New Zealand Maritime Images: the Golden Years

Description

This book contains 288 fabulous colour images of New Zealand maritime scenes from the collection of the Museum of Wellington City and Sea, and others, taken between the 1950s and 1970s. This was the era when conventional cargo ships still plied the waters, and people headed overseas still boarded passenger liners instead of aircraft. Included are large ocean going ships and smaller coastal traders, ferries, service vessels, ports large and small, and wharf scenes redolent with the atmosphere of the time before containerization changed everything. Many of the ships are British, as can be expected in the period when over 40 percent of New Zealand's foreign trade was with the 'old country', but ships from several other countries are represented also.

The author was a merchant seaman for 12 years before becoming the Exhibitions Officer at the Wellington Maritime Museum and more recently Manager of the Cable Car Museum, and has written the three volume history of New Zealand fishing vessels 'Nets Lines and Pots', as well as an account of the tragic sinking of the Lyttelton to Wellington ferry Wahine in 1968.