Author(s): anon

NZ History

This fascinating, large-format book celebrates the recent revamping of the Auckland Museum by looking back into the past of the fifty or so donors who have contributed to its Stage II Grand Atruim development, which includes the magnificent copper dome with its commemorative windows. In offering the reader potted histories of many of the founding families of the Auckland we know today - the Fletchers, the Nathans, the Hellabys - it profiles too more recent luminaries such as fashion doyenne Trelise Cooper, and the Auckland's very own Mad Butcher, aka Peter Charles Leitch. Lavishly illustrated colour spreads remind us not only of the city's recent social past - Smith and Caughey's , for example, had its own volunteer unit of 63 employees, formed in 1898 and trained in the basement of the building, later to serve in the Great War - but also of the families who helped create and infrastructure for Auckland, such as the McConnells of McConnell Dowell. If a mantra arises from this book, it might be that success demands that you arrive early in the colony and immediately buy land or provide essential services, as did the Myers with their involvement in the liquor trade, or latterly the Fishers and the Paykels as highly competitive manufacturers in the home appliance market. A recurrent theme too in these histories, mainly penned by the families themselves, is the extent to which philanthropy arises from success - the book is redolent of charitable trusts whereby wealth is translated into generalised opportunity for others and this is nowhere more evident than in the history of the Gow family and the Sculpture Trust that they have endowed at Connells Bay on Waiheke Island. The book also tells of the extent to which families ballooned pior to reliable forms of contraception, and the tightness of social circles that saw young people from the affluent clans that socialised together almost inevitably choosing partners from within their ranks. There are ample reminders here of the verities of Auckland's founding past.