Contemporary changes to the 19th century agricultural management of Mount Eden and other nearby volcanic cones spatially linked to one another under local governance through the Auckland Hundreds (1850s) and Highway Boards (1860-1870s) came to be recorded in series of contested petitions. We have the names and locations of the petitioners which critique their demands to retain their grazing rights during a highly political assessment made through committees of the Auckland Provincial Council in 1870.

 

Mary Muriel Lysaght Watt. Horticulturalist, landscape architect and mother (1917-2005).

Mary Watt was born on the 27 March, 1917 and died on 2nd July 2005, (Dunedin City Archives and Dominion Post, 5 July, 2005). Mary was born in New Plymouth to Emily Lysaght. Her family included sisters, Sylvia and Avriel Margaret Lysaght (1903-1984) biologist, science historian and illustrator, based in the UK (Thomson, 2005). Mary married Jack Watt and there was one child, Noeleen Violet (Watt) Clark/e, and five grandchildren.

In his reminiscences in the 1930s, Sir George Fowlds, Minister of Education and Public Health in the Ward cabinet 1906-11, whose papers I arranged in 1975, referred to himself as a New Zealander, although he was born a Scot. [1]

The phrase that is the title of this paper originated with an exclamation point, not a question mark, as a slogan. Local people concerned about the future of a group of historic sites near Akaroa, needed such a slogan for two purposes:

This project is intended as a pilot study for a larger investigation of the ways in which local histories are made, collected, presented and received in regional history museums in New Zealand.[1] Concerned with the way that understandings of the ‘past’ are both made and circulated through regional history museums, and with the types of historical narratives that are constructed in this process, the project also reflects its wider context: a growing interest in the study of the presence and meanings of the ‘past’ in New Zealand and elsewhere.

'For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the mind, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock'[1]

I want to share a piece of PHANZA history and popular memory – apt enough at this conference and in a discussion about history on television. In 1995 I wrote to Neil Roberts in my capacity as PHANZA president to suggest that he may have found it useful to call on the services of professional historians for advice in his 6-part documentary New Zealand at War that had screened on TV One that winter.