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

Inside Nettlebed Cave, one of the Mt Arthur caves

New Zealand’s leading cavers have, for the first time, linked up two previously separate parts of the Ellis Basin cave system, making the cave more than 1,000 metres deep in the Mt Arthur area near Motueka.

It is not, contrary to a TVNZ report, the deepest cavers anywhere have got. Getting more than 1,000 metres down is a momentous occasion for New Zealand speleologists, but it only puts the cave among the world’s deepest. The deepest is the Krubera Cave in Georgia, which has been explored to 2,191 metres.

Still, it is a massive achievement that has built upon decades of earlier exploration. One team of cavers working upwards eventually met another team working down. Among them was Kieran McKay, who knows the system very well – he was also rescued from nearby Bulmer Cavern on Mt Owen after suffering a fall in 1998.

The discovery will mean that we will have to update our caving entry, and will probably have to do so again as the cavers are confident of linking it up to another system 300–400 metres higher up Mt Arthur.

Salmon ova – little salmon eggs

An ad from a few years ago, which we’ve just put on Te Ara, shows Aussies taking credit for pavlova and Pharlap. The narrator notes ‘Everyone’s always stealing your stuff, New Zealand.’ However, we’ve taken our share of items from other countries over the years, and some of the people we got them from have started coming to get them back.

Salmon

Members of the indigenous Winnemem Wintu, a Native American tribe from the McCloud River in California, have come to New Zealand on a quest. They’re trying to repatriate some Chinook or quinnat salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) that was originally taken from their river in the early 1900s and imported to New Zealand as ova (fertile eggs). While those salmon have been successful here, following the building of a dam on the McCloud River, they have declined in their natural habitat. The members of the tribe are hoping to repatriate them as ova once the red tape has been sorted.

Possum

The Australian brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) was introduced to New Zealand from 1837 for its fur. Its introduction was poor at first, but after some effort by acclimatisation societies the furry beasts made New Zealand home. Possums have become a significant pest and now cover the entirety of mainland New Zealand with a population of between 50 and 70 million.

Ironically, the possum is a protected species in Australia. Lee Darroch, of the Yorta Yorta people from Victoria, Australia, was one of a group of artists who sought to revitalise the traditional possum skin cloaks since 1999. Because possums are protected in Australia, they imported the possum skins from New Zealand.

Bumblebees

Four species of the bumblebee were introduced to New Zealand from England in 1885 and 1906, particularly to pollinate clover. While they have thrived in New Zealand, they are now extinct in the UK.

Accordingly, the Bumblebee conservation trust in Britain is planning to catch up to 100 short-haired bumblebees (Bombus subterraneus) for a captive breeding programme. The bees will be flown back to England in cool boxes.

Wallabies

In New Zealand wallabies are hunted as game animals, though are considered pests and marked for eradication in certain habitats. The wallabies on Kawau Island are the remnant of a veritable Noah’s ark of animals imported by Governor George Grey around 1870, which included kangaroos, antelopes, zebras, gnu, emu, peafowl and kookaburras. The dama (tammar) wallaby (Macropus eugenii) are descendants of an extinct South Australian population. DOC is working with Australian authorities to provide some of these to help establish a breeding population.

Fred at the summit (click for full size)

I marked last week’s launch of Economy and the City theme by heading into the bush. I’d been promising my 13-year-old son, Fred, I’d take him tramping for ages, but events and bad weather kept getting in the way. Guilt and a clear weekend forecast saw us brush the cobwebs off our packs, fill them with gear and food, and drive over to the foot of Mt Holdsworth in the Tararua Range.

We arrived around Saturday lunchtime. Throwing on our packs, we signed the intentions book, and hit the track. Fred soon asked me what the different trees were. I desperately tried to remember what Maggy (Te Ara’s botanist) had told me about the flora of the Tararuas while writing the Wairarapa entry, but to no avail. ‘They’re beech trees’, I replied lamely. I had more luck with the birds. Last time I’d heard no native birds – introduced pests eating both them and their habitat – but this time we heard grey warblers, fantails and even the screech of a kākā.

At Mountain House shelter we stuffed ourselves with chocolate before the final ascent to Powell Hut. In this section the bush comprises twisted trees laden down with lichen and moss. Descending cloud and rising wind added to the magic of the scene, so we pretended we were in Lord of the Rings. escaping the Dark Riders.

Eventually we broke through the bush line and got to the hut. Opening the door, we discovered the place largely occupied by Wellington Girls’ College students. For Fred this was no bad thing; but his interest drained as the girls texted each other, compared notes on male teachers, and screeched while practising dance moves on the bunks. ‘Why can’t they shut up?’ he asked. ‘That’s what 14-year-old girls do’, I said. He sighed.

Around 6 p.m. we prepared our bush tucker – spaghetti carbonara, salad and tea-dunking gingernuts. At 9 it was pitch black and our fellow trampers were hitting the sack. As the beep of new texts and giggles died down, the wind and my bunkmate’s snoring picked up. With the hut rattling and shaking I imagined Cedric the Ghost bursting through the door, axe in hand. I hoped he’d kill the snorer first. Eventually the crimson of dawn appeared.

After breakfast we decided to try and reach the summit before the descent. Battling the wind we clambered up the craggy spur to the top. Fred had only been this high in a plane and looking out towards Jumbo was elated by the expanse before him. A few snapshots later we hurried back down to the hut, picked up our packs, and ambled down to the Atiwhakatu Stream. It was hot in the valley, so we went for a reviving dip in the crystal river, before following it out to Holdsworth Lodge.

Driving home, we agreed we belonged in the city, but it was great every now and then to go bush.

With the explosion of video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe and so on, people have come to expect high-quality video online. To keep up with the times, Te Ara has moved to a new video compression format, and has a new media player to display it.

Currently only a dozen videos on Te Ara are using the new, higher-quality format, but we have begun re-compressing the other 840. The new player was designed by me, and coded and built by Chrome Toaster, who have worked with NZ on Screen and The Film Archive. Read more »

Children of yesteryear, some also on trikes

The Te Ara team is working on a new theme, called Social Connections, which deals with birth, death and lots in between. We are writing about the stuff of life, and I’ve found that some of the topics I’ve worked on have made me examine people and social practices more closely than I may have done otherwise. I’m now more prone to place the actions of individuals within a wider context. This is not to say that I’ve become a fan of social determinism, but I do think that having a background narrative makes people-watching more interesting. Or maybe it has just made me more nosy – but at least I’m a well informed nosy-parker.

One recent experience of this happened on a rainy afternoon when I was sitting in a bus shelter with my almost-3-year-old son and a few other people. We had walked (me) and plastic triked (my son – remember these?) down to the shops in Newtown, Wellington, while it was sunny, but got caught out when it started to rain on the way home. As is normal for young kids, my son found it difficult to sit still, preferring to prance around the shelter and lie on the wet pavement. We proceeded to have a debate about whether he could ride his bike while we waited. I was victorious (for the ‘no’ team) after a brief period of reasoned discussion.

His actions, which I thought were quite inoffensive, prompted some reaction from my fellow bus patrons. One woman said, in a rueful voice, something along the lines of ‘the kids these days…’ I wished that she could read the parenting entry, which (when published) will show that disciplinary methods used by New Zealand parents have changed a lot in recent times. Or perhaps the childhood entry I wrote, which tries to capture the magic of this life stage, and looks at the fundamental importance of play and unfettered expression.

The body language of another woman suggested she found my son’s presence objectionable. I gathered this by observing that she kept turning her head to glare at him. Co-incidentally, I had been checking an external author’s entry on infertility and childlessness the day before, and the aspect I found most interesting was that New Zealand’s declining fertility rate (which has been at or below population replacement level since the early 1980s) can be attributed to more women either choosing to remain childless, or finding themselves childless because they’ve spent their most fertile years doing other things.

I couldn’t help wondering whether this woman had children and, if she didn’t, why this was the case – was it involuntary, through choice or by circumstance? Did she dislike children or did she find my parenting (or perhaps disciplinary) approach lacking? Or maybe she did have children and used different methods to the ones I employ.

This was social connections in action – different perceptions and social practices rubbing up against one another at a typical suburban bus stop. While I admit I was a bit cross about what I felt was unwarranted and unjustified attention, the work I’d been doing on the Social Connections entries had given me a willingness to speculate about the stories behind these women’s actions. I hope that when the Social Connections entries are published on Te Ara, they will help readers do the same.