Opening of Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank – Heugh Chappell for Radio National

Recorded 7th January 2013 by Radio National

Introduction: What’s believed to be New Zealand’s first purpose-built digital archive opened recently in a restored historic two-storey house on the western outskirts of Hastings. The Hawke’s Bay Digital Archives Trust has set up a Knowledge Bank, which aims to create and preserve a digital encyclopedia of the cultural, sporting, industrial and commercial achievements of families in Hawke’s Bay as well as their personal histories. Our reporter, Heugh Chappell, attended the opening.

Heugh Chappell: The ceremonies, in the spacious grounds of Stoneycroft House, built in 1875 as the town house for a farming family, were a grand affair, with representatives from the five families who lived in the house before the Hastings District Council bought the property six years ago, arriving either by horse and carriage or in vintage cars before mingling with about two hundred other visitors.

[Loudspeaker announcement]

Former Mayor of Hastings Lawrence Yule: Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to Stoneycroft; a very warm welcome to relishing something of the past.

Heugh: The mayor, Lawrence Yule, who officially opened Stoneycroft and the Knowledge Bank says the council, which helped fund the restoration of the house and supplied a lot of furniture, is right behind the objectives of the Trust.

Lawrence: Because it’s a completely open access digital way of storing, accessing and keeping material that is important to families [and] individuals in a way that [it] might not be normally stored or kept in more traditional museums, and it’s doing it in the way of the future, digitally. It’s fantastic.

Heugh: The driving force behind the Digital Archives Trust is James Morgan, a former editor of the Hastings-based Hawke’s Bay Herald Tribune newspaper. His family first settled in Central Hawke’s Bay in 1874. He’s had a dream ever since desktop computers came on the scene in the 1980s of preserving Hawke’s Bay’s history in a digital form.

James Morgan: The purpose of people bringing in their little pieces of information, or their big boxes of information, [background music] sp that they can be duplicated, immediately gives them the protection from the silverfish, as I call it; but more than that, metadata at the top of our systems links their material with everyone else’s material. The Knowledge Bank is a completely community project. There are no government or local authority organisations in the administration choice; that in itself is good because it keeps it out of the clutches of politics good and politics bad.

Heugh: James Morgan says that all the material members of the public bring in will be preserved for future generations in a form which is virtually indestructible.

James: It is going out onto the cloud; into four other places around as well as this, so you’re going to need to have an earthquake in Auckland, a volcano in Wellington, a fire in Christchurch and so on before this material is lost completely. So here we have material being backed up on our systems every three hours.

Heugh: Gordon Vogtherr from Hastings, who’s in his eighties, says the Knowledge Bank will be a great asset for Hawke’s Bay, and is keen to contribute what he can. He says his family is only one of three in the district who’ve survived one hundred years in business.

Gordon Vogtherr: They set up bacon curing at Stortford Lodge; that was the Elite Bacon Company. It was bought from the Lowe brothers who had a coolstore there, and our family opened a delicatessen in Heretaunga Street next to the State Theatre, the day war broke out – August 4th 1914.

Heugh: Rose Mohi and her family are part of Waipuk Incorporated which owns land overlooking Ocean Beach. She can trace her whakapapa or cultural identity back many generations. She’s very excited about the value the Knowledge Bank will have for Māori.

Rose Mohi: I’m very interested in the history of Hawke’s Bay, and the interconnection of those families in the early days, the Māori and Pākehā. There’s good paper trails because of course the Māori Land Court started here in 1866, but they’re difficult to go through. If you’re onto one particular family block or one particular family, you would want to take a snippet of that and put it into your own setting, which is exactly what they could do here at Stoneycroft.

Heugh: Patrick Parsons is one of Hawke’s Bay’s most well known and experienced historians, whose great-great-grandfather began farming in the region in 1862.

Patrick Parsons: I’m personally getting a lot of students, you know, from the EIT [Eastern Institute of Technology] and universities and so forth, pestering me if you like; and I see the Digital Archives as the place that they should, you know, naturally be sort of heading towards. It becomes a research centre, arguably the most complete bank of knowledge.

Heugh: In 2008, Judy Siers from Napier won the biography section of the New Zealand Book Awards for a four hundred page work on the architect, James Chapman-Taylor. She says the Knowledge Bank will be a huge asset, both for historians and researchers.

Judy Siers: It should inspire people to open up those wardrobes, and get under the beds … get those boxes out [chuckle] and start to sort through them. But of course you don’t have to give your family relics to Stoneycroft Archive; you can loan them, and they can be digitalised and then your family can own it [them] again.

Heugh: As well as accommodating the Hawke’s Bay Knowledge Bank, Stoneycroft House is also home to a library including a collection of important records accumulated by Hawke’s Bay genealogists over a long period of time. Lily Baker, after whom the library is named, tried unsuccessfully some years ago to set up a digital library in Hastings, and is very keen for the Knowledge Bank to succeed.

Lily Baker: It’s most important; a lot of people throw their family history away … their photographs … sombody dies in the family [and] they don’t know who it is. And that’s what we will be doing – recording that for posterity. And I’ve got a list of people that we need to record really urgently; particularly, we’ve got two members over ninety, and they are very interesting. One was at the Battle of [El] Alamein, and he’s just shared recently for the first time, what it was like on the day the battle started. He had never shared that with anybody else before.

Heugh: Meanwhile, the Knowledge Bank’s five trustees, who include James Morgan, believe what’s been created in Stoneycroft House is a model for preserving history which other regions of New Zealand should copy.

For Summer Report – Heugh Chappell.