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

Mackenzie Stream

Coming out of Tekapo on your way to Burkes Pass, you a hit an unusually named bend in the road: Dog Kennel Corner. The bend’s name honours the boundary dogs that station managers chained between properties to keep flocks of sheep apart.

Scotsman James Mackenzie passed this way in 1855, on his route through the Mackenzie Basin with 1,000 sheep he’d stolen from the Rhodes brothers’ Levels station, north of Timaru. Today Mackenzie’s known as much for his rebellious spirit as for his ability as a shepherd, drover and thief. And his faithful dog Friday and other ‘canine Scots’ are immortalised in statue form on the shores of Lake Tekapo.

Dirt road to Mackenzie Pass

After my sister’s wedding at Tekapo last week, I drove my 84-year-old grandfather back to Christchurch Airport. ‘Turn here!’, Grandad yelled as we got to Dog Kennel Corner. He grew up around these parts, so I was happy for the detour. We hit the dirt road through Mackenzie Pass about 20 minutes later.

In 1942, soon before he joined the airforce, Grandad rode a 1930s 500-cc Ariel sloper motorcycle through the Mackenzie Pass in the opposite direction, west from Albury. The graded dirt road of today is a vast improvement on the pot-holed dust bowl he rode through. He flooded the bike’s motor in a ford near the summit and had to sit it out until the water dried. No one except a lone station hand was on the track that day. The station hand told Grandad he’d not seen a motorbike come through the pass before.

Memorial on Mackenzie Pass

We stopped at the summit to admire the view back towards the Ben Ōhau Range. A memorial to Mackenzie and his captors, John Sidebottom and two Maori shepherds, also stands there. As I snapped away on the digital camera, I asked grandad if he’d taken pictures on his trip in the 40s. No he hadn’t, but he’d made some drawings in his diary, and he promised to show them to me one day.

'Old man's beard must go!' Another classic TV ad

I’ve just finished editing the Te Ara entry about advertising (which is part of the Economy and the City theme). The section about television commercials really brought back memories! With the wonder of YouTube, I was able to watch some of them again.

Television ads from your past, much like pop songs I guess, can take you back to where you were when you watched them. Watching many of these, I’m about seven, sitting in front of the television on the orange-and-black carpet in my parents’ lounge.

One popular TV ad that I only vaguely recalled was the Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial featuring Holly and Hugo. Many people have told me that they remember it fondly, and then they usually sing a bit of the jingle: ‘Hugo said, “You go.” And I said, “No you go.”‘

I definitely remembered the old BASF tapes ‘Dear John’ ad, because it broke my heart every time. What I didn’t know was that it won international awards, and was the 1980s commercial of the decade.

Probably my favourite ad of the era was the Crunchy bar train robbery ad – the long version of course. The wild west, bandits, cowboys, Indians, Arabs (?!). What more could you need? Well Nazis of course, to blow up the track! And an English bobby, and a knitting grandma. Sublime!

What were your favourite commercials? Have they made it to YouTube yet?

Geotagging can help you find gannets

Nothing new. Just an idea to retrospectively trawl through our back catalogue and plug in some numbers (or metadata to you geeks).

Te Ara has a lot of still and moving images. Many are of a specific location, and in most the date of the photograph (or film) is known as well. If we gave all these GPS coordinates and dates, then applications such as a layer in Google Earth, or something our clever designers might build, could pull out information.

You can see this in action on Flickr and Google Maps, but their images have little context or historical information. If we were to geotag the resources on Te Ara, the point of difference would be historical images plus credible caption information. Resources could be tagged to something as large as a country, or as small as a city block – as Adrian Holovaty showed us with his EveryBlock presentation at Webstock 09.

While it is probably the Places entries that lend themselves best to this approach, there are plenty of images in other entries that are location-specific. They could be categorised so that art buffs get paintings, history types get history, natural historians get gannets, and random types get random.  You could also filter by black and white, colour, film, paintings, sketches, maps etc. These could also be displayed as tick boxes in an interactive map of a region. If images were dated, you could also filter for particular years.

For example: You are a tourist. Through an application on your mobile phone you have registered as a history geek. Driving along near Tuapeka toward Central Otago, your iPhone tells you that Indian Edward Peters was probably the first discoverer of gold in Otago. When you arrive in Arrowtown it tells you that residents of nearby Macetown had a liberal approach to alcohol. Or, another example, you’re interested in art, and you’re driving on the south coast of Wairarapa. Your phone shows you Kupe’s Sail just in time for you to compare it to the real one.

One problem for geotagging would be identifying the coordinates for many photos – but near enough is good enough. For example, for Edward Peters you could just tag it to a one-kilometre radius of Tuapeka, and a mobile would pick it up within one kilometre of Tuapeka.

It would require a lot of work – someone would need to go through the images and select which ones to use, then plug in the date, latitude and longitude, and categories. But then applications could pull in the data and spit it out in all sorts of new and exciting ways.

In honour of the launch of Te Ara’s entry on the West Coast, find out how well you know ‘The Coast’.

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