Alexander Turnbull Library centenary

A mini-documentary made to celebrate a centenary of the Alexander Turnbull Library. Many thanks to the Turnbull Endowment Trust for there support in the making of this documentary.

• Transcript — A Century of Wonder — An Alexander Turnbull Library mini-documentary

  Visual

  Gloved hand taking a cover off a painting.

  Audio

  Music

  ---

  Visual

  Images of items from the Alexander Turnbull collections including small container, mirror, manuscript printed and handwritten, posters, paintings.

  Words appear on screen music, diaries, websites, drawings, recordings

  Audio

  Man's voice: It's a wonderful thing that the Turnbull Library is 100 years old. Every year, between 300 and 500 individuals, community groups, organizations gift things to the Turnbull Library.

  ---

  Visual

  A man speaking. Words Chris Szekely, Chief Librarian Alexander Turnbull Library appear on screen.

  Audio

  Chris Szekely We've got a century of trust behind us, a century of gifting a century of researchers who have used their collections and generated new knowledge.

  ---

  Visual

  Dr Jock Phillips, Historian talking. Dr Phillips walking up the stairs to enter the National Library.

  Audio

  Dr Jock Phillips: Well the ATL has been an absolute treasure house. It's a world-class institution. For a historian, it's absolutely irreplaceable.

  ---

  Visual

  Hands opening a diary. One page has small bundles of hair clippings in it. Audrey Waugh

  Audio

  Woman's voice: Well today I've brought out Joanna Turnbull's autograph album.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman talking. Words Audrey Waugh, Research Librarian Manuscripts appear on screen.

  Audio

  Audrey Waugh: So, this is a fantastic collection item in the manuscripts collection.

  ---

  Visual

  Hands opening a diary. Page with writing and a sketch of a woman.

  Audio

  Audrey Waugh: Joanna Turnbull is Alexander Turnbull's sister, fondly known as Sissy to the family in all of their correspondence.

  ---

  Visual

  Audrey walking into the Katherine Mansfield Reading Room with a collection item in her hand. She walks to a table where a researcher is waiting for the item.

  Audio

  Audrey Waugh: I love being able to work with researchers on a really wide variety of topics, bringing that sparkle to the reading room. And helping people discover things that are really significant, both historically and personally.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman talking to Audrey.

  Audio

  Jane Tolerton: But that other photo you brought me, there's this lovely piece where he gives a speech in Christchurch in July 1887, and he writes to his wife to thank her for the note she sent him.

  Visual

  Researcher pointing to a picture in a book.

  Audio

  Jane Tolerton: That's Mary Vogel, there she is, there, and later he says I made a rattling good speech.

  Audrey: Oh, fantastic.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman talking to Audrey. Words Jane Tolerton, Historian appear on screen.

  Audio

  Jane Tolerton: I've never seen that quote in any women's suffrage book, so that's new. It's wonderful to have.

  ---

  Visual

  Hands opening a folder with handwritten material in them. Audrey then talks to camera.

  Audio

  Audrey Waugh: These papers are 130 years old, and yet researchers are still able to find new discoveries and bring new meaning to the collections.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman turning pages of a large photo album full of black and white photos. Words Amalaratna, Research Librarian. Amalartna points to the images as she talks about them.

  Audio

  Amalaratna: So this is Scott's expedition to the Antarctic, 1910. The Terra Nova British Antarctic Expedition. This is the dog party, the dog camp with the horses. And this is the relief party, here.

  ---

  Visual

  Shot panning across the reading rooms and boxes of material. Words photographers, personal pagers, oral history, exhibitions, albums, lyrics, kete show on screen.

  Audio

  Music

  ---

  Visual

  Man sitting at desk with two screens. The screens have large images on them. Words Mark Beatty, Imaging Technician show on screen. Full screen image of painting of a house.

  Audio

  Mark Beatty: This is a painting by Peter McIntyre, and it shows the Turnbull House. So, this is the origins, this is where we all started. Officially became the Turnbull Library in 1920, when it opened to the public.

  ---

  Visual

  Man looking at lots of images on a screen. Then close ups of a Māori family wearing European clothing.

  Audio

  Mark Beatty: Beautiful image here of the family together useful details on the dresses, what they're wearing. We've digitized the original glass plate negative and processed it from being a negative into a positive.

  ---

  Visual

  Wall with image of Alexander Turnbull hanging and words Alexander Turnbull Library on the wall. Image changes to a painting of Alexander Turnbull. Woman walks past painting to an exhibition cabinet. Words, donations, paintings, seminars, sketches and lectures appear on screen.

  Audio

  Chris Szekely: Alexander Turnbull was a wealthy young guy. He had two big passions in his life. One was yachting, his other great passion was he was an obsessive collector.

  ---

  Visual

  Man talking to camera.

  Audio

  Chris Szekely: He was focused on two things mainly, anything to do with New Zealand and the Pacific exploration.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman walks to table with item and sits down. Looks at item. Close up of item. Words Suliana Vea, Research Librarian Pacific appear on screen. Suliana on screen. Image of a performing arts groups.

  Audio

  Suliana Vea: We have a lot of items here belonging to Māori to Mate Noa and the Pacific as well. And people can just type in a search, and if they find something like I did last night, then, yeah, we want to see it. Made me feel really emotional because it involves my uncle who's no longer alive. He was a part of a performing arts group, and they were performing all over. They went to Germany, they went to England, and he used to always tell us these stories, and sadly, when you're young you don't realize how important those stories are.

  ---

  Visual

  Man walking between storage cases. Pulls out a vertical drawer with a modern painting of a man, and angel. Words Dr Oliver Stead, Curator Drawings, Paintings, Prints appear on screen.

  Man shows us the original of Charles Heaphy's Mount Egmont water colour.

  Audio

  Oliver Stead: Mary McIntyre painted this portrait of Pat Hanley, and what's also quite amazing about it is that there's a very beautifully rendered detail of a painting by Tony Fomison in the lower right-hand corner.

  Well,to me personally the Turnbull Library published a series of prints after famous New Zealand watercolors in its collection in the 60s. And I grew up with Charles Heaphy's beautiful watercolor, Mount Egmont from the southward, on my bedroom wall. Many, many years later, to be looking after the real thing is just such a privilege.

  ---

  Visual

  Man walking an looking at music posters on a wall. Words Dr Michael Brown, Curator Music appear on the screen.

  Audio

  Guitar music

  Michael Brown: I think what's really satisfying about the job is that working with labels like Flying Nun, by digitizing that material, it actually allows it to be used again. It allows it to be remastered and reissued, or in some cases issued for the first time.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman putting a floppy disk into a floppy disk drive. Words Flora Feltham, Digital Archivist appear on screen.

  Audio

  Flora Feltham: So I am a digital archivist here at the Alexander Turnbull Library, and part of my job involves getting files off really old kinds of media. So use an old internal floppy disk drive from my computer to try and image this disk. So part of our job is about having to hook up old technology with modern technology, because, of course, when we're talking digital archives we're talking digital files that were being used up to 30 years ago. You really, really have to fix things often. It's really fun, why doesn't it sound fun?

  ---

  Visual

  Open book with picture of a birds as pages are turned. Man standing in front of four rare books in book holders. Aurora Australis front plate. Words Anthony Tedeschi, Curator Rare Books, Fine Printing appear on screen. Hands show book being opened.

  Audio

  Anthony Tedeschi: There's never a dull moment, I wouldn't think, being a rare books curator. This is one of the library's copies of the Aurora Australis. So, this is the first book to be printed, illustrated, and bound in Antarctica by Ernest Shackleton and members of his crew. I showed the binding first because this is made from recycled packing crates. We think they printed about 100 copies, and I'm pretty sure this is the etching press.

  ---

  Visual

  Shot of storage. Man sits at desk. Pulls a box out of a bigger box. Opens the box to show a recording on tape. Hands winding the tape onto a machine. Words Phil Brownlee, AV Conservation Technician show on screen. Instruments showing audio levels. Man talking to camera.

  Audio

  Woman's voice: We present the Alex Lindsay String Orchestra, conducted by Dobbs Franks, leader Ruth Pearl.

  Phil Brownlee: Old recordings of New Zealand music are probably the, where my interests lies. It's one of the interesting things about this work is that we don't know exactly what's on the tape until we put it on the machine. The huge variety of the content that I deal with, people telling their stories, and old music recordings, primary historical sources. These tapes were recorded 60 years ago, and the sound on them is as clear as the day it was recorded.

  This work was written by Bartók in 1935 at the request of--

  We've also got the radio presentation, which is of historical-- historically interesting in itself. The voices of the old YC announcers.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman walking in front of banner outside the National Library advertising He Tohu exhibition. Woman in the library looking at a table full of papers. Looking over the woman's shoulder at the papers. Words Caitlin Lynch, Researcher and Filmmaker appear of screen.

  Audio

  Caitlin Lynch: I did a history degree and so I loved coming here to find out more about what I was researching. You always discover something unexpected.

  ---

  Visual

  Black and white photo of six men and two women. Woman speaking to camera. Woman looking at suffrage statue. Woman sitting at desk looking at papers. Woman looking at paper headed ‘The Sweating System’. Paper has image of a woman sewing, a sick man in bed and children sitting around her in distress. Shots of cartoons. Footage from ‘Harriet Morison’ short film showing a woman walking.

  Caitlin Lynch: I was researching this woman named Harriet Morrison, who was involved in the suffrage movement but she isn't mentioned nearly as much as someone like Kate Sheppard. So I came to the ATL where I could look through all these newspapers and manuscript files. And I could draw out all these amazing cartoons of Harriet Morrison from the newspapers. And then we compiled all that information into a little documentary about Harriet Morrison which went on to be nominated for the Bert Roth History Awards and the Bert Roth files we actually used in the project. These were the files that had all this information about her. And so it was a really cool way to engage with the archives.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman walking towards glass sculpture of Kate Sheppard. Woman talking to camera. Words Suzanne Snively, Deputy Chair, Turnbull Endowment Trust appear on screen.

  Audio

  Suzanne Snively: I love this sculpture. I'm a trustee on the Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust, which is a foundation that's been set up in order to make sure that the collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library is available to all New Zealanders. Not only did Kate Sheppard campaign for a woman's right to vote but for universal suffrage.

  ---

  Visual

  Shot of the reading rooms.

  Audio

  Music

  ---

  Visual

  Man pulling paintings out of storage.

  Audio

  Orchestral music.

  ---

  Visual

  Hands pulling a record out of its cover. Close up of vinyl record being played. Close up of record cover, Country Girl Maria Dallas. Woman shows record. Words Bronwyn Officer, Senior Conservator Sounds show on screen.

  Audio

  Our means of preservation is to digitize the analog object for all time.

  Singing ‘Tumbling, a tumbling a tumbling down...’

  This is a lacquer disk. You can see crazing on this record. Physically, I'm not going to do anything to it. But by playing the content, we preserve it into the future. This has been requested by the great-granddaughter of the bagpipe player.

  Bagpipe music.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman wearing lab coat and white gloves sitting in front of a microscope and preparing things. Woman looks through microscope at an painting of adults and children with parcels on a bridge. Words Carolina Izzo, Director, Studio Carolina Izzo. Hands doing conservation work on the painting. Woman looking through microscope. Gently brushing of painting with a soft brush. Woman writes notes about work doing on painting.

  Audio

  Carolina Izzo: My name is Carolina Izzo, and I have a studio in New Zealand called Studio Carolina Izzo. It's a unique unique works that has the label in paper, fragment of a label paper work attach it to the surface. So this painting is painted over a cardboard. It's a poor material, and doesn't seems has a priming underneath, but still searching it out.

  Through the microscope I was able to see that it was varnished recently, I don't think it was a regional varnish. Because for example where there were fragment of paper, and where the paper was missing. there was no varnish. So you know that that was something I'm exploring that possibility there was the level was actually attached at the time that painting was completed.

  I noticed that the environment where the painting was done had some kind of a dust problem, because there's a lots of pigment used that has embedded. Very beautiful looking under the microscope.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman wearing gloves opening a cardboard box and taking a book out. Words Sarah Askey, Conservator appear on screen. Hands holding book open. Gloved hands point at parts of the book cover. Woman sitting at desk. She puts a mask on. Woman scrapping book with tool and brush. .

  Audio

  Sarah Askey: So this is a box of books that were donated last year. The descendants of a man called Charles Calvert, so this is his private library collection. But they've been quite badly damaged by silt. This is actually a book in Māori, 1848. I'm going to be chipping these accretions of silt off using a scalpel and then working through the pages with a very soft brush and a smoke sponge.

  I quite like the problem solving. When you have things come to you in they're sort of not usable as books anymore, figuring out how to make them meet present day kind of needs for access and use but still retaining what it is about their history which is important to what they are.

  ---

  Visual

  Gloved hands working with film. Words appear on screen Theresa Kele, Librarian Microfilms.

  Theresa Kele: We're looking at 35 millimeter mass of microfilm of the Tāupo Times from 1953 to 1954. This is an old acetate film, and I'm going through it to replace poor splices, and replacing them with archival splices. And this will help to keep-- preserve the microfilm for longer.

  ---

  Visual

  Man sitting at desk looking at handwritten letters. Photo of a couple.

  Audio

  Man’s voice: My dearest. My own darling.

  Jock Phillips: Beautiful. I've got the letters that were written by Peter Howden to his wife, which he wrote every day of his war service from the end of 1915 until he died in 1917. So it's a great love story.

  ---

  Visual

  Sign !Caution! Work in progress. Words on screen Mīharo Exhibition, Peter Ireland, Gallery, Exhibitions Specialist: Dr Fiona Oliver, Curator NZ and Pacific Publications. People looking at items on a table. A document with a photo and Chinese characters and an official stamp on it.

  Audio

  Peter Ireland: Effectively a passport which allowed Robin Hyde, the New Zealand writer, to travel in China in the 1930s.

  Fiona Oliver: Robin Hyde was a pen name, and her real name was Iris Wilkinson.

  ---

  Visual

  A gloved hand holding a small card with a blue and white painting on it. The card is turned over to show of small handwriting. Man talking words Peter Ireland, Gallery, Exhibitions Specialist appear on screen.

  Audio

  Peter Ireland: It's a handmade postcard by the New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins. Essentially, a thank you card to thank somebody for having her to stay when she was in France, so probably from the 1930s and 1940s. One of the reasons we liked it so much was that it's quite a rare instance, of the work in our collection.

  ---

  Visual

  Woman using tool to open pages of a book. Pages of the book with drawings of people in Pacific Islands. Turning pages of the book to show more drawings of Pacific Islands.

  Audio

  Peter Ireland: We don't know who the artist is, but we know the association of it with a particular voyage.

  ---

  Visual

  Three people taking a material cover off a very large piece of paper. Man and woman looking at a sheet with drawings, maps and lots of words. Words Margaret Morris, Senior Conservator, Works in Paper appear on screen.

  Audio

  Chris Szekely: Look at that.

  Margaret Morris: He's trying to encapsulate the history of New Zealand in one great big sheet.

  Chris Szekely: Well the history of New Zealand from European--

  Margaret Morris: His point of view, yes.

  Chris Szekely: First sight, if you like.

  Margaret Morris: It's from his point of view, that's right.

  Chris Szekely: Yes.

  Margaret Morris: I just love this item. I love the fact that all of this is done by hand.

  Chris Szekely: All by hand.

  Margaret Morris: It's remarkable.

  ---

  Visual

  Two women standing together. People standing together, children and adults. Words John Scott’s architectural works — donation appear on screen. People carrying items into the Library.

  Audio

  Powerful chanting by two Māori women's calling to each other in welcome during a karanga.

  Chris Szekely: E te whānau au Hone Scott. Tēnā koutou i o manaakitanga me te aroha, nō reira, nau mai, haere mai ki to tātou whare. Tena koutou, tena koutou. Kia ora tātou katoa.

  ---

  Visual

  Drawers opening full of photographs. Man looking through photographs. Pulls a picture of two cloaked Māori women. Photo of pohutukawa and caravan, paper with photo and Chinese script, small ceramic box, drawing of indigenous people sitting around a fire, poster, record. Words Chris Szekely, Chief Librarian appear on screen.

  Audio

  Chris Szekely: I absolutely believe that every New Zealander has a right to expect that the documentary record of their family, their community, their culture, their country is kept, cared for, and made available when they want it or when their descendants want it. That's what this is all about.

  ---

  Visual

  The Turnbull Endowment Trust thanks all who participated. Alexander Turnbull Library staff and whānau. National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Studio Carolina Izzo.

  This film was made with support from a Lottery Environment and Heritage Committee Grant. Special thanks to Women's Refuge for permission to film the Kate Sheppard sculpture. All other items featured are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library collection.

  Music
  Douglas Lilburn — collection, Xiing Wang, Jian Liu, Flying Nun, Maria Dallas, Jonathan Besser, Ana Kenny and choir, Afokoula Singers ‘Atenisi Institute, Tonga.

  Editor — Peter Metcalf
  Sound mix — Ian Leslie
  Camera — Ivars Berzins
  Director — Anna Cottrell AC Productions

  Special thanks to all Alexander Turnbull Library staff who appeared in this film.
  John Sullivan, Leader Curatorial Services
  Jenni Chrisstoffels, Research Librarian Pictorial
  Cecilia Ng, Research Librarian
  Rita Havel, Research Librarian
  Ulu Afaese, Librarian
  Samuel Ardell, Librarian
  Lynette Shum, Oral History Advisor
  Brendan O’Brien, Conservation Coordinator Exhibitions
  Keith McEwing, Assistant Curator Music
  Laura van Echten, Conservation Technician
  Greg Weiss, Conservation Technician
  Cellia Joe-Olsen,. Heritage Advice Coordinator Outreach Services
  Dale Cousens, Team Leader Collection Development

  Producer — Anna Cottrell
  Executive Producer — Paula MacLachlan, Turnbull Endowment Trust

  Logos, Turnbull Endowment Trust, ATL100 Alexander Turnbull Library National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. Lotto, Funded by NZ Lottery Grants Board.

  Audio

  Piano music.

  Any errors with the transcript, let us know and we'll fix them email digital-services@dia.govt.nz.