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

Baby shoes

Sandwich board, Salzburg

Seddon?

Globe theatre memorial

Anchor billboard

Tangaroa Sailing

Speights sign

I’ve just gotten back from my first trip to Europe, and being a resources researcher, I found it a bit hard to turn off my camera. Three thousand digital photos later, I’ve trawled through them all in order to show you some of the Kiwi connections we encountered while we were away. I wasn’t away for very long, but it was fun to spot places and things that reminded me of home.

Most of my Kiwi encounters were in the UK, but strangely it was Salzburg where I stumbled upon two quite different New Zealand connections. The first was this display of Bobux shoes in a children’s shop near my hotel. These soft babies and infants shoes are exported all over the world – including to Austria.

This Inligua sandwich board was found in the maze-like streets of the Salzburg Old Town. My rusty German translates the sign as ‘Some things you’ll just never understand/With language you’ll have it much easier’.

Once I got to London, I was spoilt for choice New Zealand associations. At the end of the Mall, just outside of Buckingham Palace, stands the Victoria Memorial, which was completed in 1911. Next to Victory are two figures donated by the ‘people of New Zealand’. Two figures, a man and a woman, represent New Zealand’s role in the Empire. I think that the chap in the photo looks suspiciously like Premier Richard Seddon. But maybe it’s just the beard?

Next, when wandering around Globe, I came across a stone donated by New Plymouth Boys’ High School. It sat alongside those paid for by Sir Patrick Stewart and other theatrical luminaries. This New Zealand connection didn’t surprise me – after all a group of New Zealand embroiderers created the fantastic New Zealand hangings inside the Globe. Sir Raymond Boyce’s cartoons or preliminary drawings for the hangings now reside in Te Papa.

Anchor billboards like this one appeared all over East London. Apparently New Zealand cows are very clever, with skills including tractor driving and cheese-making. Of course, Anchor has been a household name in New Zealand since 1886.

My dad comes from Bristol, and while the family were showing me around the rejuvenated Bristol dock area I found this sign for Tangaroa charters. The ship wasn’t in dock, so I didn’t get to see the beautiful oak ketch which was made in Denmark. I still have no idea why a ship in the Bristol floating harbour is called the Tangaroa, but it seemed appropriate.

This Southerner Speights pub was closed the Sunday afternoon I wandered around Fleet Street and Brideswell. A closer inspection of the menu didn’t find any New Zealand-themed food – but according to their website they do sell Speights and Steinlager.

A tīrairaka, or fantail

Editing an entry on tangihanga recently reminded me of the power of Māori poetry to evoke the experience of grief. The natural world was a vivid reference for Māori metaphorical imagery, and one of the thrills of reading and listening to Māori oral literature is the landscapes, birds, trees, seas and skies it describes are all here around us: beautiful Aotearoa.

It’d be a challenge for a lyrical poem in English to swallow a name like ‘bull kelp’, but rimurimu, its Māori name, is lovely. In a song written in grief for her dead child, an East Coast mother begins ‘Rimurimu teretere e rere ki te moana,’ describing the way kelp drifts and eddies on the tides, a powerful metaphor for the helplessness of grief.

In the last verse she compares her child to a tīrairaka, a fantail, a bird which flits about and is never still, a dazzling simile for the elusiveness of memory.

Another metaphor for the yearning of grief comes from the song ‘Tai timu tai pari taihoa e haere,’ which implores the turning tide to halt. This was sung to Māori troops heading off to the Second World War.

There’s an everyday poetry in te reo Māori which to me rivals the potency of Shakespearean English … why wouldn’t you want to learn it?

Pub quizzes seem like a perfect way to spend a winter’s evening. My Southern Cross quiz team hasn’t ‘competed’ for a while, and I miss those nights; they are always fun and we have a knack of winning spot prizes … we may have even won a round once.

So, inspired by them, I have written for you a quiz that would seem at home as a section in any pub quiz. I’m only sorry there are no chicken wings and hot sauce to accompany your quiz on famous Johns.

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

In the early hours of Saturday a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck just outside of Darfield near Christchurch. You know the story, it has been everywhere for almost a week. On Saturday, if you were not directly affected, you, like me were glued to the media hungry for more information.

New Zealanders surged online for information about the quake. As the day progressed and in the days since, people have been searching out more and more information about earthquakes. GeoNet, a tremendous source of seismic information saw a massive increase in traffic.

Te Ara received more visitors than ever before and our page views doubled:


So what was everyone looking at? Well…

Active faults
The most viewed page by far was this map of active faults. Visitors would have quickly noticed there aren’t any active faults marked near Darfield. Faults are only considered active if they have moved (and broken the earth’s surface) in the past 120,000 years. Kelvin Berryman, manager of the natural hazards platform at GNS Science explains:

‘Before Saturday, there was nothing in the landscape that would have suggested there was an active fault beneath the Darfield and Rolleston areas … Geologists have no information on when the fault last ruptured as it was unknown until last weekend. All we can say at this stage is that this newly revealed fault has not ruptured since the gravels were deposited about 16,000 years ago.’ (http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/16000-years)

Due to the interest in the map, I have created a high resolution version and added the epicentre of Saturday’s quake. I’ve also added the 22-km-long surface rupture (fault trace) which represents the previously hidden fault line.

Historic earthquakes
Our Historic earthquakes entry was also popular, perhaps as people tried to put this disaster in context. These were the quakes they were most interested in (in order of page views):

• Edgecumbe – 2 March 1987 – magnitude 5.2
• North Canterbury – 1 September 1888 – magnitude 7.0–7.3
• Wairarapa – 23 January 1855 – magnitude 8.2
• Napier – 3 February 1931 – magnitude 7.8

What causes earthquakes?
As well as information on active faults people were clearly interested in what causes earthquakes and seismic activity in New Zealand. We have a number of diagrams that illustrate various aspects of earthquakes that were amongst the most viewed pages:

• Earthquakes and volcanoes in the subduction zone
• Faults and earthquakes
• Plate boundary through New Zealand
• The earthquake magnitude scale
• Visualising the magnitude scale
• New Zealand earthquakes, 1990–94

That last one is very similar to this animation created by Chris McDowall using information from GeoNet. It visualises six months of New Zealand earthquakes and ends several days after the Darfield quake.

Damage, ruptures and distortion
The Deans family were the first permanent European settlers in the Christchurch area. This photo of their homestead was the sixth most viewed page on the site. The registered historic place, built in the late 1800s, was severely damaged in the quake.

I find the pictures of the damage left by Saturdays quake hard to refer to as stunning, a typically positive term, however they did stun me. Visitors to Te Ara were obviously fascinated by ruptures and land distortion, such as these:

• Fault rupture, 1987 Edgecumbe earthquake
• Sideways movement on the Hope Fault
• Twisted railway tracks, Edgecumbe
• The Edgecumbe Fault

Around the world
There was also a lot of interest from around the world with traffic increasing 50% from the United States, 76% from Australia, 89% from the United Kingdom, 111% from Canada and a whopping 500% increase from the Dominican Republic (which, admittedly was only an increase from 1 visitor last week to 6 visitors this week, so far).

Questions?
We’re pleased that Te Ara’s wide range of information, photos, maps and diagrams about earthquakes was able to help people understand what has been going on in Christchurch over the last few days, but do you have a question that you can’t find an answer to? Let us know in the comments below…

Idyllic Kaiteriteri beach

Last night, before about 140 enthusiastic locals, Hon Nick Smith, local member of Parliament and minister for the environment, ACC and climate change, launched the Nelson entries of Te Ara. This was not the first of our Places entries – it’s actually the 17th region we’ve covered – but the theme of the night was very much on Nelson’s firsts.

Nick Smith opened the batting with the following:

• the first contact between Māori and European – a bloody encounter off Wainui Inlet in 1642 when four of Abel Tasman’s men lost their lives
• the country’s only source of dolomite at Mt Burnett
• the clearest fresh water, which emerges at Waikoropupū Springs after four years underground
• the most sunshine hours (well, at least usually – when Blenheim or Whakatāne don’t pip you!)
• the birthplace of our first Nobel Prize winner, Ernest Rutherford
• the longest and deepest caves in the country
• the most prime ministers per head (five: Stafford, Domett, Holyoake, Rowling and Palmer).

I spoke next and rather let the side down. I could come up with only one first, but it was a juicy one:

• Nelson produces more boysenberries than anywhere else – in fact half of the world’s crop!

Carl Walrond, the author of the entry and one of Te Ara’s in-house writers, then restored the innings and consolidated the locals’ sense of pride with a few more:

• the largest native spider (the Nelson cave spider)
• the first railway line (the Mt Dun railway)
• the first telegraph from Australia to New Zealand which came ashore at Cable Bay in 1876.

Carl also pointed to two significant seconds:

• the second New Zealand Company settlement
• the second city to be proclaimed a city (in 1858).

Finally something should be said about the event itself. The facilities for the launch at the Suter art gallery were superb, and without any doubt Nelson came first with respect to the size of the video screen and the quality of the food enjoyed by the assembled company.

So take a bow Nelson, you are definitely first in my book. Enjoy the entry.