About 500 different newspapers have appeared since 1840, but most have failed to survive. For example, one Irishman, Joseph Ivess, founded no fewer than 26 papers in New Zealand, in addition to five which he had started in Australia. The Greymouth Evening Star and the Akaroa Mail remain as reminders of his compulsive excursions. He died in 1919, in his seventy-sixth year. James Henry Claridge, who died in 1946 aged 84, did better. He began 11 papers in the 22 years before 1920 and five of them are still publishing. They are the Eltham Argus, Martinborough Star, Taumarunui Press, Huntly Press, and Morrinsville Star. By world standards, however, New Zealand has a very large number of newspapers, owing mainly to the difficulties (geography and scattered centres of population) of building a daily national circulation such as exists in Britain or even in New South Wales.

The greatest number of newspapers published in New Zealand at one time was 193, including 67 dailies. This was in 1910, but by that time big advances in production machinery were taking place and only those papers able to lay out the capital for improved plant to meet or beat their competitors, and with assets and patronage sturdy enough to tide them over several periods of economic recession and of wartime austerity, were able to survive.

During the present century attempts to start new papers have generally failed. There were 79 new papers up to 1920; few have lasted. The Wellington Dominion is an outstanding example of success. It was begun as a morning paper in 1907 with the aim of filling a need for a newspaper to support Conservative political interests. But the Labour Party was not so successful in its attempt to set up newspapers. The Maoriland Worker was begun as a monthly in 1910 in Wellington; it finished its life as the Standard, a weekly, in 1960. An attempt to float the Times Newspaper Co. to publish a daily following the 1935 General Election, which returned a Labour Government with a large majority, failed to get support. The Southern Cross, a Wellington-based daily, lasted only five years from 1946. Labour interests still have one daily paper of their own, the Grey River Argus, Greymouth. The Argus was founded in 1865 and taken over as a politically controlled organ in 1919.

The independent Sun newspapers in Christchurch and Auckland caused much excitement during a stormy existence which roused competitors to action strong enough to finally extinguish them. These papers were founded by Edward Chalmers Huie, an Australian, who had been editor of the Evening News, in Christchurch. First, in 1914, he began the Sun in competition with the Christchurch Star and Evening News; and its success was assured. But Huie sought other fields to conquer.

In 1927 he went to Auckland and founded a second Sun to compete with the Auckland Star, conducted by the Brett Printing and Publishing Co. in which Sir Cecil Leys was a majority shareholder. Leys and the proprietors of the New Zealand Herald bought out the Auckland Sun three years later. In the meantime, Leys had taken over the Lyttelton Times Co., which published the Christchurch Star in competition with the Sun, and merged it with his own interests under the name of New Zealand Newspapers Ltd. A combination of depression, advertising-rate cutting, and price reductions killed the Christchurch Sun. When this afternoon paper was finally extinguished in 1935 the price of the deal with its company and publishers of the Christchurch Press was the cessation of a pioneer journal, the Christchurch Times, originally the Lyttelton Times. After the end of the Suns, Huie became the moving spirit behind the attempt to establish the Labour Times Newspaper Co.; in 1940 he took over the Hawkes Bay Daily Mail (like the Suns, modelled on the London namesake), which had begun to publish in 1938. But this failed in 1941. It was not alone; in the previous 10 years 48 New Zealand papers had folded up.

Powerful writing, some of it irresponsible and vituperative, but most of it couched in a forceful, often dogmatic vein almost unknown today, produced explosive reactions among the more volatile settlers who read their early papers as much to see what persons they knew were writing as for the views the writers were expressing. There was a sanguine business in the early existence of the New Zealand Herald and Auckland Gazette (1842), whose editor was a Dr Martin, “a medical man of considerable literary ability, forcible utterances, and powerful frame”. Martin wrote with an iron pen and laid about him so fiercely that before two months had elapsed he had been threatened with two or three actions for libel. One day a Government official entered the paper office and seized some of the editor's manuscripts. Martin was furious and challenged the official to a duel and, when the latter refused, posted him in the town as a blackguard and a coward. The paper, after running for only 10 months, collapsed in tumult.

The New Zealander, begun on 3 April 1865 as the first morning penny paper, published an article on Hone Heke's war. The article offended naval men, who considered that it slurred their honour. Armed with a hawser, a large number of sailors from warships in Auckland Harbour came to the door of the New Zealander office in Shortland Crescent, passed their rope through to the back and then over the roof. A full retraction – or the building would be overturned, they said. The proprietors, John Williamson and W. C. Wilson, yielded the point.

The press in its early days was motley, although some papers were excellent examples of printing. Meagre supplies of paper were responsible for some ludicrous or wry occurrences. For many weeks, for example, the Spectator was obliged to appear on red blotting paper, and the porous material took the inked type remarkably well. Sometimes the printers were compelled to print on paper of variable size, material and colour, and specimens are still in existence printed in green and blue, such as might be used nowadays on posters.

The Auckland Times, established on 5 September 1842 and owned and edited by Henry Falwasser, was an extraordinary specimen. For 10 numbers everything went well; then Shortland once more stepped in and prevented the use of the printing plant which had been bought by the Government and was then being used for the paper. But Falwasser was an ingenious and resourceful man. He gathered a miscellaneous assortment of old type, most of it suitable for printing headlines and advertisements. With the aid of a mangle and coarse paper he triumphantly produced his paper once more. Sometimes the pressure of the mangle was so violent that ink was driven right through the paper and words of the letterpress could be read there by reversal; sometimes it was so faint the words were barely legible. Words were printed with letters of various type, so that small capitals, italics, and Old English met together in the same word, producing a comical and often mystifying result. Nevertheless, “the paper afforded great amusement, and doubtless had a good circulation, especially as it lashed out to the complete satisfaction of the public”.

On one occasion the printer of the Nelson Examiner appealed to the paper's readers:

The appeal must have had some response, for the following number of the paper appeared on its due date. An advertisement in another paper read:

As publication was not interrupted, paper must have come from somewhere. The Otago Witness was not so fortunate. It appealed at least once to its readers for paper of any kind, “otherwise it will cease to appear”. The worst happened, and the Witness temporarily retired from the scene.

Politicians established four important papers in the South Island. The first was the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle which, like Revans's Gazette, was a New Zealand Company production. It came out for the first time on 12 March 1842 and its editors and contributors included such well-known political figures as Alfred Domett, William Fox, Edward Stafford, F. D. Bell, and J. C. Richmond. For nearly 10 years it was the only vehicle of settlement expression in the south.

The Canterbury Association made similar arrangements for printing a newspaper as had the New Zealand Company; and when type and press were set up a few days after the arrival of four emigrant ships at Lyttelton, the Lyttelton Times appeared. This was on 11 January 1851. James Edward FitzGerald, later to be first superintendent of the province, was its editor in the beginning, but he left it after two years for a full political life. In 1861, concluding that the Canterbury Provincial Government, which was supported by the Lyttelton Times, was pursuing an unwise monetary policy – particularly with regard to the raising of a loan to bore a railway tunnel through hills separating Lyttelton and Christchurch – he and a syndicate founded the Press as an opposition pamphlet. The Press Co. bought out the renamed Lyttelton Times in 1935 and wound it up.

The Otago settlement, which was founded in 1848, had for a short time its own newspaper, the Otago News, edited and produced by H. B. Graham. His early death saw the end of the News which, however, took shape again as the Otago Witness in 1851.

From 1848 onwards, several other papers appeared in Dunedin; but not until the vigorous and large ideas of Julius Vogel began to be applied to the Otago Daily Times, did a long-lived paper appear. There was no preliminary weekly, or bi-weekly; it appeared on 15 November 1861 as New Zealand's first full-fledged daily. Vogel was part-owner, but edited both the daily and its weekly companion, the Otago Witness.

Many newspapers were originally family owned, but most are now controlled by limited-liability public companies, some with stock exchange listings. Family ownership is largely confined to the smaller provincial papers: for example, the Bells, of the Ashburton Guardian, and the Muirs, of the Gisborne Herald. The outstanding exception among the metropolitans is the Wellington Evening Post. The Post was established by Henry Blundell, a Dubliner, in 1865, and “by concentrating on newspaper production as a vocation the Blundell family steadily consolidated its position.” The founder made it a rule of the business, followed in general by his successors, to take no direct part in public life. He believed that if this rule was followed the paper and the men who conducted it would be free to criticise, if necessary, the conduct of public bodies and companies.

Six other New Zealand papers existed when the Taranaki Herald's first issue was printed on 4 August 1852; only the Herald remains to this day. It was founded by William Collins, formerly a printer working for the London Morning Post, and by Garland William Woon, a 21-year-old printer who had served his apprenticeship in the composing room of the New Zealander. Woon was nominally the editor. William Morgan Crompton, sub-editor, was the third member of the staff.

Although newspapers did not pioneer printing in New Zealand, they have always been closely and vitally linked with it. The Bay of Islands had seen printing 10 years before it saw a newspaper. On 31 July 1830 the schooner Active arrived at the bay from Sydney. Aboard were the Rev. W. Yate, a James Smith, a 15-year-old printer, and a press. Yate wrote in September 1831: “employed with James Smith in printing off a few hymns in the native language. We succeeded beyond our most sanguine expectations”. Several copies of work done by Yate and Smith are believed to be among the records of the Church Missionary Society in England.

The New Zealand press was founded by Samuel Revans “of rough exterior, careless in dress (who) wore a conspicuously large Panama hat. His eyes were dark, penetrating, and deeply set, surmounted by thick, bushy eyebrows. His manner was restless, and his speech, though intelligent, often coarse”. After arriving back in London from a stormy experience in the Canadian colony, he was engaged by E. G. Wakefield to produce a journal for the New Zealand Company's expedition then fitting out to colonise in the antipodes. Before the expedition left England, Revans had used type and a Columbia press to produce, on 21 August 1839, the first issue of the New Zealand Gazette. The second issue (four pages for 1s.) appeared from a whare on the banks of the Hutt River eight months later; and this latter, of 18 April 1840, was the first newspaper to be printed in New Zealand.

On 18 April 1840, soon after the arrival of the sailing ship Adelaide at Port Nicholson, Wellington, Samuel Revans set up his plant ashore and produced the first newspaper. After 20 issues this New Zealand Gazette added the words and Britannia Spectator to its title, to include the proposed name for Wellington City. The Gazette waged war against the Government in Auckland and warmly defended the New Zealand Company against its enemies; its unyielding policies were its ruin. Its successor in 1844 was the New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Straits Guardian, which appeared at the instigation of a committee of six settlers but with the same printers who had been employed on the Gazette. One day, six months later, a printer inserted in one issue an advertisement, and, in the issue following, a “scandalous” rejoinder. The five printers were dismissed; but they banded together and produced the Wellington Independent. The Spectator committee reacted by slyly purchasing the printers' rented plant, but four months later the printers had got new machinery from Sydney. They did well enough to absorb the Spectator in August 1865. The Independent continued until 1874, when it was incorporated with a new paper, the New Zealand Times, which continued until 1927 when it was itself bought out by the Dominion proprietary and then closed down.

The New Zealand Advertiser and Bay of Islands Gazette began in 1840 two months after Revans had produced a paper at Port Nicholson. Published at Kororareka, its contents included the first official notices and proclamations, for Wellington had not then become the seat of government. Moderate suggestions for reform by its editor, the Rev. B. Quaife, excited official rebuke and, after threats from no less a person than the Colonial Secretary, Lieutenant Willoughby Shortland, the paper closed. In December 1840 it was succeeded by an official publication, the New Zealand Government Gazette, the forerunner of the official organ now issued each Thursday from the Government Printer's Office in Wellington.

The first Auckland paper appeared on 10 July 1841; but the enduring journal was not printed until 1863. This was the New Zealand Herald and it was distinctive because it began life as a business enterprise and not as a political mouthpiece. Its founder was a Scot, W. C. Wilson, whose sons, William and Joseph, joined forces with A. G. Horton, owner of a potentially powerful rival, the Southern Cross. Wilson and Horton Ltd. is now the biggest newspaper publisher in New Zealand.

Although equestrian events have been included in the Olympic Games programme since 1912, and have been competed for at the various A. and P. Shows in New Zealand for many years, the sport was not organised nationally until the early 1950s. The New Zealand Horse Society was formed to ensure that local riders were eligible to compete at the 1956 Olympic Games at Melbourne. It represents all equestrian interests in New Zealand including the Royal Agricultural Society, the New Zealand Hunt Clubs Association, the New Zealand Pony Clubs Association, and the Agricultural and Pastoral Societies, as well as separate hunt, light horse, and pony clubs. There are approximately 2,600 private members, and each year over 150 shows are staged by the society's affiliates. Altogether there are nearly 700 equestrian competitions held in New Zealand annually. These include show jumping, dressage, combined training tests, and horse trials. The culminating occasion of the year is the three-day Horse of the Year Show, which usually takes place in February, when riders and horses compete for the society's principal trophies.

One of the original aims of the New Zealand Horse Society was to promote and encourage competitions under international rules. In this connection, the jumping rules of the Fédration Equestre International were introduced at the Wellington meeting in 1950 and have since been widely adopted. The New Zealand Horse Society is an affiliate of the F.E.I., and in 1964 a small equestrian team represented New Zealand at the Tokyo Olympics.

A programme of publication has been undertaken to give both detailed information on the history of individual sites and a summary of their significance and main features in small leaflets. Full-length bulletins have been published on Samuel Butler's homestead at Mesopotamia, Te Porere, Waimate North Vicarage, and the Paremata barracks. Both by its main work of preservation and by the stimulation of a widening public interest, the Trust looks for growing support in its task of making the monuments of our past a living reality to future generations.

by Austin Graham Bagnall, M.A., A.L.A., Librarian, National Library Centre, Wellington.

From its inception the Trust has been engaged in the preservation and recording of significant archaeological sites. Its first “emergency” project was the recording of Maori rock-paintings at the junction of the Waikato and Waipapa Rivers on a site soon after submerged by the Waipapa dam. Arrangements were made for impressions, drawings, and as complete a photographic record as possible to be taken, after which sections of the paintings were cut out and removed for museum custody. Similar but much more extensive work in the recording of Maori rock shelter art has been undertaken in the Waitaki basin, a particularly rich centre, part of which is to be submerged by the Benmore (Otematata) hydro project. In the Waitaki and its tributary, the Ahuriri, previously known sites, as well as shelters discovered in the two seasons' survey, have been fully recorded and the summary reports published. More recently, further surveys have been made of South Canterbury rock shelters. The Trust has also provided funds for the systematic excavation of the Auckland volcanic cone of Mount Wellington – action prompted by its pending use as the site for a borough storage dam. Excavation of the striking hilltop pa of Te Tarata in the Waitotara Valley has been of considerable practical and theoretical interest. In all this work the Trust has been glad to have the services and cooperation of individual archaeologists and the New Zealand Archaeological Association, as its resources and facilities do not yet permit the regular employment of such persons.

The Trust's major project to date has been the purchase of the Waimate North Vicarage and the planning of its restoration. This building, the oldest in the country after the house built by the early missionary, James Kemp, at Kerikeri, was completed in 1831 as one of the Church Missionary Society buildings on the establishment of the station. It was later the first headquarters of Bishop G. A. Selwyn and the first site of St. John's College. It is intended to restore the upper storey and interior disposition of the rooms to their original state and purpose. A caretaker has been appointed and much preliminary work has been done. When restoration has been completed, the building should be a most interesting and attractive link in the comparatively dense network of historic buildings in the Bay of Islands area.

The remains of the Paremata barracks at Mana on the Porirua Inlet have also been cleared, surveyed, and protected. The building, of which only the lower sections of some walls and the outline of the foundations now remain, was completed in 1847 as a defensive outpost at the conclusion of a campaign against some Maoris in the area and in the adjacent Hutt Valley.

A cottage in Lavaud Street, Akaroa, known as Eteveneaux House, is the most important remaining link with the French colony of 1840. The Trust made a substantial grant towards the purchase of the building which has been constituted a historic reserve vested in the Akaroa County Council. Grants have also been made for the restoration of two pioneer cottages in South Canterbury – the Cuddy, Waimate, belonging to the Studholme family, and the Levels Hut, near Timaru, the early home of George Rhodes.

Where the preservation of a building on its original site is not possible, the Trust may support its removal. An interesting pioneer home in New Plymouth, the Richmond cottage, built of stone, has been re-erected and restored with funds provided by the Trust, the New Plymouth Borough Council, and the public.

A striking example of restoration and development has been the opening to the public of the Maori War battlefield of Te Porere near the Tokaanu – National Park highway. The three redoubts and the surrounding area on the headwaters of the Wanganui River, with the consent of the Maori owners, have been made an historic reserve. Here in October 1869 was fought the last pitched battle of the Maori Wars when Te Kooti and his followers were defeated and forced to withdraw from the main defensive earthworks which are still most impressively defined. Access bridges and tracks have been constructed, the redoubts have been cleared, and gorse is being eliminated.

The Trust for some years has been concerned that the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Wellington should be preserved. The building, the main part of which was erected in the 1860s to the design of the Rev. Frederick Thatcher, is a striking and unique example of early New Zealand church architecture. As the new cathedral, the first stage of which has been completed, is now in use, the Church authorities have considered demolishing old St. Paul's but it is hoped that the preservation of the building on its present site can be achieved. Another building with which the Trust has been concerned is the Elms, Tauranga, the former residence of Archdeacon A. N. Brown.

In addition to its work of preservation and recording, the Trust has erected plaques and notice boards on appropriate buildings and sites. A standard design for bronze plaques, with an appropriate concrete base where necessary, has been adopted. Notice boards have been erected on sites where a more detailed explanation of their significance is considered necessary. Considerable research is frequently necessary to determine the factual basis of an inscription. Twenty-seven bronze plaques had been erected by 31 March 1961, and some 10 notice boards had been erected or approved.

Suggestions which had been made from time to time that an organisation should be set up to look after such matters crystallised in the private member's Bill introduced into Parliament by Duncan Rae in 1953. Although the Bill itself did not proceed, responsibility for the necessary legislation was assumed by Government and the Historic Places Act of 1954 established the National Historic Places Trust which first met in the following year. In terms of the Act it is one of the Trust's main functions to preserve, mark, and record “such places and objects and things as are of national or local historic interest or of archaeological, scientific, educational, architectural, literary, or other special national or local interest”. The Trust as constituted consists of a chairman and 12 members to represent the Maori race, historical and founders' societies, the University of New Zealand, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the New Zealand Library Association, the Art Galleries and Museums Association, and the New Zealand Institute of Architects. The Act provides for various categories of associate members who elect a member to the Trust. The Secretary of Internal Affairs, whose Department has for some time been concerned with such work as had been possible in the past, and the Director-General of Lands are ex officio members. In 1963 the name was amended to New Zealand Historic Places Trust.

The Trust, at the outset, decided to work locally through a network of regional committees, 17 of which were originally set up, based on land districts. It is the function of such committees to determine priorities within their districts, to conduct local surveys where necessary, to stimulate public interest, and generally to act as agents of the Trust. In some areas individuals have been appointed to act in a similar way. A set of guiding principles for preserving, marking, and recording historic sites was drafted for guidance in classifying and determining the relative importance of the many suggestions which the Trust received.

New Zealanders have been compensated in various ways for the comparative brevity of their history. There has always been a lively interest in Maori origins and traditions and, more recently, a systematic and scholarly approach to Maori archaeology. A possibly disproportionate volume of local history has appeared, much of it over-concerned with the pioneers and their doings, but nevertheless it is a token of interest in the past. More recently there has been a scattered but growing concern about the visible relics of our history – not only pre-European pa sites, but also houses, churches, and other buildings of historical or architectural significance.

Lord Bledisloe's gift to the nation in 1932 of the Waitangi estate and Treaty House and its subsequent administration by the Waitangi Trust was perhaps an informal beginning. The centennial of 1940 did much to arouse public interest in the local and national past. The purchase of Pompallier House by the Government in 1943 raised the problem of the restoration and maintenance of this former French Roman Catholic mission headquarters. Its post-war renovation by the Department of Internal Affairs focused attention, again, on the need to deal more formally and systematically with our historic buildings.