Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Collosal squid

In the last week of April 2008, the scalpels are being sharpened at Te Papa. A team of scientists are about to examine the largest complete adult colossal squid ever caught. The sea monster, weighing in at an estimated 495 kilograms, was taken by a fishing vessel in the Ross Sea in February 2007. This was bad timing for Te Papa, as the museum’s wet area for housing such critters was being renovated at that time. So they put the beastie on ice. Over a year later, with renovations complete, they’re ready to begin thawing it out.

Colossal squid have not been found around New Zealand, but specimens have been caught in subantarctic waters. Very little is known about colossal squid, although their hooked tentacles suggest they are aggressive predators. Giant squid, which are slightly smaller, are found in New Zealand coastal waters as they come to breed in deep-sea canyons just off the coast. Giant and colossal squid are probably responsible for some historic sailors’ stories of sea monsters. The much smaller arrow squid is common around the coast and forms the basis of a profitable squid fishery.

The Ross Sea colossal squid is not destined to be turned into squid rings that you could walk through. Rather, scientists will defrost it and examine its stomach to see what it was eating. The stomach, beak and other mouth parts will be removed and its sex determined. You can watch this (and the preparation and examination of several smaller squid specimens) live here. (If nothing much is happening on the webcam then the squid blog should keep you updated.)

Later this year, the world’s largest found colossal squid will go on display in a specially built tank at the museum, where it will be suspended in a preservative solution – then the public can drool over the size of the squid rings such a beast would yield.

Blenheim war memorial

War memorials are a familiar sight in New Zealand’s cities and towns. War memorials take many forms, from entire buildings (such as the Auckland War Memorial Museum) to smaller obelisks and windows.

They usually remain unchanged since they were first erected, which is generally not long after the end of the war that they commemorate. But when I visited the West Coast recently, I noticed a number of changes.

• A new memorial was unveiled at Blackball on 22 March 2008, during commemoration of the 1908 Blackball strike. As a socialist stronghold, there was strong anti-war feeling for many years at Blackball, so no war memorial was built after either world war. But at the beginning of the 21st century, feelings have changed.

• Memorial gates were erected at the old Kōtuku School, near Lake Brunner, in 2006. Although the school is no longer used, it is a listed historic building.

• In 2007 the memorial pillars were removed from the site of the old Grey Main School in Greymouth, after the land had passed into new ownership. There was a public outcry, and the pillars are now at the entrance to Dixon Park. It is hoped that they will be re-erected there later this year.

The fate of the Greymouth School memorial is a reminder of how important it is to ensure that all war memorials are recorded and protected as historic sites.

A comprehensive photographic database of New Zealand war memorials is now online on our sister site NZhistory.net.nz, also run by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Many of the photographs were taken as part of a study of memorials by Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips, and published as The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials (GP Print, 1990).

Do check the database to see if your local war memorial is there, and please contact us if you can add any new information.

Lynn of Tawa - an extreme Kiwi accent

Like many New Zealanders, I was a bit offended to be told recently that I might speak like a Neanderthal.

Anthropologists at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton believe they have simulated the way Neanderthal voices sounded, using reconstructions of their vocal tracts. They’ve concluded that Neanderthals’ speech would have lacked the ‘quantal hallmark’, which helps a listener distinguish the word ‘beat’ from ‘bit,’ for instance.

Some people have suggested that this means they might have sounded a bit like New Zealanders, presumably because we are sometimes accused of making all vowels sound the same. There is, of course, no truth to this whatsoever (apart from New Zealanders’ tendency to pronounce woman and women exactly the same.)

The development of the New Zealand accent is an interesting thing. According to a major study of the New Zealand accent, based on sound recording from the 1940s, our accent is most likely a variation of southern English rural accents. This is not surprising, since many immigrants came from southern English counties.

Apparently, we have only one dialect, which is unusual for such a recently settled country. From my own experience, I’ve noticed some regional differences. The Southland accent is well-known, a hang-over from the settling Scots. And the words used in one regions are sometimes different to another. For example, what’s known as a bach up north is a crib down south, and I’ve heard what we in Wellington might call a ’stoner’ being referred by Aucklanders as a ‘waster’.

The best explanation of the New Zealand accent I’ve ever seen is a hilarious and educational short video ‘New Zealand accent explained‘, by Miss Verstaendnis, a New Zealander living in Germany. Especially good viewing for anyone who accuses us of sounding like Australians.

Extreme weather

The tragic drowning of six students and a teacher in the Mangatepopo River on 15 April, and a man and horse killed by lightning, marked a day of wild weather in the North Island.

The first reaction of many is to question how could students drown on a school trip? Many accidents have occurred on school camping trips in the past and the safety measures that schools need to take are much better than they once were – but no system is infallible.

It seems a flash flood swept down the river. This can readily be seen in graphs of flow levels, which rose very rapidly. Flash floods are not uncommon – it is just uncommon for people to be in a riverbed when they occur. For example 21 people were killed in the Kōpuawhara flood of 1938 when a 5-metre wall of water swept through a railway workers’ camp on the East Coast. Flash floods are caused by sudden downpours when many millimeters of rain fall in a few hours. For example on 30 May 2001, 109 mm fell at Leigh in one hour causing flash floods. Around 30-50 mm/hour were recorded in areas near the Mangatepopo River on 15 April, 2008.

Around 50,000 lighting strikes occur in New Zealand in a year but it is unusual for any one of these to hit someone – but occasionally it happens and one person is killed every five to ten years, on average.

While some rain warnings were in place for Taupō to Northland, in the locale of the Mangatepopo River it is not unusual for rain to be forecast – it rains some 200 days of the year. Those who look back at events are in a privileged position. As accident researcher James Reason noted in his 1990 book Human error:

There is one obvious but psychologically significant difference between ourselves, the retrospective judges, and the people whose decisions, actions or inactions led to a disaster; we know how things were going to turn out, they did not.

Suffering from 'little Kiwi syndrome'

This post is for those who, like me, suffer from the terrible Kiwi inferiority complex.

We know deep down that we are only a little country, that no-one knows where we are, that we might slip off the edge of the globe and no-one will notice.

Acute sufferers like me spend their time when overseas searching newspapers for the letter ‘z‘ because this might lead them to some news about New Zealand. Usually it turns out to be about the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane. (Bill Manhire evokes this experience in his poem ‘Zoetropes’: ‘Words which begin / with Z alarm the heart: / the eye cuts down at once / then drifts across the page / to other disappointments.’) If you do finally find New Zealand mentioned, it’s likely to be some strange story about a cow on a train line or some other tale of world-shattering significance.

So, for you fellow sufferers I decided to search Te Ara to find items in which we actually led the world. We were NUMBER ONE.

Here’s a few interesting items I found:

• The world’s largest kite, designed by Peter Lynn of Ashburton. It is 1,000-square metres (but don’t get too excited since it features, not the New Zealand flag, but the Kuwaiti one).
• The first place in the world to have an official time.
• The seabird capital of the world. Of 360 seabirds in the world, 87 breed here and nine visit.
• The world’s first solar-powered lawnmower, which was demonstrated on a Lower Hutt lawn in 1994.
• The largest animal skeleton in the world. It is the skeleton of a blue whale washed up at Okarito and now housed in the Canterbury Museum.
• The largest recorded geyser in the world was the Waimangu Geyser near Rotorua. It rose to almost 500 metres – but only between 1900 and 1904, after which it became extinct.
• New Zealand’s endemic wrybill is the only bird in the world to have a beak which twists to one side.

Now feeling better?

But before we get too smug, there are some famous firsts we cannot claim. We were not the first place in the world to give women the vote – Utah did in 1869, 24 years before us.

And there is some doubt as to whether we can claim to be the country which invented pavlova. You’ll probably get a different answer depending on whether you ask an Aussie or a Kiwi, but the most likely explanation is that a West Australian cook adapted a recipe from a New Zealand women’s magazine. So each of us has a piece of the cake.

If you know some other interesting ‘firsts’, tell us about them. It might help me when the next bout of ‘little Kiwi syndrome’ hits.