‘In this game, you read a book a day,’ a historian friend once said to me.
I never did, until I worked at Te Ara, where one had to climb a tree and root around in the undergrowth at the same time, getting an overall view of a subject and looking for the detail. You could only do it by reading a book a day.
Except where there weren’t any. My first assignment was Taxis. No one had written anything. But there was the ex-head of the Taxi Federation who was still doing its website at 80-plus. So I went to see him, and with George’s overview, I had a lead on hunting out material, mainly from newspapers.
What has been astounding to me since is the usefulness of what I learnt at Te Ara. Drilling down into individual topics has given me an enormous amount of information to call on. Doing a number of topics in quick succession meant covering a lot of ground. The combination means being able to make new connections, and the picture of the country’s history that emerges is more complicated, more subtle – more interesting. It’s much harder to make airy summings-up or give the obvious answer.
Using this item
New Zealand Portrait Gallery - Te Pukenga Whakaata
by Bev Short
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