Hello Girls and Boys

Hello Girls and Boys! A New Zealand Toy Story

Dave Veart 2014 Auckland University Press. 320 pp ISBN 978-1-86940-821-3

Blurb:

Toys are fun – but they are also serious business, as David Veart makes clear in this remarkable story of New Zealanders and their toys from Māori voyagers to twenty-first-century gamers. Deploying the tools of archaeology and oral history, Veart in Hello Girls and Boys! digs through a few centuries of pocket knives and plasticine to take us deep into the childhoods of Aotearoa – under the eye of mum or running wild at the end of the orchard, with a doll in the hand or an arrow in the ear, memorising the rail lines of Britain or heading down to Newmarket to pick up a Modelair kitset.

David Veart’s story is a big one about how our two peoples made their fun on the far side of the ocean – Māori and Pākehā learned knucklebones from each other, young Aucklanders established the largest Meccano club in the world, and Fun Ho! and Torro, Lincoln and Luvme helped to build a successful local toy industry under the shade of import protection. But this is also a story about little things and little people – the Saxton family making a ‘toy town’ during their voyage to Nelson in 1843; young Maurice Gee building a canoe out of road tar and corrugated iron in 1940s Henderson; and the author’s father firing nails at a nearby glasshouse with a giant shanghai – just for fun.

Hello Boys and Girls! covers the crazes and collecting, playtimes and preoccupations of big and little New Zealand kids for generations. With its memories of knucklebones and double happys, golliwogs and tin canoes, marbles and Meccano, Tonka trucks and Buzzy Bees, this is a seriously fun New Zealand toy story.

Mini Review

This is a POP page. It represents a Personal OPinion. That opinion is the sole responsiblity of the author and not the website!

Veart's book has more than an touch of nostalgia for the toys and games of his own youth - he was born in 1950. But is it far more than that. It is a social history of toys though all New Zealand history with more than a bit included of New Zealand's manufacturing history, the fate of enterprises under both protection, regulation and deregulation. The manufacturers who operated here are there as people too not just as dispassionate actors in a sector of the economy.

Veart as an archaeologist has an archaeologists interest in what artefacts tell us about society. Unsurprisingly there are several archaeological examples built into the story.

The book has great well chosen illustrations.

It might seem an odd publication for a university press, but Veart's scholarship lifts it easily to that class.

GL