‘Imaginative and entertaining’, ‘top quality’ and ‘skilfully composed’ — these are the judges’ words to describe the incredible creative work of our rangatahi (from more than fifty schools) who entered the 2020 Smart Alex competition. Entrants drew on current experience of COVID-19 pressures as well as responding to emotive issues such as climate change and the environment, Māori and Pasifika traditions, social inequality and unrest.

The winners, runners-up and highly commended entries will receive cash prizes and book tokens totalling more than $3,000.

See 2020 Competition Results for full details and all the prize-winning entries.

This was the third and final year of the competition, attracting nearly 120 tamariki from secondary schools around Aotearoa who were asked to respond to an image found in Alexander Turnbull Library’s online collections. They could showcase their creative talent through writing or a graphic drawing.

The competition has been organised by Friends of the Turnbull Library (FoTL) in conjunction with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Services to Schools branch of the National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. It was developed to celebrate the centenary of the Turnbull Library, which first opened its doors to the public on 28 June 1920.

We are now inviting contributions for the 2021 issue of the Turnbull Library Record.

The Turnbull Library Record is a journal in the humanities, published yearly by the Alexander Turnbull Library in association with the Friends of the Turnbull Library. It is the longest-running humanities journal in New Zealand. It publishes information relating to the activities of the library, as well as articles covering a wide range of research, with special emphasis on the societies and cultures of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Its purpose is to increase knowledge of the library’s collections by showing their scope and richness, and the ways researchers are using them.

Articles or pictorial essays should be between 2,000–6,000 words in length. Contributions that have not been previously published are welcome and, before acceptance, will be independently refereed. Articles should have a scholarly underpinning and be written in a lively and accessible manner for an informed but not specialist readership.

The Editorial Board reserves the right to decline to publish an article, whether solicited or unsolicited.

The deadline for submitting articles is Friday 11 December 2020. Publication is scheduled for August 2021.

Literary scholar and writer Sarah Shieff will receive the 2020 research grant to assist her latest project, to publish a collection of the letters of poet Allen Curnow ONZ CBE (1911-2001).

Noting that Allen Curnow is widely recognised as New Zealand’s most distinguished poet, Sarah aims to “tell the story of his long life in his own words”. She believes that publishing his letters will go some way to make up for the fact that he never wrote his own autobiography.

Sarah Shieff is Associate Professor of English in the School of Arts, University of Waikato. She has previously published Letters of Frank Sargeson (Random House, 2012), and her Letters of Denis Glover (Otago University Press, 2020) is forthcoming.

From her previous research on the letters of Frank Sargeson and especially of Denis Glover – who was Allen Curnow’s oldest and closest friend – Sarah is ideally placed to make use of the Alexander Turnbull Library’s extensive holdings. As well as preparing a scholarly edition of Curnow’s letters for publication, she plans to develop a fully-searchable database that will assist future scholars.

Kate Fortune, president of the Friends of the Turnbull Library is delighted that the 2020 research grant will be $20,000 in the centenary year of the Alexander Turnbull Library. She said “This is the first time we have been able to offer $20,000 to a researcher, and we feel that Sarah’s project is particularly apt for the Turnbull’s centenary year.

“This latest grant brings the total number of projects assisted by the Friends of the Turnbull Library to eighteen since the first grant (of $5000) was awarded to Philip Norman in 2004 for his biography of Douglas Lilburn. Six biographies have been awarded research grants and a very diverse range of other projects including a history of rugby league (awarded in 2017), and Nick Bollinger’s current project on New Zealand’s ‘Counterculture 1960-75’ (awarded last year).

“The Alexander Turnbull Library – a world-class research library that attracts scholars from around the globe – provides fertile soil for many diverse research projects. We would love to be able to support more researchers,” Ms Fortune said. “We encourage people who might be able to make donations or to set up bequests to come and talk to us about how they could help.”

‘Outstanding’, ‘high calibre’ and ‘skilfully composed’ — these are some of the words used to describe the incredible creative work of our rangatahi who entered the 2019 Smart Alex competition. The winners, runners-up and highly commended entries will receive cash prizes and book tokens totalling $3,000.

See 2019 Competition Results for full details and all the prize-winning entries.

The competition, now in its second year, attracted tamariki from secondary schools around Aotearoa who were asked to respond to an image found in Alexander Turnbull Library’s online collections. They could showcase their creative talent through writing or a graphic drawing.

The competition is organised by Friends of the Turnbull Library (FOTL) in conjunction with the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Services to Schools branch of the National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa.

This year’s entries from about seventy schools were both diverse and captivating. Entrants responded to emotive issues such as the horrors of war, the environment, and Māori and Pasifika traditions.

The judging panel this year consisted of noted children’s author Eirlys Hunter, Susan Wallace from National Library Services to Schools, and FOTL members Elle Green and Rachel Underwood.

Kate Fortune, President of FOTL, said that all the judges were very impressed with the high calibre of entries submitted.

Please join us at the Takapuna Public Library, Level 1, for the second of our Auckland public talks, on Friday 26 July 2019 at 6.00pm.

Wellington historian, author and digital communicator Jock Phillips ONZM, who created and developed the online encyclopedia, Te Ara, has been busily researching in the Turnbull Library some of the wider issues behind the Royal visits to New Zealand.

Māori and Royal Tours is a fascinating story of how Māori used the visits of royalty to emphasise their special relationship with Queen Victoria and her successors, and hoped through that special relationship to alleviate some of their issues with the New Zealand Government. It begins with the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1869; looks at the great Māori hui in Rotorua in 1901; then surveys Royal tours in 1920, 1927, 1934 and 1953. Finally, Jock briefly examines subsequent events at Waitangi. The talk is richly illustrated.

Jock Philllips has published 15 books on New Zealand history including: “To The Memory: New Zealand’s War Memorials”; “Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland, 1800-1945 (with Terry Hearn); “Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History” (with Bronwyn Dalley); “In the light of the past: stained glass windows in New Zealand houses” (with Chris Maclean); and “A Man’s Country: The Image of the Pakeha Male”. His recently published memoir is “Making History: A New Zealand Story” (AUP).

Refreshments at 6.00pm, talk starts at 6.30pm.

Entry is free, but donations welcome. Hats and flags optional!

 Please RSVP on Takapuna Library Website, or  call Lester Chung at 890 4919 or email  lester.chung@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz

Congratulations to Rachel Underwood, immediate past president of the Friends of the Turnbull Library (FoTL), who has been awarded a Queen’s Service Medal (QSM) in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Rachel has served on the FoTL committee since 1987, and led the organisation as president from 1996 to 2018. She has been an inspirational leader, notably developing and maintaining a broad national membership in support of the Library; and initiating and organising the highly effective advocacy that successfully achieved changes to the National Library Act 2002.

Her energy and drive has also led to the successful establishment of the Friends of the Turnbull Library Research Grant that has now provided funding of almost $120,000 to assist seventeen separate research projects since 2004.

Sarah Gaitanos spoke about her new book, “Shirley Smith: An Examined Life” (VUP, 2019), on Sunday 19 May at this year’s Auckland Writers Festival. This popular event was sponsored by the Friends of Turnbull Library, as the inaugural talk of three years of celebrating research in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Sarah says: “The Turnbull Library has been like a home to me for many years since researching for my biography of Nola Millar. In that case it was not just a treasure trove but also a subject of my research as Nola Millar worked there in the 1930s and 40s, becoming reference librarian until she gave it all up for theatre. The Shirley Smith papers are in the Turnbull, my oral history projects are too, and I belong to the FoTL so I’m delighted to be the inaugural speaker.”

Sarah Gaitanos is an independent writer, researcher and oral historian.

In May this year the Friends of Turnbull Library reaches a milestone anniversary, celebrating 80 years of supporting and promoting the work of the Alexander Turnbull Library. One of the ways we have begun to mark this special birthday year is by commissioning two writers to produce research essays on the life of our benefactor, Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull. Both Robyn Maree Pickens (of Dunedin) and Redmer Yska (of Wellington) will be writing biographical essays on Alex Turnbull’s life for us, and will be investigating areas such as his alleged homosexuality and drug addiction.

Redmer Yska (pictured left) has already produced a preliminary article (“A Collector’s Habit”) for the NZ Listener, 22 December 2018. For those who missed it, there is a link below to an online version of his piece, which begins:

“In 1901, wealthy Wellingtonian Alexander Turnbull, founder of New Zealand’s greatest private library, enjoyed an idyllic Christmas cruise in the Marlborough Sounds on his yacht Iorangi. Within a few years, he spiralled into depression and cocaine addiction. What went wrong?  He’s the handsome devil with the waxed moustaches who died a century ago. Alexander Turnbull, the millionaire bookman whose 55,000 volumes made a library, has been the toast of Wellington in 2018. There’s been a “Smart Alex” writing contest, a memorial walk, an iced cake as big as a shelf of encyclopedias …”

https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/history/alexander-turnbull-millionaire-book-collector/?fbclid=IwAR1qEGlZiq84W2vzu7uzID7RMfQaAiLHoetmPEmN1-TpCzSxGPvjV-1j7z0

Follow the money: the Archives, the Library and the Dept of Internal Affairs

November 25, 2018 

Photo credit: Jacob Pollock

by Don Gilling

At the height of the Watergate scandal, when the story had seemed to stall, Deep Throat told Bob Woodward that to understand what was going on he needed to “Follow the Money.” In similar vein, if we are to understand the experience of Archives New Zealand and the National and Turnbull Libraries under the control of the Department of Internal Affairs, it helps to follow the money.

In 2010 Cabinet approved a proposal to incorporate Archives New Zealand and the National Library (which includes the Turnbull Library) into the Department of Internal Affairs. It was justified on essentially financial grounds. It was claimed that the incorporation would enable the futureproofing of both entities by placing them on a much larger corporate platform, which would lead to lower corporate overheads. More importantly, the Cabinet Paper that advocated the incorporation promised that the statutory functions of both agencies together with appropriate financial safeguards as to their independence would be maintained even while cost savings and economies of scale would be achieved.

Amongst those safeguards was the promise, in June 2010, by the Minister responsible for the three agencies, that separate Budget Votes and Ministerial roles would continue.

Within a year of the incorporation these financial transparency safeguards were dispensed with. The consequence is that information on the expenditure of Archives and the National and Turnbull libraries is no longer separately disclosed in the Internal Affairs Annual Report, but is lumped together with other areas of spending and buried within different categories of output.

The Watergate Special Prosecutor had to go to Court to obtain the tapes that would reveal Nixon’s guilt; I had to use the Official information Act to obtain the evidence necessary to evaluate the incorporation of the Archives and Library into Internal Affairs. What I found was this:

1. Before the incorporation into Internal Affairs, the National Library’s total Annual Operating Expenditure was $72 million. But by 2018 it had dropped to $62.7 million. Over the period 2013 —2018, it has DECLINED 9.0%, in sharp contrast to the 12.4% INCREASE in Vote Internal Affairs since 2013. Meanwhile, consumer prices — an indication of the underlying cost rises from inflation — ROSE 12.9%.
2. Over the same period, Centrally Managed Costs, which are imposed on the Library by Internal Affairs, and which include property costs, ICT costs, and Corporate Support, INCREASED by 25.7%, with the yearly remuneration of the CEO of Internal Affairs INCREASING by 49%.

The claim, therefore, that incorporation would lead to lower overheads has certainly not been borne out. The importance of central costs is shown by the fact that in 2018 these costs accounted for 42.3% of the total Annual Operating Expenditure of the National Library.

3. In contrast, the operating expense of the National Library (i.e the funds under the control of the National Librarian, which do not include Internal Affairs’ centrally imposed costs) amounted to $30.1 million in 2018. Over the period 2013 — 2018 this DECLINED by 24.8%.
4. In 2018, the Capital Charge levied on the National Library, together with Depreciation and the allocation of central costs, accounted for 51.9% of the Library’s total expenditure.

The Capital Charge is a central cost levied by The Treasury on all government agencies for the use of assets. It is designed to encourage efficiency in the use of assets and/or the divestment of assets not essential to the operations of the agencies. This makes no sense, of course, in the case of Libraries and Archives, whose purpose is to collect, protect, preserve and build up their asset base. Illogically, it is applied to the National Library and the Archives.

5. The Turnbull’s Annual Operating Expenditure, excluding the allocation of central costs which are borne by the National Library as a whole, amounted to $6.5 million in 2018. Over the period 2013 — 2018 this expenditure has DECLINED by 9.7%.
6. The smaller sum of monies under the direct control of the Turnbull Librarian, have DECLINED by 3.6% over the period 2013 — 2018.
7. In 2013, spending on the Turnbull made up 10.2% of the Government’s Budget Vote for the National Library. But by 2018, the Turnbull’s share of the National Library cake had dropped to 9.8%.
8. Archives New Zealand have also suffered from declining budgets. Between 2013 and 2018, the Operating Expenditure component of the Archives budget DECLINED 18.7%, while the monies under the direct control of the Chief Archivist DECLINED by nearly 30%. Further stress on the Archives budget has come from the INCREASE in Corporate overheads of 279% over the period 2013 — 2019.

In the case of the Libraries the significance of Centrally Managed Costs, and particularly the inclusion therein of Corporate Support (whatever that may mean), lends considerable weight and support to the following points made in the Friends of the Turnbull Library’s submission to the Ministerial Review Group looking at whether to remove both Libraries and Archives from under the Internal Affairs umbrella:

(14) Recent pronouncements by both Minister and Senior DIA managers have suggested that a continuation of the present legal and structural arrangements is necessary because the DIA “needs the money.” This is disturbing since it implies that monies have been, and may in the future, be transferred, by various creative accounting means such as overhead re-allocations, away from the Libraries to other DIA functions and activities in possible breach of the Public Finance Act.

Alternatively, the argument may be simply that the DIA needs a bigger budget and more business units in order to spread the corporate overhead more widely. But this raises the real possibility that Libraries are, in effect, paying for the overhead generated by say Passports or Dog Control. The absence of a clear and specific appropriation for Libraries, therefore, means that there is insufficient transparency, as well as no public assurance, or safeguards, as to the financial independence and finances of the National and Turnbull Libraries.

On a broader canvas, the following comment made by the Turnbull Librarian, in his submission to the Ministerial Review Group, is particularly pertinent:

Operational resourcing — ongoing operational funding cuts over the last several years have left the National Library, and the Turnbull within it, severely weakened and demoralised. These are now manifesting in staff cuts and service closures. This is an area of immediate concern, and rates as the most urgent challenge.

These comments are also echoed in the National Librarian’s submission when he says

“After seven years of financial pressure and staff reductions, stakeholders and staff of the Library now strongly believe that, despite the Library’s best efforts, we are failing to perform properly in each of our three statutory roles.”

Following the money, therefore, shows that the central promises of 2010 have not been kept. Declining expenditure is evidence of deliberate under-funding, not the achievement of cost efficiencies. The Libraries and the Archives have not been “futureproofed”, statutory functions are increasingly at significant risk, and important safeguards have faded away.

Resourcing them properly, and turning the National and Turnbull Libraries into an Autonomous Crown Entity, under the control of an independent Board of Trustees, would go a long way to restoring necessary safeguards and public trust. The new legal status would also allow the public, in effect, to shape, build and ultimately control our documentary heritage and taonga, for the benefit of current and future generations of New Zealanders.

And making the Chief Archivist an Officer of Parliament would give them sufficient authority to fully control and shape proper archival processes and support their constitutional role as the keeper of the public record.

This article was first published in the Briefing Papers and is reprinted with permission.

  Dr Donald Gilling has taught at Universities in Australia, England and New Zealand, and for nine years was Professor of Accounting and Finance at the University of Waikato. He holds Fellowships in both Professional Accounting Bodies in Australasia and is the author of over 90 papers in academic and professional journals, covering topics in public finance, accounting and auditing, and the economics of education. He has acted as an expert witness in a number of applications for Judicial Review of the operations and decision making of government and public bodies. He has been a member of the committee of the Friends of the Turnbull Library for nearly 20 years.

In mid 2018 the Government called for submissions on the current status and future of “National Archival and Library Institutions” (NALI). The Friends of Turnbull Library immediately submitted that the National Library of New Zealand (along with the Alexander Turnbull Library) needs independence to do its job properly. At present it is under the control of the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) where it is a subset of Information and Knowledge Services. The absence of a clear and specific appropriation for both Archives and Libraries means that there is insufficient transparency as well as a lack of public assurance and safeguards for the financial independence and finances of the National and Turnbull Libraries and for Archives New Zealand. For the full NALI submission see here.

Recent further research has been carried out to show the increasingly dismal state of Library finances. See Follow the Money.

And see also The Numbers Tell the Story.

The Government is planning to make an announcement in the New Year.