A 1970s slum house in Grey Lynn. A sad-looking elephant in 1920s Wellington, with an ad for a circus scrawled on its flank. Tables groaning with Kodachrome-coloured coleslaw and ham for the opening of St Lukes Mall in 1971. A yellowing image of the Windsor Castle pub in 1884, captioned with news of “some sensation in Parnell” after “a man named Stafford, while in a drunken state” rode in on a horse.
History is closer to us in some of these images than others, but they all came to my attention through the work of Lisa Truttman, keeper of the Timespanner blog and its associated Facebook page. “My passion is history, research, and stories from the past, especially New Zealand,” she writes in her introduction to the blog. “It is also my living … It keeps the bills paid, a roof over my head, and food on the table.”
I can’t imagine it’s a handsome living; not one that would really cover her hours of research, let alone her many other duties, which include being president of the New Zealand History Federation, a gathering point for community historians since 1971. Yet 50,000 of us follow the Facebook page, with its daily reveries and occasional arguments.
In a post celebrating the page’s 10th birthday, Truttman thanked “the wonderful libraries and archives who generously share such treasures with us and do so many long hours of scanning and cataloguing.” She always properly cites her sources, but she and others like her play a role as important as the cataloguers and scanners. They bring us news of the past.
Twenty years ago, I gave an address called Information Entrepreneurs at a conference at the National Library in Wellington. I wanted to reframe what was then the dichotomy of the archive sector – preservation vs dissemination. “I am an ignoramus,” rather than an expert, I said. “But I know what I like and I am motivated, and there is value in that.”
I told them about IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, founded on scraps in 1990 by a computer programmer called Col Needham, acquired by Amazon in 1998 and now the global screen industry’s main reference tool. It is still sustained as it ever was, by voluntary contributors – 900,000 of them.
Wikipedia runs on the same basis and was controversial in 2005 (user-generated content had been ruled out for Te Ara, the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand Online) but less so now, in a year when the White House is ordering the deletion of entire official histories.
Back then, I was aggrieved by Te Ara’s paltry section on New Zealand music: “I would love to be able help build a deep and broad resource here, and I’m not alone … But there is no way in for us.”
That subsequently happened, I’m proud to say. It’s called AudioCulture.co.nz and it draws its richness from its own community. And, like Timespanner, it brings the work of professional librarians and archivists to that community. The photographs of John Rykenberg, scanned and published by Auckland Libraries, light up stories of nights out in 50s and 60s Auckland.
I told some war stories in Wellington – my battle to get a recording of David Lange’s Oxford Union speech, which had to be sneaked out of Sound Archives in a brown paper bag – but perhaps the war has been fought now. So much that had been locked up is free to view. It’s not without some compromises: you can’t read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir of her time at Facebook, without thinking about the implications of posting heritage images under the terms of such a morally compromised company.
But it is ultimately for the better. History lets us know where we stand and those pictures are a powerful and inclusive way into that knowledge. They should be shared because the history itself is shared.
