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

Local people – a hunt at Ōmarunui, in Hawke's Bay

Should the authors of Te Ara’s Places entries be locals?

Out of the 14 places entries up on the site so far, seven were written by people who were from that region, and seven by in-house writers with connections elsewhere. Having written the recently launched Hawke’s Bay entry from my desk in Wellington (with my roots in the rural settlement of Tauwhare near the Waikato town of Cambridge), this was something I often thought about. (An entry on Waikato is coming to Te Ara, via my colleague and former Hamiltonian Nancy Swarbrick, in 2010.)

One of the times authorship is discussed publicly is when these entries are launched. People – usually locals – often want to know if the author is also local. This is to be expected. Place informs an individual or community’s identity, and a strong attachment to birthplace or home town (whether long-standing or adopted) often follows. When something is written about your place you take notice, and perhaps go through the text with your fine-toothed comb in a way you might not if you went to Te Ara for a quick account of a cicada’s lifecycle or the seasonal stars in the night sky.

Obviously I concluded that an author didn’t have to be a local – if I hadn’t it would have been hard for me to write the thing. Rather, I decided that the most important requirements were those crucial to writing any Te Ara entry: thorough research, careful identification and analysis of the relevant issues, sensitive treatment of tricky or controversial topics, and rigorous in-house peer review further down the track. Specific to writing a good Places entry is contact with local people for information, getting good advice and reviews of the draft text, and paying the region a good, investigative visit.

It’s true that it would be very useful to have the existing knowledge of a local, but this can be accrued during the research process. The fact is, nobody – local or otherwise – can know all there is to know about a place without doing a lot of research. Though I spent the first 18 years of my life in Waikato, and go back regularly enough to retain my native status, I’d need to do the same amount of research as a non-local before I could write about it properly. And, while outsiders are often seen to be more impartial, a good local writer will not take sides or shy away from the tricky issues that often have to be written about in Places entries.

I don’t think that local status can be the final arbiter of whether a Places entry is authoritative. We’re not that parochial, are we? It’s the writing and the underlying research that counts. Local status is more like the icing on an already rich cake – but only if it’s made out of the right ingredients.

What do you think?

Pit bull cross

Man bites dog

Journalists are taught that ‘Dog bites man’ is not newsworthy, but ‘Man bites dog’ is. Paea Taufa found this out when he was discovered cooking his pitbull terrier cross in an umu (oven) pit in Māngere.  Apparently, dogs are cooked and eaten in Tonga.  As it turns out, because the pit bull cross was killed humanely, what he did wasn’t illegal. So why the fuss? Ultimately, it’s a cultural issue surrounding eating pets.

Lambs at pet day

No eating pets

My grandmother used to get a pet lamb for her birthday when she was little. Every year her lamb would disappear not long before Christmas dinner. Naturally, she refused to eat Christmas roast the year she discovered it was her pet. Because we build emotional ties with pets, the thought of eating them upsets us. This aversion is even stronger to animals that are solely pets. While in New Zealand we may make pets out of animals we raise for food (chickens, lambs, calves, ducks), we will not eat animals that are domestic pets (cats or dogs). This is a cultural aversion, described in Te Ara’s Pets entry as the pet paradox. While we have a strong aversion to eating cats or dogs, in other parts of the world the cultural aversion to pork or beef is as strong, or stronger.

Kurī - Polynesian dog

Dog eating in New Zealand history

Cooking and eating dogs, was for a while, an important way to access protein in New Zealand. The four main meat animals today are the pig, sheep, cow and chicken. In Polynesia the four meat animals were the pig, dog, rat and chicken. Māori only managed to bring the dog (kurī) and rat (kiore) to Aotearoa New Zealand. As the sole edible land mammals, both were considered delicacies. The explorer James Cook, following Polynesian custom, ate dog, as did Joseph Banks. Cook said it was as tasty as English lamb. West Coast explorer Thomas Brunner was forced to eat his dog Rover and earned the name ‘Kai Kurī’ (dog eater) for his troubles. As various stock animals were introduced into New Zealand from the late 1700s, kurī gradually fell off the menu.

Yesterday the Te Ara site moved to the open-source Drupal content management platform and made a number of relatively minor changes to the site navigation.

Of course quite a few things went wrong yesterday morning, but the site is now (mostly) performing better than it used to and it offers us so many possibilities that, though a tad exhausted at this point, we’re looking happily towards the future. Kudos to HeadFirst, our developers, who not only migrated the entire 30,000 pages but also gave us a new authoring system and some Easter Eggs too. Hallelujah! And to have a search engine that actually returns relevant results in a logical order is almost a religious experience for some, including the General Editor. It’s faster and more accurate than our old one. (For them as wants to know, the engine is Sphinx, also open-source.)

The site is mostly as it was (if it ain’t broke …) but here are some of the differences that you might notice:

URLs to pages have been simplified and now appear in the form

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/story-name (or /mi/ for the Māori interface)

A comprehensive redirection is in place and any bookmarks shouldn’t break, but please update them. Links deeper than a story (entry) page may not be resolved correctly but our error page gives a number of helpful suggestions.

Other changes include:

• You can now browse Te Ara’s contents (groupled (ha ha) in a variety of ways) on any page by clicking on the ‘Browse Te Ara’ command at the very top every page.
• The Short Story icon and link has been consistently positioned on all pages, to the right of the title.
• The Short Story has a new ‘lightbox‘ treatment.
• Biography links (to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website) appear at the foot of the story pages, and the Biographies Gallery has been removed.
• To move to the text from an image or other media item, click the ‘Back to story’ button.
• Images or media which are grouped together have improved internal navigation (thumbnails appear above the main image).
• Further Sources pages have been placed within the story navigation.
• Related Stories are now managed through an automated process based on key words on the page. This is still subject to refinement, and we’ve signalled the lack of human intervention in the process by labelling the feature ‘You may be interested in…’ No guarantees, but there may be a serendipity…

If any of the navigation is unclear, try reading through our ‘How to use Te Ara’ page.

There have also been a number of small cosmetic changes to improve the look of the site. We’d be pleased to have your reactions to the changes. Leave a comment below.

Before you folks in Auckland and Wellington get your pens poised to continue slugging it out as to who has more galleries and plays and general sophistication, let me say that this post is not about your fair cities but about Hawke’s Bay.  And it is not only about high culture either – it is rather drawing on the original meaning of the word which as the OED says means ‘cultivation or husbandry’. Culture in this sense is opposed to wild or uncultivated, and is found in such words as ‘agriculture’, ‘horticulture’ and ‘viticulture’.

After reading Kerryn Pollock’s wonderful new entries on Hawke’s Bay and attending the launch in Napier on Thursday, the overwhelming impression of the region is of a land radically transformed by human beings. Kerryn points out that only 6% of the land is now indigenous forest, the smallest proportion of any region in the country. The process began early – just look at our map of forest loss, and you will see that Māori settlers had cleared or burnt nearly all the forest of the region down to Dannevirke before Pākehā set foot in the area.

Once the Pākehā landed they set about transforming it further. Tussock was replaced by imported grasses, and large areas were fenced for sheep. Hawkes Bay, along with Canterbury, became the centre of large-scale pastoral farming. The best evidence of this today are the huge homesteads still to be found there. Other cultures quickly sprang up - as Kerryn explains, horticulture began with J. N. Williams’s  orchard in 1892. Twelve years later the first canning factory opened, the forerunner of James Wattie’s ‘tin can alley’. It’s worth clicking the interactive in Te Ara’s stonefruit entry to see how far Hawkes Bay still dominates the acreage of those fruits. Viticulture began very early with French Catholic missionaries bottling the first vintage in 1851 and it still has the second highest area in vines of any New Zealand region.

Other forms of cultivation also took place. The region is noted for its innovative architecture – not only the splendid art deco style which was the response to the destruction of the 1931 earthquake, but the James Chapman-Taylor Tudor-style houses before the quake and the John Scott churches and houses after the quake. And Hawke’s Bay is proud to have two amateur scientists, each in their way unique personalities, who were able to document the transformation of the land – Joan Wiffen who discovered dinosaur bones in the Mangahouanga Stream in the north of the Bay; and Herbert Guthrie-Smith whose Tutira, the story of his farm and the way it was transformed by the impact of European plants and animals has become a New Zealand classic.

So if you really want to look at how human beings have cultivated the land and erected a civilisation upon it, take a virtual visit to our two new entries on Hawke’s Bay – and then perhaps you might want to go to our cultural capital for real.

One of the images to look forward to in our Hawke's Bay Flickr exhibition

Our Flickr work has taken us to many places – with our Hawke’s Bay entry nearly complete and launching this week (Thursday), we are now starting to work on the Taranaki entry.

We love people contributing their images, and we’re now looking for images of Taranaki. It doesn’t matter what it is, we want to see it. Some possibilities are photos of people, places, towns, landscapes, beaches, animals, farms or buildings.

We’ll use images we source from Flickr either in the main entry or a Flickr exhibition, such as this one we created for Otago. Our exhibitions use a Flash slideshow called Pictobrowser to pull the Flickr images into the entry. It has been a helpful tool in allowing us to showcase other images of the regions that we haven’t been able to use in the entries.

So far we have three very successful exhibitions – for the West Coast, Southland and Otago. Hawke’s Bay will be up very soon, and our Hawke’s Bay exhibition pool will give you a taste of what’s to come in the exhibition!

We now have over 200 Flickr contacts who contribute regularly. We hope you’ll join us and start adding images to our pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/teara/.