“It turned out no one had ever digitised them fully.”
Coneybeer said he bought about 110 editions of the magazine in 2020 from Whanganui historian Kyle Dalton.
He tracked down the rest in op shops and bookstores, with the last few found earlier this year.
“I posted online looking for them, and eventually, a lady on Durie Hill was kind enough to lend me her copies, as long as I scanned them and took them straight back.”
Staff members Stefan Bourke and Nadia Kauika were key to the project, with Bourke writing an online search engine and Kauika spending hundreds of hours scanning each copy and correcting words, Coneybeer said.
“When you’re reading them, you’re constantly looking for family members, or sports clubs and businesses you relate to.
“Now, you can just type in a name and find exactly what you want.”
Rob Graham, once chief photographer at the Wanganui Herald, was the magazine’s editor.
He also ran the photography business Robuck Studios on Ridgway St, then Victoria Ave.
Graham moved to Auckland in 1980 and then to Australia, where he started the weekly Kiwi News newspaper in the mid-1990s.
Coneybeer said “anything happening in Wanganui” was documented in the magazine.
“There’s so much gold in there.”
Alarm Watch also digitised Outlook, a similar magazine that ran in Whanganui from 1980 to 1981, he said.
“I’ve always been documenting stuff, and my dad was a photographer, so everything we did as kids was documented.
“I guess I just want to make sure we don’t lose history.”
Graham died in Sydney in 2008, and in 2013, two of his children brought his ashes back from Australia to be interred in the rose garden at Aramoho Cemetery.
Digitised versions of Wanganui Photo News are available on the Alarm Watch website.
Mike Tweed is a multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present his focus is local government, primarily Whanganui District Council.
