Memory boxes

PapersPast would have to be the single most important history website in New Zealand. Access to thousands and thousands of digitised newspapers is so vital to historical research these days that on the odd occasion that the website is offline for maintenance or, more commonly, I have no internet connection despite living just 12 minutes from the CBD of a major city, it can be impossible to get any work done.

Over the last 18 years PapersPast has gone a long way towards removing the barriers to primary research that existed in the ‘good old days’, when the only way you could access a newspaper published in Hawera was to find where the physical copies of it were held and then plan a trip by road or air. I won’t be the only one who recalls the research trips to Wellington that involved being cloistered in research rooms with pencil and paper; making laborious notes of everything that might be useful. These days a trip to the heritage collection of a library will likely involve taking a few quick snaps on your smartphone but even better is being able to sit in front of the computer in your pjs searching PapersPast.

Although the newspapers are the primary attraction of PapersPast I do have to remind myself every now and then that it may be worth looking at the other content on the site. The parliamentary papers, including the Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (aka the A to Js), are not always easy to navigate but are vital for any research involving central government.

In the magazines and journals section the architecture and building journal Progress (1905-23) is often very useful and the Ladies’ Mirror (1922-26), Kai Tiaki: the journal of the nurses of New Zealand

(1908-29) and Te Ao Hou (1952-75) have also come up trumps in the past. The magazine with the longest span on my goto list is the New Zealand Tablet

(1873-1925), a Catholic periodical that provided coverage of the church’s building activities around the country. In its November 1913 edition, for example, the Tablet described the ceremony to lay the foundation stone of the new Catholic church at Ngaruawahia. St Paul’s is a landmark on the Great South Road and is listed by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga and scheduled on the Waikato District Plan.

The history of the Catholic church in Ngaruawahia obviously predates the church building by some decades. In 1861 Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier had written to King Tawhiao informing him that he was sending a priest to Ngaruawahia; none other than his nephew, Antoine Pompallier. The latter set up a modest church in a whare on the bank of the Waipa River, but he left the mission station in 1863 in advance of the