As it was

Russell Stone has reached an age and stage in life where he can be regarded not just as an historian but as part of the stuff of history itself, someone qualified to tell at first-hand just what life was like when he was young. Things, he says, were vastly different. When he was born in 1923, Greater Auckland had a population of 165,000. Today the figure is one and a half million. But mere numbers fail to convey how different interwar life was. Life was simpler, relatively uncomplicated. But it was also harsher, with much hard physical labour for men and women alike. The memory of the Great War was still raw and although the attitudes and practices of our colonial past were still to be seen on every hand, Auckland, just like New Zealand as a whole, was already passing over the threshold to modernity. Electrical power, motorised transport, new recreational facilities, liberalising educational policies, a redefinition of the Empire, and much else were initiating changes, which seemingly modest at the time, are now to be seen as forerunners of our twenty-first-century way of life. Russell Stone grew up in Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, those close-knit inner suburbs of interwar Auckland that are written about in this book. He was educated at Mount Albert Grammar School and the University of Auckland. After war service he became a secondary-school teacher for thirteen years before joining the staff of the History Department at the University of Auckland, from which he retired in 1989 as an Emeritus Professor.