Heritage et AL

Trevor Lloyd was a New Zealand artist, illustrator and cartoonist who lived from 1863 to 1937.  He was largely self-taught although he might have had some lessons from the artist Louis John Steele.  He started doing sketches and caricatures but soon moved on to oil paintings based on his sketches. Lloyd first exhibited his work at the Auckland Society of Arts in 1883.  He re-exhibited at the society in 1896, 1898 and 1899.  By the 1900s he had moved to Auckland and was making a living from his art.  He began illustrating stories and articles in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine and the New Zealand Graphic .  In 1903 he joined the Auckland Weekly News as an illustrator, graphic artist and cartoonist.  From 1904 his cartoons also appeared in Wilson and Horton’s other publication, the New Zealand Herald .  He retired from the Herald and Weekly News in November 1936. The Angela Morton collection , housed at Takapuna Library, holds a coll...

This year Auckland Libraries remembers it is 100 years since New Zealand’s first major baptism of fire during the First World War when our troops landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. To commemorate that event Sir George Grey Special Collections staff are working to make the Auckland Weekly News Supplement photographs from 1915 more searchable for researchers, librarians and readers who look at the Heritage Images in our Digital Library . These photographs feature events and people from all major war fronts but also include New Zealand personalities and scenes. How our attitudes to the people who were then our enemies have changed during the past 100 years! But back then Auckland Weekly News caption-writers jingoistically stirred up public hatred for the Germans, contempt of the Turks and mockery of the Austrians. The depths of German depravity were unfathomable as this propaganda cartoon of German troops massacring Belgian citizens in Louvain shows. Ref: M Matthews f...

To see off the old year and help usher in the new we thought it would be appropriate to see how the New Year has been celebrated down the years: Ref: P.P. De Loree, Premiers of N.Z. Happy New Year, 1894, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 661-67. Ref: Motor car invasion, Cockle Bay, 1939, 1 January 1939, South Auckland Research Centre, Auckland Libraries, Footprints 15.

On Wednesday morning, the 17 th of December, at Takapuna Library there was a small gathering of staff (past and present) and members of the public to celebrate the re-opening of the Angela Morton Art History Collection. This collection is housed in the Angela Morton Room on the first floor of the newly refurbished Takapuna Library. Ref: Christina Webb, Takapuna Library, Strand Plaza, Takapuna, 3 August 2010, North Auckland Research Centre, Auckland Libraries, T7367. 

Sir George Grey Special Collections has a range of books containing cartoons and individual issues of comics. Some of the creators mentioned in Adrian Kinnaird's excellent book on New Zealand comics -  From Earth's End  -  feature in the collection. Eric Resetar was born in Auckland in 1928 and is one of New Zealand's early comic book author - illustrators. When Resetar was a child he had a great interest in science fiction and enjoyed creating his own stories with drawings. He was 13 years old when a text story he illustrated was published in the one-off production Mighty Comic .  Below is the cover of one of Resetar's self-published comics: Adventure . For the month of September there is a case displaying some of Resetar's publications in the reading room at Sir George Grey Special Collections. Ref: Eric Resetar, Adventure No. 1, 1944. Sir George Grey Special Collections. Streetwize comics  was a Christchurch Community Law Centre project and i...

I recently attended the Cartoons, Comics and Caricatures: Evidence or Ephemera? symposium held on the 3rd May 2014 at the University of Auckland. I spent a fascinating day listening to a diverse array of speakers drawn from the cartoon world (Alan Moir), academia (University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington) and libraries/archives (Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL) including the NZ Cartoon Archive). Ref: William Bricknell Gibbs, He's (H) all there at Rat catching, no location, c. 1880s, Auckland Libraries  Heritage Collections , 661-4   Alan Moir's talk gave a good overview of political cartoons both within and outside of newspapers. He noted that cartoons are valuable because they reflect opinions and ideas over the course of history. Good cartoons he says, are those which feature few words but are still incredibly powerful and use metaphor to good effect. It's worth noting that many cartoons don't make sense or work outside of their country of or...