Heritage et AL

When Aucklanders opened their copy of the New Zealand Herald at their breakfast tables on Monday 30 April 1894 they would have found a colourful addition. That morning’s newspaper included a supplement containing four views of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland printed at Wilson and Horton’s Lithographic and Colour Printery. The chromolithographic posters feature views taken from four different elevated spots around the central isthmus, and are surrounded by vignettes of local businesses who had paid to be included in the posters. In the months leading up to publication the Weekly News and Herald had been advertising this issue and the posters as a “Special Extraordinary Chromolithographic pictorial supplements” and pitching them as of interest to tourists, potential migrants and as a memento for those who had spent time in the city and moved on. The posters would “give people at a distance an idea of the character and capabilities of our city.”  Auckland Libraries have recently acquired,...

Image: Field notes – Manawa by Toni Hartill. The Hand-printed Books exhibition celebrates text/image collaborations between Aotearoa artists, poets, printers and binders. These pukapuka range from traditionally bound, to unfolding and concertina structures, to unbound artists’ books – one example, housed in a clamshell box, is Twelve poems by Hone Tuwhare interpreted by seven Dunedin printmakers (2007). The printmakers responded to a poem from Tuwhare’s Come rain hail (1970) including Inge Doesburg, Simon Kaan, Mary McFarlane, Kathryn Madill, Olav Nielsen, Jenna Packer and Marilynn Webb. Interpreting a poem as an image was a new experience for some. Doesburg said: “Psychologically, it is a different way of dealing with a visual image. You don’t want the image to be a picture of the text – you aren’t regurgitating what has been said already … instead you are interpreting your feeling about the text and it is possibly quite different from what the text is actually telling you … i...

Back in 1982, Witi Ihimaera and D.S. Long edited 'Into the World of Light – an anthology of Māori literature written in English' . Up till then, not many Māori writers had been published in reo Pākehā. It was not because there were too few kaituhi Māori writing in English. There were many. It was more due to the racist gate-keeping of the New Zealand literary canon. This sort of bias particularly affected wāhine Māori. Mana wāhine were creating revolutionary and critical works yet these works were not acknowledged in the pākehā world. Vernice Wineera was the first Wāhine Māori poet to publish a poetry collection in English in 1978. Her collection 'Mahanga: Pacific Poems' was published by The Institute for Polynesian Studies, Brigham Young University, Hawaii. Image: Cover of Te Ao Mārama, vol. 4. A rainbow of Indigenous creative works exists at Auckland Libraries but lots of this is hidden. The kaupapa of Te Ao Mārama ~ Mana Wāhine is to showcase these radiant works. ...

Keri Hulme’s poetry has inspired two exquisite handmade artists’ books – The Visionary , and The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) , on display in the Angela Morton Room’s STARGAZER exhibition. A community of artisans and artists combined to produce these ātaahua responses to Keri’s poetry, and this exhibition shares materials and stories about how these pukapuka were created.  Artist and printmaker Beth Serjeant was involved with both artists’ books. The first was her own, The Visionary (1987), which included Keri’s poem Stargazer, along with 10 lithographs Beth created to illustrate ten poems about the future. Beth later helped facilitate the artists’ book edition of Keri’s poetry collection The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (2016). The Visionary was sparked by a young man Beth knew who was frightened about the future, and always looking for a mushroom cloud on the horizon. She wanted to make something that shared a positive belief in the future, and decided ...

The three decades following the conclusion of the Second World War saw a significant rise in migration to Aotearoa New Zealand. Pacific Islanders in particular were attracted to New Zealand through a scheme that aimed to address the labour shortages in process work and manufacturing. These low-skill, low-wage jobs were plentiful in the 1960s and 1970s, which resulted in an influx of immigrants to New Zealand, predominantly from the Pacific Islands, in order to fill these gaps in the workforce. This growth in the Polynesian population of New Zealand is represented by the fact that in 1966 there were just over 26,000 Pacific people in the country, and only ten years later the population was close to 66,000. Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans took advantage of their New Zealand citizenship by enjoying free access into the country, whilst Samoans and Tongans were specifically in demand as workers. The majority of the job openings that Pacific immigrants took were located in Auckland, s...