Heritage et AL

Currently on in the exhibition space on Level 2 of the Waitakere Central Library is an exhibition highlighting some of the stories of West Auckland contained in our collection of oral history recordings.   If you are interested in exploring any of these stories in more depth these and other recordings can be listened to in the J T Diamond Reading Room at the West Auckland Research Centre .  Ref: Picnic in Henderson, 1932, West Auckland Research Centre, Auckland Libraries.

Keri Hulme’s masterpiece the bone people became the Auckland Writer’s Festival’s inaugural Great Kiwi Classic last year. The novel took 17 years to write and was rejected by every publisher in Australasia until the feminist collective SPIRAL brought it out in 1984 with a cover illustration by the author. The following year the bone people won the Booker Prize from a shortlist that included work by Peter Carey, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.  Ref: the bone people, Cover, c1983, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 823 HUL. 

Today we are highlighting a couple of interesting items from our New Zealand Manuscripts collection: carbon paper manifold copying books. These two copying books show two of the most common uses for the technology.  The first of these is a letter book of a practising lawyer and contains business records as well as personal correspondence, while the second is a letter book as well as a diary. Ref: James Pirie's diary, Front endpaper detail, 1870s, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,  NZMS 427.

Over the last month New Zealand and Australia have been joint hosts of the latest edition of the Cricket World Cup. It started on 14 February in Christchurch and we have now begun the knockout stages. There are two remaining games in New Zealand: the quarter-final in Wellington on Saturday and the semi-final on Tuesday at Eden Park in Auckland. The final is at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday 29 March. Ref: Eric W Young, Showing a cricket game at Eden Park, 1980s, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 1021-324.

Auckland’s entertainment sensation of the 1920s was going to the movies – first silent movies, and then “talkies”. Every Saturday night, one-sixth of the city’s residents went to watch stars like Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper or Gloria Swanson in romance and adventure stories. The most-attended movie – Charlton Heston’s Ben Hur - sold 76,000 tickets during its Queen Street run, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid drew 21,000 people in a week. Ref: NZ Ephemera - 'The N.Z. Picturegoer', Volume 1, Number 7, 20 January 1928, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries. However, not everyone was pleased with cinema’s popularity. One of Auckland’s main exhibitor’s, Henry Hayward, had to answer a complaint from the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society that movies normalised crime for children by encouraging them to play make-believe games such as bush-ranging. Ref: James D Richardson, Looking north down the west side of Queen Street, 22 January 1928, Sir George Grey Speci...

You all are living under a cloud if you didn't hear that most amazing sporting news of the past month. Forget the Breakers, Team New Zealand and the Cricket World Cup… the real news was that The Bushwhackers , that great wrestling tag team of the 70s and 80s, were inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame . This is huge. Mike Hosking even mentioned it on the telly during Seven Sharp. Here at the Central Library as part of our 1920s entertainment display, we've naturally included pro-wrestling because back in the day, like its boxing cousin , wrestling just exploded in popularity. By the thirties it had become a huge deal. Bouts filled halls all over the country – such as in the image below, taken in Masterton. Both promoters and wrestlers were out to make big money and the Dominion Wrestling Union was formed to promote the sport. Wrestlers – known as ‘matmen’ – came from all over the world looking for a match, and Monday nights at the Auckland Town Hall saw fans queuing early ...

In the first week of February, Auckland Libraries was delighted to have hosted several events to support New Zealand Cemeteries Heritage Week, which was to celebrate the launch on Ancestry of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists (NZSG) cemetery microfiche. The cemetery microfiche was the culmination of almost 50 years' worth of work by volunteers from the NZSG - a painstaking process of recording and transcribing cemetery headstones from 1400 public and private cemeteries nationwide, including Māori urupa from 1800 right up until 2007. The official launch day was held on Monday, 2 February, 2015, at the New Zealand Society of Genealogists head office in Panmure where current NZSG President Gay Williams discussed the history of their Cemetery Collection and explained the work that was behind it. The launch made the news on TVNZ . Auckland Libraries hosted events for the following three days: S.S.Tararua  - our worst civilian shipwreck, 29 April 1881 - Gay Willia...