Heritage et AL

Note: The following article discusses Auckland regional newspapers family trees (LHE-062) , a new resource available on Kura Heritage Collections Online. Have you ever wondered: what are the relationships between all these Auckland newspapers? It was an unexpected question I asked myself about a year ago when I found myself utterly baffled by the shelves full of a dozen different Courier newspaper titles in the stack at Manukau Library. In January 2024, all I knew were that there were four Courier newspapers circulating in East and South Auckland: the Manukau Courier , Eastern Courier , East & Bays Courier , and Papakura Courier . Not for a moment did I consider that a complex web of editorial decisions over fifty years had led to these four newspapers existing at this single point in time. Indeed, at one point in the past there was only one Courier —the South Auckland Courier —and at a later point there were six! Thus began my quest to make sense of the Auckland’s hundreds o...

What has many editions and only one? Tāmaki Makaurau’s long-running newspaper, The Auckland Star. A researcher’s worst nightmare is knowing of a source that no longer exists, and the Star is a source like no other in that it was once published as several editions every day, yet nobody bothered to collect them all. Auckland Council Libraries holds a near-continuous run of the daily periodical from its origin as the Evening Star in the 1870s to its present incarnation as the Sunday Star–Times . However, a decision was made over a century ago to only retain a single daily copy, a mere sampling of the Star’s copious output. This decision still impacts historians and researchers today and raises important questions: why did the Star print so many daily editions and what are we missing by their absence? Image: The Auckland Star masthead with various edition stamps underneath dating from 1926 through 1975. Despite covering the same geographic area—urban Auckland—the long-running newspa...

There was a time not long ago when nearly every substantial community in Auckland hosted its own weekly newspaper. Most of these emerged in the aftermath of World War II, when returning soldiers moved into new homes in the suburbs. They quickly began commercial ventures and became involved in local politics. By 1960, there were around 30 community newspapers in the area that would become Auckland catering to a population of about 500,000. A few suburbs even supported multiple papers that catered to specific interest groups. Auckland Council Libraries and its predecessors have done their best to collect as many of these newspapers as possible and through this effort, stories have emerged from the golden age of community newspapers. Photo: Portrait of Noel E Roseman from the front page of the Ribbon News-Pictorial, 14 May 1968. Noel Eric Roseman of Grey Lynn was an unremarkable man when he printed his first newspaper in 1949. During the war, he had served in the Royal New Zealand Air For...

As the explorers from HMS Endeavour rowed down the Waihou River in 1769, Captain James Cook imagined that Hauraki’s vast forests of tall, straight-trunked kahikatea could provide all the masts and spars England’s growing navy and mercantile marine would ever need. However, unbeknownst to Cook and his botanist, Joseph Banks, kahikatea would never be suitable for strong masts and spars. Because unlike kauri, the other tall and straight New Zealand hardwood which grows on drier ground, kahikatea grows in swampy wetlands. This means kahikatea wood is softer, and although initially hard when cut, soon dries out and becomes brittle. Image: Auckland Weekly News. Kahikatea bush at sunset, 1901. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections. By the nineteenth century, Pākehā colonists realised this new ‘white pine’ was not the super-hard wonder wood early captains dreamt about, but found it was still useful for many building purposes. Then in 1882 New Zealand successfully exported its first cargo of ...