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Correspondence from Robin Hyde to C. R. Allen. 19 April, 1935
Scattered Seeds – He Purapura Marara is a digital archive that was established to collect the memories, mementos and stories of the people who called Dunedin home. The formation of this digital archive on the 3rd floor of Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library, was initiated by the generosity of the Dunedin Lebanese Community in 2015. With community input, the archive grows.
Alongside the community aspect, Scattered Seeds is also the repository for the digitised materials (books, maps, manuscripts, ephemera, etc) from Heritage Collections as well as other aspects such as the Reed Gallery online exhibitions, and specific collections such as the medieval manuscripts and the Troopship diaries. In time, this digitised collection will grow.
To kick-start our digitisation projects in Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library, we chose something small and manageable, something that could be completed. In the Autograph Letters and Manuscripts Collection (some 70-linear metres and numbering more than 5,200 items), a small cache of 9 letters (one fragmentary) written by Iris Guiver Wilkinson (1906-1939) was discovered. Better known as Robin Hyde, she is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most notable writers, best known for her novels such as Passport To Hell (1936), Check To Your King (1936), and The Godwits Fly (1938). She was also a journalist and a poet; Heritage Collections also holds signed editions of her early poetry books.
The Hyde letters cover the years 1935 and 1936 and are addressed to publisher and book collector Alfred Hamish Reed (2), the blind poet and novelist Charles Richards Allen (5), and lawyer, politician, and writer William Downie Stewart (1). Hyde was a fan of Allen’s A Poor Scholar (1936), and his poetry.
Each letter has been digitised and placed on Scattered Seeds. All but one of the letters have transcriptions attached. They can be found by a general search or under the more specific category of ‘People’.
The McNab Maps Collection in Heritage Collections consists of some 2000 recent and historical maps of Ōtepōti Dunedin, Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific and Antarctica. A number of maps have been digitised including a 'Map of Dunedin with all the latest improvements’ (1870), Part of the estate of the N.Z. Agricultural Company Limited: plan of subdivision of sections 319, 137, 123, 313, 307, 58, and parts of 135, 306 & 136, Hokonui District (c.1883), and Stone's handy reference street map of Dunedin and suburbs, (1907). Others will follow.
The third ‘great outcome’ is the placement of an ‘Inventory of McNab Archives in Heritage Collections’ (2025) into Scattered Seeds.
This now enables readers to discover the scope and extent of what is held in the McNab archives. This resource currently numbers some 312 entries ranging from ‘An account of living at Anderson Bay’ by Henry Duckworth (1853-1932), data on the Dunedin Hospital Guild, and information on Gabriel Reid, who discovered gold in the Tuapeka River in 1861, to Robert Campbell’s account of life on Benmore Station about 1863, William Heywood Trimble’s scrapbook of St Leonards (1911-1927), and a manuscript account by Henry Scott of a fire started on board the Bosworth in Otago harbour in November 1857.
The quickest way to find the inventory is to click on the ‘Heritage Collections’ button (right of screen) and then click on the link ‘Inventory of McNab Archives at Heritage Collections’. A PDF of the inventory will then appear.
The best way to read the document is to push the blue magnifying icon to the highest magnification and then click on the cross icon. These tools run down the left of screen. On the right is the page indicator (without arrows!) By clicking forward or back you can move through the document. And then there is just plain browsing.
A general search can also be carried out at the search screen of Scattered Seeds. For example, if using ‘Dangerfield’ or ‘Bosworth’, there is revealed a 13-page hit and a 1 page hit respectively. The ‘Inventory of the McNab Archive’ will be displayed showing ‘Page Hits’. By clicking this link there will appear an OCR frame that gives the text on the left and the word searched for, highlighted in yellow, on the right. Scrolling down gives the reader all the hits. Clicking on the text itself (at left) expands the text for better use.
