Cover Section

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 45, 1 January 2013, Cover Page

Turnbull Library Record 2013

Looking for the body in the library might sound like work for Agatha Christie's Monsieur Poirot rather than for historians and other scholars.

But it is just that job that the contributors to this issue of the Turnbull Library Record have undertaken. Seven-stone (49-kg) Catherine Wiltshire competing in a 100-mile walking race in 1876, burly axemen standing to their blocks in 1905, the well-clothed Dora de Beer and her climbing companions in south-west China in 1938, the cartoon figures of Maori and Pakeha rugby spectators in 1956, and the perennially popular politicians facing off as boxing opponents in the cartoonist's sketchbook all feature in this issue devoted to New Zealand's sporting life and culture.

This issue of the Record provides a taste of the riches in the Turnbull Library collections, and of the questions and pursuits researchers bring to those collections. For all that the 'national sports' of rugby, cricket and netball hog the limelight, this Record demonstrates the much larger and more mixed ecology of leisure, of competition and sports, of spectators, gamblers and participants of many kinds. It also tells us something of the ways sport provides a language and a place for discussions that are not about games, but are about who we are and what we think is right.

A running race staged for a campaign by Dormer-Beck Advertising Ltd, 1973. Photograph by K. E. Niven & Co. (ATL ref. 1/2-241030-F)