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

Not the Easter bunny – Alexandra's Easter Bunny Hunt

It is a strange time of year.

It varies when it falls according to calculations that escape me (it’s got something to do with the moon). Sometimes it’s in March, sometimes in April.

For most people it means an extra long weekend. For Christians it obviously has religious meaning. Yet not everyone is religious, nor Christian. Chinese New Zealanders use Easter as a time to hold a sports tournament. Trampers head into the hills before the snows come. In the past you could take a cheap rail holiday. For children it is about chocolate eggs. For Central Otago hunters it is about bunnies, and hunters everywhere will be taking part in the roar. And these Island-Bay types for some reason raced pancakes in 1985.

It definitely marks the end of the golden weather – it is autumn. There’s just Queen’s Birthday in early June – after which it truly is the winter of our discontent, as the next public holiday is Labour Day in spring.

During my coffee break, I learned that the four of us gasbagging were all going home for Easter weekend. Emily is off to the Hawke’s Bay, Emma to Wanganui (or Whanganui) and Julia to the City of the Future (Hamilton).  It’s truly the return of the prodigal daughters.

Me, I’m taking the family off to Auckland to my olds. If Easter has a commonality, it’s that, like Christmas, it is a time to go home. My mother has promised to walk around the garden crowing ‘kook-ka-kee-koo, kook-ka-kee-koo’ while hiding Easter eggs for her grandchildren. My role, should it need explaining, is to tell the small ones that the Easter cockerell is out and about.

Super city from space

Recently, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance released a report recommending merging the metropolis’s seven local authorities into one ‘super city’. It would make Auckland the biggest single municipal city in Australasia – just ahead of Brisbane – and end the ‘Auckland disease’ of fragmented and parochial local government. Well, perhaps.

Bickering has been a hallmark of Auckland governance since a welter of small councils were set up to govern the region following the end of provincial government in 1876. Rarely were these parts able to work as a whole. Projects benefiting the whole region – such as the harbour bridge – often got delayed or quashed by petty rivalries. In the 1950s geographer Kenneth Cumberland described Auckland’s local government as a ‘babel of disputing tongues … a comic opera of overlapping and ineffectual agencies we miscall “authorities”‘. In the 1960s these numbered 32; reforms in 1989 culled them to the present seven.

But it seems even seven is too many. Proponents argue a super-city council would stop infighting by working for the common interest. But in a metropolis that rightly prides itself on being New Zealand’s most cosmopolitan and diverse, agreeing on what these common interests are is going to be a challenge to say the least. New voices may well join Auckland’s babel of disputing tongues.

Meanwhile, the prospect of what the Otago Daily Times has called a ‘city state’ in Auckland raises the question as to whether we should embrace or fear the proposal. Will the proposal work? Might it mean Auckland dominates the country even more? Is that a good thing? Is there any alternative? And should other cities such as Wellington or Dunedin follow Auckland’s lead?

I was walking home last night, house keys in hand, and I remembered how much I liked carrying my dad’s car keys when I was younger – enjoying how grown up I felt when I held them.

Now that I have my licence, I plan to get myself a car – and some car keys … and I wonder if they will make me feel grown up.

So, in the spirit of driving and cars, here is this month’s quiz.

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

Apparently Kiwis can't fly after all

We weren’t quick enough to write you an April Fools’ Day blog post today. In fact, I only realised it was April Fools’ Day at around 10 a.m. this morning when looking at an article on the NZ on Screen site about pioneering film maker Colin McKenzie. I thought: ‘That will confuse people who don’t know that he is a hoax … oh … yes, I see now … clever.’ It dawned on me that today was the perfect day to once again try to trick unsuspecting people with that fake-historic personage.

Forgotten Silver, the mockumentary directed by Costa Botes and Peter Jackson that introduced us to Colin McKenzie, wasn’t first broadcast on 1 April; but perhaps it should have been. Many viewers believed it was a true story because, I think, it tapped into our feelings of national pride and insecurity. We wanted to believe that one of own from our little country at the bottom of the world had been the first to do something.

Many April Fools’ jokes play on similar sentiments – you’re tricked because you want to believe. I’m not sure if anyone was taken in by our flying kiwi (last year’s April Fools’ Day effort), but if they were it was probably because in their heart they wanted to believe that our national bird isn’t so pedestrian.

Similarly, personal desires also would have been the reason why people fell for a trick by the Guinness company. I haven’t been able to verify this, so it may be an urban legend, but apparently Guinness took out a full page black advertisement in a UK newspaper. The fine print said if you soaked in a glass of water, you’d get a free sample of their beer. Many tried it.

Some April Fools’ jokes are brilliant satire, and others just silly. Today’s story that the Guardian newspaper is going to publish solely via Twitter fits into the former category. On the sillier side, last year Google Australia announced the launch of gDay, that could search web pages 24 hours before they were created. This year, they’ve changed the little yellow man on Google Maps street view to a little panda. Perhaps if we lobby them, they’ll keep it. I like it better and it’s gender-neutral.

What are your favourite April Fools’ jokes, past and present?