Here's a couple of pages identifying Taiwa as D.H.Rogers.

AT SEA (John Smith AB)) Words: D.H. Rogers (1904)
The Bulletin
The entries in ships’ logs, listing only the time and place of a sailor lost at sea, are the basis of this song, published in The Bulletin under the pen-name of Taiwa M.L. (taiwa means ‘spud’ or ‘foreigner’ in Maori & M.L. is Maori Land.)
Rogers was a Dunedin accountant, writing for Sydney papers at the same time as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson.   

https://40degrees-south.com/cds/crossing-the-line/song-notes-lyrics/#19

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David Hunter Rogers was born in Edinburgh in 1865. He came to Dunedin in 1870 when his parents migrated from Scotland by a memorable voyage on a windjammer, and from the ages of 15 to 35 he gained considerable experience in the mercantile marine, but working on shore, as an accountant for the Union Steam Ship Company! As a young man he would have undoubtedly been been told many stories by the old windjammer sailors, and these influenced him greatly in later life.

He joined a shipping company because he loved the speedy windjammers, but 1870-1900 was a time of rapid change when wooden ships with sails and small auxiliary steam engines gave way to to more efficient steel tramp steamers, and as a shipping company's accountant, he had to sit at board meetings and present figures showing why sailing ships could no longer be used.

In 1894 he married Eliza Jane Nimmo, a school teacher aged 29, and they had 2 children. Later he was an accountant/secretary for various Otago companies, and as the aches and pains of an ageing body in a cold, damp came to him, the verses (such as Homeward Bound, Chanties, Seafarers, Hulks, and Seabirds) mostly published in The Bulletin under the pseudonym of Taiwa ('potato' in dialect Maori) show a romantic yen for the life of those windjammer sailors:- of high adventure on a story ocean, and a sudden painless death in the prime of life.

He became ill at the age of 60, resigned his secretaryships of the St John's Ambulance, Navy League, DIC, etc, made a visit to London with his wife and daughter, and in 1933 he died at his hilltop home 12 Pacific St, Dunedin, aged 68. His wife died in 1946.


https://folksong.org.nz/john_smith_ab/index.html

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D.H. Rogers - info from John Archer on the mudcat 'Homeward Bound' thread.
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=70177#4104166

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printed as Seafarers in
The X'MAS Bulletin Vol. 26 No. 1348 (14 Dec 1905)
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-690626012/view?partId=nla.obj-690645234#page/n27/mode/1up
>image 28