The holiday season can be a time to celebrate the year and remember fun memories of years gone by with friends and family… so why not take the chance to look at Pae Korokī together?

If a family lived in Tauranga from the 1960s there’s a good chance some of that history was captured and is now available online at Tauranga City Council’s archive Pae Korokī. Perhaps an older relative excelled at local sport, worked to put together some of the city’s renowned buildings, or spent all their time at the beach just like so many Tauranga residents and visitors will this summer. All these activities and many more are available to view and can provide memories for those who lived it, and insight for the younger generation, as to what day-to-day life was like in Tauranga.

Thousands of photographs, paintings, videos, meeting minutes, plans and maps can be found in the online collections. The keyword search function makes it easy to enter a surname, business, or organisation to see what the happenings were decades ago.

Tauranga City Council Community Services General Manager Barbara Dempsey says Pae Korokī is great tool for anyone looking to discover more about their family history and the development of Tauranga throughout the years, especially while the library is closed at times over the holiday season.

“A colleague was able to find half a dozen pictures of relatives photographed sixty years ago just by searching a surname, and some of those images had not been seen by the family since printed in the paper at the time,” Barbara says.

“It’s creating good conversations and memories of what life was like in Tauranga and the stories behind some of the photos.”

Images ranging from the late-1950s through to the mid-1980s, donated to Tauranga City Library by then Bay of Plenty Times owners Gifford and Cross families, make up a portion of the historic photographs available for viewing while content in other collections, including archives and artworks dates to the early nineteenth century.

Much of the digitisation of the photographs, artworks and archives over the past two years has been possible via a $100,000 funding grant Tauranga City Council received from Lottery Environment and Heritage.

The Tauranga City Council Libraries team also recently collaborated with Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision to ensure a range of historic video content is also digitised, including a major road update to Cameron Road in 1950 and the launching of Te Awanui in 1972. This audio-visual content is available to explore on Pae Korokī in the Norman Blackie collection and also recently featured in the Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision holiday message.

If you have any questions about the collections or would like to contribute to the archive, contact research@tauranga.govt.nz.
 

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