The rules of the competition meant that the copyright of the music would belong to the "Saturday Advertiser", which gave the manuscript to the Dunedin-based Charles Begg & Co to publish, but a nine-month delay in sending it to a publisher was followed by two months of waiting for it to be printed. The end result was a very poor edition with only one verse, which was thrown out by the "Advertiser". When promises of reprint failed to come true, the "Advertiser" was forced to hand the copyright back over to Woods. He immediately arranged for it to be printed by Hopwood and Crew in London, with Bracken's blessing. Bracken did not mean for his poem to become the national anthem, and it was Woods who had always used the word "anthem" where Bracken called it a "hymn".