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

Today we welcome to Te Ara the magnificent resource of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; and we celebrate the event with the publication of 11 new biographies of some of the movers and shakers of this country in the last half century.

The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography owed its birth to the support of Robert Muldoon, whose enthusiasm was reportedly a little dimmed when he discovered you had to be dead to be included. The eminent historian W. H. Oliver was appointed the first general editor; and the first volume of more than 600 biographies of people who flourished up to 1870 was published in 1990 as a sesquicentennial event. The outstanding scholarship and readability of the volume won it the Goodman Fielder Wattie book of the year award the next year.

By 2000 another four volumes had appeared under the editorship of Claudia Orange. There were a total of 3,049 people included in 2,977 essays, with almost 500 available in te reo Māori. That year, as a millennium project, the New Zealand Historical Association sponsored the creation of the dnzb.govt.nz website.

Now, 10 years later, we have incorporated the biographies into Te Ara, and you can search them through our search engine under the Biographies tab. We have retained the ‘trademark’ orange of the original DNZB site, but also taken the chance to improve the look and readability of the old biographies.

The 11 exciting new biographies are enriched with new elements drawn from the Te Ara style, such as division into smaller sections (we call them subentries), use of headings, many images and plenty of audio and video content, which really bring the people to life.

The new biographies include four politicians:

• Robert Muldoon: now that he is dead he has finally got his way and he has made it into the DNZB, thanks to Barry Gustafson’s excellent text. Take a look at a couple of family weddings, another slice of the famous Simon Walker interview and his notorious announcement of the 1984 snap election.
• David Lange was Muldoon’s nemesis and Barry Gustafson has also told his story.
• Bill Rowling was another who was defeated by Lange. John Henderson has written his biography.
• Sonja Davies is the fourth politician. Her lifelong battles for justice are eloquently recounted by Anne Else.

There are also four creative artists:

• Allen Curnow, written by the late Terry Sturm. A lovely clip of Curnow reading a poem about his father in a Canterbury church is well worth a look.
• Janet Frame’s life is told by Patrick Evans. I love the photo of Frame with the three actresses who played her in An angel at my table.
• Douglas Lilburn is introduced by Philip Norman. This great clip shows him in his electronic music studio. You can also listen to excerpts from three of his pieces of music: the Drysdale overture of 1937, Landfall in unknown seas of 1942 – drawn from Curnow’s poem of the same name, and A birthday offering of 1956.
• Hone Tuwhare’s biography is written by Janet Hunt, who, like Norman, has previously published a full-length life of her subject.

Finally, there are three sportsmen who each were responsible for some of the epic moments of the last half-century.

• Edmund Hillary ‘knocked the bastard off’ in May 1953; and the route up Everest is shown in an excellent map. See also Brian Wilkins’s remarkable photos of big Ed on the Barun expedition in 1954. Shaun Barnett has done an outstanding job summarising the man’s rich life.
• Arthur Lydiard’s great moment came at the Rome Olympics in 1960 when his protégés Peter Snell and Murray Halberg won gold. David Green has written his life.
• Peter Blake had many famous moments, but the triumph of Black magic at San Diego in 1995 was undoubtedly the greatest, which was celebrated throughout New Zealand. See also the amusing interchange with his mother on ‘This is your life’.  Stephanie Gibson provides a comprehensive account of Blake’s life.

So we hope you enjoy the new biographies, and do look forward to more big names in coming months.

The latest crop of Te Ara entries are a mixed bunch. So, rather than try to find some tenuous connecting thread, we’ll give them each their own time in the sun, with a different Te Ara writer introducing them.

Religion and society

Religion and society
by John Stenhouse

New Zealand has sometimes been described as the most unreligious country in the world. Certainly in 2006 more than a third of the population professed no religion or a secular world view; and for over 150 years New Zealand has had no established state church.

Yet, in the ‘Religion and society’ entry John Stenhouse points out just how important religion has been to New Zealand experience. We had no established church because no one denomination could command a majority; but until 1920 over 90% of European New Zealanders claimed to belong to a Christian denomination, and two-thirds of all children went to Sunday school. Māori were no less religious, regularly attending European churches or their own forms of religion, including Ringatū or Rātana.

John Stenhouse also points out that religion was a major influence in some of New Zealand’s great social movements, such as votes for women, prohibition, and the welfare state which many in the Labour party saw as ‘applied Christianity’. During the years before and after the First World War tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a major source of social conflict. When the Social Connections theme is complete, there will be separate entries on the major denominations; but to put them in a wider context, this entry makes a superb beginning.

Jock Phillips

Te whānau tamariki – pregnancy and birth

Te whānau tamariki – pregnancy and birth
by Hope Tupara

Te whānau tamariki – pregnancy and birth examines traditional and contemporary practices surrounding birth in Māori communities. It looks at those atua or deities associated with births in mythology including Ranginui and Papatūānuku, the primal parents, Hineahuone, who was the first woman formed from the earth who gave birth to the first child, and Hineteiwaiwa. It refers to the common practice of the whenua (placenta) being returned back to whenua (the land) following birth. Particular highlights are the beautiful illustrations by Robyn Kahukiwa, Warren Pohatu, and Adam Williams and Joshua Watene.

Basil Keane

Victims of crime

Victims of Crime
by Nancy Swarbrick

I am fortunate never to have been a victim of crime, so researching this entry was a sobering experience. Reading newspaper accounts of serious confrontational crimes such as assaults, rapes and murders, I was horrified and saddened at what victims – and often they included the primary victim’s family and friends – had to go through. The crime itself was often just the start of a long-drawn-out ordeal, in which victims relived the trauma, first through often prurient media coverage, and then through the trial. I was shocked to discover that not so long ago, victims of crime received very little, if any, consideration or help. The justice system aimed instead to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused person and punish offenders on behalf of society. My entry traces the growing awareness of victims’ needs and the development of schemes to provide support and practical assistance for them. It also points out the range of issues that they still face.

Nancy Swarbrick

As a visual person, I love Te Ara because each story is told through images as well as text. We source images from anywhere and everywhere, but mainly through institutions like archives, libraries and museums. As users, you usually only ever see a smaller image that has been optimised for the web. Behind the scenes we are very lucky to see the more detailed version of every image.

However, using a tool called Zoomify we can allow you to zoom in and see all the detail in an image. We have been using it for years, but until now you have only been able to view it in a small window. We’ve recently updated Zoomify, and we’re now adding the ability to view them full-screen as we gain permission from copyright holders.

When viewing the high-res image, especially full-screen, you tend to notice details you’ve never seen before, like the texture of the paper, emotions on faces or the amount of detail that was hand-drawn into text.

So rather than view the image below in a small window, click on the green full-screen button, use the controls to zoom in, and fill your screen with moths (that might not sound particularly appealing, but you will just have to trust me). If you would prefer, we also have the pages covering larvae … and, if you must, butterflies.

Currently there are only around 200 that have the special green button, but we plan to extend it to more images in time. Here is a list of some of the best images that you can now view full-screen:

• Cook’s map of New Zealand, 1773
• New Zealand lighthouses in 1900
• Duck shooting, Lake Ellesmere
• Bird’s eye view of Auckland, 1886
• Ye diggings, 1852
• Kōwhai in London
• The Salvation Army in action: new training school, 1914
• Wellington’s plan, 1840
• Early map of Auckland’s volcanic features, 1865–66

And last but not least is a popular board game from the 1950’s called Holdson’s Educational Tour of New Zealand. Don’t worry if you end up in Palmy, you can immediately advance to Wellington.

Is your favourite image on Te Ara available full-screen? Let us know if it isn’t (or if it is) in the comments below.

(p.s. sorry for picking on you Palmy, you know I love you.)

Five generations of the same family

Three new Te Ara entries look at New Zealanders of different ages – teenagers and youth, midlife adults and older people. Together with the recent entry on childhood, they explore what it means to move from childhood to adolescence, middle age and old age.

What is it like to be six, 16, 56 or 66? Why did The little red schoolbook generate so much fuss? When did people start to talk about ‘teenagers’? What can older people learn from adolescents? What does it mean to be ‘the sandwich generation’? Who gets to live longest, and what do older people do all day? These entries have answers to these and many other questions.

Find out about bodgies and widgies, milk-bar cowboys, beehives, rugby heads, tweens and what happened at the Hutt Valley Youth Club in the 1950s. Look at statistics on births to teenage mothers from the 1960s and find out about programmes to keep young mothers at school.

These entries show what people of different generations have in common, but also differences among them. People of all ages enjoy being with family, playing games with their friends and physical challenges. Older people as well as children and adolescents are engaged in study – some, like Marie Bell, even complete PhDs in their 80s. But the rates of death are different across these age groups, and for women and men.

New directions for midlife adults include embarking on an OE or a change in lifestyle at home. Older people both receive care and provide services for others. Some, like John Blundell, clean up the beaches while riding their mobility scooter.

Connections across generations are important. In these entries teenagers introduce older people to texting, parents in their 50s help adult children to purchase their first homes and grandparents care for grandchildren while their parents are in paid work. Older people provide emotional and financial support to middle-aged children but also receive help from them.

People of the same age group also enjoy time with one another. You can access a film clip of scouts on their way to the Pan Pacific jamboree in 1959, enjoy the flamboyant outfits of members of the Red Hat Society or connect to the pleasures of skateboarding and the Socialist Sunday School outing.

Political issues are also explored, including strategies to inform children about their rights as citizens and the activities of Grey Power. Debates about raising the driving age and parental support for tertiary students receive attention alongside the leisure activities of midlife adults.

Next month attention shifts to religious institutions with new entries on missions and missionaries, the Anglican Church and the Salvation Army…

It's your turn to add to Te Ara

We’ve just opened up an easy way for our community of users to interact with our Te Ara website.

There's a box to add your contributions at the bottom of every media page

On almost every media page – pages with images, sound files, videos, interactives, maps and graphs – you’ll now find a box where you can write a contribution (or comment) on the topic and post it to the website. The box is found at the foot of each media page. You’ll need to enter your name and email address before posting your contribution. (We won’t publish your email address or use it for any other purpose. It just helps us to ensure that there is a real person making the contribution, and not a robot or spam artist.)

It’s taken us a little while to get our heads around the best way to fit what you, our users, have to say into the context of the carefully researched and authoritative information our writers provide. So it’s been important to us to make it easy to distinguish what YOU’ve written from what WE’ve written.

Te Ara’s point of difference from publicly contributed sites such as the invaluable Wikipedia is exactly this transparency and the level of editorial control required to safeguard its status.

But we’re also trying to make the most of the extra riches that you, our community, are already adding to Te Ara by sending us your stories through the Your Story link that’s on every page.

We’ve had a lot of valuable, lively and fascinating little nuggets of information and colourful anecdotes submitted this way, but a lot of them don’t fit comfortably into the mould we’ve been using when we’ve published longer pieces on topics such as immigration experiences, bush yarns, disasters you’ve witnessed, or, most recently, stories about going to a country school. (You’ll find a complete list of them under ‘Your stories’ in the Te Ara browser.) We’ll now be able to publish these juicy morsels as comments.

This it isn’t our first foray into social media – Te Ara already tweets, blogs and flickrs – but it’s a bit more immediate than anything we’ve done before on the Te Ara site.

What we’re hoping for are contributions that will add value for other users of Te Ara. We’d welcome additional information and different points of view. We may edit some contributions, and we won’t necessarily publish them all. If you have a longer story to tell, or want to contribute images or other files, please use the Your Story link, or add images to our flickr pool.