Businesses on Revell Street, Hokitika. Ref: ¼-002702-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22327242

“Out of the Past” is a monthly series curated for The Lumière Reader by DigitalNZ. Each month, DigitalNZ will post a surprising image or item from their search service, selected to relate to the current activity on Lumière. We hope that the series will surface some fascinating ideas and images from New Zealand’s past and provide a fleeting historical perspective on Lumière’s content.

Inspired by Eleanor Catton’s recent sold out session at the Auckland Writers Festival, and as an addendum to The Lumière Reader’s festival coverage, we thought it appropriate to have a Luminaries-related image for this month’s “Out of the Past”. Here’s Revell Street in Hokitika in 1867, just one year after the fictional events Catton created in The Luminaries—that could almost be Anna Wetherell leaning against the door of the Shotover Hotel.

DigitalNZ is an aggregated search engine and data service which makes New Zealand’s digital content easy to find, share, and use. The initiative brings together the digital collections of nearly 150 New Zealand organisations from libraries and archives, to private companies and community groups—and it is growing every day. All 26 million digital items from these organisations are searchable via digitalnz.org. Part of the magic of DigitalNZ is that it surfaces New Zealand content that is buried by Google, and makes New Zealand’s digital heritage more searchable and accessible.