The West Auckland World of Jack Diamond

The West Auckland World of Jack Diamond

Essay by Scott Hamilton for EyeContact – 25 September, 2019

Auckland’s fifty-five public libraries are scattered across the city like islands. Waitakere Library in Henderson is a remote part of the archipelago, an outlier of the much larger library in Auckland’s central city. Where the central library has a massive stash of unpublished manuscripts and images, Waitakere has a more modest research archive.

Yet Waitakere Library is home to at least one astonishing hoard of unpublished material. The JT Diamond West Auckland Heritage Collection includes ten thousand photographs and an indeterminate amount of text; it was assembled in six decades by Jack Diamond, a carpet salesman who became expert in archaeology, oral history, geology, aqua-technology, and urban design.

Diamond recorded the ruins of kauri dams and pa in secluded bush valleys, as well as the shopping malls and carparks of the new suburbs of postwar Auckland. His camera looked down overgrown logging tracks and developers’ bleak cul-de-sacs. He shot house fires and crashed cars, as well as ancient ships inundated by black dunes.
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Untitled image by an unknown photographer, held in a private Diamond family collection, showing Jack and Melville Diamond sometime in the 1930s, at the beginning of a journey to the Waitakeres.

Jack Diamond, Cloud Formation, Glen Eden, 1952

Jack Diamond, Site of Todd's Shops, Great North Road, New Lynn, 1967

Jack Diamond, Kauri Dam Remains, Goldie Bush, 1975