SOURCES FOR LOCAL HISTORY IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTIONS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1 October 1972, Page 4

SOURCES FOR LOCAL HISTORY IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTIONS

A. G. BAGNALL

BEING PART OF AN ADDRESS TO A SUMMER SCHOOL IN LOCAL HISTORY, MASSEY UNIVERSITY, JANUARY 1972

At the outset it is necessary to be clear about the kind of local history with which we are concerned and what qualities a good local historian should possess. I am happy to introduce an independent witness, H. P. R. Finberg, the only professor of local history known to me (at Leicester University in England) who has said: ‘ln sketching the ideal attributes of our historian we have specified ripe scholarship, wide reading, wider sympathies, and sturdy legs. It is much to ask but to these requirements let us add one more. The local historian should be no stranger to the art of composition. . .’ x In my own view he should know something of historical techniques, possess all the desirable clerical virtues of accuracy and orderliness, be systematic and ideally have the power of total recall over his material the interrelationships of which will immediately work themselves out in his mind as soon as a new fact is brought to light!! He should also be a historical geographer, a sociologist and a psychologist with a broadly based understanding of human motives and failings; he should have a sense of community and have worked with people in a political activity of however humble a character. If experience as a Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire the local chronicler who has even held office in a ratepayers’ organisation or been a minor civil servant—and paraphrasing Gibbon ‘the listener may smile’—will have some effective background in interpreting his material. It is also an advantage if he has a dispassionate but kindly irreverence, and finally, in paraphrase of numerous scriptural injunctions: ‘He who hath eyes will see’ which is really my basic theme. It is not simply a matter of a degree in history, which can be a limitation, but of some social maturity for which even some academic staff at times have to struggle.

In the production of a local history there are normally three stages: research, writing and publication. Perhaps it was wise of the Seminar organisers to eschew publication although one is reminded of the final line in Eliot’s East Coker: ‘ln my end is my beginning’. The prospects of publication, probably the fact that the work may have been commissioned —and is required by a specific date—will have a crucial effect on earlier stages of research. In this paper we shall assume that publication is intended and that the researcher is not deceiving himself by refusing to admit that such a gross objective as some sort of book is in mind, or, alternatively, that he is a not uncommon type with whom one is much

in sympathy, who simply likes delving for its own sake quite purposively and sincerely, but who is seized with paralysis at the thought of so gross a breach of taste as to write for publication. Perhaps he cannot make the effort; perhaps more positively, it is the purpose of Mr Gardner’s paper 2 to lead him to a productive conclusion.

As Finberg spells out in the essay to which I earlier referred, presentation is of the highest importance. We are, of course, aware that in another place in general history the ability to write or even an attempt to cultivate a style is suspect. In certain quarters the historian who does so is under suspicion. The pendulum has swung a little our way on this matter and even some American scholars are trying to make their prose intelligible. But in local history, as in any history, there must be a narrative with its theme, argument, point of view and above all continuity. Extensive quotation, yes, but in a frame of reference. Undigestible assemblages of facts, if the historian can’t bear to part with them or to let the gastric juices of his reflection and style play over them, may be salvaged in the appendices but no more.

It is an interesting speculation, on this theme, to cast ourselves into the twenty-first century and to presuppose an ‘ideal’ state of total organisation when librarians (there need to be many of them) and computers (they will need to be cheaper than librarians) will have had all the facts in the manuscript collections throughout the country, in National Archives and in all the surviving newspapers encapsulated in the crystal core of a vast data bank. The researcher having paid his dues—and they will be heavy—merely arranges for the programmer to work out the appropriate recall codes for, say, Maori-European relations 1975-2025 or Palmerston North 1870-1970 and at fantastic speed all the programmed facts will pour out over the floor or more likely into neat page sized sheets. There may be three people who are prepared to pay $2,000 for the Palmerston North code. They take the facts away and there is a race from scratch to see who can produce the least readable book first. In other words there is a separate discipline of presentation of material irrespective of what the material is: and simply because the tasks of research are so heavy and prolonged—in normal circumstances—composition tends to be the last lap of an already heavy and lengthy race. The end result if seen in the beginning may normally be a printed book of from 40,000 to 80,000 words or roughly one to two hundred pages of text. There will of course be the Bushes, McLintocks, Mays and Gardners, who with good reason exceed this but for ordinary mortals, the resources of the promoters, the expectations of what the public can be charged or again simply time will dictate a more modest length. This is perhaps a rather idealised picture. In some situations a local committee will be appointed to produce a history. It will faithfully muster the modest local resources —someone may

even visit the Auckland Institute & Museum or the Turnbull Library and the end product will simply be as long as the energy, time and imagination of the Committee permit. It is about time to approach one’s assignment. One can think of the raw material in various ways, firstly in the context of the particular kind of record which one needs to search, for example land or legal records or secondly by the type of library material, to use our newer jargon, into which they fall such as books and pamphlets, public archives of central or local government, private papers, newspapers, maps and other pictorial materials. We do not think of these categories simply by the institutions in which they are found although there is an almost exclusive grouping of land records in the Deeds Division of the Justice Department, Lands and Survey, Valuation Department or the Maori Land Court. The records of central government are mostly in National Archives or the Departments themselves. For the rest the historian goes where the trail leads, and it may not have many side tracks. I have made the point for example that in my Old Greytown, which is only an outline of about fifty years the main sources were newspapers, National Archives and the Borough Council Minute Books. There was only one essential unique reference from the Turnbull Library, the autobiography of Joseph Masters.

In New Zealand, almost inevitably, local history is the human cycle on a plot of land. The conscientious local historian will want to uncover as many facets as possible which are relevant to his approach but to me the humus, clay or rock underfoot is fundamental. Man in relation to the land that he coveted, fought over, acquired, lost, or walked off is an inescapably basic framework for any local study. Whether it is 30 perches of his suburban retreat or 25,000 acres to provide the fortune to retire to the country of his origin it is fundamental to his sense of “belonging”, however temporarily. Our 130 years of national history is this theme writ large with the antithetical response that the welfare state is a recognition that the land is not enough. In this context politics may be viewed as merely a complex of constitutional checks and balances to provide a legal machinery to formalise our contractual relationships. Specifically any history of an area of up to a thousand square miles should have the main title changes established at least to the first rural subdivision. If, as is often the case, the small town did not fulfil the hopes of its promoters, this should also be explored. The decay of the New Zealand small town, which as a theme attracted the geographers long before the historians, likewise can be documented by following through the aggregation of small sections. In my . . . Carterton, 14 years ago, I made a limited use of deeds records—l have searched the titles for most of the Wairarapa runs —and more recently D. B. Waterson in an article

in the New Zealand Journal of History 3 has shown what land transfer records can produce. Broadly, however, such studies are still for the future. In my eastern bays history the Deeds records provide a firm underpinning. Without this search the owners, the basis for any inference as to what they may or may not have done as well as the relationships between individuals and their time sequence would be unknown. There are of course difficulties apart from time, and the recent change of organisation in the Deeds Offices themselves restrict the readiness with which such records are available for extended search. Few if any leases are registered, although they may be mentioned in mortgages. In Turnbull in our approach to solicitors to encourage the retention of selected conveyancing records, the desirability of preserving leases is stressed whenever possible. In Wellington, the confusing legacy of the New Zealand Company meant that the first Crown Grants were not issued until 1853. Apart from the still largely unexplored Company archives and the proceedings of Land Claims Commission hearings, the little information that has survived is in private papers.

Court Cases

These are chiefly found as newspaper reports or in Law Reports. In the past Court cases have not been used as much as might have been expected in local history. In part this stems from the tradition that the pioneers lived together in happy amicability and never quarrelled except in the pages of fiction. Instant litigation, however, was a feature of the 19th century. Professor Oliver, in his Challenge and response 4 when discussing the incidence of litigation on the East Coast as well as Court charges on cases of lawlessness and drunkenness has an interesting comment on this matter. He suggests that the community “. . . in its settling-down period . . . was not without its tensions and animosities, and that these found a socially controlled resolution in the courts . . .

It may be safely concluded that tensions existed, and also that the courts provided regular means for their resolution . . . civil suits and Native Land Court arguments provided occasions for the expression and resolution of rivalries.” At a more modest level I have used such material as extensively as I could; frequently such reports are the only indicators we have for community or local action of any kind. Unfortunately, until 1896, when the Gazette Law Reports begin one has to rely on the newspapers and here one only finds things by systematic searching. The Gazette Law Reports give the judgments in the Court of Appeal, the Supreme Court and the Court of Arbitration. Appeal cases quite often involve property or contracts and would therefore be within the ambit of an appropriate regional history. And many people turned to the law without hesitation.

A glance through the cumulative index to the Gazette Law Reports shows, for example, a fairly high frequency of appearance for Edward Joshua Riddiford as either plaintiff or defendant; and this excludes the Magistrate’s Court. A recent consultation solved a minor tricky point on a matter of company identity. . . . There are also the records of legal firms. Within New Zealand there has been a recent loosening of the traditional views on such matters and libraries are now being entrusted with legal records under certain fairly rigid terms and conditions which I consider necessary. Two years ago we received legal records from one firm comprising about 1,000 volumes of correspondence and cost books. While at present access is restricted, future historians and biographers will doubtless be able to make use of some of the material when ways into it have been devised.

Official Papers

The considerable body of reports, enquiries, etc. buried away in the Appendices to the Journals of the Legislative Council and House of Representatives is still largely untapped by local historians. The very detailed annual summaries of road construction, for example which appeared in the annual reports of the Department of Lands and Survey from 1891 until about 1902 have not been used to any extent. I have found them most useful for the central North Island and to a lesser extent in Wairarapa history. In many cases minutes of evidence submitted to Committees of Enquiry are given although where this has not been done there is a possibility that the transcript may still be in National Archives or the Department concerned. Press reports from at least the turn of the century will have preserved some local gems. There is a natural inclination to accept official papers as the complete definitive record although a recheck with newspapers can be revealing. Members of Parliament have some discretion in correcting proofs of Debates while at least in earlier years reporters seem to have exercised more selection than now. I was dealing with a minor amusing incident of this kind in connection with the history of Eastbourne and the debate in the Legislative Council on the Eastbourne Borough Bill where on this point the entire discussion had been omitted.

The same Bill brought to light another idiosyncracy of official papers. The Legislative Council enquiry and the minutes of evidence on the Bill —only about ten pages but nevertheless of importance to the area historian—was not included in the A.J.H.R. Index. I came across the report on the Colonial Secretary’s file dealing with the matter. The point was that a special act was necessary because Eastbourne did not fulfil the requirements of the Municipal Corporations Act in respect of population. This omission from the indexes is not of course an isolated

case. It is quite a game to stumble across something in A.J.H.R. and then try and see under what heading it was indexed. In the turmoil of the 1860 s, too, there was some variation between printed documents. The 1862 address To the Queen’s most exalted majesty from Government declining to accept responsibility for the administration of native affairs on the terms laid down by the British Government, exists in at least two versions.

Books and Pamphlets I do not wish this paper to degenerate into an apologia pro mea vita. As a librarian and bibliographer, however, I cannot denigrate the importance of books and pamphlets to the research worker, although they are in the present context almost a paradox. Much of our effort is directed to their production; years are spent in research—perhaps —and, ignoring in our arrogance the thousands already existing we thoughtlessly add to the quota, and then probably turn round and go on with something else—another book! And the orthodox academic approach enforces this trend; on the one hand there is the survival doctrine of publish or perish; on the other, once a topic has been dealt with in book form it is henceforth ‘published material’ and rarely awarded the accolade of being ‘primary’. The book is henceforth something to be ignored and may achieve little more than a hasty perusal of the bibliography in the final pages if there is one and the consequential grunts of superior disapproval before the investigator continues the hunt for unused source material which must be manuscript. As an acquisitions librarian and a historian, I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for manuscript but we do need to keep certain facts in perspective. Simply because so few people know or can readily find out what has been published or what is in the monographs that have appeared we have a humble usually modest class of labourers, to wit bibliographers, whose roles was recently delightfully elaborated upon by Mr H. E. Maude in a fascinating paper at the September ’7l Canberra seminar on Pacific source materials Pacific Bibliography. ... It is the expectation of discovery which I admit has sustained me in this enterprise for some twenty years. Of course, only in a small percentage of cases does one make discoveries of value to the local historian or biographer but there is still a volume of overlooked material hidden in obscure pages of value to both. Twenty three years after my discovery, for example, I must talk about H.B.’s Diary kept during a voyage round the world while in Canberra and Sydney discoveries still go on. One doesn’t rise up in one’s seat in the Mitchell Library like Harry Maude’s bibliographer and shout Eureka! but there is nevertheless more than a quiet satisfaction. Thomas Bevan’s Reminiscences of an old colonist in its first edition and supplement (second

edition) is fairly well known but his hitherto unknown pamphlet A voyage from England to New Zealand in letters from Mr Thomas Bevan . . . and another new settler . . . (London, 1842) was of great interest. The two letters in it from a disillusioned colonist Henry Wouldon, describing the tribulations of Wellington in 1841 are in striking contrast to the Company’s propaganda series Letters from settlers and labouring immigrants . . . (London, 1843). Again, by free association Wellington in 1841 takes us to Lucett’s Rovings in the Pacific (1851) where there is an intriguing chapter giving an impression of Port Nicholson which it must have been difficult for loyal Wellingtonians to stomach. It is a rare Pacific book quite properly catalogued by librarians in Pacific voyaging and shelved accordingly but the chapters on Wellington and Hokianga only a bibliographer can bring out. Many such books are known only by one or two copies and hence are as rare as manuscript. And one waits for years for something to turn up. It was almost twelve years from when I first read in the Rangitikei Advocate extracts from A. H. Murray’s Report of Wellington-Auckland Main Trunk Railway . . . 1882 until I saw a copy tucked in the middle of a Report of the Wellington Chamber of Commerce for that year in a bound volume of something else handed to me by the Manager of Levin and Co.

Theses Local historians are often unaware of the existence of theses on their area. There has been during the past twenty years a greater selection of national themes, usually political to the exclusion of purely local surveys. To the extent that it has meant the end of the rather crude outline which done properly would be quite beyond the range in time and depth of a master’s thesis this development is a good thing. However one hopes that the history departments will be able to encourage students to undertake work on a local theme in perhaps a more circumscribed area while at least covering it adequately beyond need of immediate repetition. We are still evolving a policy of thesis acquisition nationally having regard to the fact that such work is copyright and copies are automatically on deposit in the appropriate University Library. My own view is that there should be a grand central repository where most of such work is held in microform for consultation. We are most of us centralists, for some the centre is Dunedin, for far more Auckland. Wellington is of course the geographic centre!

Newspapers I cannot exaggerate the importance of newspaper searching to the local historian, nor should one be less than cautious in evaluating one’s findings. My wife who is disarmingly objective in her assessments has

more than once pointed out the seeming discrepancy between my critical demolition of the daily paper as a faithful contemporary record and the seemingly blind faith with which hours are spent searching files sanctified by age rather than accuracy. The current record is of course the trace for historians and in my defence I can only say that I have maintained a fairly extensive cuttings system which after twenty or thirty years acquire some slight significance. Here as elsewhere one should follow what I say and not what I do in that the pitfall is to be greedy and try to cover too many topics.

For the local historian it is not too much to say that if the newspaper has disappeared so has the history of the district for which it spoke. Our guide of course is the Union Catalogue of New Zealand newspapers . . . (2d ed 1961) but it is a saddening exercise to compare this with Scholefield’s Newspapers in New Zealand (1958). The number of small town journals for which files have virtually disappeared is distressingly large. Two places may be mentioned, Carterton and Taihape. Carterton’s first paper began in 1881 but there is no file until 1923. The loss includes the Wairarapa Leader edited by one M. Hornsby, the son of the Wairarapa member, with an individual, perceptive manner of reporting . . .

The Taihape Post was edited by a man of peace and temperance, rare qualities in the town at the turn of the century. It is a casualty. Fortunately copies were received by the Wairarapa Daily whose editor took a fancy to the Post and preserved for us in his own pages such gems as Sunday in Taihape. For the Wairarapa as a whole we have a fairly complete run from 1869 and the odd files sometimes turn up despite massive destruction into the recent past. For example we were last year fortunately able to arrange with the Borough Council to take custody of files from 1883 until 1940 which had been found in the strong room inside the disused Masterton’s women’s rest room. These have been microfilmed and we are now embarking upon systematic copying of local files. Preservation of the survivors is of course the main problem. Already our wood pulp papers are disintegrating literally under our hands and in another twenty years few students will be able to search other than microfilm for files down to 1920. I do not need to elaborate upon the difficulties of searching microfilm rather than the original and can only be thankful that I have lived as a historian when I did. With the present techniques available print-outs which bring the copy back to original size are too expensive other than for the very early files.

It is essential to press on with newspaper indexing. The General Assembly Library some years ago made a selective index of Wellington files through to 1860 which file has been transferred to Turnbull and Miss Walton in the interstices of other commitments is working on a highly selective index of the New Zealand Mail beginning in 1875 and

has so far reached 1890. The close searcher, however, will need to go over the ground himself on a particular topic. I have found, where every fact is important, that one needs to establish in which paper the kind of topic or local news in which one is interested appears. Incidents and meetings fully written up in the morning will be ignored in the evening. Our Taupo reporter will have many things on his mind and his appearances may be spasmodic over a ten year period. And so on.

Manuscripts I cannot put off talking about manuscripts much longer. The categories of manuscripts of interest to local historians which the A.T.L. acquires may be grouped as follows: Personal papers including letters and diaries Business archives Society and local body records Trade union records

These are obtained in various ways but chiefly by gift, purchase or photocopy. We have a policy of actively pursuing Ms. which because of inevitable pressures of one kind and another isn’t as effective as I would like although in sheer bulk during the past four years our holdings have grown more rapidly than for some time earlier. An interesting development is the increasing extent to which even locally we find it necessary to purchase although this applies chiefly to personal papers. Broadly speaking we actively pursue material which can be regarded as of national as distinct from local interest if there is a suitable repository prepared to act. But I never turn down anything offered nor readily at hand. The ideal situation in the future would be to have copies of much of the important local material held nationally in an appropriate local repository. Correspondingly we should have copies of important locally held material. This exchange will take time to achieve but can be accepted now as a working principle. In manuscript libraries such as Turnbull any large collection of political or administrative interest will have important local material. The McLean collection for example for Taranaki, Wanganui and Hawke’s Bay, the Mantell papers for Canterbury and Otago as well as Wellington—and diaries of course range wherever their author travels. Much of this material can be identified from inventories when they have been prepared or from the personal knowledge of informed and sympathetic manuscript librarians. What Turnbull has in this category is a much smaller proportion than the holdings of National Archives where the surviving registers and indexes do not make it easy to bring out all the local references. I say under my breath, ‘thank God they don’t’, because this means that for

my remaining years as a researcher there are going to be exciting discoveries still to be made.

A surprising amount of material still turns up overseas, apart from Sotheby’s auction rooms where we have to meet the market price. Recent minor examples were the discovery in Canada of the letter book of a Palmerston North land agent at the turn of the century, J. Copeland, and a large collection of West Coast legal papers from 1869 until the 1880 s which came to light in Tasmania, formed by J. Perkins a Greymouth solicitor. In local history quite minor documents can be of use. We recently took custody of the surviving records of Messrs Levin and Co. Most of the papers are fairly recent and hence subject to access restrictions. The nature and complexity of others will mean that some years will elapse before sorting is fully completed. Among the minor categories were insurance policies over a century old and a number of trustee papers. I was dubious about the insurance policies but was smitten with remorse that I had even hesitated when I came to look through the dust-coated tin trunk. Among the policies issued in 1859, for example, by the Liverpool and London Fire and Life Insurance Company was an application from one Harry Albert Atkinson who described himself as a ‘yeoman’, was said to be 5 ft 8 ins. in height and of fair complexion; he had for a time suffered from asthma. Again the Wanganui agent’s reports seemed to reveal aspects of commercial life in the river city that might be overlooked in a perusal of merely standard sources. Some important references for Eastern Bays, Port Nicholson and Wairarapa history came from a Levins tin trunk that hadn’t been opened for 108 years. Levins was of course very much a family firm managed initially by William and Nathaniel Levin and then by the Pearces and Duncans. A most helpful member of the Pearce family put me on to a further small group of papers which he had rescued from an earlier purging of the firms records. What had survived are perhaps fortuitous crumbs but one of these gave what was to me an unknown insight into the kauri trade from Kaipara in the mid 1870 s. But talking of kauri brings me to Mr Grover’s discovery in the archives of the University of Melbourne, of the records of the Kauri Timber Company, Australian based commercial giant which absorbed a number of New Zealand enterprises. In the course of a visit to Melbourne last September I was able to have a quick look at this impressive series which contains much of New Zealand interest, and have since corresponded with the University Archivist about the possibility of microfilming.

Occasionally one makes the odd find simply by working out that there should be some surviving records. I was intrigued many years ago to discover in newspaper searching of the visit to Taupo and Ruapehu in early 1875 of the Swedish botanist Sven Berggren. After enquiries

extending over many years the Berggren diaries were returned to Lund University by the descendant of the person who had borrowed them almost the same week as my third and final letter reached the University’s Manuscript Librarian. The diaries themselves as our published extracts show are chiefly of interest for Tauranga, the Bay of Plenty and Rotorua. Much of what is held nationally is included in the two volume Union Catalogue of Manuscripts in New Zealand Libraries. The skeletal entries of course give one only as much information as can be accommodated on a standard catalogue card and as I have pointed out in the introduction the main entry of the vast McLean collection receives as much space as an entry for a single letter which some library has conscientiously reported. Direct personal approach and the perusal of inventories is the only way. Turnbull publishes regular lists of accessions in the Turnbull Library Record which don’t tell one a great deal more but at least they are a listing in outline of what has been acquired.

There is of course not only the manuscript which we have in New Zealand which ultimately will be recorded in our various finding aids but also, among overseas holdings the manuscripts identified by Mr R. F. Grover when in Australia in 1969, chiefly in the National Library of Australia and in the Mitchell Library. By courtesy of the Chief Librarians concerned we were able to arrange for negative microfilms to be taken from which we have had positive 35mm or facsimile size copyflo prints made. This collection, which is still being added to, includes documents of local as well as of national interest and will be catalogued in the same way as our other material. Also on microfilm are the manuscripts copied by the National Library of Australia under the Joint Copying Project for which a comprehensive guide is being prepared in Canberra at the present time. A third category of such material is the manuscripts in the U.K. of interest to Australia and New Zealand. A detailed guide by Miss Mander-Jones, which has been in preparation for some years, will become available this year.

Maps For any region large or small a careful study of all available maps is an essential task for the local historian. The smaller the area the more maps one needs, not merely to provide information for the historian himself, but to explain the setting of events and places to readers. The larger provincial histories too often seem to get away without any maps. Adkin’s Horowhenua and Mr Gardner’s Amuri are two quite different examples of good coverage. In the first case the maps represented the schematic presentation of a life-time of research, in the second they are workman-like outlines of exploration routes, sheep runs, etc., the sort of minimal detail one would expect to find. The single map in Professor

Oliver’s Challenge and response is I feel quite inadequate and at the other end of the spectrum a tiny Rangitikei local publication J. L. Lambert’s Progress in our district is meaningless without one. Original maps are as elusive as manuscripts and even with industry one can only be sure that one hasn’t seen everything. I assume familiarity with the normal published series of the Lands and Survey Department for which there have been good indexes for some years. Bibliographies such as those by Professor R. P. Hargreaves give students an approach to the maps in British and New Zealand official papers and there are plans for more comprehensive regional listing. Official manuscript maps include roll plans, deed plans and deposit plans apart from many ad hoc surveys or collations of individual surveys. There is the Head Office collection of the Department’s manuscript maps largely Wellington region of which I was ignorant until the recent past. Then there are many detailed sketch plans on correspondence in the offices of the individual Commissioners of Crown Lands some of which are now in National Archives. Libraries such as Turnbull have many manuscript and commercially published maps, particularly those published overseas. Our collection of subdivisional plans for greater Wellington must be now virtually complete thanks to a recent gift of nearly a thousand. Other areas are represented to a diminishing degree as we move away from Wellington. These are essential local historical source material. The actual details of land subdivision are of course in the Deeds Records but the commercial plans give accompanying publicity sometimes with illustrations. In the Eastern Bays history I am including either redrawn or in photographed form about eleven or twelve maps. Maps in deeds, in my experience, are of limited value in that they seldom contain information not available on the current cadastral map; although I understand that for some land districts such as Nelson supplementary topographical information in the early years was sometimes included.

Sketches, Paintings and Photographs Some of the problems of photographs have already been covered and time is going to defeat me from opening up adequately some of the ways obvious and less obvious in which sketches and paintings are essential to local history. As a record of Wairarapa homesteads we have Captain Mein Smith’s series of drawings. These supplement J. C. Crawford’s cruder, earlier versions and a few watercolours by William Fox. And the discovery and study of a collection like that in the scrap-book of John Pearse (1851-1856) simply gives us a new dimension on the areas covered — Wellington chiefly. Pictorial records are being used increasingly for ecological study.

Conclusion Successful local history is a partnership between the historian, the sources and the mediator. It requires insight, patience, judgment and accuracy. One thinks almost nostalgically of the self-conscious lament of the late Douglas Cresswell: ‘To hell with accuracy’; one recalls with some remorse critical witch-hunting sessions on the fallibility of the D.N.Z.8.; memory even plays back to a 22-year-old controversy about whether there were too many or too few archives; the opposing protagonists, now professors of history, have both participated in this Seminar. But our chains are inescapable. We are to varying degrees fallible but our standards demand more than lip service. The local historian must pursue all sources, all facts relentlessly. Whether or not he uses what he finds is a matter of scope and judgment but he must show that he knows them and not merely that he knows about them.

The sources are übiquitous. Although they may be anywhere in the world, there are naturally far more, a growing proportion, in New Zealand than elsewhere and many more in Wellington than in any other centre. Wellington can probably produce source material for almost any part of New Zealand but there are regions, such as the southern half of the North Island and the northern section of the SouthIsland, the history of which simply cannot be attempted without use of the main Wellington repositories.

The mediator is the librarian or archivist. As the resources of the libraries vary so do their staffs. How good the inventories are, how much material there is any sort of an inventory for, will depend upon a number of factors not all obvious. In the last analysis the local historian will have to rely on the mediator who is after all only another human being. Mediators are paid to be helpful, they usually are, but the true historian would like his mediator to go the second mile. (I personally am occasionally petulant and impatient but this is a failing of age.) Whether or not they are practitioners as well as mediators is irrelevant; if they are going to be continuously useful to you over a period of time there must not only be mutual courtesy and respect but they must be made to feel that yours is a worthwhile project and, to be fully effective, the librarians and archivists must have a practitioner’s knowledge of sources. With sympathy and understanding, without imposition, an effective partnership can do much to raise the standards of our local histories.

NOTES 1 Finberg, H. P. R., Local history, objective and pursuit (1967) p. 43. 2 Gardner, W. J., The writing of Local and Regional History. Paper (unpublished) at Massey University Seminar on local history, January 1972.

3 Waterson, D. 8., The Matamata Estate 1904-1959 in New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 3, no. 1, April 1969. 4 Oliver, W. H. and Thomson, Jane M., Challenge and response, a study of the development of the East Coast Region, (1971), p. 158.