Barbara Angus

Barbara Angus (15 January 1924 – 4 February 2005) was a New Zealand diplomat and historian who served as the country's ambassador to the Philippines between 1978 and 1981. She also worked for the Department of Internal Affairs as a research assistant in its War History Branch and later for the Department of External Affairs. Angus had stints as a diplomat in Singapore, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur and Washington, D.C., and authored a book on Katherine Mansfield and wrote two entries for the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

Early life Angus was born in Woodville, New Zealand, on 15 January 1924. She was the second of three children of the bank manager Archibald Douglas Angus and his wife Cora Florence Webber.

Career She returned to Dunedin in 1947 and helped to author on the centennial history of Otago. Angus moved to Wellington in 1948 to become a research assistant for the War History Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs. Her career at the department saw her author a series of "civilian narratives" on New Zealand's social history on women's experience in particular during the Second World War. She and other women were barred from becoming diplomatic trainees in that period of history, and remained so until the 1970s. In 1993, she was awarded the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Medal. In her final years, Angus was afflicted by dementia, and she died in Waikanae on 4 February 2005.