Tag: local history

Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush with author Bee Dawson

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We sat down with local author Bee Dawson to discuss the newly released book Ōtari: Two hundred years of Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush. Dawson tells us the story behind writing the book, and explains why Ōtari–Wilton’s Bush is a unique Wellingtonian treasure. We discuss local history, native plant conservation, collaborative research, and the special people who have helped create and celebrate Aotearoa New Zealand’s only native bush reserve.

The book features an array of botanical drawings and historic photographs, charting Ōtari’s significance to the local community over its history, from the 1820’s to the present day. The contemporary photographs by Chris Coad are particularly striking and beautifully illustrate why Ōtari-Wilton’s Bush is ranked as a six-star garden of significance by the New Zealand Gardens Trust.

On Wellington City Recollect our Rare Books collection contains a digitsed copy of the 1932 document ‘A Scheme for the Development and Arrangement of the Otari Open-Air Native Plant Museum‘, written by the beloved Dr Leonard Cockayne, Wellington’s ‘honorary botanist’ and champion of Ōtari.

Otari : Two hundred years of Otari-Wilton’s Bush / Dawson, Bee

“The story of Ōtari–Wilton’s Bush, the only botanic garden dedicated solely to the collection and conservation of the plants unique to Aotearoa New Zealand and a native bush reserve with over a hundred hectares of regenerating forest, including some of Wellington’s oldest trees.” (Publisher’s Description)
For more information on the book visit The Cuba Press.

The photography of Derek Smith

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Wellington City Libraries is proud to host a remarkable collection of photographs on Recollect that capture the vibe of our city from three decades ago.

Green Door Dairy, Park Road, Miramar, c.1991

Derek Smith was born in the United Kingdom but immigrated to New Zealand with his family at the age of six. He grew up in the East Coast Bays area of Auckland’s North Shore in the 1960s and 70s where he developed an interest in photography as a teenager. After working a series of odd-jobs, in his early 20s he got a job as a meter reader for the Auckland Gas Company. Discovering that if he worked hard, he could normally complete his daily round within five hours, he took the opportunity to use his camera to document the city and his mild interest in photography became a passion.

Woolworths store, Rongotai

He began to use the resources in the library of the Elam School of Fine Arts which featured an excellent collection of photography books and found particular inspiration in the work of the American photographers Edward Weston, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans and William Eggleston. He also befriended John B. Turner, a legendary senior lecturer sometimes called “the father of modern NZ photography” who gave him advice and encouragement even though Derek was not formally enrolled in the school.  He also joined the PhotoForum collective that Turner had co-founded in 1973. By this stage he had purchased a Mamiya 645 medium-format camera which uses 120 roll film to create huge 6 x 4.5 centimetre negatives or transparencies. With an individual frame being more than 2.5 times larger than the standard 35mm film common at the time, when combined with Mamiya’s excellent lenses this camera was capable of rendering extremely high quality images that still rival most of the high resolution DSLR and mirrorless digital cameras available today.

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Design and Living by E. A. Plischke

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Now digitised on Wellington City Recollect, ‘Design and Living’ published in 1947 offers pertinent solutions to our current housing issues nearly 75 years later.

Ernst Anton Plischke (1903 – 1992) was one of the most notable architects ever to work in New Zealand. Though he produced only a limited number of buildings while living here, his influence on the path that NZ architecture and design would follow in the subsequent decades was considerable. He arrived in Wellington in 1939 from his native Vienna just four months before the start of World War II, having fled here with his Jewish wife and stepson following Nazi Germany’s ‘Anschluss’ with Austria.  Settling in Brooklyn,  it was in the capital that his influence had its greatest impact. He had impeccable credentials having studied & worked under the legendary German Modernist Peter Behrens, knew Le Corbusier, met Frank Lloyd Wright and had personally designed domestic and commercial buildings in the 1920s and 1930s in Austria that still look contemporary today.

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The 1951 Waterfront Dispute: 151 days that shook New Zealand

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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the longest and one of the most polarising labour disputes in New Zealand’s history. Now digitised on Wellington City Recollect is a selection of what were then illegally printed pamphlets and newsletters from one of the main players in the dispute, the Wellington Waterside Workers’ Union.

An illegal flyer printed to be handed out to the public to explain the position of the Wellington Waterside Workers’ Union. Emergency regulations meant any coverage of their views by news media was banned by the government.

Though it is now passing from living memory, the 1951 Waterfront Dispute remains one of the most contentious industrial conflicts from our past. Lasting 151 days, it was the longest serious industrial action ever taken in New Zealand and involved more people than any other strike in our history with over 22,000 members of the Waterside Workers’ Union and other sympathetic labour groups involved. It was a deeply divisive and polarising event with different sides accusing each other of being ‘communists’ or ‘fascists’ respectively with many of the attacks becoming increasingly personal and vindictive. Even the name and nature of the event was in dispute with the Government, port authorities and shipping companies calling it a ‘strike’ and the waterside workers calling it a ‘lock-out’. This distinction remained a contentious issue among some historians and political scientists for decades after the event.

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The Enigma of Mary Garden

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In the 1920s, the societal norms shattered in the First World War combined with a booming economy and led to the emergence of a new generation of emancipated young women – the ‘flappers’.

 

They wore hemlines above the ankle, cut and ‘bobbed’ their hair, listened to jazz and generally rebelled against the path that society expected young women to follow. They smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol, took lovers rather than husbands, sought employment and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behaviour. For more than a decade, one woman was looked up to by this new generation in Wellington, someone who ‘had it all’; a fashion designer, businesswoman and property developer who lived and worked under the pseudonym Mary Garden. 

She was born in Hobart in Tasmania in January 1893 as Ruby Russell and likely grew up on a farm not far from that city. However, Ruby had bigger ambitions; training as a dressmaker, she went on to develop her craft at the luxurious ‘Farmers & Co’ department store in central Sydney (unconnected to the NZ retail chain of the same name).

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Dining out in Wellington in the early 1990s

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Newly digitised on our Recollect site, the Sheridan Restaurant Guide from 1993 is another snap-shot of our eating-out habits and a startling contrast to the Menu Guide published a decade earlier.

Unlike the Menu Guide which was sold as a one-off product (the incentive to purchase being the number of discount coupons it contained) the Sheridan Guide was printed twice a year and given away as a ‘freebie’ via magazine racks in hotel lobbies, tourist sites and on inner-city streets. A majority of restaurants in the early 1980s were either ‘steak & chips’ family affairs or expensive French-based fine-dining establishments with only a small number of ‘ethnic’ restaurants. Ten years on and the Thai, Indian and Cambodian restaurants which earlier would have been regarded as extraordinarily exotic were now becoming mainstream.

The high interest in ‘ethnic cuisine’ (particularly from Asia) which began in the early 1990s was not lost on conventional restaurateurs; the menu of Dada (formerly located at 9 Edward street, later to became the location of ESC and latterly Meow) is a good example of this with salmon sushi, Tom Yum soup and Rogan Josh sitting happily alongside venison Denver leg and char-grilled lamb medallions. Fine-dining restaurants began to lose their stuffiness during this period; starched tablecloths, carpeted floors and silver service gave way to the ‘smart casualness’ which continues to  dominate this sector of the restaurant trade to this day.

Typical of this style was Brasserie Flipp located on the first floor of the former RSA building in upper Ghuznee Street. Not only was this an unusual location away from Wellington’s traditional restaurant ‘strips’, the interior design came to exemplify many similar restaurants; former commercial office fitouts and wall linings were ripped out to expose the raw interior of the building and a ‘post industrial’ look created. However, some new restaurants did still go ‘all out’ with highly original (and expensive) interior fitouts. The Opera Restaurant and Bar (better known simply as ‘Opera’) was one such establishment which featured sculpted devils & angels hanging on walls and a ‘floating’ staircase to access the upper level. Operatic recordings were piped through the high-quality sound system during the day and into the early evening which later gave way to the pounding beats of contemporary dance music. ‘Opera’ was among the pioneering establishments that transformed Courtenay Place in the early 1990s, taking advantage of the relaxation in regulations which previously made liquor licenses for restaurants and bars (particularly for any establishment wanting to serve alcohol after 10pm) difficult and expensive to obtain. Correspondingly, this change in regulations also saw a decline in BYO restaurants as the profit that could be made on alcohol sales (if a liquor license could be obtained) were substantial.

Only two restaurants featured in the Menu Guide from 1982 were also covered in Sheridan guide; the Mexican Cantina and Greta Point Tavern. The ‘Mex’ was already in decline by this point having lost the monopoly it once had on serving nachos and tacos. It was sold by its proprietor Jenny Burns (1929-2002) to new owners but stuttered on for another couple of years before finally closing its doors in the mid-1990s. However, with its menu virtually unchanged, comparing its 1982 prices with its 1993 prices is an interesting exercise which illustrates the impact of inflation during this period. The Greta Point Tavern continued with its ‘family’ orientated menu through to the early 2000s. It closed to make way for a housing development but survives in a manner after being  a dramatically transformed in 2002 when the entire building was lifted onto a barge and relocated to the inner-harbour waterfront where it  became Foxglove. Meanwhile, only three of the restaurants featured in the 1993 Sheridan guide have survived to the present day (2021),  The Tug Boat (though it has had many changes of owners, name variations and menus, it has remained floating at its berth next to Freyberg Pool on Oriental Bay ever since), the politically themed Back Bencher and the iconic Boulcott Street Bistro which reaches its 30th birthday this year.