At the latest Otago University graduation ceremony on Saturday, McQueen received an honorary doctor of literature degree, acknowledging her "powerful contributions" to the nation's creative life.
More than 380 graduands in arts, humanities, dentistry, medicine, pharmacy and other health science disciplines graduated at the 3pm ceremony, at the Dunedin Town Hall.
In her graduation address, McQueen thanked the university for "its continued dedication to the shaping of minds capable of making a real contribution to the world we live in".
"It is a difficult world, an endangered world, a beautiful golden goose of a world and it's up to all of us to look after it."
She recalled that when she had been a student at Otago in the mid-1960s, the main attraction in the Octagon, apart from the Robbie Burns statue, "whose cold knee I have sat on", was the former Star fountain.
"This was a sprawling affair of pipes and nozzles from which a couple of times a day sprang great vertical jets of water, illuminated, pulsing and gushing rhythmically to the martial sounds of recorded music.
"The nozzles were made of soft lead and it was discovered by some naughty students in the early hours of one morning that they could be bent outwards, so that the next day the musical spurts shot out horizontally, dousing the passing citizens."
Saturday's graduates would also remember the "tremendous fun" of their own university days, during which life-long friendships had been formed.
She read one of her poems, titled Lens, which recalled a childhood memory of her brother as a youngster "grinding for hours" to create a lens for a telescope.
Through their university studies, graduates had also completed "countless hours of grinding".
"With discipline and patience you have polished for yourselves a lens which extends your natural ability by several orders of magnitude.
"The real beauty of this lens of your education is that you can share it with others.
"It is possible that in your life you will discover something new, or create an extraordinary work of art, or invent something that will change the course of history," she said.
"However, it is more likely that you will be stressed out and overtaxed just getting by in the ordinary business of living.
"In any event, you will discover that life is a maze of possibilities, probabilities, dead ends, hopes, hard work and truth, through which you are continuously finding your path, balancing each problem with a solution.
"By the way, it is as well to cultivate in yourself that shy virtue of humility, without which no achievement can bring real satisfaction."
