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

To celebrate the end of the mid-winter month, we present Te Ara’s July quiz.

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

Film Festival programme and tickets

It’s been raining for about six weeks – not the weather for walking in the hills, but just perfect for the 37th annual Wellington film festival. The high points for me have been two New Zealand films.

Vincent Ward’s incredibly powerful Rain of the children is a return to his early film, In spring one plants alone, which told the story of an old Tūhoe woman, bent double, and her handicapped son. In his new film, Ward brilliantly uncovers layers of history that go to the very heart of Tūhoe culture. Inevitably Rua Kenana, that fascinating millennial prophet, looms large. If you go, look at Te Ara’s entry on Ngāi Tūhoe first for a bit of helpful background.

You might also like to read our entry on New Zealand’s Indian community before going to Sima Urale’s Apron strings. This is a beautifully polished drama – or rather double-drama, as it follows two families, one Pākehā and one Indian, as they sort through their family crises. It’s all told around scenes of preparing food. Worth seeing, but it will make you hungry.

It’s obviously hard to compete with the full-screen spectacular on a website. We are confined to about 30 seconds of film on Te Ara, so that people can download clips relatively easily. Yet, it is interesting how a really well-chosen 30 seconds can make for particularly intense viewing.

There are now over 170 video clips on Te Ara, with many great ones among them. Natural History New Zealand provided some wonderful footage of our birds and animals, such as the breaching whales or the scrapping gannets. Television New Zealand has given us a classic example of Robert Muldoon in all his glory, and a couple of comic masterpieces by Fred Dagg and Lyn of Tawa. From Archives New Zealand we have sourced some nice clips from the Film Unit,complete with that fruity voice-over accent. They include an amusing piece on waka-racing and a clip of Kiwi blokes heading off into the hills to build a hut.

In November we launch the next theme – The Settled Landscape – and you will be able to enjoy two particularly nice examples: a sonata played on no. 8 fencing wire, and a lovely clip from TV3 of a cyclist trying to ward off attacks from magpies with a large face stuck to the back of his helmet.

Te Ara is not a film festival – but at least you can watch it at home without having to brave that awful weather!

Volume four of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

At times, preparing a complete encyclopedia of New Zealand can seem like a long road without an end. How do you possibly include everything important about this fascinating little country?

One great advantage we have over most aspiring encyclopedists is that we already have access to biographies of famous Kiwis. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand included no less than 722 biographies, and we can depend on the more than 3,000 thoroughly researched and beautifully written stories in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB). This was put together by a team in the Department of Internal Affairs led by Bill Oliver and Claudia Orange, and was published in five very handsome volumes from 1990 to 2000.

The DNZB includes the great and famous – the Richard Seddons and the Katherine Mansfields are there – but there are also many ordinary people and some wonderful eccentrics. A particular favourite of mine is Henry Poingdestre, who came out to Canterbury from the Isle of Jersey, and established a sheep station, Blue Cliffs. There, he lined the homestead paths with gin bottles, and would ride around in a home-made gig built from packing cases, driven by a mule and a white mare.

More than 500 biographies of Māori people were also translated into te reo Māori.

In 2001 the DNZB went online, with many images added to the biographies. To make full use of the DNZB biographies in Te Ara, we decided to set up a biographies tab and introduce people who were relevant to each entry. We included short blurbs, but to get the full story you had to go off to the eDNZB. At present, this is what you see:

Over the next year we will be integrating the eDNZB into Te Ara as a new theme. So you’ll no longer have to leave us to reach the biographies, and Te Ara will suddenly become a real encyclopedia – with people as well as events and objects. At the same time, we’ll stop including short blurbs and simply list the biographies at the foot of each page, which will look something like this (click the picture for a larger view):

We hope this will be easier for users, and make the biographies more visible. But we are keen to receive your feedback. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography is one of this nation’s great taonga. We need to do it justice.

Kei te ako Māori ki te Kura o Waiwhetū. Learning Māori at Waiwhetū School

Hei whakanui i Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, kua tuhia tētahi Rātaki i roto i ngā reo e rua. Waihoki ko te kaupapa o te rātaki nei he whakanui i tō tātou reo rangatira i runga i Te Ara. Ko tā te rangatira kai he kōrero. Nā reira, rukuhia ngā kai rangatira i roto i Te Ara.

To celebrate Māori Language Week, we’re kicking off with a bilingual blog post. This post is also to celebrate our use of Māori language on Te Ara. As the proverb goes, the food of chiefs is knowledge. So, we’d encourage you to sample the chiefly foods that can be found on Te Ara.

Ka tāea te huri ki te reo Māori mā te pāwhiri i te pātene Māori. Ko ngā kaupapa Māori katoa kua whakamāoritia.

In Te Ara, click the ‘Māori’ button near the top of screen and you’ll be able to change to Māori language navigation and content.

Nā reira, kua whakaritea he whakaraparapa kia mōhio ai koe ki ngā kaupapa reo Māori.

All entries with a Māori theme have been translated into Māori. You can find them using the Te Reo Māori section in the interactive browser on Te Ara’s homepage.

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata! Nā reira, te kaupapa tuatahi o Te Ara, ko te tangata. Arā noa ngā iwi. Ko ngā urunga iwi katoa kua whakamāoritia.Tirohia te urunga mō Ngāti Porou. He mea whakamāori e te kaituhi, Tamati Reedy.

According to the saying, the most important thing is people, and so the first theme in Te Ara was New Zealand peoples, including iwi. All iwi entries are in Māori. A wonderful example of the use of dialect is the Ngāti Porou entry, written and translated by Tamati Reedy.

Ko te katoa o ngā urunga kaupapa Māori, kua whakamāoritia. Kua waimarie a Te Ara, nā te mea, ko ngā kaiwhakamāori i tipu ake i roto i te reo Māori. Ko Rangi McGarvey te kaitohutohu reo Māori. Nāna ētahi o ngā whakamāoritanga; nā tāna tama, a Tamahou McGarvey, ētahi o ngā whakamāoritanga.

The rest of the translations were done by qualified translators whose first language is Māori: Rangi McGarvey, who is also our Māori language adviser, and his son Tamahou McGarvey.

Nā reira, kei wareware koe, he taonga te reo, ā, he tumeke te kōrero Māori.

So, this week don’t forget Māori language is a taonga (treasure), and it’s cool to kōrero (speak).

Poet James K. Baxter

Happy Poetry Day!

Today is Montana Poetry Day, which celebrates New Zealand poetry. All around the country poetry events are being held, and poets are performing their work.

When I started work at Te Ara earlier this year, I was delighted (being a good, keen poetry-fancier) to discover the number of poems included in the encyclopedia, to illustrate and enrich the entries. And today seems like an appropriate occasion to highlight some of them.

There are a number of poems evoking places in the Landscapes overview entry, including Denis Glover’s ‘Summer, Pelorus Sound‘, Fleur Adcock’s ‘Stewart Island‘ and Brian Turner’s ‘Otago Peninsula‘.

Poetry features in our regional entries, with Allen Curnow’s ‘Auckland poem‘ in our Auckland entry, and Hone Tuwhare’s, ‘A fall of rain at Miti-miti‘ in Northland.

A tragic event in our history is commemorated in Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Erebus voices‘ – part of the Air crashes entry – which was read by Sir Edmund Hillary at the 25th anniversary of the plane crash on Mt Erebus in Antarctica.

Some of our community contributions – ‘Your stories‘ – have been poems, such as Maggie Rainey-Smith’s ‘After the storm‘ and ‘Alpine awakening‘ by Sabina de Rooy.

If you can’t be bothered reading, you can listen to sound files of Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover and Albert Wendt reading their work.

In our next theme, The Settled Landscape (about farming, rural life, and people’s impact on the land), you can look forward to poems by Blanche Baughan, Denis Glover (the wonderful ‘The magpies’) and a 19th century poem about weasels.