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

The mysterious Kaimanawa wall

I recently attended an interesting science communicators conference in Dunedin. At coffee, someone told me that often people he met at barbeques held that knowing things (or wanting to find out about things) was bad. It’s a belief you occasionally come across. At school, those who get good marks are derided as girly swots, and academics are often accused of living in ivory towers (sometimes with justification).

His example was of someone (at a barbeque) who told him that thunder kills goose eggs. Being a scientist, he was intrigued and asked for an explanation of how this process might work. It was not forthcoming and it seemed that none was necessary, as she knew from experience that this was so.

Someone commented that this was the tall-poppy syndrome. But that’s not quite it – that’s about building people up only to cut them down. This was about not being open minded, or, taking it a step further, not even being curious about the world. It was about belief.

Science is about humility (though scientists themselves are not always humble): if you don’t know how something works (which is the most likely case scenario) you use systematic methods to see if you can find out. Scientists are often more interested in telling you what they don’t know than what they do.

It seems to me that the goose egg believer is on the road to Roswell or perhaps the Kaimanawa Wall. While thunder probably does not kill goose eggs, just as lights in the sky are probably not aliens, they certainly are intriguing explanations. Maybe that’s what mystics are on about – for some, the world is much more interesting if they choose to believe in grand conspiracy theories.

Alternate views of reality flourish on the web, as seen in the case of the Kaimanawa Wall and the umpteen pre-Māori civilisations in New Zealand. (This phenomena of choosing the outlandish over the logical was recently parodied in a South Park episode.)

Maybe the mystics should lower the cone of silence over the goose nests in thunderstorms?

In honour of Library Week, we wanted to celebrate and thank libraries and librarians.

Why does Te Ara love librarians and libraries? Let us count the ways…

Because librarians know everything, and if they don’t, they can find it out for you.

Because they love finding the answers to obscure and complicated research questions and will keep looking for months after you’ve asked the question.

Because of their collections, not just of books, but also of maps and photographs and cartoons and magazines and ephemera and newspaper clippings and music and DVDs…

Because they provide great indexes – an invaluable research tool that enables us to track down obscure unreferenced articles with ease and joy.

Because they are developing superb digital resources and every week we find something new.

Because libraries have supplied around a quarter of all the resources currently in Te Ara.

Because here at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage we have a great librarian, Fran, who can find anything and interloan anything, and who has great patience with the fact that half her library now lives semi-permanently on our floor.

Because libraries have supplied around half the team with employment at some stage. (The arts alternative to: ‘Do you want fries with that?’)

Because on cold horrible days when the heating isn’t working, they are a lovely warm place to go and research.

Because the parents on the team tell me they are consistently kind to small children.

Many thanks to:

• Auckland City Libraries - Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero
• Manukau Libraries - Ngā Whare Mātauranga o Manukau
• North Shore Libraries
• Waitakere Libraries
• Tauranga City Libraries
• Hutt City Libraries
• Hamilton City Libraries
• Palmerston North City Library
• National Library of New Zealand
• Alexander Turnbull Library
• Radio New Zealand Library
• Wellington City Libraries - Te Matapihi Ki Te Ao Nui
• Christchurch City Libraries
• Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury
• Hocken Library, University of Otago

Harold Wellman relaxing

Geologist Harold Wellman (1909–1999) is the subject of an exhibition by painter Bob Kerr, at Bowen Galleries, Ghuznee Street, Wellington (18 August to 6 September).

One of the most influential earth scientists in the 20th century, Wellman was the first to recognise New Zealand’s gigantic Alpine Fault, which bisects the South Island. The exhibition focuses on a six-week trip Wellman made to South Westland in 1941 with fellow geologist Dick Willett, to trace the fault along the western edge of the Southern Alps. (Click to preview some of the paintings on Flickr.)

A man of varied interests, Harold Wellman appears in several Te Ara entries:

• Prospecting for uranium (Radioactive minerals)
• Understanding coal rank variations (Coal and coal mining)
• Establishing the New Zealand-wide Fossil Record File (Fossils)
• Lighting a fire in the rain (The Bush)
• Carrying corrugated iron (Iron and steel)
• Exploring for copper (Mining and underground resources)
• The ‘Wellman method’ for structural analysis (Fossils)
• Discovering rare fossils (Fossils)

Harold Wellman seems to be in the spotlight at the moment, as he also features in two new publications: Atoms, dinosaurs and DNA by Veronika Meduna and Rebecca Priestley, and The Awa book of New Zealand science edited by Rebecca Priestley. Also, my biography of Wellman, Harold Wellman: a man who moved New Zealand has recently been reprinted by Victoria University Press.

The Tasman Glacier, by Gottfried Braun-Elwert

We are very sorry to hear of the sudden death of alpine guide Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, who passed away yesterday while on a back-country expedition with Prime Minister Helen Clark and her party.

Gottfried Braun-Elwert was a former nuclear physicist who had been guiding for over 30 years. He was also a talented photographer and was very generous to Te Ara, kindly allowing us to use three of his photographs on our website. His impressive image of the Tasman Glacier is in the South Canterbury places entry, and photos of climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook and the prime minister skiing are both in The Bush theme.

Mountain guiding has had a long and notable history in New Zealand since the 1890s, when the government employed professional guides to aid climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook. The advent of new technologies and equipment encouraged more amateurs to try mountaineering, but guiding re-emerged in the 1960s, and Gottfried Braun-Elwert was one of the new generation of experts who succeeded the pioneering guides Peter and Alec Graham, Joe Fluerty, Harry Ayres and other notable characters.

Here’s a historical footnote: Gottfried Braun-Elwert was not the first German-born guide to accompany a New Zealand prime minister in the mountains. That honour may well have belonged to Harry Peters (born Peter Hinrik Peters), who in 1890 assisted the ageing ex-premier Sir William Fox on a marathon 18-hour ascent of Mt Taranaki. Fox had intended to demonstrate that a man of 78 who had been a teetotaller all his life would be ‘as active and enduring as a man of 45′. The contention was apparently not borne out.

Mabel Howard, New Zealand's first woman cabinet minister

Waiting … waiting … for something to happen, for everyone to file through the doors and be seated, for someone in charge to give us our instructions, to start our written test.

And while we waited, we watched a replay of the show. We watched as a poor Australian girl used all three of her lifelines on a $300 question.

‘You’re s’posed to breeze through these questions’, said one fellow wannabe Who wants to be a millionaire? contestant to another. He was right; all of us knew the answer that the Australian contestant was struggling with. We were waiting for our own chance to be up on that stage, and to get those answers right.

The Wellington auditions for the New Zealand version of the television game show Who wants to be a millionaire? were on Sunday. And I, like any good quiz-mistress worth her salt, had to check it out.

I trained every day; answering 15 questions from The weakest link quiz book and studying the Dominion Post quiz every morning. However, I could not have prepared for the questions I would be asked on Sunday.

My mistake: working for an encyclopedia. Well, actually, it was thinking that working for Te Ara was somehow osmotically enhancing my knowledge and that, in essence, I was the encyclopedia.

So, after it was all over, I had a quick search to see if even an encyclopedic knowledge would have helped me to correctly answer the questions I got wrong on Sunday. If that osmosis had been working, I would have answered that it was Mabel Howard who was New Zealand’s first female cabinet minister, and not Hilda Ross.

But I still couldn’t have answered that the CKD vehicle that Todd Motors produced in Petone was an acronym for Completely Knocked Down, although I would have some other interesting facts about Todd Motors.

And I still couldn’t have answered that the plant Camellia sinensis produces New Zealand’s favourite cuppa. But I would have known just how much we love the stuff – tea pops up in Te Ara a lot. Camellias get several mentions too, more often in the 1966 encyclopedia, but, alas, not the ones that produce tea.

Encyclopedic knowledge or not, I didn’t make it to the second round of the audition, so it looks like I’ll be waiting just a little bit longer to be a millionaire.