The Hocken Archives

One of the greatest challenges in organising an archive of physiotherapy in New Zealand is to locate all the various sources of material that make up a record of the profession’s past. The first person to make a concerted effort to gather material about physiotherapy was Enid Anderson (nee Gotts) – long time Principal of the Dunedin School – who, until her death in March 1976, laboured hard to collate and catalogue material for her “Golden Jubilee History” of the New Zealand Society of Physiotherapists (Anderson 1977). Barbara Hetherington, who helped her complete the archive prior to her death, remembers piles of books and papers stacked through her dining room as she waded through the material sent for cataloguing by the various Branches and SIGs. How much easier has it been for us to undertake our history project because of the labours of people like Anderson and Hetherington.

In the end, Anderson’s papers were lodged with the Hocken Library in Dunedin. Founded by local doctor Thomas Morland Hocken (1836-1910), the library contains archives ‘relating to the history and culture of New Zealand, the Pacific and Antarctica, with a special emphasis on the Otago and Southland regions of New Zealand’ http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/hocken/.

The library, also known as Te Uare Taoka o Hākena, was opened in 1910 and moved to its present site in the old Otago Co-operative Dairy Company factory on Anzac Avenue in 1998. It houses the largest collection of archive material relating to the history of Physiotherapy New Zealand outside of crown ownership, with over 30 linear metres of box files held in secure, air conditioned storage. Unfortunately the catalogue has been largely disorganized. In the past we had only had the vaguest notion of what the collection holds, so in November 2011 we began a project to catalogue the entire archive, which has just been completed.

The catalogue throws up some tantalising insights into issues affecting physiotherapy in New Zealand over the last 100 years. Readers old enough to remember the disputes with chiropractic that led to the 1979 Commission of Inquiry will see, for instance, that file AG-013 contains an undated folder containing submissions to Royal Commission on Workers’ Compensation Act (on chiropractic); a folder containing correspondence and newspaper cuttings on NZSP attitude to chiropractors, 14/12/1959-8/8/1962; and a folder containing submissions of NZSP Private Practitioners’ Association to the Select Committee on the Petition of the Chiropractic Patients’ Association (Auckland) and others, 24/8/1966.

While these are only notes of the folder’s contents, they do provide enough of a record to allow historians of the future to know what we have and where it is located. This has been our principal aim in our centenary history project, and so we are grateful for the work of Isabella Doak, Jana De Buyzer and Martin Burke who meticulously catalogued the archive for us. It has been a monumental effort, and one that is made much easier with modern technology. One can only imagine what the task must have been like for Thomas Hocken 100 years ago.

By David Nicholls

Sources

Anderson, E. M. (1977). New Zealand Society of Physiotherapists: Golden Jubilee 1923-1973. Wellington, New Zealand Society of Physiotherapists.

Goodwin, E. 'Hocken celebrates 100 years' Otago Daily Times, 01.04.2010, http://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/99926/hocken-celebrates-100-years, sourced 21.02.2012

Hocken Library official website, http://www.library.otago.ac.nz/hocken

Obituary of Thomas Hocken in Otago Daily Times, 18.5.1910

Image from Hocken Library files c. 1930. Note reference to massage as a form of nursing