 |
| Extract from Tauranga Historical Society Journal, Aug 1971 |
For someone seeking a sense of the local energies at work in any given social moment between, say, 1950 and about 2010, the search term, “newsletter” will prove to be unexpectedly powerful. It is plain, from even a simple exploration of the records held on Pae Koroki, that the (usually) month-to-month business of putting together a set of pages designed to encourage, entertain and inform a (usually) captive audience can be a rich and apt illustration of historical force and even importance. Provided, of course, your research field is timed to be after the cyclostyle machine and before Facebook.
Two hundred and thirty results – 129 of them digitized - from Pae Koroki show the power of the newsletter as an instrument of history. Where better to start than with an example from our own Journal of the Tauranga Historical Society, August 1972:
Observant readers will note the search-term in the white field on the upper left; and the power of the search engine to drill deep into the digitised document to find the exact match at the centre of the image, mauve.
Newsletter policy can be important. In the Tauranga Historical Society, for instance, the Journal was the place for long-form, considered and often rather scholarly writing. The Journals were intended to be kept and were archived by the Society as well as being made available to the public library (and, eventually, digitized on Pae Koroki). Newsletters, on the other hand, were intended to fill the gap between Journal publications with updates and administrative details about near-future activities. Their shelf-life was brief and few early examples survive. In practice, however, there was a lot of overlap, as can be seen from the extract above.
Compare this approach with that of the Hauraki News[1]:
.. a cheerful (and enduring) mix of serious military history, ceremonial commemorations, personal reminiscence and soldierly cartoons, firmly in the tradition of WW1 trench newspapers[2].
 |
| Title Page of Trench Echo, Easter 1916 |
No doubt these both were considered to be ephemera, things of the moment, intentionally disposable.
But not always.
A sad event in Te Puna – the disestablishment of its Community Library – led to the acquisition, for the Te Puna Archive, of a near-complete series of the Pirirakau “X”Press. Some 29 issues of the 36 numbers that came out over the period February 2002- 2004 were accumulated in a humble cardboard standing file, labelled, but with no accession number or other catalogue information.
 |
| Pirirakau "X"Press standing file |
It turns out that a full series of the Pirirakau “X”Press is held at the Tauranga Public Library, although it has not yet been digitised or accessioned on Pae Koroki.
The holding at the Te Puna Archive represents the second iteration of the “X” Press, which had an earlier life between 1994 and 1998, at the inception of Mark Nicholas, who took over the Chair of the Pirirakau Incorporated Society with the aim to keep people informed in the face of diminishing attendance at meetings. He also wanted to collect Pirirakau history, and to funnel this into what became the WAI277 claim. The “X”Press was a means of gathering and spreading information on the process of the claim before the Waitangi Tribunal. Funding was provided by the Crown Forestry Rental Trust.
Your writer knows all this from a recent interview with the editor of the “X”Press, Chrissie Rolleston[3]. When CFRT funding ran out, at Issue No. 37 in 1998, people found that they missed this link with their past and their future. With the residue of CFRT funding and a pretty prompt injection from the Lottery Grants Board, publication resumed in 2002. The second series of the newsletter is another lively mix of history notes, often contributed by Patrick Nicholas, news items and practical panui, legal articles that came through from the team working on the WAI277 claim, personal reminiscences and adventures, an op-ed column from a hard-headed woman pseudonym’d Panemaaro, quizzes to stimulate the critical reader (and the purchase of the next issue, which had the answers) and a great deal of reo. At the front: usually a mihi from an eminent Pirirakau personage and always Nga Mate o te Marama – those who had passed away.
 |
| Chrissie Rolleston Photograph by Beth Bowden |
Chrissie put the publication together on a computer at the Pirirakau Environment Centre, and printed it using variably reliable photocopiers, often having to clear jammed paper in the middle of the night. Print run: about 200. “The problem was,” says Chrissie, “that people loved the “X”Press and sent it on and around their whanau. They didn’t get that they should take out a subscription to help it go on.”
So, the Pirirakau “X”Press ran out of steam. Valiant but sad messages in the last three issues show that efforts were made to maintain its flagging inputs and rising costs. The writing, however, was on the Facebook wall: social media would soon overtake the solid look and feel of a folded A4, black and white, mail-delivered magazine. So many things together amount to an historical force, one that is generally recognised but rarely locally documented. The story of the Pirirakau “X”Press is a real example of the impact and consequences of relinquishing expensive print to ‘free’ web-based publication[4]. Easy to access; very very hard to archive.
Parish records, rent rolls, proceedings under the Black Act[5] and the Inquisition[6] have all provided rich source material to European historians. A search for original voices among source materials available to local NZ historians need not be confined to diaries and personal letters. Those editors who troubled to collate and publish (and send to their local library) the notes and heartfelt contributions from the communities they were working within have also created a resource in which the authentic reactions of locals, beset by larger historical forces, can be identified.
References
[1] An example: part of the May 1998 cover of the Official Newsletter of the 6th Battalion (Hauraki) Regimental Association (1995-2012)
[2] Image credit: https://www.europeana.eu/nl/
[3] Kōrero on 5 December 2022, Oikimoke, Te Puna
[4] Corey Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, McSweeney’s 2015
[5] E P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, Peregrine 1977
[6] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, Penguin 1978 (trans. Barbara Bray)
No comments:
Post a Comment