Whanganui River Annual 2024

The committee has hit the ground running and have set up our River Market Stall on a number of occasions and have had a good response from the public who have stopped by yo have a chat.

Along with information brochures about the river, we have a number of books for sale on the stall from both our own stocks, along with some from other authors that we sell on their behalf.

We are about to increase the range with a reprint of our book orginally written by Thomas Downes in 1938 and fortuitously recovered from the National Archives and eventually published by Arthur Bates in 1993.

As there were only a small number of these printed, they have been out of print for quite a few years, so the committee made the decision to have some reprinted.

We applied for a grant from Pub Charity Ltd in November to cover the printing costs, and were advised on the 31st January that our application for just over $4,000 had been successful.

This involved scanning all of the pages and re-setting them in a digital format and we were fortunate to be able to find the complete collection of the water-colour paintings online and in colour.

We have been selling another book penned by Arthur Bates and that is ‘The Bridge to Nowhere’. This book has proven to have been very popular and as well as being available at our market stall, is also sold by a number of retailers.