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

Illegally mined pounamu

Not another ‘tasteful nude calendar’!

The film Calendar girls has a lot to answer for. A number of Haast women have been photographed nude – tastefully of course – to raise money for the appeal of a couple of helicopter pilots convicted of stealing pounamu (greenstone or jade) on the West Coast. As a result of the Ngāi Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act 1997, the Ngāi Tahu tribe owns all pounamu in its natural state in the South Island.

In February 2008 the helicopter pilots, father and son David and Morgan Saxton, were found guilty of stealing pounamu valued at around $680,000, which they extracted from Cascade Plateau in South Westland between October 1997 and September 2003. David Saxton was jailed for two years nine months and Morgan Saxton, 30, for two years six months. This led to outrage amongst some locals who see the Saxtons, responsible for numerous rescue missions, as heroes. Hence the ‘tasteful nude calendar’, recently launched at the Hard Antler Bar and Cafe in Haast.

Tahu Pōtiki, a Ngāi Tahu leader, has a different point of view. He argues that Ngāi Tahu was contacted by West Coast locals and Māori artisans about a type of stone coming onto the market for which no licence was held. Therefore, ‘Ngai Tahu approached the police and asked that they investigate … The police investigated, confirmed that thefts were occurring and proceeded to prosecute the perpetrators. The courts agreed that a crime had been committed and sentenced the offenders accordingly.’ He contends that, ‘The current outrage against Ngai Tahu over the Saxton sentences is nothing short of racism.’

What do you think? Will you be buying a calendar, or celebrating that justice has been done?

Search and rescue volunteers at work

Israeli Liat Okin was last seen alive on the Routeburn Track on 26 March 2008. The track has since been the scene of an an intensive and prolonged search. After the official police search was called off on 23 April, a private search, led by her brother and search and rescue volunteers, has scoured likely areas where she may have wandered.

A rugged area, it is in the locality of one of New Zealand’s great survival stories. Prospector Alphonse Barrington and his mates survived for months in these mountains in the autumn and winter of 1864. Yet, after nearly six weeks missing, there is little hope that Okin is alive.

Possibly the longest anyone has survived in the New Zealand bush in contemporary times is solo tramper Peter Le Fleming. He went missing on the Heaphy Track on 20 January 1980. Searchers in a helicopter, conducting a last-ditch sweep, spotted his orange groundsheet in the upper Burgoo Stream and then saw him draped over a rock. He was within a few kilometres of Fenella Hut, in the upper Cobb Valley, and had last been seen 29 days earlier.

The case of Liat Okin (assuming that she has come to grief on the track) illustrates a worrying recent trend in tramping fatalities – tourists are increasingly represented. People get into trouble all the time in the bush. But if you go alone without a distress beacon and get into trouble there is no way to signal where you are and that you need help. Going solo is a gamble.

Kauri Timber Company catalogue in pageflow

A core part of Te Ara is the wealth of images and other resources we include with each entry. Some of the resources include digitisations of physical objects such as maps, books, and letters, and our clever designers have been hard at work making and tweaking whizzy interfaces to bring these to life on the web.

As Helene Coulson (who was Te Ara’s lead designer until she recently abandoned us in the pursuit of higher education), says:

Online environments can feel really sterile, stripped of context and physical sensation. When we transcribe a document or display a tiny version it can be difficult for users to get a sense of the age, beauty and decrepitude of the original, and therefore its history and life in the real world. These interfaces are about trying to preserve some of that, while also offering new ways of interacting. We’re able to use new technology to better deliver old artefacts to more people.

The two new interfaces you can already find on Te Ara are Pageflow and Zoomify. Pageflow, built entirely in-house by Heath Sadlier (now our lead designer), allows you to browse through pages in a book, as in this example of the Kauri Timber Company Catalogue from 1906.

Illustration of a kōwhai in zoomify

Zoomify, which our designers have customised for our needs, helps you to explore very large, detailed images by zooming in and out, and moving up, down and sideways. This is primarily used for historical documents, such as this illustration of a kōwhai printed in an 1791 magazine; and maps, like these maps showing the location of New Zealand sawmills in 1907.

Later this year you can look forward to the introduction of PDF facsimiles that will give you the ‘flavour’ of the original historical document but with the added features of searchable and selectable text.

Tāwhirimātea, god of weather

Earlier in the week, meteorologists forecast heavy rain, thunderstorms and tornadoes. They were right about the rain – it’s caused flooding and slips in Northland, Taranaki and Wellington, and it’s been keeping me awake at night. I admit, though, I was slightly disappointed that the thunderstorms and tornadoes failed to materialise.

New Zealanders have a tendency to be obsessed by weather – we have so much of it, and it changes so often and so quickly. So it’s fitting that Te Ara, as a national encyclopedia, has a lot of information about our favourite topic of conversation.

There’s a whole entry devoted to weather, plus Tāwhirimātea – the weather, which looks at Māori weather traditions, and a climate – which, quoting Mark Twain, tells us that ‘Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days’. From the weather forecasting entry you can learn how those people we don’t entirely trust come up with their predictions (apparently they don’t just make them up on a whim).

Several of the stories contributed to Te Ara by members of the public are about the authors’ experiences in extreme weather, including the misadventures of Zac the cat during the 2004 floods.

'That wonderful word ... fine'

Our fabulous weather-related resources include photos of a storm surge, a southerly buster and lightning damage; interactives that teach you how a thunderstorm forms and how to read weather maps; and videos of tornadoes in action and weather reports from 1978 and 2002.

A colleague confessed that the latter video, featuring the poised Tina Carline and the more-frenetic Jim Hickey, is his favourite video on all of Te Ara.