LOOKING BACK

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 44, 20 August 1938, Page 10

LOOKING BACK

NEW ZEALAND'S STORY

CENTENNIAL COMMITTEE AT WORK

AN ABSORBING TASK

s An absorbing task, but one of iml pressive magnitude, faces the National [ Centennial Council of New Zealand [ and its subsidiary bodies in creating •. not only the necessary current atmoi sphere of presenting the attractions, _ industrial and pastoral conditions, present social life of the country, and its prosperity, but by giving the true 1 perspective of the brief but amazing past, and the rapid stages by which, in a hundred years, New Zealand,: naturally favoured, has become in other directions also the envy of the world. Fortunately for the controlling council, this task has been distributed, but even the phases of preparation which have been allocated present their own problems. The eleven provincial councils (East Coast, Auckland, Taranaki, Hawke's Bay, Wellington, Nelson, Marlborough, Westland, Canterbury, Otago, and Southland) have already done a vast amount of work on their own ground, and the National Historical Committee is busy verifying and collating a naturally unrelated mass of facts of national interest. So thorough a presentation of New Zealand past and present has been undertaken that the work of research, to insure accuracy, particularly in historical matter, covers a very wide range, especially as. the groundwork on which the national history is based goes far back into the 1700's, and further, if the Maori occupation is covered. Already it has been realised that New Zealand has a wonderful history, remarkable if only for the speed at which it progressed from savagery to a civilisation superior in its amenities to that of some of the oldest countries in the world. It is far easier, however, to envisage such # an enthralling panorama over the years than to ascertain with certainty some of the really important dates on which events which must be included took place. At the moment there is a choice of dates of the foundation of one of the four centres, and also in the sailing of Captain Hobson from Sydney. The National Historical Committee section of the Department of Internal Affairs' is .the clearing house for the eleven provincial historical committees. Though not much has been heard of its activities, it is hard at work on the General Assembly Library upper floors. Filing systems are fast filling with facts covering all phases of life during the last 100 years, and these are grouped as they come to hand. Each fact needs verification, and .ingenuity is necessary to secure the benefit of deductions. It is immediately apparent that verification of even one fact cannot be a one-man job, and that assistance has to be called in. In many cases the public have helped considerably; for instance, philatelists of standing have succeeded in settling dates. %, Catering for commemorative publications is an important phase of the research being undertaken. Following the statements made by the Minister of Internal Affairs (the Hon. W. E. Parry) regarding these booklets, it may be stated that a series of Centennial surveys is to be made covering every aspect of the country's development, and supplementing these are to be pictorial surveys of the Dominion. There will be surveys to prepare illustrated histories of certain districts with letterpress, and there will ,be a historical atlas, containing Cook's and Tasman's charts, composite maps showing navigators' landings, and courses round the coast, as well as the progress of early inland explorations in addition to modern maps dealing with a wide range of subjects. It is the intention to produce wellillustrated books of magazine dimensions showing the successive stages of the development of the country, its social side, the settlement of land, transport, and industrial progress, etc. There will also be a dictionary of New Zealand biography, on the lines of the standard dictionaries of biography now produced in England and America. In the work of research old manuscripts play an importas^ part, and for these not only New Zealand, but further afield, is being searched.-. An appeal in the London "Times" by Mr. James Thorn, M.P., chairman of the National Historical Committee, has brought to light some very valuable documents. Up in the attic of the General Assembly Library there, is indeed a most interesting collection of hitherto unpublished old letters and documents. One of the outstanding treasures is the album presented to Mrs. Hobson when she left Auckland for England in the early forties. In those days, long before photography was practical, everybody with even rudimentary artistic proclivities seemed to use the brush or pencil as a means of letting people at Home know what sort of land they had come to, and the album contains a very valuable collection of landscapes and portraits, some of them of great artistic value, and all of them as loquacious as such things can be of the past. Especially useful to the National Centennial Committee in these sketches will be the Native dress, when it comes to pageant accuracy. Wellington is shown, as are the other centres, in several sketches which even today can be seen to be approximately accurate as regards leading landscape features.

Few of these early artists, truthful though they were in matters of dress, were at home with the Maori physiognomy or the foliage of the New Zealand bush. Taught, as they were iri those days, the elm, oak, or ash sketching "touch." the New Zealand forests baffled them completely. An interesting sketch, with bold bluffs that suggest the beach between Narrow, Neck and Takapuna, shows the first primitive Auckland settlement. Topographically these early sketches and water-colours are remarkably correct, and they give a good idea of the untouched character of the land.

Amongst some of the most prized manuscripts are private letters, not always because they were written by people of note, but because of the intimate details of daily life they contain. How people spent a holiday then and what they considered it interesting to talk about is surprisingly interesting today. Particulars of the house it was intended to build, how it was to be furnished, and what they cooked with in those far-off times may, if the searcher is lucky, contrast amusingly with a return letter from England describing some picnic on a Thames backwater in leafy June, and always there is the chance of coming across the verification of an elusive date. People were so thorough and fond of detail then.

Appeals have already been sent out for the submission of old manuscripts to the historical committee. It will be seen that the possessor is not always the best judge of the importance of the letter or newspaper. There may be in it some detail which rounds off another incomplete fragment of the past, and this applies to old illustrated newspapers also, in cases where a series of important events has a pictorial gap. With modern photography stains and the yellow-of age are not

insuperable bars to the use of most letters or old woodcuts. . Those who have anything likely to be informative should send it along. The scope of the research being carried on is so wide and the field the many publications mentioned will cover is so extensive that few letters written * when New Zealand was in the making will be amiss, especially those long descriptive ones sent to anxious relatives in the Old Country. Those who have branches of the family in England should ask for such unpublished manuscripts when they write. Who knows what may lie forgotten in -some loft?