NOTES AND COMMENTARY

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 3, Issue 1, 1 March 1970, Page 56

NOTES AND COMMENTARY

As a part of the National Library the Alexander Turnbull Library is responsible for the preparation and publication of the New Zealand National Bibliography both current and retrospective. The current issues are produced monthly and cumulated annually. The retrospective New Zealand National Bibliography, a special project of the editor, was commenced over twenty years ago when he was Librarian, National Library Centre. With the setting up of the National Library the National Librarian agreed that the Bibliography should appropriately be maintained henceforward in Turnbull which houses the national collection of New Zealand books and pamphlets and whose

staff have a special interest in this material. The first volume of the major work covering entries for the letters A to H for the years 18901960 was published by the Government Printer this month. The work is to be completed in five volumes over the next few years, the 18901960 section being completed in three volumes. Volume I will list entries for the period to 1889 and there will be a final index volume and supplement. Mr P. L. Barton who has been working on the bibliography since 1964 has been heavily involved in seeing the first volume through the press. From the beginning of 1970 an increase in establishment has also meant an intensification of work on the pre-1890 section where are to be found many of the bibliographically and historically most interesting titles.

It is pleasing to note in passing that through the good offices of Mr M. G. Hitchings, Hocken Librarian, the extensive private collection of New Plymouth research material assembled by Mr F. B. Butler has been secured for that city. A part of the archive consists of a formidable assemblage of newspaper clippings which are normally a problem for librarians even of specialist New Zealand and local collections. The systematic indexing for over twenty years by the General Assembly Library of the current metropolitan daily papers is an indirect formal approach to one small part of the whole which will be increasingly useful as time goes on. Turnbull has also started the selective indexing

of mid to late nineteenth century Wellington papers but there will always be a place for a carefully formed systematically organised private collection of clippings. What any Library can do is clearly limited and it is here that the regional historian or private enthusiast can serve not merely his own interests but future research by building up a comprehensive and well-arranged and indexed clippings collection. There are several of these in Turnbull as well as some inherited mountains of unsorted clippings which are awaiting a more leisurely age. The purchase at Sotheby’s in London on 17 and 18 November of three large lots of manuscripts and three small groups of maps and

photographs rounds out the Library’s McLean collection. An extended note on the collection as a whole and the significance of the recent accretion will be published later this year. Typical of the political section of the correspondence is the letter from William Fox to Sir Donald McLean, part of which is reproduced in this issue of the Record in facsimile. The sentence at the beginning of the extract commences: ‘[Some of them have been pressing me to] resume office . . .’ and that on the second page ends: \ . . worships Stafford, & [was so active last Session.]’ Clearly the influence of women in New Zealand’s political decision making has been so far as little studied as that of senior civil servants.

With the publication in February of Part II of the Union Catalogue of Manuscripts, covering the manuscript holdings of the Alexander Turnbull Library, a fourteen-year-old project initiated by the Archives Committee of the New Zealand Library Association reached a useful beginning, if not what might seem more fitting - a conclusion. The Union Catalogue in two parts prepared by Mr Peter Crisp, Assistant Manuscripts Librarian, is described as an interim edition and is the first to record in any degree of fullness both the holdings of this Library and less satisfactorily those of other New Zealand libraries. However, it will at least provide a basis on which to induce other libraries to complete their notifications. So far as Turnbull is concerned the Part II of the Union Catalogue is a stop-gap until the completion of a more detailed and analytical catalogue on which, before his leave in Australia, Mr Grover had made good progress.

In September 1969, fourteen watercolours of Mohaka, Hawkes Bay, dating from 1855 to 1861, were presented to the Library by Mr and Mrs W. J. Mouton of George, Cape Province, South Africa. The watercolours had been annotated by John Lavin, and sent to his brother (Mrs Mouton’s grandfather) who had emigrated to South Africa at about the same time. Taken in sequence, the paintings are an interesting record of early New Zealand pastoral settlement. It had always been assumed that Lavin was the artist, but close examination of the sketches revealed not only a disparity between the handwriting of the titles and that of the annotations, but also that two of the paintings were initialled ‘AJC’. The paintings have now been attributed to Alfred John Cooper, Lavin's sheepfarming neighbour at Mohaka. Both Lavin and Cooper were killed in the Hauhau massacre at Mohaka on 10 April 1869. An article by B. N. H. Teague, The fire in the fern * by the Mohaka, in the Journal of the Whakatane and District Historical Society, November 1969, gives a few details about Lavin and the Mohaka massacre. The Library has a number of letters written by Lavin to Donald McLean before his death but, unfortunately, none by Cooper.