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

The elusive North Island robin (click for full image)

I recently took some time off work to stay with a friend near Benneydale, 35 kilometres south-east of Te Kūiti. I was planning a few days of doing not very much, but my friend had other ideas.

Nic is currently working on Project Robin, a Massey University conservation project monitoring North Island robin populations in the area. With breeding season over and winter about to hit, the field work was more or less done for another year. However, there were a few jobs that needed doing before closing up shop for winter.

And it was some of those jobs that I was roped into doing. The bush Nic works in is fragments of largely native forest spread over numerous farms. On the first day we tidied up bait stations and rat trap stations in one fragment, removing the poison and securing the covers. The following two days we removed stations and traps from one fragment, and installed some in a nearby area of bush. It’s not exactly hard work, but it is very physical; methodically traipsing up and down hills with various bits of gear.

A trap (white) and bait (black) station in a forest fragment

The bush areas themselves are quite interesting. Some are open to sheep and cattle at various times of the year, and wild goats and pigs whenever they get in. The difference between those areas and bush that is completely closed off from the farm stock is dramatic – there is a near complete lack of undergrowth. But what really struck me was the fact that the robin are quite happy in the browsed areas, seemingly untroubled by the bigger beasts – farming and conservation side by side.

On the weekend, when Nic was back attempting a census count before the weather turned nasty, I made a brief trip up to the Maungatautari Ecological Island, a wonderfully accessible forest restoration project near Cambridge, with some easy walks through the beautiful bush.

There are a lot of smaller, less well-known programmes, like Project Robin, going on around the country all helping to maintain and enhance New Zealand’s unique flora and fauna.

And of course there are bigger programmes too, primarily Department of Conservation (DoC) projects. I have been lucky enough to spend time on Kapiti Island helping (in the loosest sense) with both the kōkako and hihi (stitchbird) programmes, and spending a couple of weeks near Ōmarama helping (in the very loosest sense) with the black stilt. And last year I also had the opportunity to travel to the sub-antarctic islands and document some of DoCs work down there with albatross and sea lions. There’s photos from this trip here: http://www.acpalmer.com/subant/; and some more information here: http://microphen.blogspot.com/search/label/Sub-Antarctica.

For more information about Project Robin, and other robin and tomtit reintroductions, visit: http://rsg-oceania.squarespace.com/nz-robin-tomtit/.

Paul Reynolds

A month ago I spent a stimulating lunch fantasising with Paul Reynolds about the future of Te Ara.  This morning I hear with a brutal shock that Paul has died. Paul, I cannot believe that, living as you did in the  digital world of instant messaging,  you are not still listening. So here’s my tribute to you.

You were the great prophet of the digital world.  On the lecture podium, on radio, in your blog, on Twitter, above all in your ever-enthusiastic presence, you gave us all a vision of the next turn in this digital journey.  When we first conceptualised Te Ara, XML was your passion. Then came social media and the need to let audiences engage, talk to each other and answer back. Most recently when we talked, your enthusiasm was on a jointed up web and the need to make seamless links between a site like Te Ara and the other sites in the cultural/heritage space.

We did not always listen to you or follow your ideas, and no doubt we were the losers for it, but that never offended you. It did not stop your constant support or halt the flow of ideas. However antediluvian our site, you always believed in Te Ara, always looked for ways to improve it – always warm and generous in your plaudits for what we did, gentle and intelligent in pointing out where we should move. I look back at the blog you wrote after the launch of ‘Economy and the City’ on a wet night in Auckland in March, and there it is: a statement of admiration for the project, and then deft suggestions for a personalisation folder, for links, for more of a relationship with Wikipedia, for more use of creative commons.  All good ideas beautifully put.

So we will miss you bad, Paul: that soft Scots lilt, those alert eyes, and that excitement for where the web was moving. We are all in your debt.

Ross Somerville writes:
It’s hard to believe that the exuberant and encouraging Scots voice is now silent: Paul Reynolds, who must without doubt have been able to claim to being New Zealand’s first internet guru, died suddenly at the weekend.

While Te Ara was still nothing more than an idea, Paul would hold court at an outside table at Wellington’s Astoria cafe, during his frequent visits to the capital. There in the early 2000s at a table covered in coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays, he would bail up librarians, IT geeks, CIOs and others to spread the word about the latest internet developments that had excited him, and to stress the benefits of his favourite topic, collaboration.

Paul was tireless in his quest to persuade collecting institutions and content providers to digitise their material, and work together to share standards and make it widely available.

Some of his visions were achieved; some are still ideas whose time has not yet come in an environment he must have found frustratingly slow-moving. But he did not cease encouraging us, and prodding us to go that step further.

His enthusiasm and encouragement will be very much missed.

Huntly power station – one of the photos you'll be seeing in the Waikato entry

Last time we blogged about Flickr, we were asking people for images for the Taranaki Places entry.

Busy as usual, we’ve moved on since then and will be launching the Waikato Places entry at the end of May. As usual, our Flickr friends have contributed dozens of fantastic images of the region. As well as images we’ve sourced from Flickr that will appear as part of the entry, we’ll also be staging our fifth Flickr exhibition (the link goes to our Otago Flickr exhibition). The Waikato exhibition isn’t online yet, but you can take a look at the exhibition pool to get an idea of what’s in store.

Now that the Waikato entry is well underway, we’ve started work on the Nelson entry. For Te Ara’s purposes, the Nelson region comprises Nelson city and Tasman district; the latter takes in Golden Bay, Abel Tasman National Park, Motueka, Murchison, Nelson Lakes and nearby areas.

We would love for you to start adding your Nelson photos to the Te Ara pool. We’re looking for photographs of Nelson landscape, culture and people, but in particular inland Nelson and Murchison are on our list. Thank you to the photographers who have already started adding images!

In a new feature, you can view thumbnails of recent additions to Te Ara’s Flickr pool at the bottom of Te Ara’s redesigned homepage ( which was launched in January).

Asbestos Cottage

A few weeks ago I stayed at Asbestos Cottage in Kahurangi National Park. A track leads there from the road to the Cobb Reservoir. This road turns off the main Motueka–Tākaka road at Upper Tākaka.

It takes about one-and-a-half hours to tramp to Asbestos Cottage, which was Henry and Annie Chaffey’s home of close to 40 years. In 1951 Henry died in the snow with his boots on, aged 83, humping in supplies. In her grief, Annie tried to burn the cottage down, herself included. She acclimatised at a farm outside Tākaka before being moved to Timaru relatives. Deeply unhappy, after a couple of years she secreted away a fistful of sleeping pills to get across the great divide.

Inside Asbestos Cottage (click for larger image)

In 1997 the Department of Conservation employed Anatoki-valley carpenter Gregor Koolen (assisted by ex New Zealand Forest Service ranger Max Polglaze) to restore Asbestos Cottage. It was built around 1900 from pit-sawn mountain cedar. Constructed like a huge packing crate, the only dimensions in the walls were three-by-twos and six-by-ones. It had no studs, so the weight of the building was carried by nails. The boards were just nailed to the bearers.

A seam of asbestos (click for larger image)

Henry was a prospector and wrote letters trying to get the nearby asbestos deposits mined. They were worked on small scale in the 1940s and 1950s, but were too low-grade and the country too rugged to make the cost of mining worthwhile. There are also asbestos outcrops at Red Mountain in South Westland – part of the same suite of rocks which the Alpine Fault has displaced by 480 kilometres – but the rugged country there meant they too were never worth mining.

I had with me Jim Henderson’s The exiles of asbestos cottage (1981) which details the lives of this remarkable couple. It was humbling to read it in their home, and although I had a restless sleep, no ghosts troubled it.

GDP per capita of selected OECD countries

I’m nerdy enough that I really enjoyed editing the economics entries, which we launched last month as part of the Economy and the City theme. Through editing them, I finally came to understand those acronyms – GDP, GNI, PPPs – that economists like to throw around.

Since finishing work on that theme, I’ve continued reading about economics, and have recently been finding out about the GPI, genuine progress indicator. This adds on to GDP (gross domestic product) the value of unpaid work – such as housework, parenthood or volunteering – and deducts things like the cost of crime, household rubbish disposal and environmental degradation. Green economists see this as a truer measure of economic wellbeing. Applied to the US economy, GPI showed that while GDP per person had risen steadily since the 1970s, the GPI was flat or declining.

In New Zealand the Auckland Regional Council is keeping track of GPI for Auckland. Economists are now beavering away at measuring GPI for the whole country. It will be interesting to see what it shows, and might require us to make additions to some of our entries.