Public libraries in Auckland had their humble beginnings in the Mechanics Institute only a year after the new settlement was established.
In January 1963 a wrecker’s ball swinging from a crane demolished the building known as Paddy’s Puzzle.
Robert Tod, the fiery, argumentative Scottish merchant, met John Vesey Parnell at Beirut on the coast of Syria.
In 1878 William Swainson, a former Attorney General, sold five acres of land to a purchaser who first cloaked his identity



