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

Canadians have a strange obsession with dirt and worms, a lot of people received smartphones for Christmas and, on average, people spent 6 milliseconds longer on each page of Te Ara in 2011 than in 2010.

A typical retrospective would look at everything that Te Ara accomplished in 2011, such as publishing 121 new stories. Instead I thought I’d look at our site statistics and see what our millions of users looked at in 2011.

New Zealand

New Zealanders’ three favourite stories were Historic earthquakes, Earthquakes and Active faults, all obviously influenced by the earthquakes in Christchurch, and probably the Japanese earthquake as well. Similarly, two of the top three images were also related to earthquakes:a map of fault lines and a photo of the extinct volcanoes that formed Banks Peninsula. Possibly a sign of the recession: the third most viewed image was a job advertisement used as an example of rural language.

If New Zealanders were looking at those stories and images, what about the rest of the world? (Or at least the five countries that view Te Ara the most.) I’ll leave it to you to consider why these particular stories and images were of interest to visitors from those countries.

United States of America

Favourite stories: Estuaries, Deep-sea creatures and Geothermal energy

Favourite images:

The blobfish

Photosynthesis and chemosynthesis

Estuary food web

Australia

Favourite stories: Historic earthquakes, Tsunamis and Farm dogs

Favourite images:

Active faults

The blobfish

A day at the races

United Kingdom

Favourite stories: Earthquakes, Coastal fish and Sandflies and mosquitoes

Favourite images:

Active faults

Plate boundary

Comparative sizes of whales

Canada

Favourite stories: Papatūānuku – the land, Soils and Earthworms

Favourite images:

Earthworm life cycle

Comparative sizes of whales

Arrow, giant and colossal squid

India

Favourite stories: Earthquakes, Dairying and dairy products, and Conservation – a history.

Favourite images:

The brain drain

Earthworm life cycle

Earthquake-resistant building

Other traffic

It’s always interesting looking at Te Ara’s traffic for the year. You can clearly see events such as the Christchurch earthquake in February, school holidays and the redesign in October.

Overall traffic

Despite our overall traffic going down over December (see above) due largely to school holidays, traffic from mobile devices (smart-phones and tablets) increased (see below).

Traffic from mobile devices

Mobile traffic started increasing dramatically after Christmas. Were a lot of mobile gadgets under the Christmas tree? In 2010 mobile devices only accounted for 1% of Te Ara’s traffic, in 2011 it raised to 3% but since Christmas it’s grown to 8.6%.

Coming up in 2012

Hopefully in 2012 we’ll see fewer natural disasters, so New Zealanders can read less dramatic stories such as Pets, Childhood and our story on our favourite not-that-creepy crawly the Peripatus. Perhaps some of this year’s most popular stories will come from the new stories being added to the Government and Nation theme. Stories on the Second World War, money, the royal family, Kingitanga and New Zealand’s identity will surely spark people’s interest.

A portrait of Noda Asajiro, one of the newly added photographs in the DNZB

While the main focus of our work at Te Ara is on producing new material for the Te Ara website, there is a small group of us who also work on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) which, a year ago, was incorporated into Te Ara.

We celebrated the event with ‘the publication of 11 new biographies of some of the movers and shakers of this country in the last half century,’ as we announced on our blog at the time, and a number of new biographies are on their way.

Alongside this, we regularly receive images of people already in the DNZB, some of whom we have found images for, but most of whom don’t have images at all.

We have just updated 13 biographies with new images. These folk cover the gamut from early settler to aviator.

They are not all movers and shakers, but all do have interesting tales. Like world champion pedestrianist Joe Scott, who wasn’t able to escape bankruptcy even after pawning his championship belt. Or Horowhenua midwife and centenarian Hannah Retter.

Others include pioneer aerial photographer and surveyor Piet van Asch, who started the New Zealand Aerial Mapping company, and marine biologist and reviver of the Portobello Marine Laboratory, Betty Batham.

Then there’s the story of Noda Asajiro, a Japanese national whose wedding to a Ngāti Mahuta woman is said to have been presided over by the Māori king, Te Rata Mahuta Pōtatau Te Wherowhero.

As someone with an interest in the history of photography it has also been interesting to see the changes in portrait photography over the years from whaler James Jackson to architect George Allen to choirmaster Robert Parker to broadcaster Herb Mullon.

If you have photos or paintings or illustrations of anyone in the DNZB, whether they’ve already got an image or not, do please send them through because it not only improves the biographies, it makes for a fascinating time for me too.

Carmen with former MP Georgina Beyer at Parliament in 2006

At Te Ara we were saddened to hear of the passing of Carmen Rupe in Sydney. The irrepressible, flamboyant Carmen (Ngāti Maniapoto) was a ground-breaker in so many ways. In the resolutely conservative Wellington of the 1960s and 1970s she was openly and proudly transsexual – and incredibly glamorous to boot. As an entrepreneur she provided the city with a series of glittering businesses, many of them involving commercial sex. Her unswerving insistence on being exactly who she was has been an inspiration to many – especially in New Zealand’s then-fledgling transgender community.

Carmen was a loved and respected kuia of the Australian and New Zealand queer communities, spending the last 32 years in Sydney, where in recent years she was the caretaker of a community centre attached to a block of flats in Surry Hills. However, she had been ill on and off for a number of months after a fall and hip surgery, and died from kidney failure on the morning of 15 December, aged 75.

Carmen was born Trevor Rupe, one of a family of 13 from Taumarunui. After a stint in the army (where, with characteristic confidence, she lip-synched in drag at a farewell concert), she moved to Sydney, working in the sex industry and as a drag performer – including performances with a live snake. Returning to Wellington in 1967, she rented a former clothing factory in Vivian Street and opened Carmen’s International Coffee Lounge, fancifully decorated and staffed by glamorous transgender hostesses who served tea, coffee, toasted sandwiches and pastries – as well as various sexual services, which customers requested through an ingenious system of positioning their cups and saucers. ‘All my girls were boys, or had been boys at some time,’ Carmen wrote in her 1988 memoir Carmen: my life. ‘They had to be beautiful … Dress in high fashion was de rigueur.’

Her other business ventures included striptease club The Balcony, an Egyptian tearoom in Cuba Street (’I had the walls sprayed with golden sand which sparkled … a large wooden elephant from Egypt stood by the doorway’), a curio shop, a massage parlour, and a brothel in a big old house in Hataitai. Her unsuccessful 1977 bid for the Wellington mayoralty – backed by businessman Bob Jones, under the slogan ‘Get in behind’ – saw her shoot to national prominence. In 1979 Carmen returned to Sydney, where she spent the rest of her life. Last year the Sydney Morning Herald featured her in this affectionate photographic tribute and interview, where she discusses the need for facilities for the transgendered elderly.

Carmen will be much missed by her many friends and admirers. The hundreds of tributes that have appeared online in the last day describe her as a ‘transgender goddess’, a ‘legend’, ‘the showgirl of all showgirls’ and a ‘GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender] icon’. One thing is for sure: she was a pioneer and a role model for many. Moe mai ra e te kahurangi, moe mai ra.

Te Taiao

Last night Te Ara won a prize at Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards, which are organised by Te Pūtahi-a-Toi at Massey University. Te Ara (part of Manatū Taonga – Ministry for Culture and Heritage) won the non-fiction category for our book Te taiao – Māori and the natural world, published by David Bateman last year.

The book itself was the product of a number of entries written for various themes. The book is structured around Māori conceptions of the natural world – for example Ranginui for the sky and Papatūānuku for the earth. An assortment of writers, editors, resource researchers and copyright staff, along with the publishers, all worked to put the book together.

This team effort is encapsulated in the proverb:

Mā tini mā mano ka rapa te whai.

By the multitudes the work will be accomplished.

Basil speaks on behalf of Te Ara at Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards

Myself and Jock Phillips, Te Ara’s senior editor, spoke at the awards. Jock made the point that in many ways the ceremony was a homecoming for Te Ara. He noted that Professor Sir Mason Durie had organised at hui at Te Pūtahi-a-Toi in 2001 to give advice on how to formulate Māori content for Te Ara. One of the results was Te Ara Wānanga, Te Ara’s Māori Advisory Committee. Professor Durie was one of the founding members of the committee.

Also pleasing was the award for biography, which went to Joseph Pere for his work on his grandfather, Wiremu Pere: Wiremu Pere: the life and times of a Maori Leader, 1837–1915. Joseph Pere is a former recipient of the Māori History Fellowship at Manatū Taonga.

Other recipients were Robert Jahnke for Tirohanga o mua: looking back, Tina Makereti for Once upon a time in Aotearoa, Chris Winitana for Tōku reo, tōku ohooho, and a special award to Derek Fox for Mana magazine.

Nā reira he mihi nui tēnei ki ngā kaiwhakawhiwhi, i riro i a koutou tēnei honore. He mihi hoki ki Te Pūtahi-a-Toi, heoi anō ki Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa mō tēnei kaupapa nunui.

Watches on the wrists of Te Ara old fogies

I was sitting at our staff meeting yesterday and looked at my watch to see the time. I then looked around the room and noticed that quite a number of my colleagues were not wearing wristwatches. There appeared to be a generational divide to this pattern, with those in their 30s and under more likely to have naked wrists than their elders. Was I witnessing the end of the wristwatch?

If so, it paralleled the pattern at home. When my son Fred turned 11 we said he could get a watch for his birthday and that we’d go into town and he could choose it. The expedition mirrored one I’d taken with my parents in the 1970s when I was his age. Getting a watch was big deal then – almost a rite of passage. I can still recall the event vividly. It was late shopping night in the middle of winter. It was cold and raining, but the bleakness was punctured by the blaze of street lights, flashing neon signs, and animated shoppers, including us. We ventured into a Lambton Quay jeweller (long gone) which had cases of childrens’ watches beneath the spotless glass counters. My parents made small talk with the jeweller while I scanned the dazzling collection. The first Japanese digital watches were just coming out and I thought about getting one of those, but the jeweller pointed me in the direction of the Swiss watches. ‘You can’t beat Swiss precision,’ he said to my parents. My eye finally rested on a piece with a gleaming stainless-steel casing, luminous hands and numbers, and a date function. That night I wore the watch to bed, diving under the covers to see its luminous face come to life: awesome! (I found the watch a few weeks back in a battered tin of other childhood mementos. I turned the winding knob, but the timepiece failed to tick, or tock - so much for Swiss precision.)

Fred’s trip to Pascoe’s jeweller lacked the same romance. The children’s watches were confined to a single case. Almost all were digital and featured a multitude of “modern” functions: a stopwatch, calendar, two alarms, and other things I failed to fathom. The one he wanted was larger than his wrist, but he eventually settled for a smaller one. Fred seemed less taken with his first watch than I had been with mine. He regularly forgot to wear it, so our hope that he’d become more punctual never happened.  Within a few months he lost it ‘somewhere’. We eventually got him another one, but that was ‘lost’ too. By this time he had a cellphone and was using it as his timepiece. None of his friends wore wristwatches and he did not see the need for one either. As he explained, if he forgets his phone he can get the time off his iPod. For his generation the wristwatch had lost the social status it had claimed a century before.

So like the roadmap - whose demise I’ve previously blogged about - it seems the wristwatch is fast becoming obsolete. However, I won’t be flaunting a naked right-hand wrist (I’m left-handed) any time soon. I like my watch and take pleasure in its simple design. Sometimes I watch its second hand move around the dial for the sheer pleasure watching the passage of time - it can get quite existential. At other times, I’ve glanced at it and been amazed at how quickly time has passed, or vice versa. I’d feel naked without it. What about you?