Last week I talked about the giant water chute that was a star attraction at the 1906/7 N.Z. Exhibition in Hagley Park, Christchurch. This is a follow-up post of sorts, but mostly just an excuse to share some seriously awesome photos of one of the Exhibition towers being […]
There is something about Edwardians that makes me smile. It doesn’t help that their world is one that is far too easy to romanticise – a world filled with pageantry, fancy hats, brass bands in rotundas, pocket watches, amusing moustaches and in Christchurch they even had a giant […]
At the start of the year I posted this series of summer snapshots taken by English tourists passing through sunny Nelson in 1933. Here are a few more snapshots from their New Zealand holiday, this time showing what they got up to that winter. Eighty years ago the […]
This week two television documentaries I worked on premiered in the United States as part of Discovery Channel’s high-profile ‘Shark Week’. My job on these shows was to track down and get permission to use any video footage or photographs that we wanted to include. I don’t blog […]
Today I have another couple of envelopes and another story, this time from wartime Wellington – a city that has had a bit of a shaky time lately. I came across this pair of covers (fancy philately term for used envelopes) back when I was a teenager. At […]
Today I thought I’d share a snippet of aviation history that I found during some “front-line” ephemera collecting. It also has a bit of cricket geekery thrown in for good measure along with a D-Day reference AND a tropical cyclone. In the digital age most of my collecting […]
Two years ago a powerful earthquake struck Christchurch resulting in the tragic loss of 185 lives, countless homes, businesses and untold amounts of irreplaceable heritage. Much of what so many people take for granted every day was lost in just seconds. As a born and bred Cantabrian it […]
Recently I came across a beautiful photograph in a secondhand book store and snapped it up for my collection. Usually I don’t blog about items that I’ve only recently purchased but this I thought was an exception. I give you – four Dunedin children and their pet cat. […]
Now is the time of year when New Zealand families make like a D-Day assault team and storm the beaches. The ice cream vendors make a killing while people get sand in their hair, work on their tan and lap up the beach culture. Of course none of […]
One of my geeky obsessions is stereographic photography. This interest manifests itself in the form of a personal museum of historical stereoscopic photographs and examples of 3D viewing devices ranging from an original 19th century wooden viewer through to an aircraft recognition training tool from the Second World […]
