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

Jock Phillips is General Editor of Te Ara.
A good keen man, Jock is also the author of A man’s country? and other published works in New Zealand history. He took up the gauntlet to create the world’s first born-digital national encylopedia after many years as a historian teaching at Victoria University of Wellington (where he founded the Stout Research Centre) and serving as Chief Historian for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

Basil Keane (a good Keane man) is Te Ara’s Maori Editor [where's my macron?]. With degrees in Law and Maori Studies, Basil makes a major contribution to morning teatime controversies, as well as overseeing all Te Ara content from a Maori perspective, and writing on many subjects. Basil took his glasses off for the photo so he wouldn’t look quite so brainy.
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Carl Walrond is Te Ara’s self-styled blood-sports expert. His middle name is probably Mannerheim (or possibly Moomintroll) and he has a doctorate in something to do with fish. A man of many parts, Carl may be seen in a few places in Te Ara, including up a ladder. Carl adds: ‘My colleague Maggy reckons I am the old man of the encyclopedia. I’m not sure what this makes her. Formerly a booze hound, I now wallow like a pig in the muck of domestic bliss.’ He’s either a very honest man or he has no shame. (Evidence is tending to favour the latter.)

Designer Julia Vodanovich brightens our days at Te Ara with a joie de vivre that verges on the pathological, and an irresistible smile. She can even see a funny side in insect life-cycle diagrams, and her brutal honesty about the vicissitudes of a modern gal’s life has us all clutching our sides (or our heads). Julia has an immense fund of quirky knowledge and is a keen quizmistress. She keeps us on our intellectual toes every morning with the newspaper’s daily brain-teaser, honing her skills for the firm’s weekly obscurantists‘ bake-off.

Rosemary Du Plessis is the theme editor for the upcoming Social Connections theme. She also teaches and researches in sociology at the University of Canterbury.

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Helen Rickerby is a production editor at Te Ara, where she also coordinates this blog.

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Caren Wilton is a production editor at Te Ara when she’s not journeying to obscure parts of New provincial Zealand or sweltering among the exotic delights of Bangkok and its fragrant klongs. She’s a writer as well, and now a fledgling filmmaker. The purveyor of much energetic discussion and esoterica about her current and former lives on the fringes of polite society, Caren is the great Seeker in the perfervid microcosm that is Te Ara, always peering under figurative rocks and experimenting with new mental and physical nostrums. Now she’ll ask what is meant by this, and frankly I have no idea.

Marguerite Hill is a resource researcher at Te Ara, and she is one of the coordinators of Te Ara’s Flickr group and photostream. Marguerite came to Te Ara from Te Papa and knows where the bodies are buried. As well as telling us weird stuff about weird stuff at that institution, she can frighten the unsuspecting with her enormous knowledge of film, TV and popular culcha, much of this based on a disturbingly large DVD collection. She has the admiration of her colleagues for being Te Ara’s most organised researcher (who said that’s not saying much?). And she keeps us chirpy with her cheerful attitude in adversity and grace under pressure.

Mark Derby is a writer for Te Ara. When he’s not doing that, he keeps himself pretty busy as a writer and historian, among other things. His latest book is Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War.

Heath Sadlier is Te Ara’s lead designer. The flame-haired but self-effacing innovator and team social secretary feeds his febrile imagination while gazing at a gigantic HDTV and lovingly fondling his latest of gadget. He ventures forth from his remote and shadowy cubicle in the Te Ara design ghetto into the rarified atmosphere of the tearoom to hold forth on subjects as erudite and various as fast cars, trans-sexual fashion designers, Wanganui, and, again, Wanganui (evidently the scene of some deep psychological wounding). Energetically creative, he’s masterminded some of the Te Ara site’s innovative interactive features and never wavers in his quest for pixel-perfect presentation, and his loathing of the nauseating coral colour swatch.

Melanie Lovell-Smith, Te Ara’s Senior Resource Researcher, knows where the bodies are buried. She wears the mantle of her illustrious relatives lightly, and has successfully run the gauntlet of working with historians (amongst whose number she sometimes counts herself). This of course makes Te Ara’s crew of misfits a doddle to deal with. She now wrangles librarians, museum curators, animal-disease perverts and long-distance swimmers in her mission to secure the best possible images and other media for Te Ara.

Andy Palmer is a part-time copyright administrator for Te Ara. He also works as a photographer.

The mercurial Malcolm McKinnon, editor of publishing success the Bateman New Zealand historical atlas (1997) and author of a number of other books, is Te Ara’s theme editor for Places, and is also joint editor (with Ben Schrader) of our upcoming urban life and business coverage. The elusive polymath graces Te Ara with his presence when not lecturing at Vic or gallivanting around the third world in search of material for his next book. Hardy like his Scottish antecedents, Malcolm may also frequently be found in the water at Oriental Bay – possibly training for an aquatic getaway from the rest of clan McKinnon after characterising them as ‘Vichy collaborators’ in a national newspaper. _

‘Gentle’ Ben Schrader is Theme Editor (along with Malcolm McKinnon) for Te Ara’s coverage of urban life and business. His qualifications for this role include some years examining and participating in café society in Melbourne. He may also be the only person in the world who considers Naenae to be up there with Brasília as one of the wonders of the civilised world and a triumph of urban design. His intimate and detailed knowledge of state housing has put him on the literary map, and he has an up close and personal familiarity with the multiple hazards of urban living, particularly regarding the frangibility of plate glass and the brutality of children’s playgrounds.

Despite her rural upbringing, writer Kerryn Pollock has joined the Te Ara team too late to contribute to The Settled Landscape theme. Instead she’s been recruited to write about the city and the economy, and to prepare the regional coverage of Hawke’s Bay.
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Emma Dewson is the ‘rump’ of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. She is now the sole researcher on that project, identifying the rich lists of biographies that accompany Te Ara’s entries. She also works on new biographies against the day when the DNZB website is integrated with Te Ara. A lateral thinker and free spirit, Emma, though distinctly brunette, can always be relied on to up the conversational ante with a wilful misinterpretation of an innocent remark or a faux-innocent double-entendre. She is also the teller of the best rollocking tales of youthful indiscretion in WangaVegas (what is it about that town?).

Ross Somerville is Te Ara’s production manager.
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Fiona Oliver was Te Ara’s longest-serving editor and production supremo, until her sad departure for new challenges. As well as intervening tactically in punctuation disputes (these can get nasty – ever had a comma stuck in your eye?), she could also nimbly turn a sow’s purse of a bibliographical reference into a suave pig’s ear [Shurely shome mishtake? Ed.]. The sloughs of XML held no terrors for her after slugging her way to work through the bogans of J’ville. And as if a doctorate in the depravities of Scottish literature weren’t enough, she is also rumoured to understand what Georges Bataille was on about. This is an unassailable position, as who would ever dare ask?

Simon Nathan was Te Ara’s resident rockhound, and Theme Editor for Earth, Sea and Sky and The Bush. He’s also the man responsible for the multiple occurrences of Harold Wellman’s name and biography in Te Ara (and author of a book on the same subject), but he hastens to point out, with appropriate scientific rigour, that Wellman is NOT the most biographised person in the Encyclopedia. Who is? That’s for us to know and you to find out.
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Maggy Wassilieff, who was Te Ara’s leading controversialist, attempts to hide her Celtic origins behind a Slavic moniker, but there is no mistaking that red hair and the sound of a MacDonald in full battle cry. Maggy was also our expert on the sexual configurations of various primitive or slimy life forms, and while we couldn’t say she was obsessed, she certainly delights in the detail. She’s the one proclaiming ‘geologists know nothing about biology’ in the tearoom.

Deb Sidelinger was seconded from Te Puni Kōkiri (Ministry of Māori Development) as Te Ara’s Community Researcher. She helped us with strategies to engage more with our community through the internet, including Flickr and this blog.

Shirley Williams was Te Ara’s resources team leader from the project’s beginnings until Christmas 2007. Then she abandoned us.