Friends’ bulletin board archive

 

Art-writer, poet, anthologist and essayist, Gregory O’Brien has been awarded the 2015 Stout Memorial Fellowship for 2015. Greg has spent much of the past three decades exploring the adjacent territories of imagination and research, of inspiration and scholarship. The Fellowship will allow him to complete a book on art, literature and the environment – passions that have inspired his prolific output, and themes which he drew on in presenting the FoTL Founder Lecture, “Imagination and Research”, in 2013. Greg’s recent books include a collection of poems, Beauties of the Octagonal Pool (2012) as well as monographic publications on artists including Euan Macleod, Pat Hanly and Graham Percy. He has also written two books introducing New Zealand art to young people: Welcome to the South Seas (2004) and Back and Beyond (2008).

An extraordinary history, six years in the planning, was published by Bridget Williams Books in November. Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History, written by Professor Atholl Anderson, Dame Judith Binney (who died before the project was completed) and Dr Aroha Harris, charts the sweep of Māori history from ancient origins to the 21^st century. Lively, lucid and lavishly illustrated, it combines archaeology, anthropology, linguistics and oral traditions (Anderson) with colonial history (Binney) and ever-changing post-colonial developments (Harris). This is a rich and authoritative book that provides valuable insights for the future.

Atholl Anderson and Aroha Harris – distinguished researchers and eloquent speakers – spoke to the Friends on Wednesday 4 February about their roles in this huge project. Atholl is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Canterbury and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Otago. Aroha lectures in History at the University of Auckland and is a member of the Waitangi Tribunal.

A research project into the childhood and early life of Katherine Mansfield has won the 2015 Friends of the Turnbull Library (FoTL) Research Grant of $10,000.

 Dr Gerri Kimber (pictured below right) is a leading UK authority on Katherine Mansfield. She has been working on a new biography of Katherine Mansfield’s early years and has already located previously unpublished material relating to her first 19 years in New Zealand. Dr Kimber will use the FoTL Research Grant to explore the collections of Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull Library, which is renowned for its substantial archives concerning Mansfield. This material includes the recently acquired literary and personal papers from the estate of John Middleton Murry, Mansfield’s husband.

 Dr Kimber expects to complete the biography in 2015, and her book is to be published by the Edinburgh University Press.

 ‘Gerri Kimber’s work will shed new light on Mansfield’s early life and the significant influence of her New Zealand childhood on her writing.’ said Rachel Underwood, President of the Friends of the Turnbull Library. ‘This research project will enrich our understanding of KM and reinforce the immense value of the archives of the Turnbull Library.’

 

Rolf Brednich, who has been researching a biography of the German-born New Zealander Augustus Koch (1834-1901), spoke about his life and work at a meeting of the Friends of the Turnbull Library on Tuesday 21 October.

Koch first visited New Zealand as a seaman on a sailing ship in 1855. He returned in 1858, bringing a printing press so that he could produce prints of his own artwork, and settled in Auckland with his bride. Within a few months he became known to other European New Zealanders – Dr Karl Fisher, Dr Ferdinand Hochstetter and Julius Haast – and subsequently joined the Austrian Novara Expedition as meteorological observer and later mapmaker.

Rolf Brednich retired from a long involvement in ethnology and folklore, and turned his attention to Koch’s remarkable immigrant career. Realising that this story needed to be documented, he has spent several years working on the biography which is to be published soon by Steele Roberts. It will include many of Koch’s sketches held in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Brendan O’Brien, who has curated the current exhibition at the Turnbull Gallery (first floor, National Library of New Zealand), spoke to a crowded meeting of the Friends of the Turnbull Library on Tuesday 23 September on ‘the art and times of Dame Janet Paul (1919-2004)’. Brendan has just published a limited edition book of her poems and drawings, and his talk – illustrated with images from the collections of the Turnbull Library – drew attention to her artistic talent and flair for design.

After a significant career (with her husband Blackwood Paul) as an innovative publisher and bookseller, Dame Janet became widely recognised as a painter and art historian, as well as a friend and mentor for many artists, writers and especially poets. Brendan noted that she carried a sketchbook everywhere – like a mobile phone today – and many of these sketchbooks are now on display at the Turnbull Gallery.

Having an opera company in the family was an enjoyable experience, but not really a huge advantage when historian Doug Munro set out to research the 17-year span of the New Zealand Opera Company. Doug – younger son of the founder of the company, opera singer Donald Munro – has been driven in part by a sense of urgency in capturing the living memories of some of the participants. Speaking to the Friends of the Turnbull Library on 27 August, Doug entertained his audience with many insights into the background of key figures, the circumstances of the company’s establishment, and – most of all – the ups and downs of precarious funding and turbulent backroom politics which his father always tried to shield his singers from. There is very little of this story on the public record so far; Doug notes that Adrienne Simpson’s 1996 book, Opera’s Farthest Frontier, allocated just 15 pages to the New Zealand Opera Company.

Musical parents (his mother Jean played in the string orchestra) meant that Doug’s early years included vivid memories of singers and musical performances. He also grew up with an awareness that his father’s artistic career needed to be supported by temporary work in wool stores and abattoirs, as well as considerable travel as a singing adjudicator. Looking back now on these years, his research has been frustrated by a lack of company financial details and missing minutes of board meetings, but there is still a wealth of material in the Turnbull collections – including oral history interviews, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings – and Doug is immensely grateful for the FoTL Research Grant of $10,000 which was given to him in 2013.

A major study of the Opera Company was needed, and Doug’s research has been unravelling and documenting a significant and lively period in New Zealand’s cultural history.