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

James Hector in his younger days

Congratulations to Simon Nathan, geologist, former Theme Editor for Te Ara (Earth, Sea and Sky and The Bush), writer of our upcoming entry on the West Coast, and one of our regular bloggers.

Simon has just been announced as the recipient of the inaugural Copyright Licensing Ltd/New Zealand Society of Authors Stout Grant toward a biography of James Hector. Simon introduced us to über-influential and wide-ranging James Hector back in March, in his blog post to mark Hector Day.

Explorer, geologist and natural scientist James Hector founded several of the most important scientific institutions in New Zealand: the Colonial Museum (now Te Papa), the New Zealand Institute (now the Royal Society of New Zealand) and the Geological Survey (now GNS Science). Mountains, dolphins and beaked whales have been named after him.

It’s surprising a biography hasn’t yet been written about someone who has been so significant in New Zealand’s history (I’ve heard rumours this is because his handwriting was so appalling that no-one can decipher it), but Simon is now going to remedy this. He was been well-prepared by writing a biography of fellow-geologist Harold Wellman. All the very best for this mammoth task!

The Denniston incline – a West Coast icon

With New Zealand’s highest rainfall, the highest mountains, and glaciers extending down to near sea-level, the West Coast has the feel of frontier country, combined with spectacular scenery.

West Coasters have always had a reputation for being independent minded, and suspicious of authority and regulations. Gold mining, coal mining and forestry kept the economy going for many years, but nowadays tourism and farming are major employers. Farmers are belatedly realising that the West Coast’s drought-free qualities make it prime dairying country.

The West Coast features in Peter Hawes’s new play, The gods of warm beer , at Centrepoint theatre in Palmerston North. Two young rugby players are poached by league scouts, and suffer the humiliation of upsetting the whole community. It’s a wonderfully evocative play about life in Westport in 1951. Even if the audience probably didn’t understand some of the subtleties of West Coast life, they loved it.

The West Coast will be the next region to feature in Te Ara’s Places theme, and will be published in December 2008.

If you have photos of the West Coast, we’d love you to contribute them to our Te Ara group on Flickr. We’ll select around 20 images for an online exhibition, like the exhibition in our recent Southland entry. We’re particularly interested in things that are distinctive about the region. Visit our Flickr group for more details.

It was very gratifying last night for Te Ara to win the 2008 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Award for best plain English website. And it was a bonus that another of the ministry’s websites, NZLive.com, received an honourable mention in the same category.

Te Ara editors past and present were on hand to share that rare moment when all the largely invisible work behind the scenes takes centre stage.

Good plain English is one of those things that, if done well, nobody notices. That’s as it should be. Plain English just means saying what you mean in a simple way - rather than using fancy or complicated words unnecessarily. So it should be easy to read and understand. From the beginning Te Ara staff have been committed to reaching a really broad audience. This means we’ve put a lot of effort into using clear and comprehensible language.

So far we’ve published over a million words by more than 100 writers on thousands of pages covering hundreds of topics. Some of the topics are highly technical, and we’ve recruited experts in their fields to write for us. All of their words have been edited for consistency and style by a small team of very talented editors.

In the early days, voices were sometimes raised and teeth gnashed as writers feared the ‘dumbing down’ of their high concepts or blunting of their finely honed prose. But that’s not what plain language is about, and the editors persuasively argued that the most abstruse concepts can usually be presented in a clear and plain way, avoiding jargon and complex vocabulary. That’s one of Te Ara’s real points of difference (along with its richness of illustration and attractive design).

Editors are usually the unsung heroines or heroes of publishing. They certainly are appreciated at Te Ara. Not only do they help writers to make their words speak clearly, but they also write the Short Story for each entry – lively and succinct summaries for a younger audience.

So we are really proud of this award, which honours the core of our work, no jiggery-pokery, bells and whistles or technical gizmos required.

From the judges’ comments:

Readers young and old can get immersed in this website. The website is very well structured in layers to draw the reader from general information into more technical detail. It shows sophistication of writing as well as wide appeal across many types of readers and groups of New Zealanders. The site uses wonderfully plain language and an engaging style with good use of headings, layout, and sidebars.

Outside the Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore

On 19 June the weekly newspaper The Independent featured an unusual image of New Zealand on its front page - it was upside down and had Southland at the top, crowded with buildings and general busy-ness. The rest of the country was shrunken and empty.

This tribute to recent boom times in the southern province is very timely for Te Ara, as we’re now in the final stages of preparing our entry on Southland and Fiordland – the 11th out of 22 regions.

Southland has had a long history. In the early 19th century the shores of Foveaux Strait were one of the first meeting zones between Māori and Pākehā – mostly sealers and whalers.

The Wakatipu and other gold rushes in the early 1860s prompted a short-lived boom, as did Vogel’s immigration and public works programme in the early 1870s.

In the late 19th and early 20th century the province grew rapidly as swamps were drained, forests cleared, and dairy factories and meat freezing works thrived. Invercargill grew apace to match.

The 20 years after the Second World War was another golden age for farming, when Gore was reputedly the country’s richest town and Invercargill one of its most prosperous and established cities.

To help us in preparing our entry, we’re calling all Southlanders, past, present and future (more people are going to live in Southland than leaving). We’re looking for pictures and other resources about Southland and Fiordland, to bring the entry alive.

We’ve created a Te Ara group on Flickr, which anyone can join and contribute photos to. You can also contribute personal accounts or family stories about Southland or its history, by filling in a ‘Your Stories’ form online.

So help us make sure ‘our’ Southland meets ‘your’ Southland.

The Wanganui Places entry is launched

On Monday night (16 June) more than 150 citizens of the Wanganui district came along to help us celebrate the launch of our latest Places entry: Wanganui.

It was a record turnout for one of our regional launches – larger than Auckland or Canterbury, and even larger than Timaru, where the locals also did us proud. The next morning Te Ara made the front page of the Wanganui Chronicle and the local radio discussed the entry.

So why did Wanganui respond so magnificently? There are some practical explanations.

• The author, Diana Beaglehole, was born in the Wanganui region and, despite not having lived there since 1959, she has many friends and supporters who came along to see her present the entry.
• We’ve got better at organising these events.
• It was a beautiful night in Wanganui, calm and clear with the fresh snow of Mt Ruapehu glistening on the horizon – no rain or cold to dissuade people from venturing out.

Wanganui town in the 1850s

But the reason may be deeper – Wanganui is a region with a very long and dramatic history.

The river that defines the region was the main highway of Māori society. It’s lined with pa sites, and there are some amazing historic places such as Tamatea’s cave, where generations of Māori have slept as they paddled up or down the river.

Later, the port attracted the Wakefield settlers, but it was a precarious existence. For some 30 years after 1840 the town was the frontier of Māori–Pākehā conflict. The memorial at Pākaitore or Moutoa Gardens to the Battle of Moutoa in 1864, which was fought dramatically on an island in the centre of the river, was New Zealand’s first war memorial.

In the late 19th century, as farming expanded, Wanganui city prospered. The city is dotted with very handsome buildings such as the exquisite Opera House; and it was, until 1936, New Zealand’s fifth-largest city, after the four main centres. Then growth slowed, and in the 1980s and 1990s Wanganui city and district suffered from closures and loss of jobs.

The team that brought you the Wanganui entry

But today there has been a revival – based in part on presenting Wanganui as a region of history and tradition. Our launch was held in the War Memorial Hall, which, as our interactive shows, is one of an impressive centre of heritage buildings and institutions – the museum, the Sarjeant art gallery, the Alexandra Heritage and Research Library.

People turned out on Monday because they treasure their history and their region. They know that understanding their past and telling the stories of Wanganui’s history is central to the region’s future.

Michael Laws, the mayor of Wanganui, was effusive in welcoming the Wanganui entry. We share his hopes that these entries, presented by Diana Beaglehole with a real affection for the district, will awaken other New Zealanders to the richness of Wanganui’s past.