Meet Voyager's newest recruit

New Voyager staff member, Kate Ambury, says she was attracted to Voyager because of the essential role that New Zealand’s maritime heritage has played in our nation’s history. In the final stages of her Masters of Library and Information Science, Kate has been tasked with taking Voyager’s priceless Bill Laxon Collection – consisting of approximately 250,000 photos dating back to 1860, and making it a key library and museum resource.

This largely untapped resource illustrates New Zealand’s remarkable maritime history with unrivalled volume and detail. The collection includes many thousands of Bill Laxon’s own photographs, as well as many, many more collected by Bill during a lifetime of maritime interest and research.

Kate’s role is to sort through this impossibly large collection, cataloguing it to enable Voyager to better assist with research enquiries, identifying and recording streams which document specific aspects of our maritime history, and also considering ways to integrate the material into existing and future museum exhibitions.

As Kate sees it, she’s interpreting history, and she’s particularly excited about the contribution her work will make to our records of the not-so-distant history. “The most easily forgotten part of history is the recent past. Sometimes it’s not seen as being as valuable right now, but in 50 years times we’ll wish we had access to the information.”

Kate cites the examples of small working wharfs that were once located the length of New Zealand. “If it weren’t for the photos like those in the Bill Laxon Collection, they’d largely be forgotten.”

Great stuff, Kate. We’re all looking forward to seeing and sharing the gems you’ll no doubt be unearthing along the way.

Bill Laxon, for whom Voyager’s maritime library is also named after, was a founding member of the Auckland Maritime Society that developed the proposal for the current museum, and he was responsible for the establishment of the Auckland Maritime Society's library within the Bill Laxon Maritime Library collection.