New Zealand School Journals, 1960s-70s

Abstract

In this commentary, Tina White draws on her collection of the New Zealand School Journal to illustrate how by the 1960s and 1970s the Journal commissioned content from some of the country’s best writers, illustrators and photographers. Founded in 1907 with the high-minded aim to develop among New Zealand schoolchildren an “appreciation of the higher literature”, it is believed to be the longest running serial publication for children in the world with around 750,000 copies published annually in four parts. Athol McCredie, who writes on the New Zealand photobook in this issue, once described the New Zealand School Journal as an element of New Zealanders’ cultural consciousness – “remembered as evocatively as the smell of stale school milk, the feel of chalk and finger paint, and the steamy atmosphere of a classroom of wet bodies on a rainy day”.