterior cause or another, but she sustained an intense emotional life with her interest in her students and her many friends.
The second part of this book, which covers the post-1950s period, is less satisfying than the first. The writing is not well organised and the narrative tends to move about events confusingly: people, circumstances and activities pop up unexpectedly and then disappear.
The publisher has left uncorrected a typesetting fault on some pages where a space appears between th and e; the text names Georg Kohlap "George Kotap", and there are one or two other infelicities, including the absence of an index. The range of illustrations is, however, excellent.
• Bryan James is the Books Editor.
