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

A love of sport often starts young in New Zealand (click for image credit)

Do you read the back page of the paper before the front page? Do you take out a Sky TV subscription purely to watch the netball or the footie? Do you spend your weekends ferrying kids from one suburban playing field to another? Do you walk light-headed when the Black Caps actually win; and do you cross your fingers when the Silver Ferns are one goal in front of the Aussies?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then I am happy to say you are an unreconstructed sports fan. Welcome to the club. The entries we’ve published today, on Sport and society and Sports reporting and commentating, may help you to understand your obsession.  And if you are not a fan – even if you think of sport as war by another name – then hopefully these entries will allow you to find out where the disease that infects others, perhaps the men in your household, comes from.

Greg Ryan’s story on Sport and society focuses on participation in sport and explores the question of who played games at different times and why. He shows that factors such as ethnicity, gender, location in city or country, and economics are central to the story of sport. To take one example, many colonial sports were played for small amounts of prize money, and some of our earliest heroes such as Joe Scott, long-distance walker of the 1880s, were thoroughly professional (i.e. paid). Then the games ethic of the English public school arrived to elevate the amateur sportsperson. Working people could no longer earn a living from sport. Those who tried, such as the All Blacks who switched to league, were widely condemned. But in the world of the late 20th century, as television brought in huge revenues, the amateur ideal became increasingly anachronistic. Professional sport and new stadiums with corporate boxes arrived. Sport became big business, and people could make a fortune as sporting stars. Young working New Zealanders, especially Polynesian people, saw a future on the sports field.

Keith Quinn’s story on Sports reporting and commentating focuses more on the world inhabited by fans. The changing media – from newspapers, to telegraph, to radio, to television, to the internet – helped build up support for games. The media created heroes and villains, and turned sporting contests into high dramas. Arguably the strength of analysis and column inches devoted to sporting journalism in this country has exceeded that given over to politics. So this is a rich and engrossing story which features some fine television and radio clips.

These stories are but two of 49 on New Zealand sports and sporting codes which Te Ara will have published by the end of August. They have been great fun to prepare and the sports journalists and historians who have written them have done us proud. The entries will in effect provide New Zealand’s first sporting encyclopedia. So sports fans, enjoy the coming flood; and for those who consider sports either boring or socially dangerous, be warned!

The cover of the Quick Read biography of Edmund Hillary

This week Manatū Taonga – Ministry for Culture and Heritage is taking its first small steps into the world of ebooks by releasing seven biographies from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, part of Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. They are available from today from our website in epub and mobi (Kindle) formats for free: http://www.mch.govt.nz/ebooks/. This means they can be read on a variety of devices, including ereaders such as Kobos and Kindles, but also on your smartphone.

Their release coincides with the 60th anniversary of Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mt Everest on 29 May 1953. His biography is one of this first set of ebooks. The others are biographies of prime ministers Robert Muldoon and David Lange, labour activist Sonja Davies, writers Hone Tuwhare and Janet Frame, and New Zealand’s greatest running coach, Arthur Lydiard, whose ebook includes extra material from NZHistory.

A view of the Quick Read on Edmund Hillary on an iPad

So why are we doing this, and more importantly, why are we making ebooks out of material that you can already access for free on the web? Our strategy is to make our content as available as possible in as many places as we think are useful for our readers. Ebooks let you, the reader, take our content away, offline, and read it when it suits you. It also gives you more control over the look and feel through your ereading device. It’s about letting you make the decisions as to when and where you read.

For us it will also be about finding connections across our websites and creating ebooks out of material that currently sits in different websites. By bringing it together we can make new things out of our collection of content. That, in turn, will inform how we can make our websites work together better.

We have a huge collection of written material about New Zealand; it’s an asset that belongs to New Zealanders and we want to encourage people and organisations to start using it. It’s a long-term plan but we hope to release an application programming interface (API) that makes our content and data available for re-use. With that in mind, ebooks are examples of ways that other groups might be able to start using our content.

Our quick reads are available in epub and mobi (Kindle) formats, and can be read on a variety of devices

The ebooks we’ve done so far are very simple. We’ve called them Quick Reads as they’re short and easy to read. We’re excited to be part of a small group of New Zealand publishers experimenting with ebooks, and have taken some inspiration from Bridget Williams Books and their BWB Texts series of short ebooks.

As I said, we’re taking our first small steps, but as we learn we’ll start developing longer and more interactive ebooks. We hope you’ll like our first ebooks and stay with us on the journey as we release more of them.

Download the first seven Quick Reads from mch.govt.nz/ebooks.

Wine and cheese evening (click for image credit)

Does alcohol mean good fellowship and heavenly tastes, or is it a route to poverty and despair? Is gambling just the excitement of a flutter at the races, or an addiction which can become a ruinous burden? Are recreational drugs a harmless way to see life differently, or poisons which befuddle the mind and eventually kill the body? Is it always ‘time for a Capstan’; or is smoking the country’s greatest killer?

If there is one lesson that emerges from the five new stories we have just released, it is that one person’s pleasure is another person’s vice.

The history of alcohol, drugs, gambling and smoking which are told in these entries, along with a fifth entry that examines the Māori experience, is a fascinating story of changing perceptions and judgements. What were once innocent pleasures to some became addictive vices for others. Take alcohol. In the early 19th century most UK immigrants regarded alcohol as an essential food and a way of relaxing from a tough physical life. They normally drank spirits – brandy and rum, not the beer they were used to at home – but drink they did, unashamedly. In the 19th century it was only in the Māori community that alcohol was initially regarded as waipiro (foul water) and something to be avoided. However, by the end of the century public perceptions had changed. A powerful prohibition movement had emerged and the struggle between drink as pleasure and drink as vice led eventually to that strange Kiwi compromise, six o’clock closing. Eventually from the 1960s restrictions were lifted. Surely we had grown up and overcome the vicious social and personal impacts of alcohol – or so we thought until the sight of teenagers pre-loading with RTDs and then vomiting on sidewalks sparked a new perception of alcohol as vice.

Smoking has a different story. In colonial New Zealand it was fine for Pākehā men to puff away on their pipes, but not for Pākehā women. Māori made no such distinction. From the earliest times, kuia as well as kaumātua were smokers. In the first half of the 20th century, as cigarettes replaced the pipe, smoking became regarded as a universal pleasure – ‘Whatever the occasion’, as Players said. By the 1950s three-quarters of all men and a third of all women smoked. Then medical discoveries provided a new perspective, setting in motion a war on smoking as the worst of vices. Today a small minority, under a fifth of adults, smoke – although the figure is much higher among Māori women.

The drug story is also a fascinating study of changing perceptions. In the 19th century cannabis and opium were freely available, usually consumed as patent medicines – laudanum for middle-class women, Chlorodyne for the kids. The main recreational users were Chinese gold miners, but in one of the most remarkable acts of self-discipline in our history, the Chinese community petitioned to make opium illegal and succeeded in driving the addiction from their community. But New Zealand was slow in restricting drugs – cannabis was not restricted until the 1920s, and we had one of the world’s highest rates of heroin use in the 1940s. Then, just as the counter-culture began to discover dope and LSD in the late 1960s, others began to see these as dangerous vices which needed repressing. Today we have an unusual pattern – high use of cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines, low use of heroin and cocaine – with some in the community arguing that it is time that drugs were no longer treated as vices at all.

As for gambling, here too there have been contrasts in attitude. In the early 20th century there were restrictions on bookmakers and lotteries. Then the state came in and saw gambling as a source of revenue and fun. The government, it was felt, could keep a kind of six-o’clock-closing balance between vice and pleasure. But the revenue and tourism possibilities became stronger, restrictions were eased, and now with New Zealanders spending over $30 million each week on a flutter, new perceptions of gambling have emerged. The pokies, especially, are viewed by some as a vicious industry which hurts the poor and the vulnerable.

Te Ara cannot give the final word on these matters. We have no doubt that perceptions of pleasure and of vice in these matters will continue to evolve. But for now enjoy these entries, and think about where you stand. Which are the real vices, which the innocent pleasures?

Some iconic Kiwi fare

If so, then enjoy the fare we serve up with our four latest stories. To enjoy the whole feast follow the sequence – from Food to Cooking to Eating, and then, if you are lucky, to eating outside at Picnics and barbecues.

Together the stories tell a rich account of the diverse rituals and tastes which have graced our national table. The extent of change is striking.

Take the first entry on Food: Māori, the first people to inhabit these lands, largely lived off the bush and the sea. Birds, fish and fern root were their staple diet. Kūmara was really their only important introduced food. The British settlers, however, turned their backs on bush and sea. Instead they transformed the land into an English farm which might produce the foods they had enjoyed, or rather aspired to, at home – mutton and beef (three times a day was the proud colonial claim) accompanied by traditional veggies such as cabbage, carrots and onions. Fish was regarded as poor man’s food; crayfish, so the entry tells us, was considered good only for drunkards.

Then after the Second World War things changed. Overseas travel, television cooking shows, an urban culture and immigrants from different societies brought about a revolution. New Zealanders began to realise that they were an island where fish were bountiful and of good quality; and that their climate was more Mediterranean than North Sea. They began to grow and eat eggplant, capsicums, zucchini and avocados. Asian migrants introduced tastes for bok choy and lemongrass. White bread was replaced with grainy brown.

Cooking also saw dramatic change over time, affected in the first instance by technology. For both Māori and early Pākehā, most food was cooked outside – in a hāngī or over an open fire. The introduction of Shacklock’s coal range in the 1870s was a revolution which made possible the famous scones and baking that expressed the culinary creativity of the colonial housewife. Gas stoves and then electrical ones added to the baking repertoire and facilitated New Zealand’s (Australians please note!) invention of pavlova in the 1920s. But cooking of meats and vegetables showed little refinement up to the 1970s. In 1953, so the Cooking entry tells us, Eric Linklater described the way New Zealanders treated their famous hogget: it ‘appeared to have been killed by a bomb and the fragments of its carcase incinerated in the resulting fire.’ But if Linklater were to return half a century later he would not recognise the ingenuity and energy that New Zealanders, both men and women, spend on creating culinary masterpieces as they aspire to become television masterchefs.

Eating too has seen significant change. The midday meal, which until the 1940s was the big feed of the day, has fallen out of favour, including the big Sunday roast lunch. Eating out and takeaways have become far more common. Picnics remain an important ritual for New Zealanders, but they are no longer the huge community occasions that they were up to the 1930s. Now they more often happen as part of a family outing. Barbecues, complete with huge metal gas-fired equipment, are a more recent development.

What has not changed is the centrality of food and the rituals of its consumption to patterns of hospitality and celebration. From the Māori hākari or feast, to the birthday or Christmas dinner, New Zealanders have always enjoyed breaking bread with their fellow human beings. So fill your glasses and enjoy the feast of the four new entries which we lay before you. Cheers!

Jason Scott prefers to call the cloud 'the clown'.

‘Stand up if you can name more than one Kardashian.’

‘Now stand up if you know New Zealand’s child poverty rate.’

That humbling challenge posed by Clay Johnson kicked off Webstock 2013 and was followed by an excellent presentation calling for a paradigm shift in our relationship with mass media.

Essentially: we are what we eat and ignorance can actually be caused by consumption of media (i.e. not just lack of information but by wrong information). The more junky tabloid media we consume on the web, the more junky and tabloid the web becomes. We are shaping it through our actions, and we need to shape it - and ourselves - for the better. Linking to sources to allow people to make up their own minds, and using good data to allow the creation of more honest media, were a few of his suggestions.

His call to become ‘a producer rather than a consumer’ and to start each day by writing 500 words hit a note with me, and inspired me to write this, my first ever blog post.

I found the whole of Webstock thoroughly enjoyable this year, both the conference and the fantastic workshop I went to by Chris Coyier. The speakers were a great bunch and even the speaking order felt just right.

As a tech-head who is equal parts designer/coder (otherwise known as a ‘unicorn’ according to Kitt Hodsen) I genuinely found inspiration and something worthwhile to take away from every single presentation. Here are the three that I found had the most immediately applicable ideas:

Chris Coyier introduced me to SASS, Compass, CodeKit and Emmet, and showed us smart ways to use CSS variables, nested tags, breakpointed media-queries, includes, mixins and box-sizing:border-box as well as loads of other great stuff. He somehow managed to cram loads in while giving each concept enough time and examples to really sink in. All the while being really entertaining and likeable along the way.

Karen McGrane talked about COPE (create once, publish everywhere) and used some great examples of what large media companies have done. My favourite was the US TV Guide who decided well before the technology changed that, despite the fact they were still publishing printed guides, they needed to start creating three versions of everything: short, medium and full format - now of course implemented on everything from Sky guides to websites and mobile apps. She also hit on a really simple but important point – we need to stop thinking in terms of our ‘primary platform’ – it’s just as flawed whether you are thinking first of ‘print’ or ‘website’. The content is first. The platforms are ever-changing.

Mike Monteiro delivered an in-your-face wake-up call to web designers that featured a fair amount of swearing and a strong focus on responsibility. Responsibility to be of service to the world we live in and to make things that have a real and positive impact on people’s lives (as opposed to another iPad dock). Responsibility to the craft of design – to write, speak and teach, to share failures and successes for those who come after us. Responsibility to clients – to choose the right ones, to be a gatekeeper, not an order-taker, and to do good design, not just keep clients happy. And responsibility to ourselves – ‘Your portfolio is another name for your reputation.’ He definitely had the best one liners of the day: ‘Not only can designer’s change the world, they ****ing need to’ and ‘Don’t trust a designer who hasn’t been punched in his mouth.’

It seems to me lately that the internet is at an interesting crossroads, with tension between the open environment of the personal computer and the locked environment of new tethered appliances and their proprietary gatekeepers, between what Jonathan Zittrain calls ‘generative’: the freedom to adapt and interact with an operating system, and the security of a virus/malware-free environment, between open source and copyright protection, between the potential and the threat of the cloud.

I was hoping for these concepts to be addressed at Webstock and they were. I’d recommend that everyone who uses the web watch the presentations by these three Webstockers as soon as they go live:

• Clay Johnson
• Bruce Sterling
• Jason Scott.

I love that Webstock had such a conscious message this year. I think Clay Johnson put it in context by ending his presentation with a fitting acknowledgement:

‘Who do we want to look back on as the leading thinkers of this era? The Mark Zuckerbergs? Or my mate Aaron? ‘

I know my answer.

Thanks Mike, Deb, Natasha, Ben and everyone in the Webstock team for putting in all the hard work every year.