The Merrie-Midgets were a puppet show hand-crafted, built and performed by the Comfort family of Christchurch from the mid 1950s until 1965. The show travelled the length of the South Island, along with appearances in Auckland and Wellington, and was a regular feature on Hays Roof during school holidays. Alison Comfort with characters from The…
Mac the dog pulling a sulky, Colombo Street: Picturing Canterbury
Mac the dog waiting at traffic lights whilst a bus goes past along Colombo Street. Mac is pulling a sulky carrying Jenny-Lee Barnes, aged 2 1/2 whilst passers-by watch. 21 May 1966. Do you have any photographs of Colombo Street in the 1960s? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection. The Discovery Wall is a large interactive exhibition which…
Traffic officer checking a driver’s licence: Picturing Canterbury
Miss P. Stokes, traffic officer, checking the driver's licence of a man sitting in a car. 12 August 1967. Do you have any photographs of Christchurch in the 1960s? If so, feel free to contribute to our collection. The Discovery Wall is a large interactive exhibition which allows several people to simultaneously explore images and stories of the history of the…
Changing the tyre: Christchurch Photo Hunt 2018
October is Photo Hunt month at Christchurch City Libraries. We invite you to share any of your photos and help grow the city's photographic archive. All entries must be received by 31 October. Christchurch City Libraries has produced a set of four postcards promoting the competition which are available from your local library. Each week during…
Christchurch to Lyttelton suburban Ec electric locomotive undergoing maintenance in the Addington Workshops: Picturing Canterbury
Christchurch to Lyttelton suburban Ec electric locomotive undergoing maintenance in the Addington Workshops [ca. 1960]. Built between 1879-1880, the Addington railway workshops replaced an earlier railway workshop (the first in New Zealand) and continued to operate until December 1990. The New Zealand EC class locomotive was designed by English Electric in 1928 to serve the…
A glimpse of libraries past
As we move ever closer to the opening of Tūranga, it can be interesting to reflect and look back on how far libraries have come in the last few decades. Looking at our fabulous digital collections I hit a fascinating and poignant vein of images of Christchurch libraries past. Particularly poignant is this image of…
Love, loss, and Las Vegas glitter: All the beautiful girls
Fresh out of the box this week is All the Beautiful Girls. This great story is the second novel from Elizabeth J. Church, author of The Atomic Weight of Love. Lily Dekker has had a difficult start to life. Wrenched from idyllic surroundings by a cataclysmic car crash, her family "dissolve(d) like sugar in iced tea". She…
Kennedy Assassinated! What were you doing on 23 November 1963?
By the time The Christchurch Star was published on the afternoon of Saturday 23 November 1963, it would have been hard to find someone in Christchurch who had not already heard that the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been assassinated earlier that morning (7:00am New Zealand time). But when the initial…
Peacock at New Brighton Zoo: Picturing Canterbury
Peacock at New Brighton Zoo. January 1965. The North Brighton Zoo started as an aquarium, possibly as early as the 1880s and became a mini zoo, run by Bill Grey, in the late 1940s. It closed in 1996. Date: 1965. Entry in the 2013 Christchurch City Libraries Photo Hunt. Kete Christchurch is a collection of photographs…
Cool stuff from the Selectors: from the 1960s to pink cakes and beyond…
Caves : exploring New Zealand’s subterranean wilderness by Marcus Thomas The idea of venturing into a cave leaves me with clammy hands, thankfully I can now enjoy the beauty and danger of caving without having to get my feet wet. This book takes readers on a journey into New Zealand's longest and deepest caves, through…
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