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

The city: civilisation or cesspool?

I know that many of you, our dear readers, are literary types; and when I was asked earlier today about how cities are represented in New Zealand literature, I thought immediately of you.

Ben – one of our theme editors for the Economy and the City theme, which we’re working on at the moment – is writing an entry about how the city has been represented in New Zealand art. He’s got the visual art and movies sussed, but would like some help with literature.

I’ve been having a bit of a think, and have some ideas of my own, but this seems like a good job for the online community. So:

What are some New Zealand novels, poems or stories that feature cities?

How was the city represented? Positive or negative, freeing or caging, civilised or cesspool?

Also, if you know of any studies of cities in New Zealand literature, we’d love to know about them too.

Thanks!

Captain James Cook, who arrived in New Zealand after the mystery skull

Back in August last year, we asked ‘Was Captain Cook beaten by a girl?‘ when carbon dating indicated that the skull of a European woman, which had been found in a river in Wairarapa, was around 296 years old.

This challenged what we know about New Zealand history, as it would mean that a woman, or her skull at least, had made it to New Zealand at least 23 years before Captain Cook’s first voyage in 1769. And long before the first documented white women, Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger (two escaped convicts from New South Wales), who are thought to have arrived in 1806.

This week forensic anthropologist Robin Watt has suggested an answer to the mystery. The 40–45 year old woman could have been a Dutch shipwreck victim.

Dr Watt says, ‘At this time there was a tremendous amount of movement by the Dutch. We know they were exploring the southern coast of Australia. Anything sailing this way has a chance of being stopped by New Zealand, so for my money there was either a visit here or a wreck. I’d say it was probably a wreck.’ Apparently the Dutch took their wives and families along for the trip.

Mystery solved? I doubt it.

Album cover for 'Kaleidoscope world' by The Chills

This is New Zealand music month. We decided we should celebrate that fact by pointing out some of the Kiwi music to be found on Te Ara. I started looking and, to my consternation, found rather less than I would wish.

This isn’t because we’re all tone deaf and never attend gigs or enjoy music – if you were to walk into Te Ara’s office you’d see that about half of those hunched over computers are also wearing earphones, listening to music. Nor is it because the wonderful team that search out our photos and films and sounds have not looked hard enough for music – far from it.

Rather, it is because the cost of putting up clips of most New Zealand music is just too great. The Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) controls the licensing and collection of copyright fees for most New Zealand performers and song-writers; and their charges for use of most commercial music on a website is simply out of our league. This is not to criticise APRA – New Zealand musicians deserve recompense and few of them live in gilded palaces. But the effect is to exclude many fine songs from a site like ours.

So how have we coped with this dilemma? Not by making Te Ara silent, but by ingenuity. These are some of the ways we’ve got some really unusual Kiwi music onto Te Ara:

• We’ve asked others to sing for us. For instance, there is a fascinating sealer’s song that was recorded for us by the Bach Choir. It tells of some sealers abandoned for four years at Open Bay Island in Westland.

• We’ve made the most of our friendships. TrinityRoots were really kind to a Te Ara staff member and gave us a lovely piece from their album, Home, land and sea.

• We’ve been treated really generously by a number of record companies. Because of Festival Mushroom Records you can hear Split Enz perform ‘I see red‘. Kiwi Pacific Records have been really helpful and thanks to them, if religious music is your thing, you can a listen to Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral choir and the rather different but equally beautiful choir of the Samoan Congregational Christian Church in Grey Lynn. Another great Pacific sound came from Warm Earth Records, who allowed us to use Te Vaka in the entry on the Tokelauean community.

• We’ve found nice musical clips in television or radio programmes. Neither the decimal currency song nor Country Calendar’s musical fence are high art, but they are both worth a listen. Rather more serious and stirring is a waiata telling the story of the love between Kahungunu and Rongomaiwahine, which we found in the television archives. And in the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives our researchers tracked down the Ngāti Porou anthem, ‘Paikea’, Douglas Lilburn’s Drysdale Overture, and Ron Goodwin’s New Zealand suite.

• When we couldn’t get permission for the music, we’ve at least been able to show images of record covers (e.g. The Chills and, another Dunedin band, Straitjacket fits), photos of the singers in action (such as Bic Runga and Fat Freddy’s Drop and King Kapisi), or even the text of lyrics (see Peter Cape’s 1958 classic ‘Down the hall on a Saturday night‘).

All this is but a tiny portion of what we would like to have you hear, but it’s a start. Let’s finish with the song which an Encyclopedia of New Zealand simply had to have.

Te Ara’s latest regional entry was launched at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Friday, amidst a crowd of enthusiastic locals. Author Malcolm McKinnon takes you on a tour of the entry in his launch speech.

It’s usual in these circumstances to express one’s pleasure at being here, but this would be far from the truth – asked to write on Otago solely because of the accident of my names, I’m now asked to introduce that entry to a room full of Otago experts – museologists, archivists, politicians, lifetime Otago residents – good grief, there are even historians here. So I’ve taken precautions – I’ve invited all my Otago relatives – they’re distributed around the room, you won’t know who they are because, by lucky chance, they aren’t McKinnons. But they assure me – well they did – that they would ‘take care’ of anyone who was critical in any way of my efforts. And we’ve got a military tradition in our family so this is no joke. Though I’m flying out tomorrow, just to be on the safe side.

Otago's dramatic landscapes

That said, I’m in fact going to concentrate tonight not on my words but on Otago’s – your – images. And if there’s one justification for having an outsider do this it’s because these images, while of and by Otago, are not primarily for Otago. Such is the exhilarating nature of the web, even now someone in Dundee, Donetsk, Dalian or Dunedin, Florida – where when last I checked it was 29 degrees, dry and sunny – could be looking at the site.

Those images aren’t just pictures, if you know what I mean. Yes, Te Ara is an intellectual site, not a plaything, and challenges you with a variety of resources. And there’s an additional ‘trap for young players’ – the entry is in fact two entries – one which looks at the province as a whole and one – we call it amongst ourselves a gazetteer, although turns out no one under 25 knows what that means – that tours round the many places that make up the province.

Main entry

I start with the overview maps that allow you to match up topography, settlement, vegetation and landforms. And I’ll let you in on a secret here – we wrested back the upper Waitaki Valley for Otago. So if you’re wondering why the population gives an extra few thousand more than you expect – well that’s why.

From maps of the landscape to the landscape itself – what part of the country does it better? From the dramatic faulted landscape of central Otago, to the heights of Mt Aspiring, to the striking configuration of peninsula and harbour.

A key moment in Ngāi Tahu history in this part of the world was the signing of the deed of sale. You can ‘zoomify’ – is that a wonderful word or what? – to look at the detail, and there’s a translation as well. And while we’re talking about this toy, and moving on to the consequences of that sale, what about this map of the New Edinburgh block. Close up the peninsula and harbour, as in the photo we’ve just seen, are clear as anything.

And another map – because I have a liking for maps, but I promise this will be the last – a quixotic miner’s guide to the diggings from around 1863. And I can see you’re wondering about that thumbnail in the corner, so we’ll take a quick look at that too.

Well you don’t need me to tell you that gold helped make Dunedin and Otago rich and famous … and with it came rich and famous people. This Jewish family – the Hallensteins – are indelibly associated that era and were long afterward influential in Dunedin and indeed New Zealand life. The richness, even the exuberance, spilled over into the public building, and is there any building more exemplary of that than Dunedin railway station, and especially some of its stained glass. While, at the same time, we know that most people were not rich or famous, and maybe not even very exuberant, such as these women workers in 1921

Graphs are another way we test the intellect of our visitors, and this graph on town growth is interesting mostly because it reminds us that province’s towns did have a buoyant time in the decades after the Second World War, even if they weren’t growing quite as fast as their counterparts in the North Island. They were certainly growing a lot faster than remote Queenstown at the same time. That would all change of course, but here are some more mementos from those mid-century years: Joe Brown and his high stepping entertainers, and an interestingly multi-racial crowd outside Carisbrook, that temple to Otago rugby

I now move out of the era where I’ve been completely dependent on Erik Olssen’s History of Otago to the period where I’m only partially dependent on it – if only because the history is now a quarter century old! What about an update Erik?

And here’s one phenomenon of that last quarter century – well a little over in fact – Dunedin musicians, some of which feature on this double EP.

Gazetteer

Long lost relatives?

Now on to the gazetteer. As you can see from the index map, we cover the entire province and I’m going to dart around more or less in similar fashion, starting in the far north at Kurow, where Janine (our resources team leader) found these long lost relatives of mine.

On to Ōamaru, where this picture of bikes askew outside the town swimming pool gained poignancy from it being the pool where Janet Frame’s sister drowned, probably at a time not so far from when the photo was taken.

Skipping over many renowned towns, the new carvings at Puketeraki marae just south of Karitāne were worth a glimpse.

Then southwards to the peninsula and one of Otago’s most celebrated citizens – the albatross.

From living birds to dead bards: Thomas Bracken and a poem which my father could recite in full, ex tempore and unprompted. The northern cemetery, where he is buried, is a jewel in Dunedin’s crown.

And skipping through the rest of Dunedin and on to another family’s history, this time the Tsukigawa and particularly K. K. Tsukigawa, one of whose descendants is I believe here tonight.

And we don’t just have happy stories – the landscape and ecology of Otago is contested ground, and nowhere more so than in the Lammermoors, as this protest picture indicates, with an artist as renowned as the landscape he’s passionate about preserving

You may get the idea that this driving around looking at sights is fun – well not always and the Crown Range at midday in early September last year was no place for sunbathers.

Warbirds over Wānaka (click for video)

Whereas Warbirds over Wānaka had pulled in the crowds earlier in the year

That’s a quick survey folks but it’s all there for you to sample at your leisure and it’s free for the price of a broadband connection.

I’d like to thank those repositories – North Otago Museum, Early Settlers Museum, Hocken Library, South Otago museum – who were so enormously helpful, to Stephen Jaquiery of the Otago Daily Times and the many images – not to mention information – that we garnered from that estimable source, and many individuals throughout Dunedin and Otago who were hospitable, friendly and informative to either me others in our team. Thank you all.

One of the great things about the web is the way that it allows juxtapositions, allows you to play with time and place. If you ever thought Otago was unchanging – and I’m not sure that would ever have been true of anyone in this audience – think again. What on earth would Thomas Burns’ four daughters, photographed here around 1900, have found to say to Candy Box and Polly Petrie – photographed on the slopes of Coronet Peak around 2006 – if they’d chanced to meet?

Nearby Castlepoint was the main port for Wairarapa

Anzac Day once again saw tiny Tinui swell with people attending the service in the small Wairarapa town. However, it looks like like the air force’s recent proposal to turn Tinui into a place of pilgrimage may have hit a snag.

Tinui was the site of the first Anzac Day service in 1916, just one year after the Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli. The service was held in the village church, and afterwards the villagers processed up Tinui Taipo (a rock outcrop also known as Mt Maunsell) and erected a cross – the first permanent Anzac memorial. The original cross was replaced with an aluminium cross in 1965.

So the air force’s idea has some justification, but it seems this plan wasn’t discussed with the owners of the Tinui station, on whose land the memorial stands. Tinui station is a working farm and, while the owners have allowed people access to the memorial on Anzac Day and by prior arrangement, they’re understandably reluctant to have people tramping across their fields willy nilly. Pilgrims could instead gather at the memorial in the town, but what a pilgrimage would be complete without a climb up a hill?

Tinui is a small town steeped in history. I experienced this first hand while staying in a holiday cottage at homestead of the very same Tinui station. The cottage itself was about 130 years old, and the station even older.

The village has a wee museum behind a craft shop, from which I learned that Tinui had once been a thriving village, servicing the enormous sheep stations of the region. At this stage nearby Castlepoint was Wairarapa’s main port, and it was much easier to transport goods by sea than by land – especially on the narrow windy roads around that area.

Photos of Tinui’s main street from the late 19th century showed it lined with shops, but in the 2000s most of the shops are gone, replaced by grassy fields. When I visited a few years ago, the Tinui hotel was still there, but apparently it has been moved to Greytown now. And I’m told that a church from Tinui has been moved out to Riversdale. It’s sad that the town should have to sell its historic family jewels, but, I guess – with a much-depleted population, and with wool prices not what they once were – what’s a small town to do.