Heritage et AL

Image: Auckland City Council. Sir Dove-Myer Robinson. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 580-79140B. Sir Dove-Myer Robinson has been remembered as a visionary environmentalist, who was ahead of his time. Robinson, or ‘Robbie’ as he became known, entered Auckland’s political scene in the 1940s, when he opposed the Brown’s Island plan that would have dumped untreated sewage into the Waitematā Harbour. He was elected to the Auckland City Council in 1953 and later served as Deputy Mayor. In 1959, he took on the role of Mayor of Auckland, and was the longest-serving mayor in the city's history, across two terms from 1959-1965 and 1968-1980.  Known for his charismatic and gregarious personality, Robinson was often seen riding a bicycle around the city or walking from his home in Remuera to the Town Hall shirtless, earning him the title of Auckland’s ‘Topless Mayor’.  Robinson was a strong advocate for urban planning and helped to improve the city’s bus and rail services. His effort

Figure 1: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, New York: Penguin Books, 2009.  In the ‘noughties’, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food helped to popularise an approach to eating framed around a central tenet – ‘Just eat what your great-grandma ate’, suggesting those in pursuit of perfect health should avoid consuming anything from a packet or a production line.  As journalist and author, Pollan sought to disrupt understandings of nutrition and consulted a variety of different nutrition specialists to put together the book, as Pollan saw fit. As such, Pollan consulted Jewish and Italian grandmothers as expert diet authorities, alongside those with professional training in nutrition and dietetics, as well as doctors, nurses, and anthropologists. In an interview with the New York Times, Pollan recounted his favourite quote from the grandmothers he interviewed to research his book: “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead”, these women reportedly advised Polla

  That’s so last century: What we wore 1950s-1990s provides a snapshot of what some New Zealanders were wearing during the latter half of the twentieth century. Learn about how the garment industry impacted on different parts of Aotearoa society including the popularity of home sewing, where we shopped for clothes, the emergence of New Zealand based fashion designers, and the prevalence of local clothing manufacturers. This exhibition is on at Level 2 of Auckland's Central City Library from Wednesday 20 March - 13 July 2024.  In this podcast you’ll hear stories of all things fashion – from home dressmaking to professional tailoring, pattern shops and fabrics, being a follower of fashion and what sustainable fashion means in this century. Voices have been drawn from Auckland Libraries Oral History and Sound , Heritage Collections .  The lived experience – 50s & 60s fashion  In this track, jazz singer and follower of fashion, Wendy Moore provides her lived experience of post-war

What do insects, fairy tales, old lace, Shakespeare and one of the founders of the Association of Book Crafts NZ have in common? Read on and all will be revealed. Miscellany - a Mixture from the Motu had its genesis in 2022 in the inaugural Print + Bind collaboration between the Association of Book Crafts NZ and various hand printers from around the country. The theme was 'Bugs' and the twelve printers and twelve binders all had free rein to interpret it as they wished. The only requirement was that the prints had to be on a single A5 sheet. Every printer made twenty-four prints of their chosen design which were then collated into twelve sets, each of which had two copies of each print. These then went to the binders who bound one set of prints into a book for a designated printer and the other set for him/herself. Thus, a potential twenty-four Bug books were born, and the idea arose that it would be wonderful to share the creations more widely than just through the Associatio