Meet The Bushies
Securing a safe forever home for the extensive archive of images from one of New Zealand’s most prolific photojournalists, Peter Bush, was a big mission. However, this was only the...
Securing a safe forever home for the extensive archive of images from one of New Zealand’s most prolific photojournalists, Peter Bush, was a big mission. However, this was only the...
Kirsty Porter links a Tippco truck to family life on a remote back-country farm.
Mike Roche applies an historical geographer’s perspective to a children's jigsaw puzzle from the 1950s. What did we produce and where did it go?
Join the Te Manawa Art Society for a tour behind the scenes at the Te Manawa Art Gallery. The Art Society’s Virginia Warbrick and Te Manawa senior collection manager Talei...
In the final entry in this series, Simon Johnson examines another mechanical device in the Te Manawa collection: the spud gun. Where it arose, how it was marketed, and some of the controversy that swirls around toys of this nature.
Simon Johnson explores the background of a mechanical zebra toy in the Te Manawa collection. This toy and many like it once dominated European toy markets in the first half of the 20th century - but now they are rare items.
As empires rise, so they too must fall. Simon Johnson follows up on his Mechanics Made Easy post by tracing the history of Meccano from post-war to the present day. One item in the heritage collection at Te Manawa is a landmark for the brand’s struggle to survive in an increasingly crowded market.
The heritage collection at Te Manawa contains many curiosities. Inspired by an example of “Mechanics Made Easy”, local historian Simon Johnson charts the rise of Meccano and the toy empire of engineering entrepreneur Frank Hornby.
Every year Te Manawa adds dozens of items to its collections. Artworks to the art collection; artifacts of our society, past and present, to the heritage collection. Long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, collecting was to be paused during the first six months of 2020. When a community is as generous with its donations as this one, says collections manager Jeff Fox, sometimes you need to stop to get your breath back...
Creating digital backups of artworks is a way of preserving them