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

Webstock 2009

Webstock, a conference about all things internetty, was held in Wellington last week. Some of us went along, and maybe you went along too. We’re interested in hearing about what you learned, or what excited you. Let us know! Leave a comment.

To get the ball rolling, here’s my two cents:

I learned that the internet can be a place for real emotion. At Webstock there were a lot of people talking about a lot of different things, and while I enjoyed almost all of them, I realised that the web projects that got me really excited were the ones that involve genuine emotion, and people connecting to each other in real ways.

The speaker I thought I would dislike the most was the one who ended up inspiring me the most. Ze Frank was described as a performance artist and humorist, and there was some mention of miming (!?). Quite frankly, I was suspicious. And he did indeed begin with a mime; but then he went on to talk about his many and varied web-based projects, including some sillier things such as a voice-controlled drawing program, ‘My cat Annie‘, and vacuum cleaners dressed as people (mostly – at least one is dressed as a rabbit).

But I found some of his projects genuinely moving, such as ‘From 52 to 48 with love‘ where he invited people on both sides of the political fence to reach out to each other after the US elections, or ‘Scared‘, the song he wrote for a child who is scared of the dark (after being asked by her mother if he could help). He wrote a follow-up for a woman who said she’d like a song for when she was feeling stressed and needed someone to give her a hug and just chill out. He asked people to sing along to the track and send him the audio files, and created a virtual choir. The result, ‘A children’s song for adults: anxiety‘, is currently one of my favourite songs.

The web can be a cold place sometimes, but I think that by writing in our own personal voices, and connecting with people on a personal level, we can help warm it up.

‘We’ve got the highest birth rate in the country; we’re the fastest growing region. All we need now is the lowest death rate and we’ll have the magic trinity.’ Tony Kokshoorn, Mayor of Grey District, was welcoming guests at the launch of our West Coast entry on Monday night in Greymouth. He went on to say that he was contacting the local bishop about arranging the latter.

He is right that the West Coast, with a huge export trade in coal and a flourishing tourism industry, seems to be booming. Certainly the over 100 locals at the launch were in fine mettle, and they especially loved the clip of Greymouth winning the 1977 Top Town competition. Even the weather obliged, with rain dropping gently on the roof of Tai Poutini Polytechnic just as Jeffrey Holman read us his poem on West Coast rain.

A flourishing West Coast, with smart places to stay and great coffee, is a rather different image from the West Coast of my youth. Growing up in Christchurch, I always imagined the Coast to be that wild place across the mountains where the pubs never closed, the weather was wild and the men were even wilder. It all seemed very romantic and I longed to be able to visit. But my parents refused to oblige, and it is only in recent years that I have made the journey from the dry brown river flats of Canterbury to the green, green bush of the Coast by walking over a number of the wonderful trans-alpine passes.

So it was great to go there again and present our entry to the locals. Simon Nathan, the author, has done a brilliant job summing up the region, New Zealand’s longest and least-settled. Janine Faulknor, who resourced the entry, found some great images.

Enjoy it and – even better – go visit.

A digital lock of Katherine Mansfield's hair

Recently, I went to a forum where staff from the National Library showed off some of the new digital things and projects they’ve been working on.

Here at Te Ara, we’re hoping these projects will make it easier for us to find resources, and to connect our information with other people’s.

No longer concerned only with looking after books and other things made of paper in their bunker-like building (of which I’m very fond), the folks at the National Library have been working hard to make New Zealand material (their own and other people’s) more easily accessible to everyone via the internet. They’ve also started preserving digitally born material, such as websites.

This is just a quick overview of some the things I found especially interesting - click through to the web pages to have a proper look.

Digital New Zealand: http://www.digitalnz.org/
Using this website you can search across the digital material (images, text, videos etc) held by a number of different organisations, including us. You can also make little search widgets to put on your website, and using ‘Memory Maker‘ you can remix things like photos, film clips and music to make your own short video.

Donald McLean Papers/Manuscripts and Pictorial search: http://mp.natlib.govt.nz/
A project to digitise selected papers from the Sir Donald McLean collection in the Alexander Turnbull Library, has also led to a new and much-snazzier interface for searching across the manuscripts and pictorial material the library holds. There are also some objects - one of my favs is this record for a lock of Katherine Mansfield’s hair, which is kept in the library’s curio collection.

Hard-core searchers will enjoy the search filters down the right-hand side of the search-results screen.

Be Heard. Forever: http://www.myspace.com/beheardforever
The National Library has been using Myspace to encourage musicians to legally deposit their albums.

Kiwi Research Information Service: http://nzresearch.org.nz/
If you’re interested in New Zealand research, this is the place to go. It gathers metadata from contributing institutions, and you can get an rss feed about your topic of interest, be it the rubberband algorithm or female imperialism.

Digital legal deposit: http://www.natlib.govt.nz/services/legal-deposit-donations/web-deposit-tool
You can now deposit your digital publications with the National Library via a web-deposit tool. Possibly they don’t want all the holiday snaps you took on your new digital camera, but you could check out their collections policy, just to make sure.

Other things, briefly
The library is also on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, and has three blogs. Phew!

Burning the bush, Taranaki

The appalling news of the bush fires in Victoria invites the question as to whether New Zealand and not Australia is the lucky country.

It is true that we have never lost such huge numbers of people in fires. As the 1966 New Zealand Encyclopaedia records, the two fires with the greatest loss of life in our recorded history were fires in buildings, not bush fires. The worst was the fire in Ballantyne’s department store in Christchurch in November 1947. Forty-one people died, many trapped in the upper storeys.

Almost five years before, in December 1942, fire broke out in a locked ward in Seacliff Mental Hospital in Dunedin. The ward held ‘difficult women’ and only two of them escaped. Thirty-nine suffered terrible deaths.

There have been famous bush fires in New Zealand.  Farmers often used fire to clear scrub. In his book New Zealand’s burning Rollo Arnold described the drought in the summer of 1885–86 that provided the dry timber for the burning of large areas in Canterbury, Hawke’s Bay and Taranaki. The town of Raetihi was also razed in a bush fire which sent up huge billows of smoke in 1918.  But few died in these rural conflagrations.

Fireman in the wreckage after the Napier earthquake

Yet, before we get too smug, it is worth pondering the news comments that the recent bush fires are Australia’s greatest ‘natural disaster’ in terms of loss of life.  Of course the New Zealand fires were not ‘natural disasters’ – they were very much man-made. But, as the horrifying death toll in Victoria approaches 200, we should recall that the Napier earthquake in 1931 cost 258 lives and the Tangiwai rail disaster in 1953 caused by a lahar resulted in the deaths of 151.  Even these numbers are small by comparison with the greatest death toll in one day in New Zealand history, which was very much man-made, not natural – 12 October 1917 at Passchendaele, when some 845 New Zealanders lost their lives.

So when in Australia beware of the bush, in New Zealand beware of earthquakes and volcanic activity, and in both countries beware of war.

If you like feeling wanted as a historian, go south!

I’ve just returned from a short trip in Central Otago, photographing for our next Places entry. Apart from the dramatic skies and the universal friendliness of the people (the slogan for Clutha country is ‘Where everyone says hello’), my overwhelming impression was of the importance of history to the region.

I was made aware of this while I was down there by news that a local Glenore resident, Alan Williams, was publishing a book about Edward Peters – or ‘Black Peter’, as he was known – and putting up a monument to him. Most people believe that the Australian Gabriel Read was the person who discovered gold in Otago. Within a few months of his 1861 discovery, Gabriels Gully was a tent city of thousands. But ‘Black Peter’, as he was known, had discovered gold at Glenore (between Lawrence and Milton), probably in 1858 or 1859. Black Peter was an Indian, originally from Mumbai, and while the great surveyor John Turnbull Thomson took note, no-one else did – presumably because a black man’s word could not be trusted. It took an Aussie to spread the news.

The monument to Black Peter will join many others in Otago that remind the region’s dwellers of their history. Last year, after I travelled around Southland, I listed a few of the unusual historical monuments to be found there. Here are some others I discovered in Otago:

• Blue historical plaques on bridges at Balclutha, Horseshoe Bend, Alexandra, Clyde and Ophir.
• A cairn near Fruitlands to those goldminers who lost their lives in the ‘Great Snowstorm’ of 1863.
• On the waterfront at Wanaka is a timeline in tiles. In 1865, we learn, Lincoln was assassinated, Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery, and Ann Pipson was the first woman to live at Makarora.
• Not to be outdone, the waterfront at Queenstown displays its history with a statue of the pioneer settler William Rees, and a lovely historical poem by David Eggleton weaves its way along the stone wall (see above). The poem begins ‘Hoisting history on his back like a sugar sack, the swagger…’
• Splendid war memorials inscribed with sadly long lists of names abound everywhere, but in Queenstown I discovered the only one in the country that is accompanied by an interpretive board explaining the history and meaning of the memorial.
• Also at Queenstown I discovered a cairn to Robert Falcon Scott, which was put up within two years of his perishing in the Antarctic in 1912.
• At Ranfurly, where Art Deco boosterism dominates, John Turnbull Thomson gets his memorial sculpture.
• And, most remarkably, at Taieri Mouth I discovered a monument that shows how desperate the community was to remember its past heroes. The plaque reads: ‘To the memory of all those who have lost their lives in pursuit of their endeavours in this area.’

Perhaps those in other areas who turn their backs on their past might take note.