Heritage et AL

The destruction of kahikatea forests in the Hauraki Plains inspired Tāmaki Makaurau artist Toni Hartill’s exhibition Artful Narratives . She has created sculptural artist’s books and art objects that showcase the history of these mighty trees and the importance of caring for the forest remnants. This exhibition will be open to the public on Saturday 2 April until Thursday 2 June 2022, in the Angela Morton Room at Takapuna Library. Due to the uncertainty caused by the current Omicron outbreak, all public artist talks and workshops will be scheduled nearer to the time and announced online . Toni was captivated by the history of the kahikatea swamps of the Hauraki Plains which she discovered while researching an art project about the importance of forest remnants. The kahikatea were cleared to make way for pasture. “I remember as a child being drawn to the sorrowful huddles of the often bedraggled remnants which we passed on the way to visit family - both south to Tauranga, via Waika

The Sportsman newspaper was a ‘weekly illustrated review of sports’ published each Friday from August 1912 to March 1914, by the Auckland-based Sport Printing and Publishing Company. Although it was an Auckland paper its contents were national and international in scope. It looks as though the run held at Auckland Libraries is unique and thus a potentially underused resource for Aotearoa sports researchers. The copies here have been well read and are in a very fragile condition.  Image: Fragile copies of The Sportsman . The Sportsman The Sportsman appears an almost forgotten publication. There is no mention of it in Te Ara’s story on New Zealand sports reporting , nor in Guy Scholefield's Newspapers in New Zealand or Ian Grant’s recent Lasting impressions: the story of New Zealand’s newspapers, 1840-1920 .   Even more strange is that there is (almost) no mention of it in the contemporary newspapers. The only trace I found is a paragraph in Dunedin’s Evening Star (8 August 1912)