Post researched and written by Jennie Henderson, Hocken Collections Assistant  – Publications As a researcher, the promise of what might be hiding in a primary source can be irresistible.  Primary sources can convey a sense of time, place, and personality like nothing else. There is a great satisfaction that comes from connecting the dots between […]

Post by Karen Craw – Maps Curator As well as sheet maps, charts and Atlases of New Zealand, Australia, Antarctica the Pacific and the wider world, the Hocken Maps Collection contains a wide variety of cartographic resources and reference materials. This portable terrestrial globe produced by George Philip & Son, London and Liverpool, is an […]

For Māori, place and place names act as constant reminders not only of where one is, but of who one is – without one the other does not exist. Māori named the landscape as a way of emphasising claim to the land, to describe features, to immortalise people or events for historic or spiritual reasons […]

To coincide with “Hector Day” 16 March, we are launching a new online version of a map documenting the geological survey of Otago and Southland carried out by James Hector in the early 1860s. 16 March is Hector’s birthday. Hector is one of New Zealand’s most respected scientists, and after he completed the Otago and […]

Kelvin Grove Dunedin, by Bastings, Leary & Co., 1879. R. Hay surveyor. One of the most attractive sales plans in the collection and typical of its time, this black and white auction notice for the North East Valley subdivision of Kelvin Grove plays up the rustic element with heading and border of twigs and a sketch […]