The recent opening of Hotel Indigo Auckland, located in the 41-storey tower at 51 Albert Street, and photos showing parts of the old building combined with the new, prompts the rich story of those...
“Go and Take Over the News…” Early Days of TV in Fiji I had been to Fiji several times in the late 1980s as a trainer, teaching radio and TV news reporters from various South Pacific Islands...
Auckland had a flourishing prostitution business in the 1870s and 1880s, much to the dismay of respectable citizens, the police and civic authorities. Several brothel-keepers became prominent but...
The centenary of the first radio transmission in New Zealand (Professor Robert Jack in 1921) and the first broadcast by a licensed radio station (1YA Auckland in 1923) prompted a look at those...
Asher Asher was a businessman in early Auckland who led the town’s first volunteer fire brigade. But there’s a challenge to this fact in the writings of another pioneer, William Daldy. Based on...
This story was inspired by a stay at the Orua Bay Motel in 2015. Reading the in-room almanac I found a list of former proprietors of the harbour-side accommodation since it was first opened by the...
Charles Alexander Woolley was from a “fire brigade family” and began his career as a talented fireman in Auckland but who swapped his fire uniform and went to fight in World War One. He returned to...
In the late 1920s Shorters of Shortland Street, in Auckland’s central business district, offered rental cars in what was fast becoming a lucrative business, the hire-car industry. The “Drive...
This is the unlikely story of two successive Wellington fire chiefs whose personal lives cost them their jobs. It was almost incredible that not one, but two, Superintendents resigned from the same...
In 2014 the person of John Gildroy Grant was rediscovered, a young volunteer firefighter from Hawera who enlisted to serve in the First World War – and returned from the Front in France with...