Recent Acquisitions

The museum recently acquired six original photographic prints by Alfred Gregory, official photographer of the 1953 Everest Expedition.

Gregory's work features scenes of icefalls, crevasses and of course the men who braved the heights of Everest, perhaps the most well known being the then Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. 

There are six images in total. Items .2 and .5 (below) were purchased with funds provided by the Museum Circle.

TR650 G822.1 Noyce and Porters in West CWM
TR650 G822.2 Hillary Just Back from the Summit
TR650 G822.3 Icefall
TR650 G822.4 Nawang Gombu Sherpa crawls across an alloy ladder spanning a big crevasse
TR650 G822.5 Hillary & Tenzing just back from the summit
TR650 G822.6 Tenzing (left) & Hillary on Lhotse face going to South Col for summit assault

Some of these images can be seen as part of a display near Sir Edmund Hillary's ice axe and painted portraits in the stairwell landings leading off the Grand Foyer.

This image of the just completed Museum building, but with grounds still to be finished, was acquired by the Auckland Museum in October 2009. 

The photo was taken by John Thomas Ward, early in 1929 during shore leave in Auckland from his job as a steward on board the RMS Niagara, which plied between Sydney and Vancouver, Canada.

On this particular voyage, dad was signed on in Sydney on 13th December, 1923 and signed off again in Sydney, on 2nd February, 1929.  He worked on the RMS Niagara for some years from 1916 and again from October, 1928 to December, 1929.

John Thomas (Jack) Ward was born at Tyndale on the Clarence River in northern New South Wales, Australia on 24th October, 1890 and supposedly ran away to sea at the age of 14. For many years he was a keen photographer, until, his son suspects, he was forced to sell his camera when he and his mother struck hard times on their poultry farm in western Sydney in 1939. He died on 24 July, 1959 in Wollongong, New South Wales.

The photo is donated by Brian George Ward (John Thomas’s youngest son) and Warwick Michael Ward (John Thomas’s eldest grandson).