A&P Show history on display at Heritage Tairāwhiti exhibition in Gisborne

A large crowd turned out to enjoy the Poverty Bay A&P Show in 1979. An exhibition of show photographs is running at Heritage Tairawhiti's Centre for Heritage.

The Poverty Bay A&P Show might be over but there’s still a chance to reminisce through an exhibition of photographs at the Centre for Heritage on Saturday.

The exhibition features images from William Crawford, the Gisborne Herald photographers and Stephen Jones, whose work all contributed to the more than 600 selected for a just-published, 150-year history of the Poverty Bay A&P Association.

Titled Where Town Meets Country, the history was written and produced by historian Sheridan Gundry with former Gisborne Herald chief reporter and now Gisborne district councillor Debbie Gregory providing modern interviews of prominent show contributors.

A young girl looks down at the crowd attending the 1966 Poverty Bay A&P Show.

Gundry, also the deputy chair of Heritage Tairāwhiti, said she and former museum director Mike Spedding chose and installed the small selection as a taster for the book, available for sale at the A&P Showgrounds office.

“This exhibition replaces our earlier one focused on the Taruheru River. But as an integral part of our entity, we have retained and shifted the Taruheru photographs into our foyer, with two donated paintings of the river by Graeme Mudge and Peter Ferguson.

“This makes for a full centre of images about us here in Gisborne Tairāwhiti,“ Gundry said.

“Fellow member Marty Reynolds and I will also be leading another of our free guided tours of the lower Taruheru on Saturday.

“Not much walking is involved, but there is a lot to talk about within a short space about early Māori use of the river and European settlement.

“The tour takes about an hour or so and is held on the last Saturday of each month.”

The A&P Show exhibition will be open from 10.30am Saturday and the Taruheru tour starts from the Centre for Heritage (the former Plunket Building in Palmerston Rd near the Peel Street Bridge), at 11am.

The exhibition will be open on Saturdays from 10.30am until 2.30pm until early December.