Blog Update

Society bloggers and Brain Watkins House guides, at The Elms, July 2021
Photograph by Brett Payne

In July 2021 the Society celebrated the eighth anniversary of the blog with a get together of contributors, past and present, kindly hosted at The Elms. Between June 2013 and January 2022 we published almost 400 articles, written by 21 contributors and several guest authors. Although some articles have been notices of recent and forthcoming events, most have been the result of the various authors’ original research into the history of Tauranga Moana. We currently have seven regular contributors who each supply an article every two months, published every Friday. It is perhaps worthy of note that four of our founding blog authors are still making regular contributions - after eight years, that is some achievement.

Shirley Arabin - History of Tauranga buildings, Items in the Brain Watkins House Collection
Trevor Bentley - Early Sailing Vessels and visitors to Tauranga
Beth Bowden - A variety of topics relating to early Tauranga
Julie Green – People who Shaped Tauranga
Fiona Kean - Notes of recent events of historical interest
Justine Neal - Tauranga postcards from her personal collection
Brett Payne – A century of Tauranga photographers (1861-1961)

Since April 2021, we have also enjoyed a partnership with Tauranga City Library’s research room, Ngā Wahi Rangahau, whose team post about interesting items in the collection (see Pae Korokī) on the first Tuesday of every month. The staff at Ngā Wahi Rangahau, past and present, deserve additional credit and many thanks for the invaluable research assistance and images provided to authors over the years.

The blog receives between 2000 and 4000 visitors each month. All articles are archived on the web site, and may be accessed using the “Blog Archive” drop-down menu by date (Year and Month), or the “Labels” list, on the right of the main blog page. A list of current and past contributors is also available on the right of the page – click on the name for further information.

Further pages about the Society and Brain Watkins House and are available from the links at the top of this page. PDFs of the Society’s Newsletter can be downloaded by clicking the links in the box at top right.

Considerable time and effort have been put into writing the articles and sourcing images, and both the writers and the Society would welcome your feedback, either through the Comments section at the foot of each blog or via email. It’s always nice to know that your articles are being read and appreciated, so please do leave us a quick note to let us know you’ve dropped by. We’ve introduced a security step in the Commenting procedure in an attempt to alleviate problems with inappropriate spam – it may be a little  tedious to have to go through this step, but please bear with us.

The Society welcomes further contributions to the blog in the form of short articles (roughly 500-1000 words) with appropriate copyright-free images from members and non-members. If you hear of a forthcoming historically related event that you think might interest members, please feel free to let us know and we’ll do our best to find out more and publicize it on the blog. Alternatively, if you’ve been to such a place or event and would like to send us a brief report on it, with at least one photograph, we’d be happy to publish it on your behalf.

Contact Julie Green by email (tauranga.historical@gmail.com) with any such material, or to request a copy of our Blog Article Submission Guidelines.

Brett Payne
Web Editor