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

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.

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

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.

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?