Research Notes

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 1, 1 May 1988, Page 52

Research Notes

Just before the final text of this issue went to the printers we learned of the death in Wellington on 17 April of Ormond Wilson, a long serving member of the Alexander Turnbull Endowment Trust Board, and the Trustees Special Committee for the Turnbull. An appreciation will appear in the October issue.

The Library will be making a major contribution to the celebration of the Katherine Mansfield centennial year in 1988. An exhibition, calling on the wide range of Mansfield materials in the collections from the memorabilia (her typewriter and shawl) through photographs, paintings and drawings, manuscripts, periodicals, books, and music, is being mounted in the National Library’s exhibition gallery for October. In addition the Library will be supporting an international scholarly conference being organised through the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University. A major reconstruction of the Mansfield collections in the Manuscripts Section is under way. It is proposed to issue a new inventory to the Katherine Mansfield papers and related papers in the collections.

Recent publications issued by the Library include the 1987 Photographic Print ‘An Edwardian City’ featuring six black and white photographs of Christchurch at the turn of the century, sponsored by The Star, Christchurch; the Fletcher prints featuring reproductions of three watercolours from the Fletcher-Challenge collection in Auckland (Sharpe’s ‘Wenderholm’, Mein Smith’s ‘Woburn Farm’ and David Powell’s ‘Diggings Township: the Dunstan’); a new edition of volume one of Early Eyewitness Accounts (de Surville’s in 1769); and Women’s Words, an annotated guide to material in the Turnbull Archives and Manuscripts collection identified as being of value for women’s studies. All these publications are available from the National Library Bookshop on the ground floor of the Molesworth Street building.

The National Library has published a consolidated Union List of Newspapers, based on the two national surveys of newspaper holdings and their condition conducted by Dr Ross Harvey, formerly Newspaper Librarian at the Turnbull. Dr Harvey edited the new Union List which is the first complete statement of newspaper holdings since 1961. It comprises brief bibliographical information and details of the holdings of New Zealand newspapers 1840-1986, and overseas published newspapers 1801-1986. Original copies and microforms are included. The Union List was launched at the N.Z.L.A. conference at Hamilton in February, and is available for sale from the National Library.

The second volume of letters between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, Na to hoa Aroha: From Your Dear Friend was published in 1987. The launching took place at Urenui, Sir Peter Buck’s birthplace. Edited by

Professor Keith Sorrenson, and published by Auckland University Press, the letters cover the period 4 May 1930 to 12 August 1932. A third volume will follow. Professor Sorrenson made extensive use of the Buck-Ngata letters in the Manuscripts collection, and publication was assisted by a grant from the Endowment Trust.

Two recent novels well illustrate how Turnbull manuscripts can provide factual material and stimulate the writer’s imagination. In Symmes Hole lan Wedde made extensive use of whaler James ‘Worser’ Heberley’s ‘Reminiscences’. For her first published novel After Z-Hour , Elizabeth Knox read a number of First World War diaries, in a search for authentic expression and colloquial slang for her character Mark, a young New Zealand serviceman.

The first award of the National Library’s research fellowship has been made to Dr Rory Sweetman to enable him to complete a book on the trial for sedition in 1922 of James Liston, the Roman Catholic Coadjutor Bishop of Auckland. Dr Sweetman has been working on New Zealand Catholicism and the Irish Issue 1910-1922 at Cambridge for his doctoral thesis. He will make extensive use of the Turnbull’s collections and in particular the diaries and other papers of Patrick Joseph O’Regan, Liston’s defence counsel, which were deposited in Turnbull in 1976.

The Chief Librarian has been awarded a thirty day International Visitor award by the United States Government to enable him to visit a wide range of research libraries and related institutions in the United States during April 1988. The primary purpose of the visit is to make arrangements to borrow about fifty books from the United States for a major exhibition during New Zealand’s commemoration of the sesquicentenary of European settlement in 1990. The books have been selected to represent the culture and ideas of the European heritage. Mr Traue will also take the opportunity to look at techniques for the exhibition of library materials and to improve the Library’s contacts with the hand printing movement in the United States.

In late November 1987 Sharon Dell, Keeper of the Collections, visited Australia on a short study tour of research libraries. She visited the National Library in Canberra; in Sydney the Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales, and Fisher Library, University of Sydney; La Trobe and the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. A range of activities and policies were examined including automated cataloguing of non-book materials, conservation programmes, rare book collections, display techniques, the storage of paintings, drawings and prints, photographs and manuscripts, and the operation of field officers. Australian counterparts gave freely of their time and opinions, making the tour particularly successful, and providing the Keeper with several recommendations for application to Turnbull policy and practice.

It is with sadness that we record the untimely death of Tony Ralls, a member of the Catalogue Section for eight years and Assistant Editor of the Record from 1983 to 1986. The Chief Librarian, speaking at his funeral service, described Tony at his best ‘as a gentlemen and a scholar; concerned for others and sensitive to their needs; concerned for truth . . . He believed passionately in the Turnbull and what it represented a research library, dedicated, in Alexander Turnbull’s words, to the search after truth. He believed in high standards and he saw in the Turnbull an excellence seldom achieved in this country ... .’