NavList:

David, I wanted to thank you again for your post in August about the Mt Cook initial station and the link to the New Zeland historic records.  Your remark about the jail was the key to a search for the exact spot - inside the lobby of the Old Dominion Museam.  I have dowloaded  almost a hundred files and maps and records, a lot from the surveyors' report to the goverment.  Great stuff.

The Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representative (AHJR) are a great source of information, particularly now that they are online. It continues to amaze me the amount of technical data that was published in the AHJR rather than just boring "political"  material.  For example, yesterday I came across a report from the 1870s describing the planning for the San Francisco - NZ steamer mail service. Among descriptions of the steamers that were to be leased (or purchased?) was an explanation of how to determine great circle distances.  Imagine spherical trigonometry in government papers today.

This was all before the Freedom of Information Act.