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Home / Hawkes Bay Today

Enriching view of Hawke's Bay's proud past

By MARK STORY
Hawkes Bay Today·
7 Nov, 2010 04:00 PM3 mins to read

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Former Bay boy Matthew Wright claims publishing Bay histories is less about garnishing the province's coffee tables and more about understanding the human condition. He talks to Mark Story about the release of his latest book.
Matthew Wright reckons he's blessed with Hawke's Bay as a subject.
The historian's latest book, Historic
Hawke's Bay & East Coast, the most "picture intensive" of any of his eight books on the Bay, is one the author's hugely proud of.
Hawke's Bay folk should be proud too, he tells me, given the provincial pride leaping from its pages.
While a historian's role to "look for meaning" doesn't change whether presented via photographs or text, a visual history offers something unique, Wright says.
"It's a different kind of book - it has a particular purpose that differs from histories written with text.
"We're [historians] always looking for understanding and a picture conveys understanding in its own way. It literally shows us quite a bit about the past - and you can't get that out of documents."
Now living in Wellington, the historian says there are rich yesteryear pickings in his home region; a place he's spent the past quarter of a century studying.
"Hawke's Bay was tremendously important for New Zealand, particularly in the colonial period. Napier at one point was the largest town on the East Coast of the North Island and stayed that way until the 1880s.
"The economic power that Hawke's Bay had in the 1860s was huge. It got to the point where local MPs were able to try and knock over the government - Donald McLean came very close to managing it in 1868."
Given writing's still a pauper's pursuit, what's behind the author's prolific output? Wright says a passion, "curiosity of discovery" and a quest to better understand humanity keeps him at his keyboard.
"History brings the human condition into sharp relief."
A photograph of a pre-World War I Shakespearean party in Havelock North is an apt example, he says. "Here's a town in conservative, rural Hawke's Bay, which had a mystic aspect to a lot of its social activities, including a secret cult. Before the war, you have to ask how did that happen?"
The book's substantial in its breadth and includes 160 photos from the 1850s through to the present. The "literal quality" of the uncovered images stunned the experienced researcher, who acknowledges the book doubles as a history of the camera. "Photographic technology took a step back when they invented roll film because the grain was no where near as good as the big glass plates. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by the physical sharpness of the images ... pieces of art created with those early cameras.
"Back then, it was an expensive hobby but these were pastoralists who had plenty of money."
He counts the colonial era as a personal favourite, due to "the raw energies that people had pouring into what they were doing, the idealism, the interplays of humanity that were going on, the hatreds the politics and their great triumphs".
To this journalist, the stark depictions of colonial graft and apocalyptic landscapes of cleared bush impart a lasting sense of melancholy.
Wright disagrees.
"I don't quite see it that way actually. I see it as an exciting period, positive and hopeful. It gives a snapshot of people getting from there to here - and the humanity of it."

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