Introduction

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 42, 1 January 2009, Page 7

Introduction

PETER IRELAND

This edition of the Turnbull Library Record marks the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended the First World War. As part of the government initiative to commemorate this, known broadly as Coming Home: Te Hokinga Mai, the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library contributed two main activities.

The first of these was 'Welcome Sweet Peace: Returning Home After the Great War,' an exhibition that examined the New Zealand to which service personnel returned. The other was a collaborative venture between the National Library's Digital New Zealand team and the National Digital Forum to make Turnbull Library material relating to the First World War available for people to search, or to 'remix' with digitised content from other public collections to create their own 'Coming Home' album or tribute.

The articles for 2009 provide a variety of perspectives on events taking place in New Zealand following the First World War. The emblematic John A. Lee, featured on the cover, represents defiance of the odds against any recovery. In his portrait of wartime experience, Civilian into Soldier (1937), Lee's persona John Guy makes a pungent observation of war's wholesale destructiveness:

So ends everything in war. Love and profane love, religion and nationalism, patriotism and pacifism, realism and idealism, life itself - in satirical madhouse laughter. 1 The horrific loss of life and extent of the casualties that resulted from New Zealand's contribution to the First World War support this view, and point to the mood of 'listlessness and lack of idealism' that characterised the 1920 s. 2

Nevertheless, the articles suggest that the fabric of society did in fact recover and life pushed on. The principle of Empire remained strong, as evidenced by the country's welcome of the lovesick Prince of Wales in 1920. However, the legacy of war continued to affect those with the misfortune to be labelled 'enemy aliens'. The dispossession of Maori was ongoing. Elsewhere, John A. Lee, newly married and living in Auckland, was listening to jazz and dancing the Charleston as the

influence of American culture began to make its presence felt. 3 Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova toured New Zealand in 1926 to a rapturous reception.

In this expanded edition of the Record, we also profile Turnbull Library benefactor Sir Joseph Kinsey, and look in detail at one of the major acquisitions of 2009, a number of notable rare books and manuscripts from the collection of Edward C. Simpson.

It is one of the tasks of the Alexander Turnbull Library to test the assumptions of and about a given age, and the purpose of the Turnbull Library Record to assemble the research that is the result of these investigations. While there is much here that is the excitement of the revealed, there is also appreciation that the topic of life in post-war New Zealand remains rich in potential for further exploration.

REFERENCES 1 John A. Lee, Civilian into Soldier (London: T. Werner Lurie, 1937), p. 286. 2 Jock Phillips, Nicholas Boyack and E. P. Malone (eds), The Great Adventure: New Zealand Soldiers Describe the First World War (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1988), p. 1. 3 Erik Olssen, John A. Lee (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1977), p. 18.