Real Gold - Exhibition at the Central Library

Made another visit to this wonderful exhibition at the library with good friend M who noticed the book at our place when she was here in Inner Ponsonby last weekend. I gave it to Dieter for Christmas . Anyway however had the Special Collections exhibition space to ourselves this Saturday afternoon and had a good browse - things from many of the different collections - maps of early Auckland and Wellington, letters - from Darwin to Sir George Grey, Florence Nightingale to Grey, diaries of Sarah Mathew, autobiographies of Peter McDonald (1876) " Auckland was a queer wee town...in 1842", and Robin Hyde , written while a patient at Auckland Mental Hospital in the 1930s. This manuscript was given to the library by the doctor who encouraged her to write it, Dr Tothill. I remember it coming through the cataloguing dept in the late 1970s .There are photographs by Clifton Firth of Allen Curnow and ARD Fairburn, others of Lee Grant of the Mercury Theatre, John A Lee's scrapbooks with photos and cuttings stuck down with bits of sticking plaster. I seem to recall him gifting those to the library in the the late 70s or early 80s too. Whina Cooper came in too and gifted a beautiful cloak. This year I will have been in the library 30 years (1oth of July this year!) I digress. The middle picture is of the winning garden plan for Western Park, then called Central Park. It is still a great big park with huge trees going from Ponsonby downto Auckland Girls and beyond.

The last picture is the southern end of Waiwera Beach, a watercolour by Thomas Ryan, 1892.

We have another picture of Waiwera, a watercolour painted by Dieter's friend Sir Riga in the 1950s, one showing the big rock and a pier that used to be there. I remember the Waiwera hotel which was the place to go in the 1960s, before or after a hot swim. Those were the days...

Anyway however there are the beautiful manuscripts, rare books, even a handwritten translation of St Luke's Gospel in an aboriginal language, done by a missisonary L E Threlkeld in 1857. Sir George Grey had it bound and had it illuminated like a medieval manuscript by Annie Layard, the wife of his private secretary.

Other collections represented are bookplates, music (God defend NZ) , Maori manuscripts, first editions. The book contains even more information about other collections, I didn't even know the library has - for example old tokens. Dieter has quite a few of these, sadly being sold off by me on Trademe, with his consent of course. You can't keep everything for ever can you.

Finished off a pleasant afternoon with coffee at the library cafe, Real, then paid a visit to Smith and Caughey's sale, where I bought a cute little floral torch which I will keep for myself to take on holiday with me. We are going round the East Coast in a couple of weeks time and up the Danube from Bulgaria to Germany later in the year.