ARCHIFACT S

Published by the Archives and Records Association of

October ARCHIFACT S

Editor: Susan Skudder

Editorial Committee: David Green Michael Hoare Gavin McLean Bruce Ralston

Reviews Editor: David Green

Archifacts is published twice-yearly, in April and October.

Articles and correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at:

National Archives P.O. Box J2050

Intending contributors should obtain a style sheet from the Editor.

Printed by Otago University Printing Department

Copyright ARANZ 1993

ISSN 0303-7940 Contents

Editoria l

Business and Archives Brad Patterson Board Rooms and Balance Sheets 1 S.R. Strachan Business Archives in New Zealand 5 Joanna Newman Precedents and Public Relations 21 PR. Miller From Minute BooL· to Ledgers 27 Brian Easton Why we Need Business Histories 32 Gavin McLean Commissioned Business Histories — Pitfalls and Prospects . 44 M.M. Roche Business History in Wider Context: a View From Historical Geography 49 S.R.H. Jones The Role of the Centre For Business History 61

Tomorrow' s History Ellen Ellis Preserving Ourstory 65 Jane Tucker Ôá Keita I Mahi AilWhat Katy Did 69 Belinda Battley Suffrage Year in the North 72 Dorothy Page Suffrage Year in the South 77

Book Reviews 79

Accessions 100 Archives and Records Association of New Zealand Inc.

P.O. Box 11-553, Manners Street, Wellington, New Zealand.

Patron Her Excellency Dame , GCMG, DBE, Governor-General of New Zealand

Council President Brad Patterson 20 Khyber Road, Seatoun, Wellington. Vice Peter Miller 114 Evans Street, Presidents Opoho, Dunedin. Sheryl Morgan Massey University Library, Private Bag, Palmerston North. Secretary Thérèse Angelo Royal NZ Airforce Museum, RNZAF Base Wigram, Private Bag, . Treasurer Jane Tucker 53 Moana Road, Highbury, Wellington. Editor Susan Skudder National Archives, P.O. Box 12050, Wellington. Membership Thérèse Angelo Royal NZ Airforce Museum, Secretary RNZAF Base Wigram, Private Bag, Christchurch. Members Philippa Fogarty National Archives, P.O. Box 12050, Wellington. Jan Gow 18 Modena Crescent, 5. Michael Hoare 77 Spinaker Drive, Whitby, Wellington. Margaret Morgan 46 Skibo Street, Kew, Dunedin. Pauline Porteous 144A Upland Road, Kelburn, Wellington. Mark Stoddart 4/1 John Davis Road, Mt Roskill, Auckland. Andrew Thompson Rotorua District Council, Private Bag, Rotorua. Editoria l

Welcome to the first issue of Archifacts produced by your new Wellington-based editorial team. After thtee years of sterling work, the Auckland team have finally said — enough! We have committed ourselves to producing three issues, after which we will review our energy levels. We are: Susan Skudder (National Archives), Michael Hoare (Police Centennial Museum), David Green (Historical Branch, Internal Affairs), Bruce Ralston (Alexander TurnbuU Library) and Gavin McLean (Historic Places Trust). You will hardly have failed to notice that we have made some changes to the format of Archifacts. As well as introducing a new look for the cover, we have also returned the size to a standard paper cut. The content may look different as well. However, the absence of 'News and Notes' is only a temporary consequence of the thematic nature of this issue. In 1991 a symposium on business archives and business history was held at the Stout Research Centre in Wellington. It was hoped that the proceedings of this conference could be published, but lack of finance precluded this. Archifacts now publishes a selection of papers from the symposium. A generous donation of $500 from Fletcher Challenge has enabled us to exceed our normal page limit. We did not, however, want to overwhelm either our new printer or our readers, and so have omitted the 'News and Notes' section this time. It will return in the April 1994 issue. Any contributions for this section are welcomed, as often news about archives in regional newspapers and other publications may not come to our attention in Wellington. Accessions lists from the Turnbull Library and National Archives, Wellington, only appear in this issue. Archifacts has always relied on the editor of the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts to send out requests for accessions lists, and NRAM, sadly, is no more. By the time we knew that we would have to do the mailout ourselves, and obtained a copy of the mailing list, we felt that it was too close to publication to ask contributors to prepare their lists. You will be hearing from us in plenty of time for the April 1994 issue. The editorial team regrets that the publication of NRAM is to cease, and that the National Library did not consult the archival community in this matter. Finally, far be it from Archifacts to overlook Women's Suffrage Year. A lot of work has been done this year in researching, uncovering, displaying and otherwise publicising the wealth of records relating to women held in repositories of various kinds throughout the country. We publish here some shorter articles that look at the work done in a few areas. We hope to bring you more discussion of what suffrage year has meant for archival collections and vice versa in the future.

ARCHIVE S OF WOMEN' S ORGANISATION S

A register of collections held at New Zealand archives institutions, libraries, museums and historical societies.

The register is a special edition of the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts, published by the Alexander Turnbul l Librar y in association with the Preserving Ourstory project. It contains 325 entries from 57 institutions.

Price: $27.00. Available by post from:

Subscriptions Officer Publications Unit National Librar y of New Zealand Ñ O Box 1467 WELLINGTO N Board Rooms and Balance Sheets: Recording New Zealand's Business Past

Brad Patterson

Wellington

A quickening of interest in the study of New Zealand business history has been apparent since the early 1980s. This has been evidenced by the publication of an increasing number of enterprise studies, by the appearance of commercial biographies, by the floating of the first tertiary courses in business history. Yet, somewhat incongruously, there are strong grounds for believing that, relatively unprotected by legislation, many bodies of business records, the raw materials upon which future histories should be based, are at risk. It was concern about the related issues of the future preservation of business archives and the best ways in which they might be utilised by researchers that motivated ARANZ, in association with the Stout Research Centre, to organise a two-day symposium at Victoria University on the weekend of 29-30 June 1991. It was never intended that the gathering would throw up conclusive answers to long-standing problems. For that the time was too short, the questions too wide- ranging. But- it was hoped that by bringing custodians and users together to discuss mutual problems a foundation for future dialogue might be provided. With over 60 attending, that objective, at least, was met. It was a further promising sign that this was one of those rare occasions where littl e coercion was necessary to secure speakers; one, in fact, where more papers were offered than could eventually be accommodated. In the two years since the symposium was held there has been surprising interest in the proceedings. Repeated requests for copies of the papers delivered have been received. In response, Council initially intended that a special volume, one incorporating all the papers delivered, be published. Despite strenuous efforts, however, this eventually proved impossible. At its May 1993 meeting Council therefore resolved that the possibility of a thematic issue of Archifacts be explored with the incoming 1993-94 Editorial Board. Happily, this

1 Archifacts was a Suggestion with which the Board readily concurred. The generosity of the Fletcher Challenge Corporation, which made a grant to assist with publication costs, has enabled the page length of this issue to be extended. Less happily, it has not been possible to present more than a selection of the papers. In several instances, because of length or format, it has been deemed more appropriate for papers to be published separately. In others, given the passage of time, the whole or part of papers delivered has already appeared elsewhere. In yet others again, papers promised have failed to materialise. It is nevertheless believed that those finally selected impart some flavour of what took place. It is futther believed that points made in 1991 are no less valid two years down the track. The first day of the symposium, devoted to discussion of the state of business archives, opened with two keynote addresses: the first by Stuart Strachan (Hocken Library), surveying the historical develop- ment of collections of business archives in New Zealand; the second by Michael Saclier (N.G. Butlin Archives, Australian National University), outlining parallel efforts in business archives preservation in Australia. What emerged was that, while the Australians had had a more vigorous start, progress had been hampered by regional antagonisms and competitions between collecting institutions. There was agreement that in both countries restructuring and corporate retrenchment from the mid-1980s had placed many accumulations of business records at great risk. With this in mind, the focus moved from the general to the particular, with custodians discussing the place of business records in specific repositories. Joanna Newman (Fletcher Challenge) made the case for retention of archives within originating organisations, demonstrating how archives operations could be combined with records management. Peter Miller (Hocken Library) and David Retter (Alexander Turnbull Library) then addressed the importance accorded business papers in their respective institutions. While specialist research libraries recognised the value of the documents, the ability to collect vigorously was being curbed by competing priorities. The limited involvement of university libraries was stressed by Sheryl Morgan (Massey University). A survey revealed that only Massey and Otago held significant collections, and these more by serendipity than deliberate policy. Mark Stoddart (National Archives) summarised the classes of business-telated papers held both in Wellington and in National Archives' regional offices. Though these were largely aligned to the regulatory functions of government, much about individual businesses could be unearthed. The day

2 Board Rooms and Bahnce Sheets concluded with an eloquent plea by Jim Traue (Victoria University) for the establishment of a national business history collection based at the Turnbull. On the second day the focus switched to the writing of New Zealand business history. Again, the scene was set by two keynote papers. First, Russell Stone (Auckland University), the doyen of New Zealand business historians, discussed the problems of researching and writing business history, with illustrations from his own experiences. Adopting a slightly different tack, economic consultant Brian Easton critically scrutinised recent work, coming to the conclusion that many chronic defects were still discernible: the preference for public relations over objective analysis, inappropriate authors, the inability to place case-studies in wider economic contexts. Perhaps as an 'antidote' to the previous day's prolonged discussion of sources, Ralph Hayburn and Christina Cregan (Otago University) followed with a presentation criticising traditional approaches to business history and calling for a more analytical inter- disciplinary perspective. To an extent this theme was echoed by Gordon Boyce (Victoria University) who discussed the thinking behind the setting up of business history courses in Wellington. Consolidating the argument for greater university involvement in the promotion of business history, Simon Vill e (Auckland University) backgrounded the establishment of the Auckland-based Centre for Business History in 1990. The intention that the Centre function as an information clearing-house for all interested in business history, as well as an initiator of research, was made clear. Subsequently Gavin McLean and John Angus, both authors of commissioned business histories, debated some of the pitfalls of that route to publication. On balance, with appropriate safeguards, they considered the option still viable. Concluding the formal presentations, Michael Roche (Massey University), referring to his studies of the geography of the nineteenth-century frozen meat industry, and Brad Patterson (Stout Research Centre), citing examples from an ongoing study of settler capitalism, probed the utility of business history approaches to research in associated disciplines. Throughout the symposium, both at the conclusion of papers and in plenary sessions, debate, while good-humoured, was vigorous. Although in the-early sessions a division between custodians and users seemed apparent, by the end there was greater unanimity, and more sensitive recognition of respective viewpoints. Even so, many questions remained to be resolved. In the case of collections: just

3 Archifacts how are administrators to be convinced of the long-term value of their organisations' records; can 'stand-alone' company archives be sustained; do wider research repositories have definable responsibilities; who should take a lead in campaigning for the preservation of business papers; how are holdings to be made better known? With respect to using the collections: in what ways could prospective users afford support to custodians; how might higher scholarly standards in the writing of business history be promoted; who should be encouraged to wotk actively in the field? What was abundantly clear was that there was considerable scope for further meetings. Until these could take place, there was consensus that dialogue between participants should continue informally. While responsibility for organising the symposium fell to Brad Patterson, it was with the assistance of a number of others. In planning the programme, there was useful comment from Ken Scadden and Michael Hoare. The Association's partner in the venture, the Stout Research Centre, was constant in its logistical support. The then Director, Jim Collinge, freely offered advice, and helped oversee arrangements on both days. The Centre's Secretary, Valerie Jacobs, assisted in many ways, from formating the initial brochure and arranging for its printing to recording registrations and ensuring the requisite tea facilities were in place. Kathryn Patterson organised the social gathering on the first evening. Michael Saclier's visit was made possible by a grant from the Australia-New Zealand Foundation. Fletcher Challenge's assistance for the publication of this issue has already been acknowledged.

4 Business Archives in New Zealand: The Development of an Infrastructur e

S.R. Strachan

Hocken Library While in London on a major overseas collecting expedition in the summer of 1903, Dr Thomas Hocken wrote to the Under Secretary of State at the Colonial Office on 11 August thanking him for permission to examine the records of the New Zealand Company then housed in the Public Record Office. He also asked for permission to retain duplicate and triplicate copies of the tecords, presumably to add them to his own butgeoning collection in Dunedin; and offered to sort all the records. He completed the sorting ovet the next two months, and on 22 October wrote again to the Under Secretary, suggesting that the main set of papers be presented to the New Zealand government and again asking permission to retain duplicates and triplicates for himself. Lengthy negotiations followed, with the upshot that by special United Kingdom Order in Council of 4 June 1908, duplicate documents were permitted to be transferred to the New Zealand government, where they were to form the nucleus of what was to be known as the National Historical Collection. The original fair copies were retained at the Public Record Office, where they are still housed as class CO 208. Dr Hocken himself had to be satisfied with duplicate printed items.1 Dr Hocken's interest in the archives of the New Zealand Company, and the subsequent transfer of copies to this country, was the first substantial local recognition of the permanent value of a business archive for this country's history. For a business, if one with a very special impulse, the New Zealand Company surely was. Constituted as a joint-stock company on 2 May 1839, it had a nominal capital of £400,000 in 4000 snares of £100 each, a Court of Directors, share- holders, and a requirement to pay a dividend. Its surviving archives are also recognisably those of a business. As well as correspondence, they include minutes of general and directors' meetings, general

Copies of the correspondence and other relevant papers are recorded in Calendar of Dr T.M. Hocken's Personal Letters and Documents Preserved in the Hocken Library , Orago University, compiled by Lind a Rodda, Dunedin, 1948. See also Archives of the New Zealand Company, Dominion Archives Preliminar y Inventory No. 2, Wellington, 1953, ñ.4· 5 Archifacts

Journals and general ledgers, and share records.2 It is a considerable and interesting irony that a major foundation of our public archives system in New Zealand should be the records of a business.

Yet business, in its various guises, whether sole proprietorships, partnerships, or companies public or private, has been at the very heart of New Zealand's economic development from even before the signing of the Treaty of 1840; and the survival in archives of evidence of its activity, either directly produced by enterprises or reflected in offical archives, -both within New Zealand and overseas, while not all that could be desired, is surprisingly widespread. Just how widespread is not precisely known, as a comprehensive guide based on detailed surveys has still to be published. There is only the patchy knowledge of a few individuals, archivists and historians with a special interest in the field.3 This interest has developed almost entirely since 1960. After Dr Hocken's 1903 foray into the archives of the New Zealand Company, business history, and by extension business archives, attracted very littl e interest from New Zealand historians or from economists with historical leanings. The former were chiefly interested in constitutional and political history while the latter, such as J.B. Condliffe and W.B. Sutch,4 were mostly concerned to delineate the development of the New Zealand economy in the large, and except for agriculture, had littl e real knowledge of the progress of individual industries, let alone of individual enterprises.5 What littl e work was undertaken on individual industries was written almost entirely from published sources. H.D. Bedford, whose death in 1918 at the age of 41 robbed New Zealand of its pioneering business historian, had this to say at the head of the bibliography of his 1916 doctoral thesis on banking in New Zealand: Any enquiry respecting banking meets with special difficulties owing to the secrecy which properly shrouds the relations of banks to their customers. Furthermore, the chief asset of a bank

2 J.S. Marais, The Colonisation of New Zealand, Oxford, 1927, p. 41; Australian Joint Coding Project Handbook. Part 2 Colonial Office — Class and Piece List, Canberra, 1974, pp.71-7. 3 This lack will be remedied when the Centre for Business History in the Economics Department of the completes the 'guide to archival sources of business history in New Zealand' that it is preparing. 4 J.B. Condliffe, New Zealand in the Making, London, 1930; W.B. Sutch, Poverty and Progress in New Zealand, Wellington, 1941. 5 A notable exception is H.G. Philpott, A History of the New Zealand Dairy Industry, 1840-1935, Wellington, 1937.

6 Business Archives in New Zedan

is the confidence of the public and it is jealous of any disclosure which would have the slightest tendency to shake such confidence. Naturally, therefore, I have not been able to obtain access tö any unpublished records of the bank of New Zealand in pursuing my investigations. I mention this not by way of complaint but of explanation. In examining the 'dead' loans which cumbered all the banks in the 'nineties', I have had to rely entirely upon such material as was to be found in public records.6

Without intending any injustice to Bedford, one suspects that he did not try too hard to gain access to banking archives, and even that he was sympathetic to responses that, in effect, guaranteed individual as well as corporate privacy. After all, it is the private character of business archives that perhaps most strongly distinguishes them from the archives of government and of local government, and this was an even stronger characteristic of them before 1960 than in later years. If a firm maintained archives, it scarcely ever admitted to doing so publicly, and barely informed its own staff. Business records were not sought for deposit in public institutions, and very littl e material was so deposited. Their potential bulk and seemingly difficult nature appear to have been a sufficient deterrent to collecting institutions, especially given general indifference from their users. It must be remembered, too, that at the time New Zealand's general archives infrastructure was in an extremely rudimentary state. From the Second World War through to the mid'1950s the energies of those interested were directed towards the establishment of a national archives with responsibility for public records, an objective largely achieved by 1957 with the passage of an Archives Act, which made littl e reference to business archives. Nor did early writers in the field refer to the subject. New Zealand's first archivist, ,7 writing in 1946 on archives in New Zealand, and local archives in particular, has nothing to say about those of business;8 while J.C. Beaglehole, that most concerned scholar, who spoke and

6 H.D. Bedford, 'The History and Practice of Banking in New Zealand', DLit t thesis, University of New Zealand, 1916,11, p.529. 7 He was appointed Controller of the Dominion Archives in 1926. 8 G.H. Scholefield, 'Archives in New Zealand', New Zealand Libraries, IX , 3 (1946), pp.37-45. Even Michael Standish, Officer-in-charge of the Dominion Archives, writin g as late as 1951, makes only the most fleeting references to business archives. See M.W. Standish, 'Historica l Records', New Zealand Libraries, XIV , 2 (1951), pp.42-4.

7 Archifacts wrote with some regularity on the need to keep archives, was silent on this aspect of our past. Those libraries that actively collected unpublished papers — Hocken, Turnbull, the Auckland Institute and Museum, and the Canterbury Museum — were largely preoccupied with gathering in the personal papers of missionaries, of nineteenth-century public figures, and of records from the earliest years of European settlement generally. Because of their early date, these had the character of foundation documents, particularly those concerning European immigration, the taking up of land, relationships with the Maori (missionary and military), and the country's political development towards full nationhood. The few examples of business records which came into libraries and archives tended to belong to the foundation period, particularly the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1863, and to be embedded within the papers of an individual as an undifferentiated mixture of personal and business documents. This is exactly what one would expect when, before the joint Stock Companies Act of 1860 and the introduction of limited liability, 9 business in New Zealand was conducted almost entirely through sole proprietorships and partnerships. Good examples of these kinds of business arrangement whose papers did find their way into manuscript collections before 1960 are the Logan Campbell papers (1841-92) in the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, and the Octavius Harwood papers (1833-1840s) relating to Otago whaling and storekeeping, in the Hocken Library.

In the 1950s, the body most active in promoting archives development in New Zealand outside National Archives was the Archives Committee of the New Zealand Library Association. Formed in 1951, its most prominent members were Michael Standish and Pam Cocks of National Archives, Enid Evans of the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, Graeme Bagnall of the National Library Centre, Michael Hitchings of the Turnbull Library, John Wilson of the Canterbury Museum, and Frank Rogers of the Library, who convened the committee from 1951 to 1955. Its two major projects were the production of a practical archives manual (which did not neglect business archives)10 and a

Modelled on United Kingdom legislation, notably the Companies Act of 1844. Historically , New Zealand company statutes have consistently followed Britis h law — the 1882 New Zealand Companies Act being based on the 1862 Britis h Act. This legislation obliged firm s to keep records far more systematically than was previously the case.

8 Business Archives in New Zealand sorely needed survey of local authority archives." Only towards the end of its active lif e did the Archives Committee turn its attention seriously to the question of business archives, when in 1960 Pam Cocks published two prosletyzing articles, in the very sober Canterbury Economic Bulletin12 and the more popular Management.13 Both articles emphasised the importance of business history and the need to preserve business archives, both for the writing of a firm's history and for the administrative advantages that a well-ordered archives would bring. The link with sound records management was made clear, and advice was given on what to keep and how, and where to find further information. The deposit of archives in a suitable library or museum was suggested as an option.

The impetus for this initiative was undoubtedly provided by the example of the very active Business Archives Council of Australia (with branches in New South Wales and Victoria),14 which had been in existence since 1954, conducting surveys and issuing its own journal, which was taken by several New Zealand libraries.15 An article in the December 1959 issue of New Zealand Libraries further publicised the Council's wotk amongst librarians in this country.16 In academic circles, interest was quickened by the publication in 1961 of two bank histories. The larger of the two, S.J. Butlin's account of the Australia and New Zealand Bank, covered its history in both countries;17 the other, a history of the Bank of New South Wales in New Zealand by Sinclair and Mandle, related to this

0 An Elementary Guide to Archiv e Practice, edited by F.H. Rogers, Wellington, 1955. The Guide, the first of its kind in New Zealand, gives good coverage of companies, their economic functions, the use of business archives for research, and the kinds of business records appropriat e for permanent preservation in the chapter on Organisations Which Produce Archives'. 11 The results of the survey were published in Preliminary List of Archives of Local Bodies in New Zealand, prepared by Pam Cocks for the Archives Committee of the New Zealand Librar y Association, Wellington, 1960. 12 Pamela Cocks, 'Business Archives', Canterbury Economic Bulletin, 425 (May 1960). Pamela Cocks, 'What is Being Done to Preserve Business History' , Management, VI , 4 (1960), pp.50-3. This was in tur n inspired by developments in the United States, and in Britai n where the Business Archives Council had been operating for almost 15 years. 15 Business Archives and History, I ( 1955), later the Australian Economic History Review. 16 David S. Macmillan, 'Business Records and Historical Research in Australia' , New Zealand Libraries, XXII , 10 (1959), pp.217-24- " S.J. Butlin , Australia and New Zealand Bank: The Bank of Australasia and the Union Bank of Australia Limited, ¡828-1951, London, 1961.

9 Archifacts country only.18 These were the first New Zealand business histories with recognisably modern academic standards of research and documentation. They made free and open use of archives, and the process of locating and identifying these for the purposes of research led to major discoveries. In Christchurch, Graeme Millar of the Economics Department, , found records of the Union Bank dating back to the 1840s and made their contents available to Butlin. Similar discoveries resulted from the investigations of Sinclair and Mandle. Also appearing in the same year was N.M. Chappell's history of the Bank of New Zealand,19 for which the bank's own records were used extensively, though this is not apparent from the book itself. These three bank histories are instructive .n several respects, and not just for the systematic use of archives in their writing. All were prompted by significant anniversaries — Butlin's by the tenth anniversary of the merging of the Union Bank of Australia and the Bank of Australasia in 1951, the other two, more typically, by centenaries of their business in New Zealand. And, even more signifi- cantly, the work of gathering historical documentation for these histories led eventually to the establishment of professionally staffed in-house archives, an important model for business archives preser- vation in this country, particularly for banks with their very strong tradition of client confidentiality. Indeed, centenaries and centennial histories in later years, especially the 1970s and 1980s, were to be a powerful force for the preservation of business archives generally. Meanwhile, paralleling, and sometimes preceding quite considerably, these academic flagship bank histories, there was a growing, substantial interest in business history at least at the level of particular industries, rather than of individual enterprises. This is most evident in masters level theses in economics and history as listed in the Union List of theses. Some industry histories were written — heavy engineering,20 quick-frozen foods,21

' 8 K. Sinclair and W.F. Mandle, Open Account: A History of the Bank of New South Wales in NewZeahnd, 1861 - ) 96 ¡, Wellington, 1961. ' N.M. Chappell, New Zealand Banker's Hundred: A History of the Bank of New Zealand, 1861-1961, Wellington, 1961. !0 K. Simmonds, 'The Growth and Structur e of the Heavy Engineering Industr y in New Zealand', MCom thesis, Victori a University of Wellington, 1959. !1 A.S. Carrington , ¢ Study in the Growth and Structur e of the Quick-frozen Food Industr y in New Zealand', MCom thesis, Victori a University of Wellington, 1960.

10 Business Archives in New Zealand freezing,22 brick and pottery,23 linen flax,24 chemical,25 and kauri timber,26 for example.27 It is not clear how many of these made use of archives, but three at least did. Dennison's 1948 thesis on the chemical industry in Otago drew on the archives of Kempthorne Prosser and Co. Ltd, McLeod Bros., and the Milburn Lime and Cement Co. In 1962 C.J. Hudson completed a Victoria economics thesis on the origins of the cement industry in New Zealand, then largely centred in Otago, using early minute-books and letter-books of the Milburn Lime & Cement Co., and of the Ewing Phosphate Co.28 M.N. Pearson of Auckland University similarly drew upon Campbell papers for his 1964 MA thesis on the early firm.29 However, E.N. Harraway, writing on the flour-milling industry in Otago as late as 1965, made no such use of archives.30 It was Michael Hudson, a Sydney University graduate working in the Economics Department at the University of Otago, who initiated what I believe was the first systematic canvassing in New Zealand of business firms for information about their archives. A major factor prompting this initiative was the spectacular end of the Standard Insurance Co. in 1961 as a result of malfeasance by its Sydney manager, who had made large, risky, unauthorised guarantees without reinsuring. The Standard was an old Dunedin firm formed in 1874 with offices throughout New Zealand and Australia. Its archives would obviously be a prime source for insurance and investment history. Hudson secured the transfer of a portion of them to the

T.K . Fallwell, 'The Freezing Industr y of Hastings: A History of the Hawke's Bay Farmers' Meat Co., 1912-1939, and the Pioneering of the Boiling Down and Freezing Industr y in Hawke's Bay', MA thesis, Victori a University of Wellington, 1956. E.M. Seed, 'The History of the Brick , Til e and Pottery Industries in Otago', MA thesis, University of Otago, 1954. A.G. Banfield, 'The Linen Flax Industr y in New Zealand, 1940-49', MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1949. J.S. Dennison, 'The History of the Chemical Industr y in Otago up to 1914', MA thesis, University of Otago, 1948. P.H.H. Taylor, 'The History of the Kaur i Timber Industry' , MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1950. The most comprehensive listing of these is in Margaret D. Rodger, Theses on the History of New Zealand. Part 4: Economic, Agricultura l and industrial History, Palmerston North, 1972. C.J. Hudson, ¢ Study of the New Zealand Cement Industr y — its Development, Growth and Structure', MA thesis, Victori a University of Wellington, 1960. M.N. Pearson, 'Brown and Campbell in Early Auckland', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1964. E.N. Harraway, ¢ History of Flourmillin g in Otago', MA thesis, University of Otago, 1965.

11 Archifacts

Economics Department of the University in 1962, where they were listed and sorted and then transferred to the Hocken Library. This was the first substantial transfer of the archives of a major national company to a New Zealand library. The general survey took the form of writing to all major Dunedin businesses to find out the extent of their holdings and emphasise their potential value.31 The response to these letters was not as good as had been hoped, but the archives of Ross and Glendining, the textile importers and manufacturers, were listed and subsequently transferred to the Hocken Library, as were those of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce. Hudson left the University of Otago shortly afterwards, but he had started in Dunedin at least an interest in the acquisition of business archives that has continued to the present day. More importantly, he provided a second model for business archives preservation — their systematic acquisition regionally by a university institution. After all, it was, and still is, the universities who have the greatest stake in the preservation of business archives as a research resource for both staff and students. A littl e later, a similar survey was undertaken in Auckland by F.A. Sandall and M.F. Lloyd Pritchard, but it does not seem to have led to any substantial deposits.32

A thitd possible model for preservation arose out of the collecting activities of Eric Warr of the Geography Department of Massey University. In the mid-1960s (it would be interesting to know exactly when) he began systematically collecting the archives of closed dairy factories, of which there was a great abundance in the lower half of the Notth Island. His activities eventually extended to include the whole of the country. Aided by Lloyd Jenkins, University Librarian at Massey, who helped provide space for the collection's accommodation, Eric accumulated a comprehensive national archive relating to a single industry, so providing the third possible model for the preservation of business archives, but one that has yet to be

The evidence of this is to be found in the general correspondence files of the Hocken Library . M.F. Lloyd Pritchard , 'The Importance of Business Archives', New Zealand Libraries , XXVI , 2 (1963), pp.53-69. As well as containing a useful, short survey of the development of business history overseas, Dr Lloyd Pritchar d reported the results of a writte n appeal to 217 selected Auckland businesses for informatio n about their archives. Only 21 replied, and of these only five said that their archives would be available for research.

12 Business Archives in New Zecdand adopted for other industries.33 Its great advantage is that it allows easy comparative studies within a single industry, as well as facilitating the study of the industry as a whole. Its major disadvantage is that it removes archives from their regional context, so that linkages with other economic activity and the community as a whole are difficult to trace or even obscured altogether. What is certain is that at the time Eric Warr did exactly the right thing. He provided a focus without which many, if not most, of our early dairy industry archives would have been lost.

A fourth possibility, that of a total national business archive, did not show itself in the 1960s. The most likely centre for such an archive, the Alexander Turnbull Library, was very confined, and anyway had yet to develop a taste for business archives. And when it did in the early 1970s its accommodation was still cramped and the moment had passed, though the idea was briefly floated in the Smith Report of 19 7 8.34 The possibility of a separately funded, free-standing archives on the Danish model, if it was ever considered, has never been publicly mooted.35

By the mid-1960s the Archives Committee had lapsed into inactivity and, with it, so had its brief advocacy of the cause of business archives. However, the seeds were already well sown for much of our present infrastructure: in-house archives epitomised by the banks; university interest, with the Hocken Library galvanised by Michael Hudson and the Standard Insurance crash, and a rare bloom tended by Eric Warr at Massey Univetsity; and waiting, passively receptive, the traditional archives institutions — the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, the Alexander Tumbull Library, and the Canterbury Museum. The last under John Wilson had always had a well- established interest in pastoral records. Professional interest revived in 1969. At the New Zealand Library Association Conference in Nelson in February of that year, which

33 A substantive description of this archive has yet to be published. Brief notes, however, are in E.C.R. Warr , 'The Beginnings of the Dairy Industr y in New Zealand', New Zealand Journal of Dairy Science and Technobgy, XV, 3 (1980), pp.A109-Al 13, and Sheryl Morgan, 'Th e Dairy Records Collection in Massey University Library' , Archifacts, 1987/1, p.14. The latter records that the collection contains the archives of over 260 dairy companies. 34 W.I. Smith, Archives in New Zealand: A Report, Wellington, 1978, pp.26-7. 35 See 'Appendix VIII . Denmark. Act Concerning the Nationalisation of the Private Foundation Erhvervsarkivet' , Business Archives: Studies on International Practices, Munich, 1983, p.149.

13 Archifacts the writer attended, there was a session devoted to business archives. Russell Stone forcefully pointed out the current bias in historical writing. 'How many', he proclaimed, 'are aware, for example, that the most influential Aucklander was not a politican but a financial "grey eminence", Thomas Russell, driving force behind the formation of the New Zealand Insurance Company, the Bank of New Zealand, the N.Z. Loan and Mercantile Agency Company, the Piako Swamp Syndicate, the N.Z. and River Plate Land Mortgage Company and the Waihi Gold Mining Co.' And he linked the ability to know and appreciate such figures and thus have a more balanced historiography to the adequate preservation of business archives by all means possible.36 The 1970s were a golden decade for business historians and business archivists. It was a lot of fun and many discoveries were made by those who were sufficiently energetic. And the business environment, despite the oil shock of 1975, was sympathetic and still apparently prosperous. Many companies produced centennial histories, most often written by journalists, but sometimes by professional historians. Of course company histories had been produced for a long time, but in the 1970s, with the advent of centennials, they got bigger, and were better researched, illustrated, written and produced than before. A distinctly competitive element intruded. One of two prominent early journalist historians was A.G. Parry of Dunedin, who after an early history of National Mortgage in 1964,37 produced successively histories of National Insurance, Arthur Barnett's and the D.I.C. Ltd.38 Further north, C.W. Vennell produced histories of two insurance companies (South British and Government Life), of the Public Trust Office, and of A. & G. Price.39 Shipping companies and freezing companies were also prolific producers of histories. The first professional, free-lance historian in the field was John Angus, with

R.C.J. Stone, 'Business Archives and the Librarian' , New Zealand Libraries , XXX11I, 6 (1970), p.209. In the same issue was also published H-G. West, 'Business Financial Records', ibid., pp.214-22. NMA : The Story of the First 100 Years, Dunedin, 1964. Underwriting Adventure: A Centennial History of the National Insurance Company of New Zealand Ltd, Dunedin, 1973; Arthu r Barnett: Retailer Extraordinary, Dunedin, 1975; Retailing Century: The First 100 Years of the D.I.C. Ltd, Dunedin, 1984. Tower of Strength: A Centennial History of the N.Z. Government Life Insurance Office, 1869-1969, Auckland, 1969; Risks and Rewards: A Policy of Enterprise: A Centennial History of the South British Insurance Company Limited, Auckland, 1972; A Century of Trust: A History of the New Zealand Public Trust Office, 1873-1973, Wellington, 1973; Men of Metal: The Story of A. and G. Price Ltd, Auckland and Thames, 1868-1968, Auckland, 1968.

14 Business Archives in New Zealand histories of Shacklocks, New Zealand Paper Mills, and Donald Reid Otago Farmers.40 He has had a successor in Gavin McLean, who has written histories of Alliance Textiles, Richardsons of Napier and the Union Steamship Co.41 A few business histories have also arisen out of student theses, such as that on Donaghys by Kathryn Lucas.42 In a class of its own for its extensive and felicitous use of a wide range of primary sources, not all obvious, is Russell Stone's Makers of Fortune, published in 1973, a study of the rise and fall of an Auckland business community that had Thomas Russell at its centre.

The point is that all these histories made use of business archives (if with varying degrees of thoroughness), so encouraging companies to consider their safekeeping. And the appearance of histories based on such sources stimulated libraries and archives to include them in their collections. The Turnbull Library (with Tom Wilsted appointed as Manuscripts Librarian in November 1973) began,43 and the Hocken Library resumed, collecting with some aggression; and a much greater awareness of the permanent value of business archives gradually took hold.44 The archives of major firms began to be acquired. Into the Turnbull Library came those of Levin and Co., the New Zealand Shipping Co., New Zealand Loan and Mercantile, Brandon Ward and McAndrew,

The Ironmasters: The First One Hundred Years o/H.E. Shaddock Limited, Dunedin, 1973; Papermaking Pioneers: A History of New Zealand Paper Mill s Limite d and its Predecessors, Mataura, 1976; Donald Reid Otago Farmers Ltd: A History of Service to the Farming Community of Otago, Dunedin, 1978. Spinning Yams : A Centennial History of Alliance Textile Ltd and its Predecessors, 1881-1981, Dunedin, 1981; Richardsons of Napier, Wellington, 1989; The Southern Octopus: The Rise of a Shipping Empire, Wellington, 1989. A New Twist: A Centennial History ofDonaghy's Industries Limited, Dunedin, 1979. Graeme Bagnall, Chief Libraria n of the Alexander Turnbul l Librar y at the time, always had a keen interest in business archives, being responsible for saving from destruction the records of Levin & Company Ltd , 1841-1960, and arranging for their deposit in the Turnbul l Library . For a description of these, see Gillia n Ryan, 'Records of Levin & Company Ltd , Wellington, 1841-1960', Archifacts 6 (December 1975), pp.5-10. Short articles on the value of business archives were published by S.R. Strachan in The Accountants' Journal (March 1973) and Chartered Secretary (Apri l 1973); the New Zealand Division of the Institut e of Chartered Secretaries and Administrator s issued its handbook, The Retention and Disposal of Documents, Auckland, 1972; the New Zealand Institut e of Economic Research published a report by J .A. Ellis, Business Archives in New Zealand, Wellington, 1974; a seminar on business archives was held at the 42nd annual conference of the New Zealand Librar y Association at Auckland in 1975; when the Archives and Records Association was formed in 1976, a Business Archives Committee was immediately established; and ]'.E. Traue advocated the preservation of farmin g records in the New Zealand Journal of Agriculture , August 1977.

15 Archifacts to name a few. The Hocken Library, working rich Dunedin ground, took over the whole of the great National Mortgage and Agency Co. of New Zealand archive, and those of a number of the old Otago firms, such as New Zealand Paper Mills, New Zealand Cement Holdings and Mosgiel Woollen.45 Canterbury University Library made its first foray into the field with the acquisition of New Zealand Refrigerating Co. archives in 1976. And Massey University continued to be quietly active in taking in dairy company archives.

All the while the in-house model of archives keeping was gaining strength. The banks, with their head offices in Wellington, were its stronghold. The Bank of New Zealand was the first to create a position for a full-time professional archivist, in July 1973, Robin Griffi n being appointed.46 Two other banks followed : the Bank of New South Wales47 and the Australia and New Zealand Bank,48 appropriately enough. The National Bank was much later in catching the mood.49 The Reserve Bank also made an appointment.50 Two other business archives created, with full-time archivists, were those of the Union Steam Ship Company51 and the National Mutual Lif e Association of Australasia52 — the former, in particular, possessing one of the country's finest business archives. The full-time movement, at this time, was almost entirely confined to Wellington.53 In a few

For the collecting methods employed at the Hocken Library , see S.R. Strachan, 'The Acquisition of Business Records: A New Zealand Approach', Archives and Manuscripts, VI , 5 (1975), pp.177-84. 'News Notes', Archifacts, 2 (June 1974), p.7. The first full-tim e Archivist , Clair e Dawe, was appointed in 1979. See Clair e Dawe, 'The Archives of the New Zealand Division', The Etruscan (Westpac's staff magazine), XXX, 2 (1981), p.7. Kevin Bourke, 'Commitment to Business Archives: The Case of the ANZ Bank', Archifacts, 24 n.s. (December 1982), Supplement, pp.i-ii. The first full-tim e archivist was appointed in February 1986. Previously the National Bank's archives had existed as an accumulation in the Te Ar o Branch under the Public Relations Department. Informatio n communicated to the author by the Bank's Archivist , Doris Gardiner, August 1993. The date of establishment is difficul t to determine, but is thought to have been in the early 1980s, when George Cassells, a long-serving bank officer, was appointed to a short-term position as Archivist with the task of setting up the Archive. It is now administered by the Bank's Librarian . K.J. Angwin, 'The Rationale for Business Archives: The Case of the Union Steam Ship Company', Archifacts, 10 n.s. (June 1979), pp.197-202. This seems to have been a short-lived affair in the early 1980s. The Wellington business archivists formed a small group, under the umbrella of the Business Archives Committee of the Archives and Records Association, which met regularly for social and professional purposes.

16 Business Arc/jives in Neu» Zealand instances, allied professional staff, usually company librarians or records managers, were crucial in ensuring the preservation of their institutions' archives. They could give them a home attached to the company's library' or records section. Four examples spring to mind: Broadlands Finance Ltd, New Zealand Forest Products Ltd, New Zealand Insurance Co. Ltd, and the giant New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company Ltd based in Hamilton. Librarians were involved with the first three and the records officer with the fourth. Such an arrangement could, and often did, work satisfactotily for a littl e while. But, unless the work was undertaken with official support and additional resources were made available, the burden of managing a large, active archive rapidly became too much.

That, then, was the infrastructure in place for the preservation of business archives at the end of the 1970s. The Hocken Library covered Otago, the University of Canterbury Library was emerging in Christchurch, and the Turnbull Library acted as the Wellington repository, but one with national overtones. In addition, there was a clutch of in-house archives, mostly banks based in Wellington. The worrying and most surprising gap was, of course, in Auckland, despite its being easily the largest centre of New Zealand business, and despite Russell Stone's long espousal there of the importance of business archives. Lack of space at two institutions that would otherwise have been interested in preserving business archives, the University of Auckland Library and the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, is a partial explanation. And, at that stage, National Archives' regional repository in Auckland housed only government archives. The situation was changed, and for the better, by the formation in December 1983 of a Northern Archives and Records Trust with the widest possible objects.54 Its main function, however, was to promote the preservation of business, local government and unofficial archives

The philosophy of the Northern Archives and Records Trust is set out in Jolyon Firth , 'The Regional Archives Concept — An Auckland Viewpoint', Archifacts, 1983/2, pp.25-8. The Trustees then included Jolyon Firth , an Auckland accountant, Kenneth Bullock, a barrister , Russell Stone, business historian, Willia m Laxon, a solicitor, David Johnson, a businessman, Ian Thwaites, Auckland Institut e and Museum Librarian , Mar y Ronnie, City Librarian , Graham Bush, local authorit y specialist, Verna Mossong, a genealogist, and David Thompson, a local government officer. An executive officer was appointed, and surveys were embarked upon under contract on a commercial basis. From the beginning the Trust has had a close, mutually supportive relationship with National Archives. Northern Archives and Records Trust Deed, 1 December 1983.

17 Archifacts in the Auckland region, and if necessary to find an appropriate home for them. The Trust has had considerable success in locating a number of significant company archives, and in arranging for their safe custody. In 1988, for example, Mercury Theatre material was placed in the Auckland Public Library, a second lot of Yates Corporation archives were recovered, Farmers Trading Co. records were transferred to the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, and records of Parkinson and Bouskill were placed in storage at National Archives.55 This last is significant in hinting at the entry of National Archives, Auckland, into the field. By April 1991 it was committed with a vengeance, having accessioned the archives of the New Zealand Insurance Corporation (South British Insurance Co. Ltd and New Zealand Insurance Co. Ltd), 1852-1990. Another notable Auckland event was the deposit of Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd archives in the North Shore Public Library.

The development of our current business archives infrastructure probably reached its apogee (excepting Auckland's late development) over the period 1984 to 1986, beginning with the holding at Wellington in February of a well-attended Business Archives Seminar organised by the Archives and Records Association, and culminating in the establishment of two new business archives, the National Bank's and the Fletcher Challenge Group's, in 1986.56 Four later developments need to be referred to: 1. A decline in the Turnbull Library's enthusiasm for business archives during the 1980s. No doubt this owed something to the acute lack of accommodation immediately preceding the move to the new National Library building in 1987, but it also reflected a changed approach by its management subsequently.57 2. The growth of commercial records management consultancies that offer independent records and archives advice to business enterprises. Previously this had been the preserve of libraries and

Northern Archives and Records Trust Board, Annual Report for the Year Ending3i/3/88, p.3. The situation in that year at the Hocken and Turnbul l Librarie s was summarised in two articles: P.R. Miller , 'Business and Legal Archives: The Hocken Library' s Experience', Archifacts, 1986/3, pp.19-22, and David C. Retter, 'Business and Legal Records at the Alexander Turnbul l Library' , ibid., pp.23-5. This is indirectl y indicated in J.E. Traue, 'The Alexander Turnbul l Library : Present Trends and Futur e Policies', Archifacts, 1986/2, pp.37-41. lr . any case, the Library' s collecting of business archives dropped away sharply.

18 Business Archives in New Zealand

archives institutions. At least five firms have been in the field: Rosemary Collier, Acton Fraser & Associates Ltd, Records Management Ltd, Total Records Management (N.Z.), and the Records Management Branch of National Archives. It is not known what the overall effect of this development on the preservation of business archives has been, but it is probably safe to assume that it has been beneficial, given that a number of those involved have been experienced archivists. Certainly, these organisations fil l a need that archives institutions are no longer (if they ever were) capable of meeting. 3. The national economy has experienced in the last seven years a massive restructuring, and subsequent recession, from which the country has still to emerge. This has shaken loose the archives of many business enterprises, with more mergers, takeovers, liquidations, and changes in premises than at any other time in our history. The existing business atchives infrastructure has been quite unable to cope with the resulting demand for accommodation. 4. Finally, there has been the partial demise of the in-house model. The Union Steam Ship Company archive was an early and total casualty in June 1983, its holdings being distributed chronologically between the Hocken Library and the Wellington Maritime Museum.58 More recently, hard times for the banks have meant retrenchment to relatively bare-bones operations at the Bank of New Zealand and Westpac. Offsetting those setbacks, however, has been the emergence in the last few years of the archives of the Fletcher Challenge Group at its South Auckland head office.59

This paper has outlined the story of how and why our business archives are held the way they are. How adequate a structure is it? The answer must be, unfortunately, that it is not even barely adequate. There is in some places a much greater awareness of the importance of business archives and history than was the case 30 years ago, some good history has been written, and much has been saved. But much has been lost; every business historian and archivist has his or her

'Analecta', Archifacts, 1983/2, p.38. This was in part the outcome of a report and survey conducted by the Northern Archives and Records Trust. Joanna Newman was appointed Archivist in 1986. Informatio n from the Fletcher Challenge Archives, August 1993.

19 Archifacts story of losses and near losses. And in what has been saved there is a strong bias towards large firms, particularly financial institutions and those with a close connection with the rural economy, such as stock and station agencies, or with the processing of its production, such as freezing companies, dairy companies, and textile firms. It is known, in a general way, that huge areas of manufacturing are not represented in our collections of business archives, and practically nothing is known of their survival. This is particularly the case with firms in foreign ownership. Consider, for instance, the archives of the following industries, about which almost nothing is known: motor vehicle manufacturing, heavy and electrical engineering, agricultural chemicals, oil and petrol, paint manufacture, and car tyres. The list is endless, and here must be sounded a note of caution. Maintaining and providing access to business archives, whether held in-house or in public institutions, can easily be regarded as costly relative to their use; and in today's more stringent environment, the case for preservation has to be argued harder than ever before. Business archives are bulky and correspondingly expensive to maintain. Increased use and appreciation are the most cogent arguments for retention, and they need to be forthcoming. The 1991 Stout Research Centre symposium, the new courses in business history, and the establishment of the Centre for Business History at the University of Auckland are all promising signs that this will happen. From them are needed surveys, guides, bibliographies and histories; and, of course, we need the archives too to write and validate business history. Our ignorance is great.

But, at the risk of complacency, one thing is sure: we have come a very long way since Dr Hocken first poked his head into the cellars of the Public Record Office to investigate the archives of the New Zealand Company 90 years ago.

S.R. Strachan Hocken Library August 1993

20 Precedents and Public Relations

Joanna Newman

Fletcher Challenge Archives

The title 1 was given for my paper when I was asked to contribute to this seminar was 'Precedents and Public Relations'. Being the only business archivist to address a business archives seminar is not, I hope, the precedent that was referred to. I do, however, sincerely hope that this seminar will represent the beginning of a 'public relations' campaign for business archives, and that their importance and profile will begin to be more widely recognised as a result. I am sure there is no need for me to say that I believe in the value of business archives. I am continually amazed at how Fletcher Challenge's various ancestors helped make New Zealand the way it is, and still find it surprising that most history is written about government and its influence on society and the development of the nation. Quietly (and sometimes not so quietly), in the background, business has always had as much influence on the shaping of a country as has government. It can only be hoped that more serious and reliable histories of business and its effect on the development of New Zealand will be written in future. This paper will not, however, address the philosophical issues. It will instead focus on how a business archives in New Zealand works. Most of all, it will attempt to reassure the audience that business archives are being taken very seriously by at least one firm in New Zealand. The best way to do this is probably to describe how we work, how we are used, the problems and challenges we face and our successes. Firstly, some background. An Archives and Records Manager was appointed at Fletcher Challenge in 1986. The real work of establishing the Archives, however, did not begin until the end of 1987, when I had completed half the Diploma in Information Studies in Australia and transferred (along with Head Office) to Auckland. Until that time, things were 'on hold' because I was concerned not to do the wrong thing through lack of knowledge. Ignorance is not bliss!

21 Archifacts

Altogether it was not an easy birth for the Archives, complicated by a furthet move after the transfer to Auckland and by my spending another four months in Australia (during which we acquired all the records ofWinstones, with its long history). Today, however, and three moves later, we find ourselves in very good premises with a total of five staff, physically part of the corporate office again and with an exciting future. After having several different reporting structures over the past few years, we now come under the Information Service and are part of the Corporate Affairs Division. Our organisation chart reveals a very important aspect of the way we operate. Our staff consists of the Archives and Records Manager, an Archivist, two Records Management Officers and a Typist, and it is the linking of archives so strongly with records management which is significant. Originally, the company intended to appoint an archivist only, but from the very beginning I believed that it was important to emphasise records management as much as archives. If you do not have good records management practices you may never have a good archives. I also believe this is one of the reasons our influence continues to grow and our place in the company is assured. Records management has an obvious impact on people's daily working life, helping them to organise and retrieve current and not-so-current information — and it is as much (perhaps more) because we are useful to people in the day-to-day running of their business, as because we 'preserve history', that we are of value to the company. Our Archives and Records Management Division is still a small group, with the equivalent of about one and a half full-time staff working on pure 'archives'. Like most other institutions, we have a growing backlog of processing which will need to be addressed with extra resources at some stage — but in the current business climate, now is not the time. We occupy approximately 4000 square feet in a new (though not purpose-built) building, and have all essential archival requirements, including 24-hour environment control and high security.

How We Work Administratively, our Archives work much like any other, following the path from accession through series arrangement and description to the final product: neat rows of boxes on the stackroom shelf and finding aids. Because the Atchives is not, however, designed

22 Precedents and Public Relations primarily to serve outside researchers, the finding aids are developed more for internal use. One way in which we differ from most archives in the country, is that we have had the advantage of being able to use computerised finding aids from the beginning, and so have rapid and excellent search capabilities. We use a powerful, full-text retrieval data base software package, and so are able to store administrative histories, biographies and research requests for full-text searching. The system is not static in terms of development, either, and we are continually looking for ways to upgrade it in order to improve our service to the organisation. Accessions come to us in several different ways:

1. Items such as publications are sent to us on a regular basis. 2. A great deal of material arrives on an ad hoc basis — someone clears out drawers, a project is finished or items are discovered and sent to us for appraisal. 3. Records come via our inactive records storage system, and are appraised at their review date. 4. We are sent in to sort out and clean up storerooms, offices, and other not so usual repositories when a company is acquired or sold. These have been known to include rat- and spider-infested sheds with dust an inch thick on the boxes and water an inch deep on the floor — though fortunately most of the time one does not see the wildlif e because there in only one lightbulb!

The reference side of a business archives is probably a littl e different from that of most other New Zealand archives. Being an in-house function, we provide an information service for staff. Our user is not concerned with how things are stored, provided that he or she can get the required information quickly. We carry out research for the majority of staff, and very few come to the Archives to use records themselves. Because of the emphasis on service and the fact that we are a cost centre like others in the company, speed of response and quality of research are the crucial issues for us. Reference use of the Archives is increasing all the time. Although most of this comes from internal sources, there are a variety of external requests as well. The latter have generally been reasonably 'lightweight', and their fulfillment is regarded very much as a public relations exercise. External requests do, however, receive as much attention as internal queries, and the only charges made are for such things as the reproduction of photographs and large amounts of photocopying.

23 Archifacts

A considerable amount of time is spent in promoting the Archives and seeking out links with other divisions as a means of enhancing its profile and increasing use. I believe that, apart from fulfillin g legal obligations, archives are only collected and maintained to be used. There is no point in keeping historical material if people do not know it is there. Promotion takes a lot of energy and ingenuity. One becomes adept at getting at people when they don't know they're being got at. For us, this includes such things as featuring in other people's newsletters (for example, the Information Technology Department's, the Risk & Insurance Department's) and the Group staff publication, staking out a position in induction courses, and speaking to employee relations meetings and conferences.

The Futur e The Archives at Fletcher Challenge is still, relatively speaking, in its infancy, and the future is exciting. But business must operate at a profit in order to survive, and when a company considers spending money the cost must be carefully evaluated in terms of its impact on corporate well-being. There is a decided reluctance to spend money on activities that aré not pertinent to either the current situation or the future. It is not enough to make claims for the intrinsic value of history or the value to society of well-preserved business records, although I believe that any reasonable-sized company does have a responsibility in this respect. Management must see some tangible benefit in maintaining archives. The prime responsibility of a business archives, therefore, is to serve is own organisation. The archives must be positioned as a contemporary information resource, with links to such areas as marketing, public relations, employee relations, planning, technical operations and other departments, so that its resources can be fully exploited. History must be seen to support current business activities. Fot business, success depends on careful planning, which depends on being well-informed about every aspect of the environment, using available resources to the maximum and building on what has been learned in the past. Archives are thus well-placed to play a role alongside other information providers.

24 Precedents and Public Relations

The message about archives that we have to get across is, as Thomas Carlyle said:

'What is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history.'

I would like to give you an example of how links with other parts of the company are being developed in Fletcher Challenge, in ways other than supplying them with historical information from records held in the stackroom or photographs. More and more we collaborate with other departments in the maintenance of data bases. For instance, one of our major research tools, and a valuable source of historical information for many people in the organisation, is Fletcher Challenge News, the monthly staff publication. Recently, using our extensive experience of creating data bases, we have established a full-text data base of the journal, created directly from the desktop publishing source. The rate at which we can now retrieve information for people from the journal has increased impressively, and the assistance this gives us in other research is invaluable. Of course, we still keep copies of the original in its traditional form, but people want information and they want it fast, so such initiatives show our colleagues that we are concerned about meeting their information needs. With the technology available, we have also begun indexing photographs at the point that the Public Relations Department collects and stores them. When they are ready to be physically transferred to the Archives, we will simply transfer electronically the majority of the indexing information related to the photographs along with the photographs themselves. This helps Public Relations in their day-to-day work, it helps us because photographs will be identified when we receive them and we will not have to re-enter data, and it helps all future users of these archives because there will not be years of delay before photographs are properly identified and indexed. The classic marketing question asks, 'Are you in the business of running railways or the business of transporting goods and people?' We have to ask ourselves whether we as archivists are in the business of hoarding historical documents or supplying accurate, historical, company-generated information as quickly as possible. If a business archives is not clear on the reason for its existence, it may find that it soon becomes obsolete.

25 Archifacts

Like every other part of a business, archives must have a strategic plan, the purpose of which is to contribute to the overall company mission. If, like Fletcher Challenge's, this states, among other things, that we will 'strive for excellence in everything', then that is what we must do. Archives and records management cannot afford to be static in their outlook any more than the rest of the business can. Once again, I emphasise that archives and records management must be linked.

Conclusion If we want to see an increase in the numbet of business archives in New Zealand, we must sell the idea to the senior management of firms and prove that they have current value as well as intrinsic historical merit. And if archives, once established, are not taken seriously by the decision-makers and given the resources to make them useful, their position will always be tenuous. Ensuring a 'living' archives is the responsibility of the archivist, who must show the organisation that archives are an information resource as valuable as any other.

26 From Minut e Books to Ledgers: Business Archives and the Hocken Librar y

RR. Mille r

Hocken Library

I should like to begin by declaring my position and that of the Hocken Library. The Library has acquired business archives throughout its existence, but especially over the past 30 years. It has recognised theit value to researchers and their place as part of New Zealand's archival heritage. There is certainly no intention to either cease collecting them ot give a lower priority to collecting. To use a business analogy we, as the principal shareholder, are satisfied with the return on our investment in these 'doubtful guests'. Having said this, it must be admitted that business archives do pose some peculiar difficulties for the research library. On the other hand, they offer considerable benefits. I intend examining both, with illustrative case studies, from my perspective as Archivist during the past ten years. But first, let us place business archives in their context. The Library limits its collecting activities in the area of archives, with a few exceptions, to Otago and to a lesser extent Southland. Within this geographical limitation, it collects fairly omnivorously — government (on behalf of National Archives); local authorities (both territorial and ad hoc); the university; schools (Otago only); Anglican, Methodist, Congregational, Associated Churches of Christ and Baptist churches; community organisations of every description; trade unions; employer organisations; and of course businesses. There are three archivists who deal with all aspects of work — appraisal, transfer, arrangement and description and reference. The Hocken Library's holdings of archives and manuscripts amounted to 5610m at the end of 1990. Of this figure, about 1600m were archives of business firms. During 1990, out of 458m of new holdings, 102m, or 22%, came from companies. A few statistics of use, again from last year: 1300 reader daily visits, 4521 productions,

27 Archifacts

567 written and telephone enquiries, and 228 loans to depositors. Alas, I cannot provide you with a breakdown of usage figures to identify those pertaining to business archives, as our statistics are not kept in this form. It would, however, be a worthwhile exercise for research libraries to analyse annual statistics of use, and relate them to broad categories of achives held. I suspect it might also be a somewhat surprising and sobering experience! As I mentioned earlier, business archives do pose some peculiar difficulties for us. The very nature and volume of the records from which they are mined probably makes these difficulties inevitable. Appraisals, in my experience, frequently have to be carried out at short notice to the Library because of a move of premises, closure or an imminent tidy-up. The quantity of records to be appraised is often very considerable and they are generally poorly housed, with discernable order sorely lacking in many instances. Appraisals are therefore lengthier than they could be, with a sizeable labouring component, and they live longer in the memories of our archivists than most. I have to say that we receive the most appreciative reception from the older staff of companies, who frequently say that their younger colleagues have no interest in things historical and that they are pleased we are taking the archives before they are thrown out. Archivists and users must work to change this view of archives from below, for obvious reasons. One further observation I would make with regard to records within companies is that over the past ten years there has been an increasing tendency for accountants, not the company secretary, to be given responsibility for the disposal of records. Having completed the appraisal, there are a number of attributes of business archives which cause us some problems. Generally speaking, deposits are more sizeable than others — transfers of over 50m are not uncommon. In other words, they are great space consumers, and especially so in recent years, with the pace of closures and mergers quickening. Estimating intakes from year to year is very difficult to do with any degree of accuracy. Because of their bulk and the specialised nature of the financial component, which comes in such forms as computer printouts, the arrangement and description of business archives is not as straight- forward a task as for other archives. This means that it takes longer and requires more supervision. It is also not every archivist's cup of tea!

28 From Minute Boote to Ledgers

I turn now to consideration of the value of holding business archives: their use. As Stuart Strachan has written elsewhere, 'The importance of the part played by business in the development of New Zealand is beyond dispute. . . . But if the place of business in New Zealand histoty is to be properly appreciated by future generations, then it must rest on substantial and fully documented histories'.1 It goes with out saying, particularly to an audience like this, that one cannot write such histories without the relevant archives being available. In my opinion, access is generally easier for the historian if the archives are held by a research library or archival institution where the preliminary sifting and listing has been done and other sources are at hand. But the writing of company histories is only one use. There are a number of others. Business archives in the Hocken are increasingly being used for theses. During the past couple of years, we have had two Otago History Department PhD students undertaking research. Fergus Sinclair's topic was 'The Relationship Between Economic and Political Developments in Otago From the 1860s to the 1880s', while Jim McAloon investigated 'The Political Economy of Otago 1880-1914'· Both made extensive use of holdings of business archives, especially correspondence and financial material, for their respective periods, e.g. the National Mortgage & Agency Company of New Zealand Ltd, Ross and Glendining Ltd, Murray Roberts and Company Ltd, and also defunct company files from the Department of Justice, Dunedin. This year we have a fourth-year history student researching the impact of the typewriter on office procedure and the work-force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has had a particular need to see outwards letterbooks and staff records. Other students have previously used the archives of the Evening Star Company Ltd (the former Dunedin newspaper company), those of the general importing company Mackerras and Hazlett, and the prescription books of a chemist. Then there is the use made by people from outside the university. We regularly receive enquiries which necessitate teference to business archives. To give a few examples. The Library holds the archives of H.E. Shacklock Ltd, whose history John Angus has chronicled in his book The Ironmasters.1 Amongst them ate a series of product catalogues fot coal ranges. A request came from the North Island for photocopies of these to assist with the establishment of a museum featuring coal ranges.

29 Archifacts

Genealogists and local historians also have need of business archives. The former are usually endeavouring to trace family members who were employed by firms, while the latter are concerned with the place of an industry or industries in the local town. The survival of a company's records is a bonus to both. Business history in New Zealand has, almost without exception, been the history of a single company. And yet, the Hocken Library's holdings, like I'm sure those of the other major research libraries, lend themselves to a number of other areas of comparative historical research, as yet untapped. Three possibilities spring to mind. Firstly, a history of technological development in the woollen industry in Dunedin. Secondly, a survey of the architectural styles of business premises over the decades, as evidenced by plans and photographs. Thirdly, in the field of social history I can envisage research into working conditions in offices and factories being a very viable project, utilising staff wages and salary records, and enlivened by photographs of employees and the work-place. Research could also enable comparisons with similar industries in the other major cities. Depositors too make use of their archives. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this. Earlier this year Fowler Bathroom Products Ltd of Auckland commissioned a public relations firm to produce a new catalogue of their products. They wished to show their connection with McSkimming Industries and, as we hold this company's archives, we were able to provide copies of photographs to illustrate the catalogue. Another depositor wished to check details regarding one of its premises to satisfy the Department of Inland Revenue, and required access to board minute books. We have found that in the main, companies require their permission to be sought by researchers wishing to consult their archives. While this in itself is not unusual and is quite acceptable, locating the owner of the archives can sometimes be difficult. Firms have changed names, closed down Dunedin offices altogether, relocated north and so on, which doesn't help when readers are requesting, addresses in order to obtain permission for access. Once access has been granted, and I have to say that most companies are very happy to do this, researchers are sometimes daunted by the quantity of material available for perusal. A number also have insufficient background training to exploit business archives, e.g. they don't know what a ledger or journal is and cannot analyse a balance sheet. The fact that there are very often gaps in

30 From Minut e Books to Ledgers series, particularl y those pertaining to staff, is a cause for considerable disappointment to genealogists, and I might add also to the archivists who have to explain this state of affairs. In short, the pickings to users can be lean, but they can, on occasion, be very rich. It would be tru e to say that the Hocken Library' s holdings of business archives are not consulted anything lik e as frequently as those of our schools and churches. But this is to be expected and should not be a cause for concern. Everyone goes through our education system, and a large percentage of the population are involved with a church at one time or another, if only when they get married. But a much smaller number have been employed in business or have left significant data with business firms. The genealogical value of such archives is therefore lower. However, the value of business archives to economic historians as the foundation blocks for the writin g of the business history of New Zealand cannot be over- estimated. 'Doubtful guests' they most certainly are not.

References 1 Business Records: Their Continuing Value and Preservation, Dunedin, Hocken Library , 1973, P-tU- 2 J.H. Angus, The Ironmasters: The First One Hundred Years o/H.E. Shacklock Limited, Dunedin, The Company, 1973.

An unidentified office scene just before the onset of the Great Depression. Gordon Burt Collection, Alexander Tumbull Library G15721 111

31 Why We Need Business Histories

Brian Easton

Economic Consultant

Introductio n When invited to give an outsider's, or even user's, view of the role of business history in the wider intellectual community, I responded with some diffidence. When pressed I agreed to give a personal account, from someone who has been working in economics and related social sciences for a number of years, and who is not without a sympathy to history. What I shall do is first relate some of my experiences with business histories, to give you some idea of how at least one outsider uses the product, and to identify some features which I have valued in the histories, and some weaknesses I have cursed. After bringing these themes together I will make some remarks about the future of business histories. As will become apparent, I do not have any narrow definition of what constitutes a business history. Users have needs, and cannot afford to be too concerned about the academic niceties of official scope. Indeed, given the shortage of good business histories — although there are some very good ones — none of us can be too precious about what constitutes a business history. Although as a rule the illustrations in this paper are from what constitutes traditional business history, the generalisations come from a wider range, including union history, the history of public organisations, and contemporary business history.

Using Business History: A Canterbury Student I first met business histories of New Zealand while taking my economics course at the University of Canterbury. In those days some quarter of the introductory course was devoted to New Zealand

32 Why We Need Business Histories economic history, which was taught by Graham Miller, a man who will probably be best remembered by his students as he did not publish a great deal. The two things that struck me about Graham were his compendious memory and his kind manner. He was an old-fashioned historian, a littl e out of place in the Canterbury Economics Department of the 1970s, with its emphasis on quantitative analysis. Instead Graham accumulated facts and anecdotes, both in his mind and in his room, which was piled high with papers, books, and records. I seem to remember some of these being kept in sacks; certainly he stored the station records he collected in sacks. Although the room seemed shambolic, I do not think it was muddled, at least as far as Graham was concerned. It was a bit like his dress: a formal suit which hung around him comfortably rather than smartly. In the middle of a conversation he would introduce some anecdote, and start shuffling through one of his piles of paper to illustrate it. Both he and his audience were frequently distracted by anecdotes. I experienced this as a student because a couple of us — John Patterson, now a philosopher at Massey, was the othet — had a clash between our third-year maths course and Graham's lectures. A special tutorial was arranged for the two of us. Each week we would have the ptivilege — we were first-yeat students — of an hour with Graham in the room which was once the headmaster's study in the stone building which had been the first Christchurch Boys' High School, with a secret inner circular stairway which crept up to the staff room. This was as close as I ever got to an Oxbridge-type tutorial in my time as a student — although I did not have the pain of having to write a weekly essay. Graham treated us most generously in a sort of lectute anecdote format, which focused on the rise of the South Island (European) economy. I was sufficiently enthused to get through most of his reading list. In those days there was no good general New Zealand economic history — there still is not. We did have Bill Sutch's two books, although his works are not'pure economic history. J.B. Condliffe just never turned me on, and Colin Simkin's invaluable Instability of a Dependent Economy was more of a macro study than the development economics with which Graham was concerned. I must have read 's and Bill Oliver's general histories, which were also just out, but they are both like the typical novel, in which one has

33 Archifacts no sense of the underlying economics which made possible the events being described. I also read a number of business histories. The ones I remember were the bank histories which, with one exception, were just awful. One was so awful that, it remains memorably so, though courtesy makes it also unmentionable. Looking back, I think I learned one fundamental lesson from Graham's course and that reading, plus — of course — a lot of anecdotes, and a bit of my nation's economic history. Graham had started off as a clerk before he did his degrees in economics and history, and anyway he was a Canterbury lad. This engendered a certain scepticism that economic history was about what governments did. Instead, the focus was on history and, indeed, economics being about what happens on the farms and in the firms and households of New Zealand. This is one of my major disagreements with the Victoria tradition in economics, which concentrates almost obsessively on the governmental process, while looking down on — when not ignoring all together — what happens to people in places and through time. It is not appropriate to pursue this contrast here, except to say that the stance is not a peculiarity of Wellington's university, but pervades the capital, to the detriment of good government. This focus on firms was very much reinforced while I was at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, with Conrad Blyth, and at the University of Sussex, with its strong industrial economics base. My Sussex economics history teacher was Barry Supple, who was then writing his history of Guardian Royal Insurance. Barry used this business history to examine attitudes to prudence and thrift in the nineteenth century, and the policy debate that took place over lif e insurance. I shall come back to the notion of using a business history to provide a perspective on a wider issue. I mention it here because Barry's GRI study is the first place I recall seeing the practice.

The Business Cycle and Depression Returning to New Zealand in the early 1970s, I began working on a series of seemingly disparate topics, all concerned with some contemporary economic and social problems which were puzzling me. In hindsight I realise that they were tightly linked around the

34 Why We Need Business Histories process of development and structural change, and so they had a strong historical perspective. But that was not how I saw it at the time. ' Fortunately I tend to be an omnivorous reader, so I was dipping into a range of histoty books, more out of curiosity than because of a focus. But inevitably when tackling some contemporary problem 1 began to see parallels with what had gone before. This came to a head when I got interested in the relationship between asset prices and product prices, which seemed to be so important in the post-war farm economy. You did not need much sense of economic history to identify that this was also one of the central features of earlier farm history. While I had some data series from Bryan Philpott's Lincoln team going back to the 1920s, and also some work by Condliffe and Rodwell covering an earlier period, most useful were two nineteenth-century business histoties. There is no prize for guessing that one was Russell Stone's Makers of Fortune, an outstanding work which should be compulsory reading for anyone doing a business or history degree in New Zealand. Russell is, of course, not an economist, and I had to pull the economics of his story out. But it is well enough written to do that. The same underlying economic processes also appear in H.J. Hanham's 'New Zealand Promoters and British Investors, 1860-1895', in the essays in honour of Willi s Airey, Studies of a Small Democracy. At this point I went back to Keith Sinclair and W.F. Mandle's Open Account, which I had read as a first-year economics student. It has a couple of useful chapters on the Great Depression. This is an example of the strategy I learned from Supple: a good business history can be remembered and valued because it uses the story of the firm to illustrate some wider issue. Being totally eclectic, I also raided Frank Anthony's Gus Tomlins for a useful, if fictitious, account of the business of farming in the 1920s. Perhaps here 'eclectic' is a euphemism for the more down-to- earth 'scavenger'.

Stock and Station Agents As I shall report, the study of the depressions of the late nineteenth century and the inter war period, and some analogous behaviour in the post-war era, prepared me well for a later economic trauma,

35 Archifacts but before that another project caused me to use business histories again. I had moved on from the University of Canterbury to the Institute of Economic Research. There I became involved as an expert witness in a case before the Commerce Commission over whether Wrightson NMA should merge with Crown Dalgety. The economics of the case are not important here, but pertinent to it was the question of why there were stock and station agents at all. In particular I was puzzled about what bound together the various services they provided, and why they were losing some of these services to specialist providers. I do not need to tell a conference of historians that looking back through history can often give clues to contemporary problems. So I began reading histories of stock and station agents. I can report that many of them are about as successful as the average bank history. But as a result of my persistence I learned that this process of horizontal disintegration was not new and, for instance, that the agents had once provided liquor and groceries to their customers. It was all done on credit, and there is the account of a worried agent writing to a farmer in the 1930s, advising that given the state of the farm's finances he should cut back on his drinking — of tea. Most people will say that it was credit which bound the stock and station agency's operations together. That is only part of the story, for it does not explain why stock and station agents only appear in pastoral farming in the Southern Hemisphere. My conclusion was that it was not the credit per se, but the cost of monitoring the assets on which the credit was secured. Advancing money on the basis of livestock which could wander off, die from poor management, or even be miscounted, required a close familiarity with the farm and the farmer. It was this familiarity which the stock and station agent had, and this was why he had a competitive advantage over the trading banks. Of course none of the business histories told such an explicit story, but it could be inferred from a well-written history.

The 1987 Crash As the published record shows, I was not surprised by the 1987 share-market crash. There was the work on previous asset price realignments, a central feature of any depression process, and while at

36 Why We Need Business Histories the Institute I had been associated with a study of the share market in the 1970s by Des O'Dea and Anne Horsfield. There had been a major crash in the mid-1970s which this work nicely traces. So I knew a littl e about how asset prices could get out of alignment, and the inevitable consequences. Nevertheless, on the weekend immediately after the October crash I curled up with every book on every previous financial crash I could lay my hands on. There were some old favourites, like J.K. Galbraith's The Great Crash, and some new ones. I do not think I had previously read about the boom and bust in the Dutch tulip industry in the sixteenth century, or other such arcane examples. Once more a recourse to history was shedding light on a contemporary issue. A lesson I learned from this reading, which is still being proven, is that the recovery from such crashes takes years, perhaps a decade, or even a generation. It is a pity more of our financiers did not have a sense of financial history, a point made by commentators in other countries that went through milder crashes thanks to the excesses of the 'short-pants brigade'. The theory is that a new generation of financial whiz-kids who were in short pants during the last boom think in their ignorance they are not subject to the underlying economic, financial, and historical processes. Any fool can make money during a financial boom, but that money neither buys nor indicates wisdom. The lesson for the investor is to get your money out of a speculating market as soon  s it becomes dominated by those who were still in short pants during the previous crash. Even so, our commerce faculties and business schools have some responsibility to ensure that their graduates acquire the sense of financial history which is so evidently lacking. We need good business histories to underpin these courses. The firm which has a good business history available to its better entrant staff will inculcate its history into its culture. One of the useful outcomes of the crash has been a couplé of instant histories about New Zealand businesses. Bruce Ross's The Ariadne Story and John McManamy's Crash.' are both good reads in their own right, and they are underpinned by a lot of economics. One special merit is that they are stories about the business failures. Too often business histories record the triumphs of successful firms. Add to these Allan Hawkins and Gordon McLauchlan's The Hawk, and Yvonne van Dongen's Brierley — both biographies offering insights

37 Archifacts into the business world — and Bruce Jesson's The Fletcher Challenge and Behind the Mirror Giass. These six are probably the best set of business histories available for any period, although purists may object to their being classified in this way.

Some Lessons Why have some business histories been mote valuable to me than others? It will be cleat that to this scrounger of ideas and anecdotes, relevance has not been important. Nor do I need to reiterate the standard requirements that they be well-written and well-presented. Let me start off with some of the common features of bad histories. The worst is hagiography and its close ally, vanity publishing. One of the first things a newly independent colony in Africa did was to create an army, despite being under no threat from its neighbouts and having secure natural borders. When asked why, the new ptesident replied that 'a gentleman needs a tie'. Similarly, many well-established firms see a need for a business history of themselves, and have no clearer idea than that as to the purpose of the commission. The outcome is a book which celebrates the firm, its triumphs, and its great men (women do not appear centrally in business history as yet), presented in a lavish publication with stunning pictures (or not — because often by the time the book has been finished the board of directors has lost interest, and publication is expensive). The result is a totally boring book which ends up sitting on the shelves of employees and scholarly libraries gathering dust. In my view, the firm would be better to spend its money on a leather binding with the company's name embossed in gold, and blank pages inside. Of perhaps there should be a standard text on computer to which a few details about the firm and its great employers can be added. They can do this for children, so why not for some of the childish attempts to record a firm's history? Closely related to the hagiographie is the unprofessional writer. Very often they come from the firm itself, I assume as a form of early retirement on full pay for some much-loved or well-related but ineffectual employee. Knowing a lot about the business of the firm — and for all I know, these people were once experts — or being a good raconteur, is not enough to do a professional job of writing a history.

38 Why We Need Business Histcmes

The Last Two Chapters Professional writers do not always do well either. Sometimes it is under funding or time constraints that damage them. But one issue that seems unresolved, even when there are no resource limitations, is the problem of the last two chapters of a commissioned work. By the time the writer gets to the events described in the last two chapters, there are persons living who were involved. Business can be a dirty activity, people make faulty judgements, and sometimes the key to understanding is some personal failure at senior level, such as alcoholism. What is the writer to do about such things? There is a certain point in a business history of a contemporary firm by a good writer at which the alert reader realises that we have reached the era whose actors are still living or have powerful children. You identify it by a lack of vigour in the account and a tippy-toeing around the edges of interest. Even a well-written book loses its thrust. There is a paper to be written entitled 'Writing the Last Two Chapters of a Business History', which would set out the various sttategies and give successful illustrations. Alas, I am not the one to give it. My reading strategy is to skip the last two chapters if I am in a hurry, and to fall asleep reading them if I am not.

One Damned Thing After Another Another contribution to somnolence is the 'one damned thing after another' approach. This medication is not confined to business histories, but they face a special problem. The writer stumbles on a rich source of data, reports, or even diaries, from some obscure part of the firm, and suddenly this section has a significance in the firm's history that it never had in the firm. A good writer can use this sort of material to give a flavour of the industry. Even if the reader is familiar with the industry today, practices in the past may have been quite different. Sometimes he or she gets littl e feel for the way that technology is shaping the firm's destiny. How is today's student to make sense of the banking practices of the nineteenth century? As the child said about the reconstructed bank in the museum, 'where is the automatic teller?' A diary or a good set of records from a branch can be used to describe a fictitious day in the lif e of the firm, especially that of an ordinary worker or in a typical branch. Very often the writet

39 Archifacts has steadfastly stuck to the facts and given every detail, without imagination but with a commendable concern for the insomniac. Another valued strategy is to place some aspect of the firm in a wider context. Supple 's GR1 and Sinclair and Mandle's Bank of New South Wales histories illustrate this approach. A goodly number of studies could have been improved if the writer had begun by asking why any general reader would want to read about this firm, and if the answer was that they would not, how the story of the firm could be used to entice the reader to tackle the book. The result would be a better book which would actually be read, much to the pleasure of the commissioning firm. It would also add to our knowledge, and enrich both the nation's understanding of its history and the writer's professional and academic reputation. If the history is to avoid the one-damned-thing-after

The Role of Economic History Adding tables of random numbers to an account is no substitute for analysis. Some writers seem to think that a tabulation or two in an appendix adds to their academic credibility. On more than one

40 Why We Need Business Histories occasion I have looked at a table proudly displayed in a text, and wondeted what on earth it was meant to be telling me, other than that the writer was a numerical neophyte. . Undoubtedly writers' often include such tabulations in the hope that someone else will interpret them. Usually these are senseless even to a professional statistician. Part of the problem is that our economic history has no sound quantitative basis. 1 know that quite a bit of wotk has been done, albeit much of it in universities where there is more concern with input than output. But the material which does exist is not readily accessible to even the professional quantitative social scientist and historian. The historical data base reflects a more fundamental problem, and one which causes me a littl e embarrassment. Having asked business historians to be aware of the needs of economists, I know we have vety littl e to offer you. What a lot of the histories — general as well as business ones — require is a reliable schematic account of the economic environment in which their firm existed. Sometimes reading a text one has the impression that at no point in the narrative is the writer sure whether the economy is in boom or in slump; or whether the importance of the fiftn's sector and/or region is increasing or diminishing. Sadly, there is no passable economic history of New Zealand which a business historian could use to provide such a macro-economic framework, and there is no master account of out general economic history, as there has been for general history since at least the late 1950s. I would have thought that a decent economic history reference text was a priority at this stage of the history profession's development. But perhaps as an economist I over-emphasise the role of the economy in the development of a nation.

Promoting Business History There is no easy remedy to the lack of a reliable economic history. But in a second problem area I can think of a way to make progress. Earlier I mentioned the lack of professionalism in a lot of business histories, particularly commissioned ones. We are not going to be able to prevent some managing directors renting their dipsomaniac uncles on full pay as the firm's official historians. But we can improve the public's understanding of the standards of professional business historians by publicising those standards.

41 Archifacts

I am not merely concerned with having a standard contract, operational guidelines, and indicative fees for commissioned business histories. What I would like to see is the honouring of the best with some prize or award. I shall leave the mechanics of organisation and funding aside, and concentrate on the public spectacle. I would envisage the award being made only every second or third year. There is not enough being produced to justify an annual award. I would have a wider scope than pure business histories, and include histories of unions and government agencies, organisations that should be operating in a businesslike way. We might call it an award in 'business and organisational history'. 1 would not exclude contemporary business history either. And while ideally there would be a prize, perhaps sponsored by a business, I am more interested in the judging panel offering merit awards, so that in a good triennium, or whatever, several good books would be celebrated. Once the awards were known, it would percolate into the business consciousness that there were standards, and they would become keener to commission professional histories in the hope of that of their firm obtaining a merit award. Even showing them those studies acknowledged as meritorious would help the firm understand what was achievable. Of course not all the merit successes would be commissioned works, just as not all business and organisational history is commissioned. But a process which recognised excellence would, I believe, do much for this genre of literature. Indeed business history is hardly recognised as a genre. With the possible exception of Russell Stone's studies of , which are treated as biography, I do not think there is a single reference to a business history in Peter Gibbons' chapter on non- fiction in The Oxford History of . One should not get paranoic about this: there are hardly any references to social science or natural science literature either, apart from some on Maori studies. You find the same absences in the non-fiction book awards. The literary establishment may well — for all 1 know — consider such scientific writing as fiction, or perhaps they think the works are written in Swahili. Yet, as we have seen even in this superficial review, there is a body of business history, patchy in scope but ranging in quality from the awful to the excellent. For at least one person, the best of these works have been useful as well as interesting and enjoyable reading. They have not only filled in gaps in general economic history, but assisted in the study of industry and monetary economics.

42 Why We Need Business Histories

Mor e fundamentally, they provide an antidote to the idea that economies revolve around the clever actions of Prime Minister s and Minister s of Finance. Rather they are about households, firms, and other organisations and the people in them, all facing a constantly changing and bewildering economic environment. This paper from an outsider is a way of expressing thanks for what business historians have done in the past, and of strengthening your resolve to extend your contributio n to the nation's understanding and welfare in the future.

Photographs can tell us a lot about business. Christchurch photographer Steffano Webb took this photograph of an unidentified workplace on 18 November 1912. Stefano Webb Collection, Alexander Tumbull Library G40851/1

43 Commissioned Business Histories Pitfall s and Prospects

Gavin McLean

NZ Historic Places Trust

Pitfall s . . . The conference organisers asked me to speak on the pitfalls of and prospects for commissioned business histories. With your indulgence, I shall add to the alliteration by prefacing my perusal of pitfalls with publication pathways, patronage and piracy. Let me begin by examining the special features of that sometimes negative term 'commissioned history'. As you are probably aware, there are two common pathways to publication. The first, and increasingly less common, is to spend several years researching and writing about the topic of your heart's desire, then despatch the manuscript to the publisher of your choice. This pathway, for all but the fortunate few, is strewn with rejection slips. The second and now preferred pathway is — before tapping even a single key — to approach a publisher, jointly negotiate the subject of the book, its extent, manner of treatment, primary audience, delivery date and even the precise number and type of illustrations, then head to the keyboard. While authors retain general control over the project, they are in effect working within fairly tightly constrained parameters. You will see, therefore, that the majority of mainstream New Zealand historical publishing is commissioned in one form or another. Wise commissioned business historians, like their mainstream counterparts, will sit down with their clients at the earliest possible stage to agree on the size and scope of the project, the resources required, the delivery date, the style and appearance of the finished product and, of course, their remuneration So what makes the commissioned business history different? It is not, as outsiders sometimes suggest, that these books are boring —

44 Commissioned Business Histories not all are, and in any case, the soporific effects of many mainstream historical works would leave a hot glass of Horlicks for dead any day. Nor is it that they deal with subjects that are not viable for commercial publication — each year several publishers scramble to package big run commissioned works while foisting several unsaleable 'great' works on an indifferent reading public. Commissioned business histories, it seems, differ from their mainstream counterparts chiefly in that they record the histories of the publisher. And as writers have known from at least the time of Cicero onwards, there is a tendency for the person who pays the piper to dictate the tune. Before dwelling too heavily on the pitfalls of patronage, though, I should acknowledge that these commissions have their positive aspects. First and foremost, patronage of this type brings almost certain publication. Provided that the patient does not die while on the historical dissecting table (usually via hostile takeovet), you are almost certain to secure a publication, and often a damned handsome one. Since many companies are accustomed to spending large sums of money on annual reports, share offer documents and advertising and Other mind-numbing fripperies, business historians may find that theit works are launched into print with few of the tedious budget- conscious debates over paper weights and number of half-tones that concern commercial publishers. Other historians, whose books have to survive publishers' mergers, threats from competing titles in other lists, changing market fortunes and downturns in the economy, may envy this near-certainty. It should also be noted that commissioned histories are a useful entry point for first-time authors. Sometimes they are very well paid for the work involved. Patronage, though, does bring its complications. All too often, for reasons of company politics, or because of the low profile of business history in this country (q.v.), the task of writing a business history is entrusted to a 'faithful retainer' working out time until retirement, a local journalist ot a former manager. The result is often hagiology, and poorly written at that. You know the type — nary a whiff of analysis, honorifics and unnecessary capitals oozing off every line .... Let us assume, though, that from now on most businesses will cast their nets wider and secure competent historians. This, alas, is not necessarily the end of that happy scholar's problems. Clients often severely underestimate the lead times requited for serious research, writing and book production; equally often they also equate history

45 Archifacts with mere chronology. Be prepared to accept that not every client may understand the value of a Marxist analysis of labour relations in a late nineteenth-century New Zealand provincial woollen mill! There are times when it is better to go away and quietly produce rather than try to dazzle academically insensitive clients with your intellectual wizardry. Let's return to our dilemma over the pipers and their tunes. It is my experience that discordant notes are more often imagined than heard. Problems, if they arise at all, are usually a result of a client's ignorance of the true nature of the scholarly process. If a client is worried about comment on the company's immediate history, the prospective historian should define the time boundaries for the book. My own experience with a textile group, a port authority and a trade union is that sponsors respect historical professionalism and almost never attempt to influence your writing. In any case, the very nature of their work predisposes managers to be more interested in the present and the future than in the past. Interference is usually restricted to individual managers trying to sneak their photographs into the book under a weird and wonderful variety of pretexts! But let us step back from the mechanics of the master/servant relationship for a moment in order to examine the more general problems confronting commissioned business historians. All have something to do with the low profile of the sub-discipline in New Zealand. The first thing that the intending author notices is the near absence of high-quality local models. Although there is a tolerably large shelf of house histories around, more substantial, analytical works are rarer than credible politicians. New Zealand academic historians, with a few notable exceptions such as Russell Stone, have not shown much interest in business history, which tends to be regarded in the same light as family history and local history. Labour history greatly overshadows business history in both extent and quality. Academia has been more interested in strikes and the workplace emancipation of women than the robber barons and the institutions that they created. A quick flick through the New Zealand Journal of History for the years 1985 to 1991, for example, revealed that just four of the 71 articles of the period covered business or economic topics: two were by Russell Stone, and one of the others covered the Royal Bank of Australia's loan to the New Zealand government in 1842. None fitted within the traditional business

46 Commissioned Business Histories history category. Current research preoccupations and the gender imbalance amongst practitioners suggest that this is unlikely to change, and that in the univetsities business history will continue to fall flat on its face between the stools of the history and economic history departments. Anothet significant hutdle facing any business historian is the poverty of local archival holdings. The small and turbulent nature of our business community means that few businesses boast anything approaching a complete record. Often share registers, printed annual reports and minute books are all that remain; sometimes not even that. Prospective company historians will often be told that 'all the old stuff was sent to the tip when we remodelled the office/merged with our rivals/shifted head offices'. For the late nineteenth-century/ early twentieth-century history of the woollen mill, I relied on a few fragments from the Defunct Companies File, photographs and cadastral maps, and a long and poorly-rewarded search of the Timaru newspapers. If individual businesses keep records poorly, our public archives perform littl e better National Archives retains useful Justice Department material and limited amounts of private business information, but is essentially a repository for public archives pure and simple. Local-body museums and libraries are more active collectors of business documents. Although some institutions have been collecting business papers avidly for many decades, other librarians and archivists — who may have been infected with this nasty littl e virus by the academic historians with whom they come into regular contact — have demonstrated a curious antipathy towards spending precious staff and financial resources on housing business records. Fortunately that attitude is changing. Increased awareness of the value of business papers, together with the introduction of improved finding aids such as the National Register of Manuscripts, will make lif e easier for future business historians.

Prospects .. . As is often the case with human nature, it is easier to catalogue the pitfalls than the prospects. Certainly, in the last few yeats there seems to have been a decline in the number of traditional commissions. The state of the New

47 Archifacts

Zealand economy is undoubtedly a major contributing factor. Many of the Dunedin and Auckland companies which celebrated their centenaries during the 1970s and 1980s have disappeared or become mere cogs in larger machines. Recent commissioned works have come from professional businesses and public enterprise. Signals are conflicting as far as academic and archival support are concerned. I have already noted the apparent lack of interest in business history in professional circles. Against this, however, I do not think that the appalling performance of the New Zealand commercial sector during the late 1980s will do anything to win the hearts and minds of historians, as it almost did with the wider community a few years earlier. Sir Michael Fay lost the Cup and Sir Robert Jones's share price fell while the piles of his books climbed higher in the remainder shops. The academy will continue to be obsessed with social history. Libraries and archives have made great strides in recent decades, and can be expected to continue to do so provided that Treasury bean-counters leave them alone. Amongst recent encouraging moves has been the sponsoring of oral history recordings by several large companies. Against this, however, must be considered the trend towards what I shall call, before being hooted from the stage, 'Rape by Repository', the imposition of excessive reproduction fees for the use of photographs. This user-pays policy, led by the Turnbull, is already threatening unsubsidised commercial publishing by forcing authors to pay up to 90% of potential royalties for the use of photographs. It may mean that future books will make very sparing use of one invaluable type of document, the photograph. Spent managers and provincial hacks and hackettes will continue to produce what histories come their way. The real future of quality business history, though, will lie in the attitudes and resources of the handful of professional academic historians in the universities and the Historical Branch. The latter has an important part to play. The Branch has recently published guides to researching and writing Maori history, women's history, oral history and local history — but not business or institutional history. Let us hope that the Centre for Business Studies announced at this gathering includes effective lobbyists.

48 Business History in Wider Context: A View From Historical Geography

M.M . Roche

Department of Geography, Massey University. V aimer ston North

Introductio n Can historical geography offer anything to the study of business history? I shall address this question by highlighting some of the distinctive attributes of a geographical approach at a conceptual and technical level. The work of various geographers will be used to further illustrate these points before I pass on to two specific New Zealand examples. From this discussion a set of distinctive and potentially useful perspectives applicable to the putsuit of business history will emerge. Historical geography, a well-established sub-branch of the discipline, has long waxed and waned in popularity in Anglo- American geography. In the 1980s it enjoyed something of a revival, but in the last two or three years there have been renewed calls to absorb some of its perspectives within human geography in general (e.g. by F. Driver). The objectives and methods of historical geography have changed over time. Traditional definitions have emphasised the reconstruction of the geography of an earlier era, and the way geographies change over time. It has also been boldly defined as 'the geography of the past' (Gregory, 1981, pp. 146-50). Geography more generally is taken to be 'the study of the earth's surface as the space within which the human population lives' (Haggett, p. 133), although again, definitional emphases have varied over time. People and environment, regionalism and spatial analysis have all been accorded a central place in successive reconceptualisations of the discipline. Leading historical geographers such as the Canadian Cole Harris have also emphasised the extent to which geogtaphy and history share common goals and objectives. These include: 49 Archifacts

1. A concern with the particular. 2. Explanations which may take into account the thoughts of relevant individuals. 3. Explanations which may make use of general laws. 4. Explanations that rely heavily on the reflective judgement of individual scholars.

Geographical Constructs Bearing on Business History At the risk of grossly over-simplifying the situation, the theoretical ideas underlying historical geography can be subdivided into what might be termed 'empirical', 'classical', and 'critical' eras. Out of each emerge a number of insights for business history, some distinctive, others reinforcing ideas from other disciplines. A few indeed are negative lessons, born out of the shortcomings of various geographical investigations.

Empirical Much historical geography, and human geography generally until the late 1950s or early 1960s, was strongly empirical in conception. The emphasis was on direct observation of the world, to explain it without recourse to theoretical statements. A colleague paraphrases this as the 'what you see is what you get' approach. As such, it has fundamental shortcomings. The first message for business history is this negative one: factual accuracy is essential to business history (and geography), but empiricism alone is not enough because it offers few avenues for explanation as opposed to description. There are, however, two additional lessons for business history that can be drawn from the historical geography of the 'empirical era'. The first relates to the emphasis in mainstream Continental and Commonwealth geography up to the 1960s of impacts on environments. In consequence, some historical geographers focused particularly on the exploitation of natural resources in various industrial settings. Their special contribution was to demonstrate that natural resources were not a static concept, but that changing wants, needs and abilities are created and defined in cultural terms. Thus flint axes are no longer a valuable resource, while oil, known

50 Business History in Wider Context through natural seepages, was not a resource in the pre-industrial era (Zimmerman, pp. 3-20). The historical geographers pointed to this as an important interface between 'nature' on the one hand and industrial capital on the other. The insight from historical geography, then, is that some business history will be concerned with the transformation of natural resources into social commodities. Business history has perhaps a more central link to the environment as a consumer of natural resources and as an environmental polluter than may be generally appreciated. This linkage ought not to be lost sight of. A second insight from the 'empirical era' is derived from prevailing conceptions of geography in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s as the study of the variable character of the surface of the earth. This view of geography as a chorological science (i.e. one concerned with distributions over the surface of the earth) elevated the study of regions to a central position within the discipline. Regional studies undertaken by historical geographers, often of pioneering communities, place industries and businesses in a wider setting (both socio-economic and environmental). Herein is another insight fot business history: firms should be placed in context rathet than examined in isolation. What ultimately became clear, however, was that the traditional regional view itself provided an inadequate context, especially as nation states became mote homogenous and more latterly as the world economy has become increasingly global in character. New Zealand examples of this sott of research include the works cited below by McCaskill, Insull and Hewland. McCaskill's regional study of the Coromandel draws attention to the importance of sawmilling and goldmining concerns in creating the geography of the district. Some of G.J.R. Linge's work on the origins of New Zealand manufacturing is also in the empirical mould (e.g. his 1958 and 1965 articles), while agricultural industries have also received some attention (e.g. by L.J. King and C.J. Sparrow).

Classical The empirical era in historical geography gave way to one in which the notion of geography as the study of spatial relations gained greater currency. Accordingly ideas and approaches from human geography generally were incorporated into historical geography.

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Because much of this era coincided with the expansion of university geography departments in the 1950s and 1960s and the appearance of the high-speed electronic computer, not to mention an explosion in the number of specialist academic journals, the volume of work in the 'classical mould' outstrips the rest. Quantity is not, of course, synonymous with quality, but three foci of this era are worthy of attention. These concern spatial models of industrial systems, models of urban morphology, and systems theory as a means of explaining geographical change. Many of the first spatial models were extensions of theories drawn from contemporary economics, but adjusted to incorporate a third, spatial (and hence geographical) dimension. Spatial models of economic behaviour attempted to explain the location of businesses, in the case of Weber's classic industrial location model in terms of minimisation of transport costs with respect to the weight of raw materials and the distance which these must be shifted, and the market. Many embellishments followed (e.g. those of D.M. Smith). Other conceptions such as Christaller's central theory used the idea of the 'range' and 'threshold' of a good as the basis for understanding the spatial patterning of firms in urban hierarchies. Changing the scale of analysis, there were several models providing insights into the general location of firms within cities. Various concentric zone, sectoral and multiple nuclei models are probably the most well- known of these formulations (Johnston, 1971). . Other historical geographers, inspired by systems theory, have offered explanations for instance of the development of staple trading industries (J. Vance) and of the growth of firms in colonial trading cities (A. Pred). These efforts at building spatial economic theory have, potentially at least, considerable significance for understanding in general terms the location of businesses nationally, regionally and within urban systems. Local examples of work in this style are provided by some of Linge 's research into manufacturing (1957) and by Golledge's 1963 examination of the consolidation of the New Zealand brewing industry between 1920 and 1950. In contrast to such single-industry studies, B.A. Badcock examined the development of central place networks in South Auckland between 1840 and 1968. In effect this work presented a new understanding of the evolving business hierarchy of this region. A further example of the quantitative

52 Business History in Wider Context model-building era is R.G. Cant's computer-facilitated factor analysis of changes in the location of New Zealand manufacturing. Le Heron and Warr's 1976 study of the evolution of agribusiness, though not historical geography per se, is another geographical study of businesses.

Critical Perspectives The historical geography of the last decade has been characterised by a sharp break from the theoretical constructs of the 1950s to 1970s. In very bold outline, the spatial modelling of conventional economic theory has given way to a greater critical attention to the tole of the state, a closer focus on capitalism as a process fundamentally shaping recent human experience, the recognition that this produces an uneven geography of development, and a renewed interest in both global and locality studies. The last decade of wotk in historical geography, drawing on critical social theory and perspectives from political economy, contains some important suggestions for business history, particularly the emphasis that firms have in effect operated for many decades in an increasingly global economic environment (see I. Wallerstein). At the regional level, the notion of successive rounds of investment and reinvestment provides clues about the complex overlap of head offices and branches (e.g. Gregory, 1989, pp. 75-7). The insights from this most recent era are particularly significant. An international setting is provided for business developments. The focus on plant gives way to one on firms and organisations, while entrepreneurship again comes to the fore. In addition there is a recognition that apparently different regional business outcomes may have common underlying principles. To date, unfortunately, there has been littl e local work from a critical perspective. G.M. Winder's 1983 work on the penettation of capital into the was inspired by R.C.J. Stone's Makers of Fortune and organised around a theoretical framework. Almost the only other publications in this vein ate Watson and Pattetson's 1985 studies of the political economy of Wellington Province. I.M. Hay's 1989 monograph on the business of medical provision is an overtly theoretically informed account which is perhaps marginally relevant in this context.

53 Archifacts

Some Shortcomings Simply put, research philosophies are directed at formulating useful questions and methodologies at arriving at reliable answers, while techniques are the routine approaches used to operationalise a methodology. Prevailing research mores in geography, as in other disciplines, have influenced the way in which techniques have been used. Thus, although regional studies of pioneering industries in frontier regions tended to identify specific business enterprises and even provided interesting snap shots of the firms involved, with the shift to the classical era of spatial geography this interest waned. Instead, with techniques available to handle masses of quantitative data and growing interest in general statements rather than a focus on the unique attributes of firms, historical geographers frequently tended to distance themselves from the specifics of individual firms, though they perhaps did this less than did other human geographers. Reinforcing this tendency was a research ethic which regarded the study of aggregate plant operations as a 'public good', but placed individual ownership of firms beyond the pale. Geographers have tended to focus on the plant, and so the conceptual focus has been on the 'firm' rather than the 'business'. This distinction is significant and to geography's detriment. A firm-based analysis privileges plant over arguably more important considerations such as ownership and profitability. Interestingly, by the 1980s the adoption of critical perspectives in historical geography had again thrown attention onto the global and strategic local impact of specific internationalised firms. This is a strength which can provide context for otherwise exceptionalised accounts of single businesses that can exaggerate the importance of management decision-making as against wider sectoral and regional conditons.

Two Cameos Some of the preceding points are necessarily generalised and at times somewhat abstracted. Lest this smack of fruitless geographical navel- gazing, I will now turn to two specific examples. The first is drawn from the New Zealand frozen meat industry, and the second from the New Zealand timber industry.

54 Business History in Wider Context

The Frozen Meat Industry The New Zealand frozen meat industry has attracted considerable popular and scholarly attention almost from its inception (e.g. by Critchell and Raymond in 1912). Geographers are not prominent as major contributors to the current understanding of this area, but some thesis work and related papers have appeared. Notable among these is the work of G.J. Burridge, which combines elements of both the 'empirical' and 'classical' approaches. There is a concern for spatial variation and a regional mosaic; information was solicited from a wide range of historical sources as well as by obtaining questionnaires from firms and farmers. Some of this material was presented in cartographic form. And yet, from the perspective of the 1980s and 1990s, Burridge is fascinated by the plant rather than by the firm and its owners; furthermore, he goes to some lengths to aggregate his data in order to make information about individual companies unrecoverable. A related shortcoming is his tendency to focus on the frozen meat industry from a domestic New Zealand perspective. Reworking Burridge's research themes from the perspective of contemporary historical geography poses some quite different questions. Freezing works are seen as enterprises rather than plants. This approach immediately throws into sharp focus the fact that the New Zealand freezing industry tended to identify itself in terms of plants identified by geographical location (e.g. Tomoana rather than Nelson Brothers Ltd, Longburn rather than CWS). In terms of ownership, it also highlights the importance of British capital to the establishment of the 'New Zealand' freezing industry. For instance, Borthwicks, originally a British firm of wholesale butchers, initially purchased consignments from New Zealand plants, but bought the Waitara works in 1902 in order to secure, its supplies. They later purchased other freezing works, including Pakipaki (1915), Waingawa (1928), Feilding (1931) and Tokomaru Bay (1944). Only one works was built from scratch, in Canterbury in 1914. Of the freezing plants that operated in New Zealand between 1882 and 1972, some 15 remained in the hands of the original owners, ten had been sold to other New Zealand interests, two remained in their original overseas ownership and eight had new overseas owners, one was controlled by a joint domestic/foreign company, and 16 had closed by the latter date.

55 Archifacts

Hawke's Bay is perhaps the most least studied of the major regions of the sheep freezing industry. Plants were built at Taruheru (1899), Wairoa (1915), Westshore (1887), Whakatu (1912), Tomoana (1884), Pakipaki (1905), Waipukurau (1889) and Woodville (1891). If the focus on geographical appellations for plants is removed, the regional importance of one firm, Nelson Brothers Ltd, becomes obvious. With works established at Taruheru, Tomoana, Waipukurau and Woodville, and the purchase of the Povetty Bay Farmers Meat Waipawa works in 1923 and of the Gisborne Sheep Farmers Frozen Meat Kaiti works in 1930, this firm was a significant North Island presence in the industry. For a time it also had South Island interests, owning Ocean Beach (from 1894 to 1960) and the failed Hornby works, and declining an offer to purchase the Burnside works in 1892. It was also an early leader in the industry, William Nelson having established rendering down and meat preservation works in Hawke's Bay prior to the refrigeration of meat. Nelson's success was not solely the product of fortunate timing and hard work. His company was funded with family capital from Britain, and Nelson used his knowledge of industrial processing (gained in the family gelatine-manufacturing business) to good effect in setting up and running the Tomoana works. The fate of his works partially explains why William Nelson's contribution to the frozen meat trade has been forgotten. In 1920 the British-based, family-owned Vestey Group purchased all of Nelson Brothers' intetests, which they operated as Nelsons (N.Z.) Ltd rather than using their own name.

The Timber Industry In a presentation to the 1988 ARANZ Conference later published in Archifacts I outlined an historico-geographical approach to studying New Zealand's timber industry. A subsequent tome on the New Zealand forestry scene drew the observation of a historian colleague that in spite of its title, A History of New Zealand Forestry, it was clearly written by a geographer. By this I assume he was referring to the themes of people and environment, the examination of regional patterns, and the use of generalisations to add meaning. The timber industry needs to be understood within a commodity production chain stretching from the acquisition of cutting rights through felling and processing to transportation and sale, if its workings are to be appreciated. In the nineteenth century wood was a

56 Business History in Wider Context ubiquitous resource, but some species had quite specialised end uses; totara was used for piles and posts, matai for flooring, kahikatea for butter boxes and cheese crates. In my 1989 paper I emphasised that the acquisition of cutting rights was a key first step that generally escapes attention. Without retreating from this observation, I would in addition stress that the 'timber production chain' involved various organisations, including partnerships and companies (both private and public), and that consequently business interrelationships are a key to understanding. Few firms had control from forest purchase to sales (the Kauri Timber Company was an exception). For most the process was a contested one. The changing balance between timber merchants and sawmillers in the decade before the First World War is especially intetesting. However, to reassert a geographical perspective, the timber industry was also shaped by physical-cultural attributes (in a sense a dimension of human ecology with a distinct regional manifestation). In particular the mix of forest types, land tenure and access to markets produced distinctive regional mosaics. The form of tenure of forest lands was also important: Crown land, freehold land and Maori land were typically available under differing terms and conditions, and the local mix of land-ownership was relevant to the levels of investment in and the structure of local timber industries. The absolute and relative accessibility of forests to potential markets were an important third component. Many areas were burnt off as part of the land settlement process, regardless of the quality of the timber thereon, simply because it could not be milled economically.

The Idiosyncratic Disciplinary backgrounds are enabling rather than prescriptive. Individual research endeavours may also be marked by an idiosyncratic streak which should be encouraged rather than scourged. At the personal level, this takes the form of an interest in period photography as an aid to the reconstruction of earlier eras and as an end in itself. As it relates to business history, the historical photograph has a part to play as a means of establishing the external design and comparative location of buildings and plant. Sometimes it may produce more serendipitous connections, for example, in

57 Archifacts establishing a link between Alex Entrican, an outspoken Ditector- General of Forestry (1939-1961) and his Auckland family. A chance sighting of the sign ¢. and J. Entrican and Co. Ltd' painted on a building in the background of some photographs of the Auckland waterfront I was examining at the Auckland Public Library caught my attention: Entrican is not an especially common name. Imagine then my surprise and delight when I subsequently realised that I have looked unknowingly at this very building on numerous occasions while waiting at the central city bus depot. Some subsequent research has revealed Entrican's father was a prominent Auckland merchant, and later deputy mayor of the city. In itself this is a small enough matter, but it helps make sense of some aspects of Entrican's early career.

Conclusion Histotical geography offers some distinctive sttategies of use to business historians. Many complement and reinforce rather than duplicate those of other disciplines. However, not all of the insights from historical geography are straightforward — an over-emphasis on empiricism is limiting, as is a focus on the plant at the expense of the business. But, at a time when interest in business history appears to be growing in New Zealand, perhaps the most significant geographical insight is one which emphasises the need to place the business in context, to see it as part of a capitalist economy and to appteciate the specifics of three interlocked scales, the local, the national and the international. Furthermore, natural resources were integral to many of New Zealand's early business operations, such as mining, timber- milling, flax-milling, et al. This is not to deny the value of a focus on business leaders and boardroom politics, nor is it intended to suggest that a narrow balance-sheet approach to business history is not a viable alternative. Ultimately, perhaps, there is no single approach to producing quality business history. Furthermore, rigour in the application of any particular perspective is likely to yield more than the ineffective utilisation of a suite of casually applied techniques. Returning to Cole Harris's prescription, a concern for the particular and the general tempered by much reflective judgement is perhaps the key to producing sound results.

58 Business History in Wider Context

References Badcock, B.A. (1970): 'Central Place Evolution and Network Development in South Auckland, 18404968: A Systems Analytic Approach', New Zeahnd Geographer, 26(2), pp.109-35. Burridge, G.J. (1962): 'The New Zealand Meat Freezing Industry: Its Location and Factor Flow Patterns', MA thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch. Burridge, G.J. (1964): 'The Location of Meat Freezing Works in New Zealand', New Zealand Geographer, 20(1), pp.43-59. Cant, R.G. (1971): 'Changes in the Location of Manufacturing in New Zealand 1957-1968: An Application of Three-Mode Factor Analysis', New Zealand Geographer, 27(1), pp.38-55. Critchell, J.T., and J. Raymond (1912): A History of the Frozen Meat Trade, Constable, London. Derek, M. (1988): 'The Post Modem Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 13, pp.262-74. Driver, F. (1988): 'The Historicity of Human Geography', Progress in Human Geography, 12(4), pp.497-506. Golledge, R.G. (1963): 'The New Zealand Brewing Industry', New Zealand Geographer, 19(1), pp.7-24- Gregory, D. (1981): 'Historical Geography', in Johnston etal., pp.146-50. Gregory, D. (1989): 'Areal Differentiation and Post-Modern Human Geography', in Gregory and Walford, pp.67-96. Gregory, D., and R. Walford (eds) (1989): Horizons in Human Geography, Macmillan, Houndsmill. Haggett, P. (1981): 'Geography', in Johnston et al., pp.133-6. Harris, R.C. (1978): 'The Historical Mind and the Practice of Geography', in D. Ley and M.S. Samuels (eds), Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, Croom Helm, London, pp.123-37· Hay, I.M. (1989): The Caring Commodity, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hewland, J.L. (1946): 'Manufacturing in New Zealand: Its Outstanding Characteristics', New Zealand Geographer, 2(1), pp.207-22. Insull, H.A.H. (1948): 'The Solar Salt Undertaking at Lake Grassmere', New Zealand Geographer, 4(2), pp.155-62. Johnston, R.J., D. Gregory, P. Haggett, D. Smith, D.R. Stoddart (eds) (1981): The Dictionary of Human Geography, Blackwell, Oxford. Johnston, R.J. (1971): Urban Residential Patterns, Bell, London. King, L.J. (1958): 'The Agricultural Lime Industry of the South Island', New Zealand Geographer, 14(2), pp. 115-30.

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Le Heron, R.B., and Å.CR. Warr (1976): Corporate Organisation, Corporate Strategy and Agribusiness Development in New Zealand, New Zealand Geographer, 32(1), pp.1-16. Linge, G.J.R. (1957): 'The Location of Manufacturing in New Zealand', New Zealand Geographer, 13(1), pp.1-18. Linge, G.J.R. (1958): 'Manufacturing in Auckland: Its Origins and Growth 1840-1936', New Zealand Geographer, 14(1), pp.47-64. Linge, G.J.R. (1965): 'Manufacturing in New Zealand: Four Years in a Century of Growth', in R.F. Watters (ed), Land and Society in New Zeahnd, Reed, Wellington, pp. 139-59. McCaskill, M. (1949): 'The Coromandel Peninsula and the Thames Valley', New Zealand Geographer, 5(1), pp.47-71. Pred, A. (1966): The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-industrial Growth 1800-19 J 4, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Roche, M.M. (1989): 'The Timber Industry in New Zealand 1880-1920', Archifacts (October), pp.6-13. Roche, M.M. (1990): History of New Zealand Forestry, GP Books, Wellington. Smith, D.M. (1971): Industrial Location: An Economic Geographical Analysis, Wiley, New York. Sparrow, C.J. (1964): 'The Growth and Status of the Phormium Tenax Industry of New Zealand', Economic Geography, 31(4), pp.331-40. Stone, R.C.J. (1973): Makers of Fortune, Oxford University Press, Auckland. Vance, J. (1971): The Merchant's World, Prentice Hall, New York. Wallerstein, I. (1974): The Modern World-System, I, Academic Press, New York. Watson, M.K., and B.R. Patterson (1985): 'The Growth and Subordination of the Maori Economy in the Wellington Region of New Zealand, 1840-52', Pacific Viewpoint, 26(3), pp.521-45. Watson, M.K., and B.R. Patterson (1985a): 'The White Man's Right': Acquisition of Maori Land by the Crown in the Wellington Provincial District of New Zeahnd 1840-76, Department of Geography, Victoria University of Wellington, Working Paper. Winder, G.M. (1983): 'Development of the Waikato 1860-1895: Power Structures and Historical Explanation in Geography', MA thesis, University of Auckland. Zimmerman, E. (1951): World Resources and Industries, Harper, New York.

60 The Role of the Centre for Business History

S.R.H. Jones

Director, Centre for Business History

The Centre for Business History (CBH) was established at the University of Auckland in 1991 in order to raise the profile of the discipline in New Zealand and to provide support for those engaged in teaching, research and the preservation of business archives. It is hoped that the activities of the CBH will foster a broader appreciation of business history within the community, both in terms of its value to business management and as an academic discipline and, mote generally, as an important part of the cultural heritage of New Zealand. Although the CBH is funded through the Faculty of Commerce & Economics at the University of Auckland, it is intended to be of benefit to a wider external faculty that embraces business historians throughout the country. To further this aim, the policy committee of the CBH includes business historians from both Wellington and Dunedin. At the moment members of the policy committee are drawn from the university sector, but there is no reason why it should not include people from the business community or other public institutions. One of the most important functions of the CBH is to provide a network through which professional and amateur historians, archivists, librarians, and all those concerned with the study of business history might exchange ideas and information. The main networking medium of the CBH is its newsletter, an eight-page A4 publication that appears every June. The newsletter is currently sent to more than 150 readers, most of whom are resident in New Zealand, although copies are also mailed to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The contents include an editorial, details of the Centre's seminar programme, a section on teaching business history, information concerning research and publications on New Zealand business history and by business historians in New Zealand, a calendar of forthcoming international conferences on

61 Archifacts business history and cognate subjects (e.g. the history of accounting) together with btief reports of the proceedings of some of those conferences, details of new journals and other regular publications, comments concerning archival and other primary sources of interest to business historians, and a section on archives management. Infotmation is also provided about the current state of the Centre's various projects. Readets ate invited to shate information that they feel may be of interest to others and to raise issues that need a public airing. The CBH also fulfill s an important role by providing the opportunity for business historians and others to discuss sources and methods and to present their findings to a knowledgeable and critical audience. A tegular seminar series commenced in 1991, and so far the CBH has hosted more than a dozen local and ovetseas speakers. A diverse range of topics has been covered, with papers delivered on subjects such as theories of enttepreneurship, multinational banking, the failure of British management education, ownership and control of Japanese business, the New Zealand meat freezing industry, the origins of the Goodman Group, and the operation of the Hudson's Bay Company. The seminar series is not the exclusive preserve of academic historians and papers from businesspeople and others are warmly welcomed. Indeed, the CBH is particulatly keen to encourage practical businesspeople to speak. Thus in 1992 members were fortunate enough to be able to hear Brian Picot give a very illuminating talk on his experience with Progressive Enterprises and the development of supermarkets in New Zealand. It is intended to strengthen the links between the CBH and the business community by inviting more businesspeople to give talks to the Centre in the future. The other practical way in which the CBH attempts to suppott the study of business history in New Zealand is by undertaking projects that facilitate both teaching and research. The first project to be undertaken was the production of a bibliography of New Zealand business histoty. Simon Ville, the first Director of the CBH, commenced the project in December 1990, compiling lists of books, essays, articles, and graduate dissertations. By the middle of 1992 the bibliography was substantially complete and, undet the title of Bibliograph)! of Secondary Sources for the Study of New Zealand Business History, is about to be published by Auckland University Library in their Bibliography Bulletin Seties.

62 Centre for Business History

The lack of a central directory of business archives for New Zealand has frequently been commented upon in the past but, apart from frequent expressions of concern, littl e has been done to rectify the situation. The policy committee of the CBH was cognizant of this fact, and agreed.that with the compilation of the business bibliography well under way, it should investigate the possibility of providing some sott of guide to primary sources. Following discussions that began at the ARANZ symposium on 'Boardrooms and Balance Sheets' in June 1991, the CBH decided to press ahead with a pilot project to compile a directory of business archives held in the Auckland region. The archival project commenced in November 1991, when a steering committee was established in Auckland that included business historians from within the university, staff from National Archives in Auckland, and librarians drawn from the principal local institutions. A format for the directory was quickly established, a research assistant hired, and over the next three months question- naires were sent to a variety of companies and institutions. In the meantime, details of institutional holdings were obtained from National Archives, Auckland, the Auckland Institute and Museum, Auckland Public Library, the Museum of Transport and Technology, Birkenhead Public Library, and other museums and libraries in the region. At an early stage in the proceedings the sponsotship of Buttle Wilson Group Ltd was secured, the CBH also receiving assistance from the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, the Employers' Association and the Auckland Manufacturers' Association. The Group Records Manager of Fletcher Challenge Ltd and the Librarian of Lion Breweries were also most helpful. The initial response from most companies was quite favourable, although in some cases a shortage of staff and a lack of existing inventories meant that details of holdings were not finally obtained until early in 1993. Rather more problematical was the lack of willingness of some businesses to provide details of their holdings or access to them. Persistence paid off in several cases, but two major corporations, both of which have expanded through the acquisition of lesser companies, remain somewhat intransigent. Hopefully they will change their corporate minds — or their senior management — before too long! Despite a lack of co-operation in some quarters, the CBH has managed to obtain inventories from more than 150 companies. A

63 Archifacts synopsis of these inventoties, together with location, contact person, and conditions of access, has been entered in the directory according to the New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification. The directory also contains an outline of the more general holdings of various institutions in the Auckland region, including National Archives, the Auckland Institute and Museum, Auckland University Library, and the Justice Department's Commercial Affairs Division (Companies Office), together with details of opening hours and conditions of access. A short introduction discusses sources and methods for New Zealand business history. The directoty is to be published for the CBH by Buttle, Wilson Group Ltd, and will be available shortly. Hopefully the successful publication of An Archival Directory of Business Records Held in the Auckland Region will encourage the publication of archival directories for the rest of New Zealand. The CBH sees itself as having a peripheral role in the actual collection and preservation of business archives, limiting itself to intervention only in situations where inaction might result in a body of business records being destroyed. Unfortunately there is the danger that such intetvention might be increasingly called for in future years, as the Northern Archives and Records Trust (NART) is no longer active in this field. Given the low priority that many businesses place on the preservation of archives and the continued horror stories of their wanton desttuction, it can only be hoped that some agency will take over the role that NART was established to play. Where the CBH might take a more active role, however, is in helping to establish an oral archive of business history by recording structured interviews with prominent businesspeople. The policy committee is cutrently investigating the current state of oral archives in the Auckland region and, after gathering further information, may decide to mount a business history oral archive project in 1995. The CBH has no plans at this stage to undertake contract work, although proposals from institutions and companies to write theit histoty would be considered by the policy committee. Instead, the CBH sees itself essentially as a facilitating agency, generating a flow of public goods and external economies that benefits the discipline as a whole. Trends in government funding may, however, result in the CBH exercising'property rights over an increasing proportion of its output in the future, at which point recipients of the newsletter may be called upon to pay a small subscription to cover costs.

64 Tomorrow's History

Preserving Ourstory: Keeping the Records of Women Together

Ellen Elli s

Hanorah Research and Information Service

'The lives of great women will now be read as much as the lives of great men.' Sir on hearing that New Zealand women had won the franchise, 1893. While Sir George Grey should be applauded for his optimistic picture of the future of women's biography, the lives of great women ate still notoriously difficult to document. This is in spite of the best efforts of the writers and researchers of women's history, or 'herstory' as it is now commonly called. The lives of 'great men' and their role in society are often well recorded in the public records of the governing institutions and public companies in which they have, until recently, taken the dominant part. Largely unacknowledged and hidden is the out- standing contribution to society that women have made over the past 150 years through voluntary organisations created in almost every sphere of activity. In many cases, these organisations were formed by women when they were denied entry into clubs and societies set up by men. These women's organisations have had a major impact on the lives, not only of their members, but also of all women and New Zealand society as a whole. As women gathered to fight for the vote, they set precedents. Since then women have continued to form groups to educate them- selves, discuss, protest, lobby for change, to create and display their arts and crafts, entertain each other and play sports, to raise funds and make donations, to care for the sick and aid the needy, to pray and

65 Archifacts look after their children, and as they did so, they created records and archives about théi t members and activities. Unfortunately, many of these records have failed to survive. Research undertaken recently for suffrage commemorative publications has shown that thete is littl e surviving documentation from hundreds of previously active women's organisations. This may be because women's archives have not always been deemed important or worthy enough to keep, even by women themselves. The Preserving Ourstory project aimed to change this for postetity. It set out to encourage women's organisations to preserve their records and archives so that they would be available in the future to help celebrate the contributions and achievements of women of the past. It proposed a number of specific ways to achieve better records and archives keeping. One major objective was achieved in July with the publication by the Alexander Turnbull Library of Archives of Women's Organisations, the 1993 edition of the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts. As well, the project has offered and continues to offer while funds are available Keeping the Record Straight introductory training workshops on records and archives keeping for women's organisations throughout New Zealand. Thete has been an enthusiastic response to the several workshops presented so far. The development of the Preserving Ourstory project was made possible with the backing of the Women's Studies Association (NZ), which sponsored the project proposal and obtained a grant from the NZ Lottery Grants Board. A further grant from the Suffrage Centennial Trust has been obtained for the production of a manual for women's organisations about keeping records and archives. This will be available later in 1993. Also of key importance to the success of the Preserving Ourstory project has been the support of Jock Phillips, Chief Historian, and the assistance of othet staff at the Historical Branch of the Depattment of Internal Affairs.

The Scope of the Project Broadly, the Preserving Ourstory project covers the records and archives of voluntaty organisations set up by women fot women, with women membets, and involved with issues of concern to women. The background to this scope is the relationship between the Preserving Ourstory project and anothet project conceived and

66 Preserving Ourstory developed at the same time, Women Together, a history of women's organisations in New Zealand, edited by Anne Else and published in 1993 by the Historical Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs. Preserving Ourstory has closely paralleled Women Together in its definition of the women's organisations considered for inclusion. Outside its scope are government and business institutions set up by or for women, such as the Ministry of Women's Affairs, and companies and corporate bodies.

Archives of Women's Organisations: The 1993 Edition of the National Register of Archives and Manuscripts The scope of the National Register edition was determined in part by the resources of the project and the availability of records and archives. Originally the Preserving Ourstory project proposed to survey all current women's organisations, as well as repositories, to record the extent of their archival holdings. Because of funding limitations, it was decided to work first towards creating a data base of those records held in established archival repositories. However the range of archival materials which appears is not comprehensive, in terms of either the organisations or the archival repositories represented. In addition it will become out of date as otganisations continue to deposit their records in local and national repositories. It provides a beginning, a preliminary guide to atchives so far located and recorded. It gives an indication of the wide range of women's organisations for which archival materials survive, and also of the variety of archival records held. It is hoped also that it will provide an impetus for further donations of records of women's organisations to archival repositories. Several different approaches were used to gather the information for the data base of repository holdings on which the NRAM edition is based. Initially there was close co-operation with the Women Together publication project, which allowed for the sharing of information gathered from a survey of women's organisations and archival repositories. Through this survey and from other sources, a wide variety of repositories throughout New Zealand, from major institutions to local historical societies with relevant archives, were located and as many as possible were visited. This meant that some archival collections not yet fully listed or arranged and described were recorded and included. However, it was not always possible to

67 Archifacts obtain detailed information about the history of defunct organisations and branches, even from published sources, and this is reflected in the briefness of some entries. To increase the usefulness of the edition as a research tool, it was decided to include any relevant entries which had appeared in previous editions of the National Register. Lynn Benson and David Colquhoun of the Alexander Turnbull Library's Manuscripts and Archives Section prepared the entries about their extensive holdings, and completed the final correcting and preparation of the publication. Also of major importance to the compilation of the edition were staff and volunteers at the 57 repositories whose collections are represented. Often at short notice, they gave their full and generous co-operation during visits, and assisted with corrections and requests for further information. Organisation members also supplied valuable assistance with some entties.

Keeping the Record Straight: Trainin g Workshops The aim of these subsidised workshops is to provide an introduction to records and archives to those who have taken on the records and archives keeping role for their organisation. They are designed to raise awareness of the importance of records and archives, to cover basic definitions and key principles and processes, to alert record keepers to important 'do's and don'ts', especially in regard to preservation and conservation, and to give guidelines about depositing archives with repositories. . One-day workshops have been conducted for a diverse group of women's organisations. Also planned are workshops designed specifically for an organisation, which involve planning and prior consultation with the body's officials. This consultation process will begin the formulation of a draft records and archives policy, which can be discussed and modified during the training process. It is hoped that this introductory training may lead to the archivist appointed seeking further education and training in records and archives. Overall, the Preserving Ours tory project is intended to ensure better archives through better record keeping, so that researchers and writers of herstoty can better document the lives of all great women.

68 Ta Keita I Mahi Ai: What Katy Did Researching a Suffrage Year Photographic Exhibitio n

Jane Tucker

Archivist/Researcher, Wellington

The Trade Union History Project was founded in 1987 with the aim of promoting a wider understanding of the history of trade unions and working people in New Zealand, and to document that history. Its achievements to date include a number of publications, ranging from Stevan Eldred-Grigg's New Zealand Working People 1890-1990 to A Guide to the Archives of the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1937-88 by Cathy Marr, and a documentary (available on video) on the 1951 waterfront dispute, Shattered Dreams. The Project also offers assistance with preserving and arranging labour movement material, and offers financial grants towards research, publications and oral history. To mark Suffrage Centennial Year, the TUHP felt that trade union women's activities, particularly the role of working-class women such as Harriet Morison and othet activists, should be recognised and celebrated. Trade union women's political, social and economic contribution to New Zealand society and the position and status of women since 1893 has been highly significant. The TUHP decided to commemorate this contribution with a photographic exhibition depicting women in the paid workplace. Application was made to the 1993 Suffrage Centennial Trust for funding assistance, and thanks to the generosity of the Trust the exhibition has been made possible. The first major task was to set parameters for the scope of the exhibition. Was it to only include women involved in overt union activities or other action to improve working conditions and wages? Should women in unpaid work be included? What time-span should be covered? Decisions on these questions could only be made once we had seen what there was Out there'. I visited the major research institutions and investigated their photographic holdings, obtaining whenever possible copies of images showing women in the broadest

69 Archifacts sense. Letters and phone-calls to unions and other organisations likely to hold such material led to visits to. those who responded positively. The radical restructuring of the past few years created some difficulty in contacting appropriate unions, but by word of mouth I was able to tap into some outstanding collections both preserved within and currently being consciously created by unions with large or predominantly female membetships. Provincial museums were also canvassed by letter for suitable material. What I did find was a vast array of pictorial material, ranging from photographs, cartoons, posters and art-work to videos such as one on the Rixen dispute (Even Dogs are Given Bones). The range of subjects was wide, if not fully representative of women in the workforce. Images of barmaids at work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fot example, are rare. Moral disapproval that the 'future wives and mothers' of the colony might take up such an occupation may have had as much to do with this as the technical difficulties of making photographs inside buildings, particularly after dark. More frustrating are the stunning images for which no information about the people depicted, the place, date or occasion was recorded. The result of this initial cut into the coal-face of photographic collections was an accumulation of over 600 photocopies, of varying quality, plus descriptive notes from those collections from which it was not possible to get copies. The Dan Long Library at the PSA, as an example, holds pictures of: marches, rallies, pickets (e.g. by dental nurses) workers in their wotkplace (e.g. the Government Printing Office) PSA staff at work and in formal group portraits conference sessions, both business and social Public Service Queen competitions, picnics individual portraits of officials women's meetings, informal groups equal pay campaign photos gathered for publication in No Easy Victory posters and cartoons Similarly, the Farmers Trading Company collection in the Auckland Institute and Museum depicts the activities of a major department store, including: workers in subsidiary factories, e.g. Unity (packing tea and other foodstuffs, making toffee-apples, tents, , oilskins and the )

70 Ta Keita I Mahi Ai

branch staff on the shop floor formal group shots of branch or section staff formal group shots of the entire FTC staff weekend excursions (complete with chaperones in the 1940s) staff picnics 1912-15, staff ball 1956, and farewells telephonists, telephone exchange operators, typing pool, printers training sessions on decimal currency lunchtime in the staff cafeteria product demonstrations Many images ot situations recurred frequently in the collections. Picnics, sporting competitions between workplace teams, group portraits taken on the steps of buildings where conferences or meetings were being held, and more recently marches and demonstrations in support of better working conditions and pay rates featured. Women working at 'unusual' occupations both in the last 25 years (apprentice mechanics) and during wartime in 'manpowered' activities (delivering mail and driving trucks) caught the imagination of some photographers. Othets found their local district a rich source of material, for example William Tyree, who extensively and comprehensively documented a vast range of daily activities in the Nelson region. The examples above are samples of the range of material available which illustrates women in the paid workforce. Equally wide-ranging is the quality of the images, from formally posed professional photographs to less than perfectly focused, over-exposed snapshots which may still capture the imagination or the moment. On the basis of the material collected, the TUHP Women's Committee decided to focus on pictures of women in the workplace and involved in paid work-related activities. The quantity of exciting and unpublished images available meant that the selection had to be tightly focused, while still showing as representative as possible a sample of occupations. The period from which photos would be selected was then established as the 1880s (the first women's trade union, the Dunedin Tailotesses, having been formed in 1889) to the 1940s. This half-century covered the rise and subsequent dwindling away of all-female unions as they were absorbed into the wider union movement, the 'Sweating Commission' which investigated the low pay, poor working conditions and long hours of factory workers in 1890, two wars which saw women take on work previously considered suitable only for males, and the Depression with its devastating effect

71 Archifacts on the economic well-being of the population. The small proportion of Maori women in traditional wage-eatning occupations in the period coveted by the exhibition is teflected in their relative absence from the photographs. In 1926 only 10% of Maori women were in paid employment, and the figure fell to just 4% in 1936. Not until the 1960s, with the large-scale urbanisation of Maori, did Maori women become a much more visible part of the workforce. In addition to the data bank of photocopied images, some oral histoty tapes were made of women who had worked in the 1920s and 1930s. Both the tapes and the photographic material have been deposited at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where they are freely available for those with an interest in working women's history. The pictorial data bank will , it is hoped, be augmented by additional material that is found and copied. The folders of photocopies have been arranged by institution from which the copies ate taken, as all orders for prints will have to be sent directly to the institution holding the original. Any collections or individual photographs which the owner is happy to have copied and lodged in the data bank would be welcomed (contact the Trade Union History Project, Women's Committee, PO Box 27425, Wellington). As for the exhibition, it is currently on show in the greater Wellington area, and it is planned to have it tour the country in 1994- Watch out for it near you!

Suffrage Year in the North

Belinda Battley

National Archives, Auckland

That 1993 is women's suffrage year in New Zealand must by now be known to all but the most reclusive. Innumerable projects to celebrate the centenary of the granting of the right to vote in general elections to women have been set up around the country by a great variety of organisations. It is often suggested by the cynical that such projects smack of tokenism, and are therefore of littl e value, but a survey of projects

72 Suffrage Year in the North carried out and continuing at archives institutions around Auckland has shown that 1993 has provided an opportunity to reveal the hitherto almost invisible half of the history of New Zealand. Women previously defined in terms of their husbands, fathers or sons are now appearing as index entries in their own right, and the realisation is slowly growing that records relating to 'women's issues' are worth retaining. Although women's history was already a growing field before 1993, the suffrage centenary has focused attention on the study of women's contribution to society, helping to bring it more clearly into public view. Archival institutions in the Auckland area have been involved in conducting and assisting with research projects and displays, in sponsoring projects carried out by others, and in helping the many individuals who are using their archives for research. The results of a brief informal survey of archives institutions in Auckland on theit suffrage year projects are given below. I am grateful to all the archivists and librarians who so helpfully provided this information.

Anglican Church Diocese of Auckland Archives • Has been-assisting many researchers on a variety of suffrage projects, including the Papatoetoe Historical Society's study of women in Papatoetoe's past, and a history of orphan homes in the diocese, with particular reference to the matrons.

• In combination with the Women's Resource Centre, has sponsored an oral history project in parishes throughout the diocese. Transcripts and tapes are being collected at the Anglican Archives. Parishes so far involved include St Lukes Mt Albert, St Marks , St Peters Onehunga, St Peters Takapuna, St Georges Epsom, and St Marys by the Sea at Torbay.

Auckland City Ar t Gallery Research Librar y • Has assisted in documenting a number of exhibitions of contemporary Maori and Pacific women artists throughout the year. • Is currently developing and documenting a series of exhibitions with the group title 'Unruly Practices'. The first exhibition is of the work of Carole Shepheard. Others planned for the series include Mary Mclntyre and Christine Hellyer. It is intended that there will be a publication associated with this exhibition.

73 Archifacts

Auckland City Council Archives • Has not had the resources to carry out any projects themselves, but has assisted in other projects, especially the Auckland City Library's research into Ellen Melvill e and Elizabeth Yates.

Auckland City Librarie s • Held an exhibition entitled 'Running the Gauntlet' which gave a historical context to the 1893 election, commemorated the first seven women to enrol to vote, showed examples of contemporary reactions to women's suffrage, and included a tribute to Ellen Melville, a pioneer worker for women's rights who also chaired Auckland's Library Committee for 30 years. The exhibition ran from 1 May to 31 July 1993. • Developed a series of 16 displays which are circulating around Auckland Community Libraries throughout the year. Entitled ¢ Suffrage Sampler — Pae Tukutuku', each display relates to the lif e and work of an individual New Zealand woman, with the exception of one display, called 'Unsung Heroines — Mothers Past and Present'. • Have set up a Suffrage Centennial Women's Register, with the aim of recovering information about the lives of women in the Auckland provincial area, from Cape Reinga to the Waikato, including their social, cultural, political and economic aspects. Anyone with details of female forebears who were born or arrived in Auckland before 1920 is invited to contribute information about them. More information and forms for contributions are available from the Librarian, New Zealand and Pacific Department.

Auckland Institut e and Museum Librar y • The 1993 Suffrage Centennial Trust is funding a project using the records held by the library. The aim is to create a guide to manuscripts by and about women held in the museum's manuscripts collection. The two women carrying out research for this guide have found that the quantity of material by women in the collection is far smaller than that by men, and that many of the papers written by women have been collected under the name of their more famous husband or father. The guide should provide direct access to the writings of these women, as well as to those of more well-known women whose papers were collected in their own right. It is hoped that the guide will be completed by the end of 1993.

74 Suffrage Year in the North

Methodist Church of New Zealand, Auckland Regional Archives • Has provided material for articles for the Wesley Historical Journal, which has as its main theme this year women's history. Also provided sources for a book to be published this year on New Zealand women serving in the Solomon Islands Mission, written by Daphne Beniston. • Many researchers into New Zealand women have been using the archives this year, and it is noted that church newspapers often contain obituaries of women which include much biographical detail. The archives also holds records from the Wesleyan Maori Mission, which contain a number of obituaries of Maori women.

Museum of Transport and Technology Archives • Was involved in setting up a display on Jean Batten at the Auckland branch of the National Library of New Zealand in March and April. • Is also involved in the development and provision of background information for a special 'live day' with the theme of women's work to be held at the Museum in September.

National Archives, Auckland Regional Office • Two volunteers from the NZ Society of Genealogists spent many hours compiling an index to the 1892 women's suffrage petition held by National Archives. A copy of the index, and the index to the 1893 petition, are now available to researchers. • Is currently running a small exhibition on the theme of 'Women and Work', consisting of three mobile display boards showing examples of archives relating to women's employment and invovement in education, health and industrial relations. These boards may be available for outside displays in the future. • Has compiled a Guide to Women's Sources at National Archives Auckland, which will soon be available. The guide is divided into sections by broad subject area, including employment and business; politics; the law; birth, death, marriage and divorce; health; education; land and property. Sections will be available separately if the entire guide is not required. The intention is to improve access to sources in the archives relating to women, as traditionally these have tended to be obscured by the far greater volume of material relating to men.

75 Archifacts

North Shore City Council Archives • Has been involved with the North Shore Libraries in creating a display of histotical newspapet articles about women of the North Shore. The display opens in September at the Devonpott Public Libtary.

University of Auckland Architectur e Librar y • Assisted in providing background information fot the 'Women in Architecture' exhibition. Resources used included the Shephetd Collection, which provides biographical information on architects in New Zealand, including newspaper and journal articles, original photographs, and ephemera. Collections of enrolment lists and graduation lists were used to trace women who attended the school. Another source was the information collected at the 50th Jubilee of the School of Architecture in 1977, at which time people attending were invited to fil l in information sheets about their work. The collection of architectural drawings held in the archives was also used. A problem which appeared in the course of the research was that generally the name appearing on architectural drawings is that of the head of the firm of architects rather than the individual architect involved. Thus, the work of individual woman architects working in larger firms has been difficult, if not impossible, to trace. Currently students in the Women in Architecture course are interviewing woman architects, and the interviews may be collected for the archives.

Other Institution s Institutions not running suffrage centenary projects generally stated either that they were currently involved in other major events which precluded additional projects, ot that their collection area was one in which women did not traditionally appear, and so they felt that they did not have sufficient material to warrant a suffrage project.

76 Suffrage Year in the South

Dr Dorothy Page

History Department, University of Otago

Dunedin is a city with a strong sense of its past. We are proud of our part in the suffrage campaign of a century ago and the women — Anna Stout, Harriet Morison, Marion Hatton and others — who organised it so efficiently. The City Council is supportive of suffrage year and has marked it by naming a number of streets after distinguished Dunedin women and putting together a reference booklet of local women's organisations. Environment Access was allowed to plant a cluster of camellia bushes in the Octagon. The Council has given permission for a mass banner march (organised by the YWCA ) on 17 Septembet; its own celebration for that day is a talkfest in the Octagon, to be followed by entertainment and a celebrity debate. Public institutions ate commemorating the centenary in their distinctive ways. At the Otago Museum, 36 women's organisations and individual women have mounted a stunning exhibition, 'Carrying the Banner: One Hundred Years of Women's Votes', which represents various ethnic communities and groups ranging from the Salvation Army to the Prostitutes' Collective. The Otago Early Settlers Museum has an historical exhibition on women in sport, and a winter lecture programme focusing on women's skills. The Public Library launched its popular 'Lunch and Learn' series with a suffrage session. The Art Gallery plans an exhibition of works by Otago women artists, past and present. University and university-related events abound. Five University of Otago Suffrage Centennial Postgraduate scholarships have been made available to women. The speaker at this year's Suffrage Day open lecture is Baroness Warnock, a distinguished English academic, philosopher and educationist. The New Zealand Historical Association began the year with a Dunedin conference focused on women's history. The Law Faculty held a special series of four lectures by prominent women lawmakers. All the speakers in the Zoology

77 Archifacts

Department's open lecture programme are women, as are those in the ptogtamme of the Otago Branch of the Royal Society. Women have been asked to deliver prestige memorial lectures, such as the Guest and Hocken lectures. The Classical Association had a suffrage session, as did ARANZ. The Hocken Library is mounting an exhibition illustrating women's contribution to the Hocken collection. Women's organisations are celebrating the past and challenging the future in their own ways. A Suffrage Liaison Committee centred on the YWCA keeps a Diary, sends out a newsletter and is compiling an archive of the year's events. The Otago Btanch of the National Council of Women addressed a widespread concern when it organised a weekend seminar on the theme Towatds a Non-Violent Society'. The Federation of University Women presented the university with a seat to commemorate its first woman graduate. Many organisations have heard speakers on the women's movement in Otago. Local theatre has a female focus, from the premiere of 's hit 'By Degrees' — about four adult women students at Otago University — at the Fortune Theatre, to the new dramatisation by , Burns Fellow, of Mary Lee's moving autobiography. There have been all-women performances of women's music and an exciting festival of women's song. The most ambitious public suffrage event this year combines theatre, music and history, professional skill, council support and institutional and voluntary organisation energy in a satisfying way. 'Heroines, Hussies and High, High Fliers' was written by Renee for ZONTA and the Otago Early Settlers Museum. With City Council backing and a huge cast, the pageant will run for four nights in the Regent Theatre, a splendidly exuberant celebration of 200 years of women in Otago.

78 Book Reviews

Keith Sinclair. Halfway Round the Harbour: An Autobiography. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993. 228pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-14017-985-2.

The death of Keith Sinclair, the removal from our midst of a commanding figure in our historical and literary world, can only be deeply regretted. This, his final throw, his autobiography, leaves many questions concerning career and character unanswered, which is almost certainly how he meant it to be. The book falls into four natural divisions: childhood and education, including a hands-off involvement in the Second World War, to which must be added  chapter on his family background which comes much later in the book; a series of chapters on being a university teacher and historian; chapters, not sequential, on his association with writers and writing, particularly poetry; and a final section on other activities that included the political climax of fleeting membership of the House of Reptesentatives. The fift h component of his life, women, is curiously absent, apart from his confession that he spent more time thinking about sex than about history. 'We were poor, but I had no sense of poverty', is the conclusion of the first two chapters, which outline in carefully structured prose the lif e of a 1920s boy growing up as the eldest in a family of ten children. While regretting that the young Sinclair was deprived of the stimuli and example that would have been provided by a different home environment, it is clear that for Keith himself there was only the security of a home which gave him a sense of belonging and a degree of love that outweighed the unpleasantness of drunkenness and occasional wife-beating. An untemarkable four years at Mount Albert Grammar School provide no very significant events. The two principal landmarks are a broken pelvis (rugby) and a brief and quite unsuccessful petiod working on a farm. As yet the young Sinclair had not been confronted by either challenge or precept that would indicate the path he was to follow. Like so many of his impecunious contemporaries, he drifted

79 Archifacts into school-teaching. As he points out later, teachers' training colleges were major means of upwards social mobility. It was a route that was to change the nature of university teaching: the traditional professor was to make way for the more radical newcomer. Fortunately the urge to write both prose and poetry remained, and the study of Maori language was begun. Training college final exams ('ridiculously easy') and Auckland University College (no college lif e for part-timers) ended with a call-up for military service. This period saw more education than actual war: the education of an as yet rathet ingenuous young man in how others lived and how he must conduct himself in differeing environments, and education in its more formal sense as an extramural student of the University of New Zealand. In tetms of life-enrichening experience, it was all rathet ordinary. Towards the war's close Sinclair went to England with a draft of naval cadet ratings to undertake a course that was not completed until aftet the war in Europe had ended. His voyage and his eager reaction to the cultural lif e of London will be familiar to many of his generation. His conviction of his own superior ability was not severely tested, and he passed out of the coutse as a junior naval officer. He evaded a posting to a 'Hunt' class destroyer that would have involved him in the war against Japan, and returned for discharge in New Zealand after a flying visit to France and Germany. His love of theatre and the great art galleries had deepened just as his determination to write poetry and prose had sttengthened. As an extramural student he had passed enough units for a BA degree that excluded History III , granted as a wartime concession. Sinclair returned to New Zealand to pursue an MA degree in History on a rehabilitation bursary. An interesting omission at Auckland was the tutorial system, a feature for 'rehab' students at Cantetbury that brought intellectual solace (and degrees) to many an adult returned serviceman. Such relief for Sinclair was found not in lectures but in discussions with contemporaries Bob Chapman and Ken Smithyman. Matriage in 1947 brought financial security but not the exhilaration and pink-spectacled view prompted by a second marriage in the early 1970s. The reader is spared the details, and is left to applaud the privacy that shelters both the mother of his four sons and the companion of his latet years. But this is the autobiography of a major New Zealand historian. How does History fare? Sinclair's wartime degree had not contributed

80 Book Rew'ews very much, and he tells us that he learned to become a professional historian during study leave in England in the 1950s, searching historical records. He wasn't the first to write New Zealand history from the record, Rusden having done so almost a century earlier, but he was in the vanguard of the work that would promote New Zealand history from the amateurism of The Long White Cloud to the professionalism of The Origins of the Maori Wars. Here the reviewer must make allowance for the perils that go with being the first in any field. The fresh evidence, the degree of insight and objectivity, has not been balanced by the conclusions of other minds. It is probably too soon for judgement in Sinclair's case, but some trends are already clear. Sinclair's first publication, The Maori Land League: An Examination Into the Source of a New Zealand Myth, has been seriously challenged; The Origins of the Maori Wars is not now regarded as covering more than a phase of those origins; the Pelican History of New Zealand is now a good read rather than an innovative work taking New Zealand out of the field of British Imperial history and placing it more appropriately in a developing stream of Pacific history. But the absence of a driving sense of history, particularly recognition of the importance of southern politics, is now more widely felt. And so on — both expectations and attitudes have changed, due in large degree to both the example and the teaching of Sinclair himself. He has coached many of his own critics in the use of historical evidence. Perhaps it is in researching and writing his best biography, William Fernher Reeves, that Sinclair comes closest to reaching his full potential as both writer and historian. Nash, in the ebb tide of Labour idealism, may have eluded him. There is, too, Sinclair the teacher, the head of a history department, and although the insensitivity in his handling of Professor Rutherford (who had greatly helped him in the presentation of The Origins of the Maori Wars) is to be regretted, it may be here that he made his greatest contribution as an historian. In extending the areas of study, particularly the important place given to New Zealand histoty, in his emphasis on research in primary sources and in his careful selection of staff, Sinclair fully justifies his claim to have made the Auckland History Department the outstanding department in New Zealand. Sinclair confesses to more pleasure in winning the Hubert Church prize for prose for his biography of Reeves than for any tribute as an historian. The strength of his devotion to poetry and writing is a cementing quality of the book. The major events of his lif e each

81 Archifacts demanded a poem, as did so much in nature that moved him. His discussion of the literary scene and its creators, despite the same condescending criticism that is aimed at most of the historians who are mentioned, has an intimacy and warmth not present elsewhere. Curiously, he tends to atbitrate in the literary squabbles of the period without, it seems, realising that the differences that existed between and , Brasch and Baxter, Eric McCormick and others enriched the fabric of a New Zealand literature and in no way diminished it. He does, however, demonsttate beyond dispute that he belonged to that select band. In the section dealing with his foray into politics in the Eden electorate, and other committee and public responsibilities (surprisingly few) there is cause for concern. The reader has already been made aware that the facts of a situation must not be petmitted to spoil a good story. In this section there is a disturbing unawareness of the standard of factual analysis that could teasonably be expected from a major historian. As a Trustee of the National Library (whose resignation was accepted before his term was up) he disparages the committee of the Friends of the Turnbull Library as the 'Enemies of Turnbuir. These enemies, these 'paranoid guerilla fighters', included men of the stamp of Don McKenzie, Ormond Wilson, . The disparaged Les Gandar was in fact obliged to wait twice on the televant Minister before the name of Turnbull Library was permitted on the outside of the new building, an indication of the attitudes of the time. Again, Sinclair's shared bottle with Muldoon may have marked a pleasant evening, but it had littl e to do with the beginnings of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, which began after ten years of effort as a project of the Historical Publications Branch of the Department of Internal Affaits, and which was in fact rescued from an attempted coup by the National Libtary, which proposed to finance the project from its new book fund. Sinclair knew of this but did nothing about it. Sinclair was also the most vocal member of the Advisory Committee for the Historical Publications Branch, which he does not mention. Although this Branch was dedicated to research in New Zealand history from primary sources and to the maintenance of the highest standards in publishing, all close to his heart, Sinclair's open antagonism was such that the Committee was called with increasing infrequency.

82 Book Reviews

The book does not give the complete man, but is more like an outline of which he wearied as it progressed. As much space is given to the first, inconsequential patt of his lif e as to his career, written with a care as to style and presentation altogether absent from the jottings of the end-run of the book. His worth as an historian demands separate treatment, but there are pointers throughout the book. Here are two from the same page (p.172). Sinclair says that before The Origins of the Maori Wars most books on New Zealand history were written from Governors' despatches held in the Public Record Office. They may have been written mostly from despatches, but not ftom PRO sources — rather from the despatches published in Parliamentary Papers (the Blue Books of the time). The difference between the published version and the original is an early lesson for a New Zealand historian. And Sinclair was early to find — he couldn't be a student of Rutherford's without finding — that Governor George Grey could fictionalise in his despatches. Yet his final work on Grey, his essay in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, depicts Grey as an ideal administrator without fault. A more certain point to make is that as historian, poet, writer and administrator, Sinclair exerted an influence in New Zealand not exceeded by any historian before him.

Ian Wards Wellington

Barbara Brookes, Charlott e Macdonald and Margaret Tennant (editors). Women in History 2: Essays on Women in New Zealand. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1992. 321pp. $34.95.

This collection of eleven essays, three of which have been published previously, builds on Women in History, published in 1986. It is both a continuation and an extension. While the first volume contained no essays about Maori women, this one has two: Judith Binney's thought-provoking 'Some Observations on the Status of Maori Women', which draws on her interviews with Ringatu women, and Barbara Brookes and Margaret Tennant's 'Maori and Pakeha Women: Many Histories, Divergent Pasts?', which is an attempt to look at contact and divergence between Maori and Pakeha women, and provides a synthesis of recent work in the

83 Archifacts fields of women's, gender and race studies in New Zealand — but looks at that work with what the authors call 'doubled vision', so that the dual past of women in New Zealand can be recovered and the significance of gender in structuring society can be acknowledged. This is a useful essay that will , we must hope, set historians to thinking about ways of reinterpreting evidence and work already to hand. For that, of course, is one of the issues that is most significant about the study of women's history in this country (with some notable exceptions, it is surely not too rash to say the study of history in general): there is no depth of historiography. If an issue has been studied once, it tends not to be looked at again. This collection fails to fall into that trap. While none of the essays is on the same topic, some address a similar theme. Those by Margaret Tennant, Btonwyn Dalley and Barbara Brookes, on women's homes, Te Oranga Reformatory, and Seacliff Asylum respectively, look at the way in which women outside the tespectable tier of society were managed by the authorities, and the ways in which such women in turn manipulated those authorities. Such work, by looking beyond the records of the institutions involved, by refusing to see the women as passive receivers of society's discipline, by acknowledging work done overseas in similar fields, and by the use of nicely reasoned argument, adds to the historiography of institutionalisation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Zealand. Not all the essays are as successful. Sally K. Parker's study of farm women in the Waikato uses oral testimony to discuss the lives of farmers' wives in the 1950s. Interviews are an excellent method of obtaining evidence which would otherwise be virtually impossible to uncover. While the excerpts used enliven her narrative, Parker's study rarely rises above generalisation. She fails to place these women into any context — we do not know, fot instance, whethet theit opinions were any different from those of their urban contemporaries, or whether the behaviour of theit husbands was any different from that of urban men. It is a common fault to use oral evidence anecdotally rather than as rigorously as documentary evidence. In her study of industrial conscription during the Second World War, Deborah Montgomerie uses it in a much more satisfactory way to support her argument that man-powering brought few new opportunities for women.

84 Book Reviews

This is a useful collection because it includes essays on areas which have not previously been drawn to the general reader's notice. A very helpful Guide to Furthet Reading includes both published work and graduate theses completed after 1985. I have a minor complaint about the production: while the cover illustration is very attractive, it is a shame that the paper on which the rest of the book is printed is of inferior quality. As the editors say in their introduction, there are few books which take women's experience in New Zealand in the past as their prime focus. For that reason, collections such as this perform a major function in making that experience more accessible.

Megan Hutching Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs

Judith Devaliant. Kate Sheppard: A Biography. Auckland: Penguin, 1992. $39.95.

Frances Willard was, and is remembered as, one of the most prominent leaders of the United States and World's Women's Christian Temperance Unions, and the National and International Councils of Women. Kate Sheppard was, and is remembered as, one of the most prominent leaders of the New Zealand Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the National and International Councils of Women, the successful campaign for women's suffrage in New Zealand, and, to a lesser extent, the Canterbury Women's Institute. Both women were prolific and influential writers and speakers for their cause, both had international reputations and served as role models for their contemporaries and for following generations of temperance women and feminists. Of course, there were differences. Willard was a spinster; Sheppard married twice and bore a son. Willard did not survive to see the twentieth century; Sheppard lived to see the female franchise achieved in Britain and the United States, Lady Astor and Elizabeth McCombs elected to Parliament in their respective countries, and prohibition narrowly defeated in New Zealand while coming to fruition in the US. But the difference

85 Archifacts between these two remarkable women .which most concerns us here is something ovet which neithet had any control: their biographers. Willard penned an autobiography in 1889 which has served her several biographers well, and also left a number of personal papers and diaries for them to sift through.1 This is, I suppose, part of the reason why Willatd's latest biographer, Ruth Bordin, made such a fine job of presenting her lif e to a modern audience.2 By contrast, Judith Devaliant was faced with the unenviable task of piecing together the lif e of a woman which, whilst relatively easy to untangle at the public level, has, in regard to the private sphere, been almost completely hidden from the prying eyes of researchers and readers. This was not entirely Sheppard's own doing. A number of her personal papers were destroyed by the Lovell-Smith daughters after her death, presumably for reasons which they felt were justified at the time. Devaliant, having spent an impressive number of years researching Kate's life, nonetheless came to the conclusion that sufficient material remained to enable her to construct a biography of 'the lif e of the woman who led the struggle' for the vote. Alas, unlike Bordin, she has failed to do her subject justice. Bordin explains that she was first attracted to Willard as a subject while researching the American WCTU, but came to the conclusion that 'Frances Willard played a much larger role in nineteenth-century America than her leadership of the temperance cause, and women's part in the temperance movement was much larger than Willard. Each deserved a separate volume.'3 This is exactly what Bordin did, first completing Woman and Temperance, before going on to research and write her fine biography of America's 'Queen of Temperance'.4 One cannot help but think that Devaliant, whose bibliography makes no reference to Bordin's earlier publications, may well have benefited from considering this model. By relying so heavily on Kate's public career, Devaliant has fallen into the trap of writing a history of the struggle for the vote (as the cover sub-titles suggest) which does justice neither to the movement nor to Sheppard. Devaliant mistakenly credits Kate with having single-handedly dragged the women of New Zealand, not only towards enfranchisement, but also toward all manner of reforms; For example: The repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act was one of Kate's prime goals. Many women in the WCTU disapproved of her open discussion of a question which they found distasteful, but Kate had no difficulty in speaking frankly about sexually transmitted disease.5

86 Boole Reviews

This is a startling assertion, considering that the WCTU had, at its first national convention in 1886 — which Kate did not attend — tesolved that 'the Union strenuously oppose the operation of the Contagious Diseases Act [CD Act]; and that, on the meeting of Parliament, the Union endeavour to obtain women's suffrage.'6 In writing that Kate was a strong supporter of the CD Act repeal campaign Devaliant is perfectly correct. In her capacity as editor of the Union's page in The Prohibitionist from 1890, and the WCTU's own magazine, the White Ribbon, from 1895, Kate was active in promoting a whole range of reform issues. But the impetus was not Kate's alone. She would have been the first to admit that she was only one of many within the Union who laboured to achieve their Utopian vision — the pure society. Moreover, Devaliant gives no evidence to back her claim that 'many women in the WCTU disapproved of [Kate's] open discussion of a subject . . . they found distasteful'. This assertion misses the whole point of the Union's endeavours, at Sheppard's expense as well as that of her white ribbon sisters.

Devaliant fails to make adequate connection between the Union's purity and temperance agendas and the suffrage campaign. Her book would have served its readers far better had she spurned her encyclopaedic recording of the passage of the petitions and the electoral amendment bills in favour of some deeper consideration of why it was that so many women not only wanted, but were prepared to fight for, the vote. Devaliant seems uncomfortable with the notion that Kate, like all women in the WCTU, really believed that alcohol was an evil which, while it remained, precluded significant societal improvement. By working towards the political and economic emancipation of women the Union believed it was working towards a point in time at which women would have the power to exert the moral authority on which their claims were founded.7

By choosing to mix what is nominally a biography with an in-depth account of a national public campaign, Devaliant has left each element insufficiently teased out. Kate was, albeit perhaps the most prominent, only one of the hundreds of women who gave so much energy to a very long campaign. Kate was working within several organisations which deserve consideration in their own right. As Bordin points out, a biography is not the place to do that, but by giving theit work such prominence within the context of one woman's life, Devaliant has skewed the perspective in which they are

87 Archifacts seen, with the result that Kate has a starring role in organisations which appear to have a membership of one. There are some unfortunate typogtaphical etrors which further undermine the book's ctedibility. A few examples: A proper name is misspelled on page vii (Polglaze should read Polglase), while the bibliography refers to the Minutes of the New Zealand Women's Temperance Union (p.236). The omission of 'Christian' may seem minot, but was crucial to the Union's identity and, in the context of book production, betrays a lack of critical editing. Still in the bibliography, Patricia Sargison is erroneously referred to as Sarginson (p.235). In the body of the text I was constantly frustrated by what I felt wete an inadequate number of footnotes. Devaliant makes innumerable general claims, few of which can be checked. These errors and omissions make a mockery of the author's hope that her book will 'provide a reliable account of Kate Sheppatd's lif e and work which can be used as a starting point for further study'.8 While I congratulate Devaliant for providing a biography which is long overdue, I hope that she gives enough thought to her current project — a biography of Anna Stout — to avoid the flaws of structure and detail which mar fCate Sheppard: A Biography.

Sarah Daltot; New Zealand Historical Atlas

' Frances E. Willard , Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman, Chicago, 1889. 2 Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography, Chapel Hil l and London, 1986. 3 Bordin, 1986, p.xiv. 4 Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-19ÛÛ, Philadelphia, 1981. 5 Judith Devaliant, Kate Sheppard: A Biography, Penguin, Auckland, 1992, pp. 165-6. 6 Minutes of the New Zealand Women's Christian Temperance Union, at the first annual meeting held in Wellington, 23rd February, 1886, Wellington, 1886, ñ.14· On Kate's non-attendance, see Devaliant, p.23. 7 Devaliant, pp.31-2. 8 Devaliant, p.2.

Willia m Renwick (editor). Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights: The Treaty ofWaitangi in International Contexts. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991. 248pp. $24-95.

It might be thought that given the flood of books, articles and reports on the Treaty of Waitangi in recent years, nothing new remains to

88 Book Reviews be said. But this book, based on the 1990 Stout Conference, sets the Treaty in international contexts which have all too often been ignored in the past. It does not produce any crucial big insight but it is a book which merits close study, for often the most important material comes in asides, throwaway lines or footnotes. These often report research which questions some established orthodoxies. One of our most cherished ideas about the Treaty is that it is unique. But Keith Sorrenson demonstrates that as far as the basic text of the English version of the Treaty is concerned, there is littl e that had not been expressed in earlier British colonial treaties. Drawing on some recent research of Sir , he tells us that the British-Sherbo agreement of 1825, negotiated with tribal rulers in the Gambia, is almost identical with the Waitangi Treaty (p.17). Not only does this diminish the concept of uniqueness, it also does away with the idea, beloved of 'conspiracy theorists', that Hobson was insufficiently briefed and hence the Treaty was never seriously intended by the British. Another plank in the 'conspiracy theory' is the view that James Busby and Henry Williams were land grabbers who framed the Treaty in a way that would promote their personal interests. Sorrenson, however, tells us that Henry Williams' translation, a 'creative reworking of the main English provisions into a saleable Maori text' (p.29), gave the Treaty its unique quality. One only has to think of his phrase, 'te tino rangatiratanga', which has been so useful to Maoridom in recent years. As for Busby, he has his reputation rescued by a footnote to the editor's concluding chapter, which reports Tom Bennion's finding that the reference to 'Estates Forests Fisheries' in Article Two of the Treaty 'is unusual in British treaty language and reflects Busby's contribution to the drafting' (p.240, note 12). Far from being the villains of the Treaty, Busby and Williams are emerging as its guardian angels, contributing its unique qualities. If the book corrects some of our views of the Treaty, it is also interesting for the conflicting views of contributors. Unfortunately these differences are rather muted. Occasional comments critical of the Treaty are made as asides and are not followed up or argued through. Furthermore, some of the best contributors — for example, Judge E.T.J. Durie, M.P.K. Sorrenson and Alan Ward — are associated with the Waitangi Tribunal and share the editor's favourable view of the Treaty. For this reason, the book as a whole, despite its international perspectives, tends to come back to 1990

89 Archifacts orthodoxies about the Treaty. The potential for new thinking is not fully realised. One of the issues is whether the Treaty is to be regarded as New Zealand's founding document and whether Judge Durie is right in his view that without Waitangi there would be no lawful authority for the Pakeha presence in New Zealand. One presumes that citizenship of the country one is born in is a basic human right as far as present-day New Zealanders are concerned; but what of the situation in 1840? Sir Keith Sinclair is quoted as arguing that Pakeha did not need any 'lawful authority' to be here — they just needed a chief or tribe willin g to accept them. There was no government to possess sovereignty or negotiate a treaty. Sorrenson begins the book by dissenting from Sinclair's view and Renwick, in his concluding essay, refers to 'the unique status of the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document under which an indigenous people and settlers from a vastly different culture were intended to live together peaceably in the same country' (p.207). However, Alan Ward, despite his admiration for the Treaty, does not accept the view that the Maori-Pakeha relationship began- in 1840. 'There was', he writes, 'mutually enriching association from trade, travel and intermarriage for half a century before the Treaty of Waitangi. Neither people, by 1840, was wholly ttaditional, wholly separable from the other' (p. 129). By 1840 there were some 2000 overseas settlers in New Zealand, and many thousands more had come and gone in the previous half-century. Settlers had already made their own accommodations with Maori. The Treaty was between Crown and Maori, with settlers excluded. It was not about settlement or the right to remain. Arguably, it was the foundation document for colonial-style central government and for the preservation of Maori rights under that government. One of the puzzles about the Treaty is the prestige it has gained in recent times. I.C. Campbell, who refers to the Treaty as having 'as ambiguous and confused an identity and meaning as it did at the be ginning' (p.81), points out that all the similar treaties in Polynesia 'had limited lives as all were overtaken by events, and none is in force today' (p.69). Sorrenson tells us that most of the African treaties 'had no subsequent significance' (p.19). Presumably the reason is that they were foundation documents for colonialism and vanished with it. Malama Meleisea observes that 'most Pakeha are bewildered at the credence given by Maori to an old colonial document' (p.130). Campbell identifies the revival of interest

90 Book Reviews in the Treaty as a likely problem for future historians (p.67). Judge Durie atttibutes its current pre-eminence to 'the most dogged determination on the part of Maori never to allow the Tteaty to slip from view . . . despite the aspersions cast upon it by lawyers' (pp. 158-9). Renwick couples this with 'a dawning perception among Pakeha that their own moral integtity was at stake — that what was happening to Maori was wrong and ought not to continue in a national community in which Maori as well as Pakeha should be treated fairly' (p.213). However, thete remains the problem of why a people with an awakening conscience should choose to operate through the Treaty, rather than by other means. Alan Ward expresses well the ambivalence which many historians feel. On the one hand he thinks that, understood as a political compact, the Treaty 'is a subtle instrument of enormous worth' (p. 127). But he also thinks it has 'been put at risk because it has been asked to serve tasks for which it was not designed' (p. 115). Alison Quentin-Baxter wonders 'whether the Treaty, on its own, can bear all the weight that is sometimes put on it' (p. 110). Both agree it is but one strand in a complex of relationships. One of the main problems with the Treaty is whether we attempt to take literally the meanings which we think applied in 1840 (complicated by the variant versions), or whether we attempt to apply its 'spirit', or 'principles'. The dilemma is particularly acute in relation to the concept of 'sovereignty', and the related concept 'te tino rangatiratanga'. Both concepts have changed with time. Malama Meleisea asks, 'Would the Maori have fared better if their chiefly institutions had been fostered rather than undermined over the past 150 years? And if they had been, would the Maori of today accept such authoritarian institutions?' (p. 133). But if Maori institutions and attitudes have changed over 150 years, so also have there been changes among the British and among Pakeha New Zealanders. Paul McHugh, in a closely argued chapter, states that the concept of sovereignty does not mean today what it meant to those who drafted the Treaty. It is not altogether clear what he thinks the term meant in 1840, but he states that later, under the influence of A.V. Dicey, it came to have the meaning of paramount and singular power for the Crown. Hence the Maori and English versions of the Treaty may not have been as incompatible in 1840 as they appear today. McHugh also points out that nation states ate now becoming mote and more accepting of international limitations on

91 Archifacts sovereignty. Sorrenson refers to an earlier concept of 'domestic dependent nations', put forward by the American Chief Justice Marshall in 1831 in relation to the Indians of the United States. The idea that sovereignty is paramount and indivisible is thus under question from more than one angle. The book's title and its content seem to share the common assumption that 'indigenous rights' and the Treaty of Waitangi are synonymous. Although the book looks at other countries which have no equivalent treaty, it does not explore the rights Maori might have without Waitangi. There is an interesting chapter by Pat O'Shane, who opposes a treaty between Aborigines and non- Aboriginal Australians because this would deflect attention from 'basic demands for social justice in the spheres of the law, housing, health, education, and land rights' (p. 147). The possibility that this may have happened in New Zealand is not explored. Looking to the future, it is arguable that the Treaty may not long have the prestige it had in 1990, when this book was put together. The time will surely come when New Zealand severs its connection with the British Crown, and it is inevitable that in varying ways it will come more under the influence of Asia. In that context, Waitangi, the foundation document of British colonialism, is unlikely to retain its. influence. We will not be able to ignore the challenge of maintaining indigenous rights in a context of multiculturalism. In such a situation we will have to seek an alternative basis for such rights. There are several references in the book to the work of the United Nations and to the Draft Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This could be of crucial importance in the future, and it is regrettable that the topic is not pursued. The book, therefore, is disappointing in not following through the differences between speakers, and tantalizing in its references to promising areas not explored. But many of the contributions are of high quality, and it is certainly one of the better books available on the Treaty and indigenous rights. It is full of interesting ideas and opens up areas on which many more books will have to be written.

J.M.R. Owens Palmerston North

92 Book Reviews

G.V. Butterwort h and S.M. Butterworth . The Maori Trustee. Wellington: The Maori Trustee, n.d. 172pp. $39.95. G.V. Butterwort h and H.R. Young. Maori Affairs/Nga Take Maori. Wellington: Iwi Transition Agency/Te Tira Ahu Iwi, 1990. 139pp./151. pp. $54.95.

The Maori Trustee announces its significance with a cover photograph of a waka huia, a receptacle containing both a precious huia feather and a greenstone hei tiki: signs of a rangatita. This underscores an important theme of this work: that the Maori Trustee, while an expression of Western legal thinking, also reflects a Maori dimension; he or she acts as a rangatira. In Maori tribal society the tangatira exhibited some of the qualities of the Trustee, being responsible for the economic, social and spiritual integrity of the iwi or hapu. Both the Maori Trustee and the rangatira were also particularly concerned with caring for and maintaining the land. The similarity in the responsibilities of these offices is made explicit in an Aftetword by the present Trustee, who argues that he can play an important part in restoring 'the damaged mana and dignity' of Maori through the development of their lands as well as the restoration of cultural and spiritual values. Another important similarity between the Maori Trust Office and the rangatira is their desire to assert their individual sovereignty or autonomy. The Maori Trustee is a physical manifestation of this desire and an attempt to reach out to present and future Maori clients. The rhetoric of chieftainship in the text also seems intended to align the Trustee with the current political assertion of tino rangatiratanga or the sovereignty of Maori (see pp. 156-9). The Maori Trustee as history makes the usual claims to objectivity and truthfulness; it certainly is a workmanlike view of the influences and development, of the Maori Trustee (and its predecessors) since the nineteenth century. As a creature of the legislature, the Trustee occupies an ambiguous historical and legal position. A tecent Trustee described himself as 'walking ... a narrow defile on a course chosen by someone else with stones raining down upon his head from the beneficial owners on one bank and the lessees on the other' (p.98). Frequently, the Trustee has become the whipping boy for the government, being given responsibilities for disposing of 'uneconomic'

93 Archifacts lands which antagonised many Maori and turned them against the Trustee as yet another insensitive and colonialist agency of the Pakeha. The state has also been frequently tempted to avail itself of the Trustee's client funds in order to finance general Maori programmes which if more properly financed by the state itself might have antagonised the Pakeha electorate. The Trustee has also suffered under various political and bureaucratic regimes. It has experienced a sometimes awkward and even conflicting relationship with other parts of the bureaucracy, notably Maori Affairs, Treasury, and the judges of the Maori Land Court. The Maori Trustee is based on an interesting array of historical source materials. The Butterworths raise interesting questions about the status of some written documents, notably departmental reports which manage, without mendacity, to conceal anything of interest. They found departmental files to be far more productive (p.56). A particular strength is the use of an extensive number of interviews with past and present members of the Trust Office and Maori Affairs. This has enabled the Butterworths to highlight the individuals behind the bureaucratic and political actions: they are scrupulous in heaping praise or odium upon the officials and misguided policies in relation to Maori clients of the Trustee. The oral history interviews vividly portray the recent events up to about 1990; in particular, the struggles between the Trustee, representing Maori clients, and the then Iwi Transition Agency. The very personal antagonisms which the Butterworths judiciously represent demonstrate how much of recent public policy reform has been a mixture of high-minded ideals and executive ad-hocery. The Maori Trustee is a case study of the dangers of poorly executed policy in a politically touchy area. If I have any criticisms of The Maori Trustee, they relate to the organisation and form of the history. At times I found myself becoming confused by the frequency with which I was referred backwards or forwards to points in other parts of the text. I wondered if the strictly chronological plan was entirely adequate, or whether a more thematic approach might not have been successful. Much more could have been made of the theme of rangatiratanga, or of the issue of race in the politics of policy-making or bureaucratic appointments. At times too, the entire text seemed pedestrian and bogged down in legislative minutiae. Perhaps a more intellectually provocative analysis could have been attempted. This, however, is a fault of much New Zealand history writing.

94 Book Reviews

Maori Affairs or Nga Take Maori shares many of the same historical themes with The Maori Trustee. This is not surprising, since for many years the Trustee was part of the Department of Maori Affairs. Given the latter's role as the key agent of the Pakeha-dominated government and legislature, the history of the Department deals with the larger histotical canvas of Maori-Pakeha relations. Thtee distinct organisations in their time have served as this central agency: the Protectorate, the Native Department and Maori Affairs. They have all been concerned with 'regulating relationships' between Maori and Pakeha (p. 18). As institutions they have become 'instruments of management' (p.35) fot the colonising power to use on Maori. Inevitably, the Department often served as a mini-government (p.42). These citations highlight an important dimension of this history; it is a study of the institution responsible for controlling Maori and bringing them under the colonial regime. One of its primary tasks was to wrest control of rangatiratanga from the hands of chiefs and leaders of Maori resistance. This history is also a study of the physical, legislative and political forms of violence, resistance and transformation of colonisation within Aotearoa. By 1990 the Maori leadership of the Department was seeking to move buteaucratic and financial hegemony away from the Pakeha-oriented governing circle and out to the very iwi which the Department and its predecessors had sought to weaken and dominate. Rangatiratanga now voiced a Maoti demand for mana motuhake rather than a Pakeha expectation of assimilation, amalgamation or integration. This contest remains undecided. Maori Affairs is not entirely successful in the representation of this contest. It is limited by the requirements of the original commission, which meant the authors relied on secondary literature. The production too, with its glossy paper, is more redolent of an elaborate departmental commission to boast of its own achievements than of a critical analysis of the history of an institution fot the containment of the colonised. The reader must await a future work. Nevertheless, within these constraints Maori Affairs achieves some distinctions. First, the authors have festooned the pages with fascinating illustrations. The photographs of many of the prominent actors in the Department's history stress the human side of the narrative. Some of the cartoons show the racism which is frequently denied in New Zealand: Maori lessors are depicted as mechanical bitds of prey feeding off their hard-working white labourers (p.65);

95 Archifacts

Ngata is depicted 'going native' after his resignation as Minister of Native Affairs (p.78). A second distinction is the series of statistical appendices identifying senior staff, the size of the Department and its expenditure (pp.123-30). These alone make Maori Affairs a useful book to possess. The most important distinction is the bilingual text. The work comprises two books: Maori Affairs, with the appendices, written by Butterwprth in English, and Nga Take Maori, with a photographic essay, written by Hepora Young in Maori. Young's clear and comprehensible prose makes reading both highly enjoyable and informative. She explains in her 'tiimatanga koorero' (p.viii) that she resorted to Williams' Dictionary. to ensure that her writing did not become dull. Her Maori text has the added advantage of being able to use culturally significant terms without the difficulties and ambiguities of English translations. A reader who can comprehend both texts will gain immeasurably from such historically valuable insights. Lastly, 1 wish to record my unease with the state of New Zealand historical writing. New Zealand history has for too long considered narrative history as the only virtuous path.that an historian could travel. Nga Take MaoW seems to suggest that a similar avenue is aspired to amongst Maori historians. When will some of the implications of writings by Michel Foucault, Edward Said and others make their appearance ?

Michael Reilly University of Otago

Charles Royal. Te Haurapa: An Introduction to Researching Tribal Historiesand Traditions. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books/Historical Branch, 19.92. Hipp. $17.95. ISBN 0-908912-17.

A phenomenon of recent times has been the enthusiasm among many Maori for strengthening their sense of identity through the discovery of their past. The search has been given additional impetus

96 Book Reviews by the work of the Waitangi Tribunal, where claims about breaches of the Treaty inevitably have an initial focus on the establishment of rangatiratanga over land and resources. Rangatiratanga and mana are expressed through knowing, and being able to articulate, the ttaditions and other historical taonga of the claimant group. For these reasons Te Haurapa, an introduction for Maori people to research work, is a timely publication. In particular, Royal stresses the need to start at home — asking your own relatives to pass on their lif e experience. I think this is very important. Many of us are conditioned to think that histoty is about great events and public figures, but there is a world-wide movement now to record and study the experience and interaction of communities, and the ordinary and extraordinary individuals any community contains. We are often taught to think that 'history' means at least last century. But our own century is even less well recorded, and there is an urgent need to record the stories of our twentieth-centuty kaumatua and kuia. For this reason, Royal's advice on recording oral history, especially regarding the use of equipment and interview techniques, will help avoid beginners' pitfalls. Royal's guide to using libtaries and archives is also a useful introduction to resources which some Maori people have been somewhat reluctant to utilise. I support his view that there is no need to feel intimidated by large formal institutions, and my own experience of librarians and archivists is that most are willin g to help — but you have to ask, and maybe keep asking. Te Haurapa's message that these resources are waiting for Maori to use them offers encouragement to those wondering where to start. But in spite of my positive response to much in the book, I put it down with a feeling of ambivalence. My reasons are these. There will never be an easy relationship between the traditional Maori approach to the past and the conventions of western historical scholarship and research methodology. In Te Haurapa, Charles Royal has made a bold attempt to effect a juncture between the two, but the attempt has not been successful. I think this is because the perspective he adopts makes the two approaches almost irreconcilable. In the traditional world, the transmission of knowledge was surrounded by religious restrictions to ensute exactness and spiritual safety. Knowledge was seen as fixed from the beginning of time. The task of the genetations was solely to preserve it, not to question or

97 Archifacts change it; Knowledge which was considered especially powerful was not freely available. Only certain people were selected as repositories, and then only after completing a rigorous period of examination to determine their suitability. In some instances this is still the case today, but that is changing. Contrast this with the western literate tradition, where recorded information is normally available to anyone who can read. There is no prior testing of the recipient to determine fitness for the task, and there is no religious ritual to ensure the information doesn't hurt anyone. Most of all, there isn't much 'received truth'. No views, however eminent, are beyond examination or criticism. Where Te Haurapa runs into difficulty is in trying to marry these two entirely different approaches by simply placing oral culture rules over the top of a literate western methodology. Examples are the prominence given to the spiritual element through the use of karakia, and the assumption that the oral tradition is inviolate. The difficulties presented by the attempt to judge the past by the present oral tradition are clear in Royal's judgement on Te Rangihaeata's and Matene Te Whiwhi's writings. While the chiefs recorded in detail the traditions of Ngati Raukawa and Ngati Toa, they apparently deliberately falsified one detail in a whakapapa 'lest the book fall into the wrong hands'. The evidence for the falsification is that the genealogies given by the chiefs differ from those taught to Royal. Royal assumes that only one can be the 'right' version. The point I want to. make is that while in the oral tradition the present version is always the only one, almost all our genealogies exist as written documents, all of which are 'versions'. Oral versions of whakapapa change subtly and silently without leaving a tracé, but the existence of written versions make our ancestors 'wrong' too often for a history based on the view that the oral tradition is somehow  higher truth to be solid and credible. The explanation that our ancestors knowingly set out to deceive has been offered too often, with no more evidence than that we say so. If we are'going to research written documents in libraries and archives in order to recover our history, and I join with Royal in supporting this development, then we must allow our ancestors' writing its own validity. How should we test those writings for reliability, if the need arises? By evaluating them in the context of their own times and their own beliefs. And by accepting the fact

98 Book Reviews that in some cases, the truth for my family is not the truth for your family. I have difficulty too with Royal's view that there is no such thing as Maori history, only tribal history. This is a too limiting definition. On the contrary, there is a nineteenth-century race relations history that all Maori share, because Pakeha saw Maori as Maori and dealt with them as such. In tesponse, Maori formed organisations such as the Kingitanga and Kotahitanga movements, which were attempts to combine in ways which transcended tribal boundaries. To restrict Maori history only to tribal traditions makes too much of the nineteenth century silent, yet our society today cannot be under- stood outside of that experience. The investigations of the Waitangi Tribunal into the nineteenth-century Maori-Pakeha interface illustrate that point. Finally, I find it disturbing that Te Haurapa makes no reference to training for would-be Maori historians working with archival resources. A recurrent experience in Waitangi Tribunal work is meeting enthusiastic, dedicated claimants with their 'research'. This turns out to consist of mountains of material photocopied from various books and papers. This, of course, is but the first step in research — the next one is evaluation and analysis, and after that the composition of a teadable narrative. Historians are not bom but made. Encouragement to research must be accompanied by provision for the acquisition of professional skills. History is a discipline, and while enthusiasm and commitment are the first requirements for researchers, more is needed to see a ptoject through to fruition. The publication of Te Haurapa is a step on an exciting road of discovery to something difficult and new. We must find ways to combine the warmth and continuity of the Maori view of history as an integral part of the Maori present on a daily and personal basis with the strengths of the western tradition, which allows for the storage of huge volumes of information and for the 'frozen in time' documentation of people and past events. While I have spent time in this review showing some of the difficulties in the path of combining the two traditions, Te Haurapa has opened the way for the debate necessaty for this achievement.

Buddy Mikaere Wellington

99 National Archives Wellington

Accessions October 1992 — September I993

ADULT READING AND LEARNING ASSOCIATION FEDERATION. Papers 19764982, 0.1m. Restricted. CABINET OFFICE. Cabinet records 19574984, 59m. Restricted. COMBER, KEN, MP. Political papers 19724987, 1.6m. Restricted. COMMERCE COMMISSION. Multiple number subject files 19164986, 42m. Restricted. COMMERCE, MINISTRY OF. Miscellaneous volumes re WWII 19394952, 0.9m. CONSERVATION, DEPARTMENT OF. Nelson/Marlborough Conservancy, 12m. CREECH, WYATT, MP. Political papers 19884992, 7m. Restricted. CROWN RESEARCH IMPLEMENTATION STEERING COMMITTEE. Computer printout of personnel 1992, 0.7m. NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE, BASE RECORDS. Microfiche of closed military personnel files 19894992, 8.3m. Restricted. NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE HQ. Staff College records 19414944, 4m. NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE HQ. Army Board records 19374968, 0.6m. NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE HQ. Royal NZ Artillery Collection 18854945 (also known as the Stagg Collection), lm. NZ DEFENCE FORCE HQ. 1 RNZIR Commander Diaries, 8.6m. NEW ZEALAND DEFENCE FORCE HQ. 1 RNZIR Unit Histories 19904991,0.3m. . - NZ DEFENCE FORCE HQ, DEFENCE LIBRARY. Official Numbers register 1941, 1 vol. NZ DEFENCE FORCE, WAIOURU. Unit Histories 19774992, lm. DSIR HEADQUARTERS. Multiple numbers subject files 1940s-1992. DSIR-RMU. Photographs 1919-1989, 0.6m. EDUCATION DEPARTMENT, HO, SCHOOL DEVELOPMENT GROUP. Plans and Drawings 19474986, 17 large map folders and 4 small folders.

100 Accessions

ELECTRICITY DEPARTMENT. Personal files on accidents to workmen, 1955-1971, 0.1m. Restricted. ESTRAY.. Statement of Railways guard re Tangiwai 1953, 0.1m. EXTERNAL RELATIONS & TRADE, MINISTRY OF, HO. Copy WWII German Surrender documents, 0.3m. FOLKEMA, MR CHARLES. Udy family history 1986-1989, lm. FRIENDS OF THE BOLTON STREET CEMETERY. Photographs 1968-1969, 28 large prints. GOVERNMENT COMPUTING SERVICE, TRENTHAM. Registered files 1977-1983, 1.3m. GOVERNOR-GENERAL. Hobson's instructions from Queen Victoria 1840,0.1m. GOVERNOR-GENERAL. Royal Instructions, oaths of allegiance 1840-1907, 0.1m. GUADALCANA L SOLOMON ISLANDS WAR MEMORIAL . FOUNDATION. Correspondence 1989-1992, 0.6m. HAUGHTON, MR B. Building contracts 1881, 0.1m. HEALTH DEPARTMENT, HO. REGIONAL AIR POLLUTION CONTROL BRANCHES. Multiple number subject files, maps, plans, 1958-1991, 8.3m. HILLAR Y COMMISSION FOR RECREATION AND SPORT. Files, fil m video and audio tapes, 2m. HOUSING CORPORATION, HO. Case files — computer printouts, 8.6m. IMAGES LTD. AUCKLAND . Government advertising 1980-1990, 0.3m. INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH & FORENSIC SCIENCE LTD. Multiple number subject staff files 1939-1992, 2m. Restricted- INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH 6k FORENSIC SCIENCE LTD. Multiple number subject files 1925-1989, 37.3m. INTERNAL AFFAIRS, HO. Armorial bearings of NZ, 0.5m. INTERNAL AFFAIRS, HO, LIBRARY. Plans, submissions and reports 1945-1973, 0.6m. INTERNAL AFFAIRS, FILM CENSOR'S OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1922-1985, 1.6m. INTERNAL AFFAIRS, FILM CENSOR'S OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1917-1987, 2.6m. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, HO. JP appointment files 1919-1979, 8m. Restricted. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, HO. Photographic negatives of Justice Department buildings, 1992, 0.1.m.

101 Archifacts

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS, LOWER HÜTT. Court reports and registers 1909-1985, 2.3m. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, COURT OF APPEAL. Case files, civil register, 1979-1981, 7.6m. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, HIGH COURT, WELLINGTON. Judges' notebooks 1976-1992, 0.3m. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, HAWERA DISTRICT COURT. Stratford & Eltham court records 1884-1988, 37m. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, TRIBUNALS DIVISION. 1983 Town and Country Planning files, 17m. LABOUR DEPARTMENT, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SERVICE. Arbitration Court case files 1975-1984, 25m. LABOUR DEPARTMENT, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SERVICE. Register of Unions and Employer Organisations 1913-1991, 1.0m. MAF, HO. Multiple number subject files 1916-1980, 17.6m. MAF, HO, LIBRARY. Photographs 1940s-1950s, lm. MAF, HO. Multiple number subject files c. 1929-1984, 14m. MAF, HO. Multiple number subject files c.1960-1988, 192m. MAF, HO. Staff classification cards 1945-1967, 1.5m. MAF, BLENHEIM. Miscellaneous records 1929-1991, 0.3m. MAF, HAWERA DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1936-1988, 2m. MAF, WALLACEVILL E ANIMA L RESEARCH CENTRE. Registered and unregistered files c.1905-1987, 21.6m. MAF, HASTINGS REGIONAL OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1969-1988, 2m. MAF, NEW PLYMOUTH DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1988, 0.3 m. MAF, WANGANUI DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1969-1991, 0.3m. MAF, BATCHELOR AGRICULTURE CENTRE, PALMERSTON NORTH REGIONAL OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1930-1988, 1.3m. MAF, DANNEVIRKE DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1946-1973, 0.6m. MAF, WAIROA DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1969-1982, 0.6m. MAF, MASTERTON DISTRICT OFFICE. Multiple number subject files 1971-1988, 0.3m. MARSHALL, HON. DENNIS. Political papers 1990-1993, 2m. Restricted.

102 Accessions

McKINNON, HON. DON. Political papers 1987-1990, 1.3m. Restricted. NZ 1990 COMMISSION, AUCKLAN D OFFICE. Project files and posters 1988-1991, 22.3m. NZ 1990 COMMISSION, CHRISTCHURCH OFFICE. Project files and posters 1988-1991, 7.3m. NZ 1990 COMMISSION, DUNEDIN OFFICE. Project files and posters 1988-1991, 5.6m. NZ 1990 COMMISSION, WELLINGTON OFFICE. Project files and posters 1988-1991, 4.1m. NZ ATOMIC ENERGY COMMITTEE. Multiple number subject files 1948-1956, 7m. Restricted. NZ DAIRY BOARD. Multiple number subject files 1947-1988, 117.6m. Restricted. NZ DAIRY BOARD. Asst. records 1920-1969, 1.8m. NZ POULTRY BOARD. General records, 1.34m. NZ RAIL LTD. Multiple number subject files, 1884-1988, 24.3m. NZ RAIL LTD. Personnel files 1906-1948, 0.3m. NZ RAIL LTD, HO. Multiple number subject files, 1876-1988, 39.6m. NZ RAILWA Y AND LOCOMOTIVE SOCIETY. 1 Glass negative of Royal Mail Truck c.l930s. NZ SCHOOL OF ADVANCED NURSING STUDIES (SANS), lm. OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSMAN. Case files 1962-1985, 121.5m. PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARY, WELLINGTON. Domestic Survey of South Island Maori Settlements 1937, 2 vols. PARLIAMENTARY SERVICES. Plans 1898, 1 folder. POLICE NATIONAL HQ. Personnel and salaries records 1982-1985, 17.6m. Restricted. POLICE, WELLINGTON CENTRAL. Incident and Offence files 1978-1988, 2.6m. Restricted. POLICE, LOWER HÜTT. Incident and Offence files, 1985-1986, 1.6m. POLICE, LOWER HÜTT. Incident and Offence files 1978-1987, 7m. Restricted. POLICE, UPPER HÜTT. Assorted records 1919-1979, 9m. Restricted. POLICE, MASTERTON. Incident and Offence files 1986-1987, 0.6m. Restricted. POLICE, WANGANUI. Incident and Offence files 1982-1987, 0.6m. Restricted. POLICE, NAPIER DISTRICT HQ. Incident and Offence files 1985-1987, lm. Restricted.

103 Archifacts

POLICE, HASTINGS. Incident and Offence files, photographic negatives 1982-1987, 0.6m. Restricted. POLICE, PALMERSTON NORTH DISTRICT HQ. 'Grapevine' . newsletter. 1988-1992, 0.2m. POLICE, PALMERSTON NORTH. Incident and Offence files, 3.1m. POLICE, NEW PLYMOUTH. Incident and Offence files, 1962-1987, 0.6m. Restricted. PRIME MINISTER'S OFFICE. Speeches 1983-1990, 3.3m. QEII ARTS COUNCIL. Multiple number subject files 1970s-1980s, 14.6m. Restricted. RAILWAY S CORPORATION, HO. Catalogue for photos and articles in railways magazines, 0.3m. SIMMONS, MR. Photographs re Tangiwai disaster 1953, 0.2m. SNADDEN, J. P. Records of the North Africa campaign 1939-1944, 0.3m. STATE SERVICES COMMISSION. Personnel schedules 1980s, 1.3m. STATE SERVICES COMMISSION. Multiple number subject files 1975-1989, 26m. TE ARO SCHOOL. Registers of admission and withdrawal 1960-1979, lm, TVNZ PROGRAMME STANDARDS. Formal Complaint files 1977-1990, 8m. VALUATION , PALMERSTON NORTH. Valuation rolls.1982-1983, 6.6m. VALUATIO N NEW ZEALAND. Napier valuation rolls, 1977-1985, 24m. WATERFRONT INDUSTRY RESTRUCTURING AUTHORITY. Correspondence and minutes 1989-1992, 1.5m. WORKS, RMU. Service records 1982-1983, 1.6m. Restricted. WORKS CORPORATION, NAPIER. Multiple number subject files, 25m.

Alexander Turnbul l Librar y Wellington

Accessions January — June 1993 Note: The following list is a selection only of the 174 accessions received in the first half of 1993. Accessions of further papers to existing collections have not, generally, been listed. Music manuscript accessions are published separately in Crescendo.- . '

ARCHER, COURTNEY. Papers relating to Rewi Alley, 1946-1988. 7 folders. Restricted.

104 Accessions

BARCLAY, GEORGE STANLEY. Log kept while a prisoner of war, 1943-1945. 1 volume. BARRON, CHARLES JAMES. Notebooks and diaries, 1892-1945. 85cm. Barron studied veterinary science at Lincoln college, served in the South African war, and later farmed in Marlborough. BENNETT, LOUIS AMOS. World War II diaries, 1942-1946. 6 volumes. Bennett served with the New Zealand Medical Corps. BERTRAM, JAMES. Papers of James and Jean Bertram, 1949-1989. 1 metre. BIELSKI, LES. Korean War diary, 1950-1952. 1 volume. CARLE, JUNE. Ko te Kawenata Hou / annotated by an unknown hand, with accompanying notes by Angela Bailara. 1 volume + 1 folder. The volume contains early annotations by a Maori owner, including illustrations of Pai-Marire niu poles. CORBETT, GEORGE. Shipboard diaries, 1879, 1891. 2 folders. CORSON, NORAH BROUGHTON. Letters relating to nursing service in World War II, 1940-1944. 4 folders. EDMOND, LAURIS. Further papers, 1941-1991. 40 cm. Restricted. EVANS, E. R. G. Autobiographical account of an Antarctic expedition, 1908. 1 folder. GEE, MAURICE GOUGH. Papers, c.1930-1992. 7.5 metres. Restricted. GRACE, SIR JOHN. Grace family papers, 1863-1949. 16 cm. GUSTAFSON, BARRY SELWYN. Papers, 1878-1988. 4.5 metres. Includes papers collected as part of his research into aspects of New Zealand political history. HART Aotearoa. Further records, c.1984-1990. 10 metres. HENRY, PETER. Correspondence with Denis Glover, 1964-1975 (photocopies). 1 folder. HIGHET, DAVI D ALLAN . Papers, c.1920-1992. 66 cm. INSURANCE COUNCIL OF NEW ZEALAND. Records, 1855-1988. 34 metres. KELBURN MUNICIPAL CROQUET CLUB. Records, 1913-1982. 1 metre. KING, RUSSELL DAVID . World War II papers and photographs, 1917-1956. 2 folders + photographs. LOWE, JOSEPH. Dance book, c. 1850s. 1 volume. Restricted. MARSDEN FAMILY . Correspondence with and about Samuel Marsden, 1826-1836. 1 folder. NEW ZEALAND COUNCIL FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES. Records, 1957-1991. 2 metres. 105 Archifacts

NEW ZEALAND FEDERATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN, AUCKLAN D BRANCH. Scrapbooks, 1950-1992. 2 volumes. NEW ZEALAND SOCIETY OF POTTERS. Records, 1963-1991. . 1.3 metres. Restricted. , BLENHEIM BRANCH. Records, 1935-1976. 30 cm. PAINE, DOUGLAS ALLAN . Papers relating to Auckland Islands, 1942-1990. 2 volumes + 1 folder. PARLIAMENTARY WIVES AND HUSBANDS ASSOCIATION. . Records, 1982-1990. 2 folders. RAYNER, ROBERT WILLIAM . Chatham Islands diary, 1866-1868. 1 volume. SCOTT, DONALD DAVID . Papers, 1896-1948. 1 metre. Scott was a prominent Presbyterian minister. SEED FAMILY . Papers, 1839-1949. 30 cm. Includes papers of William Seed, a prominent nineteenth-century public servant. SMYTHE, AUDREY LEONORE. World War I correspondence of Hugh Decimus Bridge, 1914-1918. 4 folders. STOKES, BERTRAM OLIVER. World War I papers, 1914-1921. 38 cm. THESPIANS (INC). Records, 1934-1954. 13 cm. WEIR, JAMES HARRISON. A New Zealand ambassador's letters from Moscow, 1977-1980. 1 volume. Restricted. WELLINGTON CHESS LEAGUE. Records, 1951-1972. 2 folders + 1 volume. WELLINGTON HIGH SCHOOL CENTENARY COMMITTEE. Records of and relating to Wellington Technical College and Wellington High School, 1887-1986. 3 metres. WELLINGTON WORKERS EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION. Records, 1915-1991. 1.7 metres. WERTHEIM, LUCY CARRINGTON. Letters from Frances Hodgkins, nd. 1 folder (3 letters). WRIGHT, KATHERINE. Papers relating to Rewi Alley, c.1912-1988, 15 cm. YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION. Records, 1953-1988. 2 metres.

106