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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Murray Buckman
Date: 2020 Aug 23, 09:45 -0700
Although the hard work has been done, I would add that the date of this photo almost certainly fell during the August school holidays that year. So I think the presence of children on the platform can be ignored as a clue.
I do not have a primary source reference to the New Zealand school holidays for 1950, but I do have a primary source reference to the university holidays that year, and the term break was the 5th of August to the 28th. The school breaks, though shorter than the university break, generally fell within or slightly overlapped the dates. Further, a quick check at PapersPast turned up an item from the Otago Daily Times of 15 August 1950 that announced "No primary school soccer matches with be played this week...) because of the school holidays. All provinces shared the same school calendar, so what worked for Otago also worked for Wellington. So we are using social history to support celestial time keeping which is itself an input to a social history question.