The Topp Twins have been named among New Zealand’s newest arts Icons, and for the first time in more than forty years only one of them was there to accept.
Dame Lynda Topp collected the Icon Whakamana Hiranga Award on behalf of the duo at a ceremony at Government House in Wellington on Thursday 6 August, ten weeks after her twin sister Dame Jools Topp died of breast cancer at the age of 68. The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi announced the four 2026 recipients the following morning.
“A great honour and a chance to honour my sister Jools,” Dame Lynda said. “We have been called ‘icons’ a few times but now it’s official and that is very cool.”
The foundation said Dame Jools was told about the honour before she died and was presented with her medallion. She died at her home on Saturday 23 May with Dame Lynda, her brother Bruce and close friends beside her, 1News reported at the time. She had first been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 and had been treated again since the illness returned in 2021.
The Icon Whakamana Hiranga is the highest honour the New Zealand arts sector gives itself. It was established in 2003 and the number of living recipients is capped at 20, so new artists can only be brought in when others die. This year’s four inductions restore that circle to its full complement after several Icons died over the past year. Fifty artists have now been honoured in total, 20 of them living.
Joining the Topp Twins are glass sculptor Ann Robinson, painter and sculptor Darcy Nicholas, and the writer Witi Ihimaera Smiler. Robinson pioneered the lost wax casting of glass in this country, adapting a technique borrowed from bronze work into something of her own. “I am honoured to be chosen by my contemporaries,” she said. “New Zealanders love their artists. They’re very proud of them.”
Nicholas has spent five decades as both an artist and a builder of institutions, founding Pātaka Art and Museum in Porirua and the Māori Art Market. “I am very humbled having been raised as the little boy in a big family and always being told to keep quiet,” he said. “My drawings and later my art became my voice. My mother and father and my late wife would be smiling in the spirit world.”
Ihimaera Smiler was the first Māori novelist published in New Zealand and wrote The Whale Rider, which reached audiences around the world through the 2002 film. Accepting the award, he said the rangatahi, meaning the young people coming through behind him, “are already standing on the horizon, waiting”.
Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro, who is the foundation’s vice regal patron, presented the awards. She said the word icon can suggest distance or grandeur, and that what struck her was the opposite, “the way these artists have all drawn us closer – to an idea, to this place, to one another. That is an extraordinary gift.”
Each recipient is given a bronze medallion set with greenstone, designed by the sculptor John Edgar. The medallion itself passes to the next recipient when its holder dies, and the artist keeps a pin version. “I chose bronze for the medallions for its rich colour, its strength and hardness, and for its long association with the history of medals and coinage,” Edgar said. “Each medallion has its own unmistakable character through the pounamu placed at the centre.” Pounamu is the Māori name for greenstone.
For anyone who grew up in New Zealand in the past four decades, the Topp Twins need no introduction. Jools and Lynda Topp were born in Huntly on 14 May 1958, grew up on a Waikato dairy farm and started out busking, holding down a regular Friday night pitch on Queen Street in Auckland in the early 1980s. What began as two women with guitars and a yodel turned into one of the most unusual acts in the country, part country music duo, part political comedy troupe.
Their characters became national property. Camp Mother and Camp Leader, and the pair of ordinary blokes known simply as Ken and Ken, gave them a way of talking to New Zealanders who would never have sat still for a lecture. Their television series Do Not Adjust Your Twinset ran for three seasons in the late 1990s and won multiple New Zealand Film and Television Awards, and they returned to screens with Topp Country between 2014 and 2016.
They were also present at most of the arguments that shaped modern New Zealand. They performed at the Bastion Point land protest in 1978, at the United Women’s Convention in Hamilton in 1979 and at the marches against the 1981 Springbok tour, and they sang for homosexual law reform and the nuclear free policy. They were openly lesbian performers at a time when that was still a criminal matter for men and a professional risk for everyone. They did it without ever losing the rural audience that first claimed them, which may be the most remarkable thing about them.
The 2009 documentary The Topp Twins Untouchable Girls introduced them to a new generation and took more than $1.8 million at the box office worldwide, winning audience awards at festivals in Toronto, Melbourne, Göteborg and Portland. They were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2008, made Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004, and appointed Dames Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018 for services to entertainment.
Previous Icons include Ralph Hotere and the weaver Diggeress Rangituatahi Te Kanawa, who were among the first named in 2003, along with Margaret Mahy, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Joy Cowley and Neil Finn. RNZ has more on the ceremony, and Stuff has profiles of all four recipients.
The award was founded with a $500,000 gift from Sir Eion and Lady Jan Edgar after Sir Eion stepped down as a foundation trustee in 2010. The foundation says recipients must be at the peak of their careers or still working at that level, with a body of work of outstanding quality and standing beyond New Zealand.
What do the Topp Twins mean to you? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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