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

Changing the New Zealand flag – it’s one of those issues that regularly rises and falls in prominence without actually resulting in change. I’m writing an entry on flags for Te Ara so I’ve been looking into this issue. I recently perused two Internal Affairs correspondence files dating from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and they were populated with new flag designs submitted – without solicitation – by members of the public.

Most of these were doomed to remain within the files, never having received the attention their designers perhaps thought they deserved, other than a polite, yet non-committal, letter from the minister. Until now that is. I have taken it upon myself to share some worthy examples with the world.

First up we have Mrs G. Bell’s design, dating from the early 1970s.

Mrs G. Bell's flag design

She writes: ‘I am forwarding this design as it may interest you. I thought the yellow would mean the land of sunshine the green the fields and the blue in “New Zealand” the blue sky. If you feel the animals would be best deleted, do so. Also the sun.’

In 1979 Mrs Caroline Smith submitted an annotated sketch.

Mrs Caroline Smith's flag design

She apologised for her rough sketch, writing: ‘I am a busy housewife with two children and my husband’s parents are arriving from England next week for their “trip of a lifetime”; consequently I haven’t much time to sit down and do a “proper” plan carefully. I am, therefore, just letting you know of my rough initial idea and I will quite understand if it is rejected immediately.’

There are a few submissions from school children in the files. In 1979 the students of room two at Rolleston School designed flags after the minister of internal affairs publicly suggested it was time for a new one – in the words of student Selena Taurua, the class ‘decided to give you a hand with finding some suggestions.’ Here’s one of them:

A flag designed by a student at Rolleston School

Most of the students’ designs incorporated Māori elements, such as the poi in the top right corner of this example. I noticed that consideration of Māori motifs cropped up more from this period.

Some submissions came from far afield. Mr J. A. Hocksenar of The Netherlands sent in a new design after he visited New Zealand in the late 1970s. I was impressed by his fine felt-penmanship.

J. A. Hocksenar's flag design

I said the submissions were made by members of the public, but I did come across one from someone with official responsibilities – the New Zealand ambassador to Germany, B. F. Bolt. He really went to town and made his design up in acetate and red tape.

Flag designed by ambassador B. F. Bolt

It seems he did this in a personal capacity in 1980 after hearing about the minister’s call for a new flag mentioned above. In his words, his flag ‘represents Ao-tea-roa – a white band between the dark blue sea and light blue sky.’

These days the Ministry for Culture and Heritage looks after official flags and we occasionally receive new designs in the mail, like this one:

Flag made by a member of the public

I don’t know who the maker was, but they obviously went to a bit of trouble sewing it. The flag is cared for by our librarian Fran McGowan.

By the way, this blog post should not be read as an invitation for more flag designs. There are no official plans to change the flag – not that this has ever stopped people from sending their designs in.

There are a number of people in the Ministry for Culture and Heritage who have an obsession with war memorials.

Chief amongst them is Te Ara’s general editor Jock Phillips. In 1990 he and fellow historian Chris Maclean published a book on war memorials around our country – The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials. There’s also the online memorials register over at NZHistory.net.nz, and Te Ara has an entry on memorials in its upcoming Government and Nation theme.

I don’t count myself as a war memorial obsessive (… yet), but I do like them very much and have indeed photographed many memorials over the years (which you can view here and here). On a recent North Island road trip I, again, photographed a number of memorials, and was once again reminded of the similarities and the differences between them.

From random observation it seems that we have four types of war memorial – the plinth/statue, the gate, the hall and the park. At the risk of protesting too much, I feel I should point out that I wasn’t actively seeking war memorials, merely regularly coming upon them.

Bunnythorpe war memorial statue

The war memorial in Bunnythorpe has long been one of my favourite memorials, even before I visited it, thanks to a wonderful Laurence Aberhart photo. Its location on the corner of a rugby ground, with farmland on one side, and industry on the other, seems to encapsulate the New Zealand male stereotype.

Tikitiki war memorial

Equally I love the memorial in Tikitiki. Like Bunnythorpe, the statue itself is stunning, but so is the location on a hilltop looking towards the rising sun. The other week I was lucky to arrive in Tikitiki an hour or so before sunset and the light was just beautiful.

A little way south of Tikitiki is Tolaga Bay, and there you can find a large memorial gate. There’s also one in Taranaki, at Normanby School from memory, which always catches my attention as I drive past saying I must stop and photograph it one day.

War memorial gates in Tolaga Bay

Many of those communities which don’t have a statue or gate, and indeed some that do, often have a Memorial Hall, a hall for the community, such as the one in Mahoenui. Occasionally the building has some other public function, such as the War Memorial Library in Lower Hutt or the War Memorial Baths in Millers Flat, Otago.

Mahoenui memorial hall

Lastly there are the parks. It seems to me that naming a park ‘Memorial Park’ was easier than coming up with some other name. There’s not always any memorial of any kind, or even suggestion of it being a memorial aside from the name. Sometimes, as with the park in Taihape, there’s quite an entrance.

Entrance to Taihape war memorial park

The newest memorial I came across on my trip was one in Rongotea. At the centre of town they have a statue and little park, but the Te Kawau Memorial Recreation Centre is on the edge of town … which is only 500 metres or so from the centre of town. And while the rec centre is reasonably new, the gate on the left confirms that the park has been a memorial for some decades.

Rongotea's new memorial hall

And while it’s not a war memorial, this rugby ground not far from Tikitiki also caught ­my fancy, and does (I suppose) memorialise battles of another sort.

George Nepia Memorial Park

History in a mural: bagging oysters in Bluff

The recent debate (if it be dignified as such) about the merits of the ‘Wellywood‘ sign on Wellington airport land, invites attention on how places assert their identity.

The most common device for small-town New Zealand is the giant icon – for example, the Rakaia salmon or the Ōhakune carrot. These were a phenomenon of the 1980s, as rural towns suffered from the downturn in the farming economy, and looked to find ways of enticing visitors to stop, perhaps take a photograph of their giant ‘thing’, and even spend a few dollars on a bun and a cuppa. They were in many places a successful gimmick, but they tended to freeze identity – a problem which Gore tried to overcome by several large icons: a brown trout, a guitar and a merino sheep.

In the first decades of the 20th century such places would often trumpet their achievements through a statue of their founder or notable pioneer. So Ashburton put up a statue to John Grigg, who was responsible for draining the land around the neighbouring property of Longbeach and turning it into productive farm land. Bluff honoured its local booster, with a statue of Joseph Ward. But it was not very forward-looking to seek identity through a founder, and once the First World War came along these statues were often edged aside or upstaged by a large memorial to the dead of the Great War. Of course, war memorials were hardly expressions of distinctiveness, because every township or locality in the country had one.

More recently cities and regions have trumpeted their identity through slogans, such as the try-hard ‘Absolutely Positively Wellington‘, or Dunedin’s rather apologetic ‘It’s all right here’ (used from 1988 to the mid-1990s, and later replaced by the confounding ‘I am Dunedin’), or Horowhenua’s ‘The feel of real New Zealand’. The problem with this route to identity is that the slogans tire quickly, and they tend, as with the above examples, to be applicable to any community. They are not really expressive of particular identity and are little more than feel-good advertising slogans

Another way for a town or city to proclaim identity is through murals. The richness and abundance of these became apparent recently when I drove down the east coast of the South Island seeking images which might illustrate stories we had prepared for visitors to the Rugby World Cup. We are creating 3–4-minute-long audio files about characters, interesting events or natural phenomena to be found along the main highways of the country. I needed to find images to accompany these stories in a web-based slide show.

I soon realised that it would be quite hard, in many instances, to get photos of the actual subject matter. The story at Bluff is about oysters, but it was not an easy matter to arrange to go out on an oyster boat or capture shots of workers shelling oysters. It was much easier, and visually more interesting, to photograph the murals about the history of oystering which adorn the walls of the town. Similarly, in Kaikōura I had neither the time, nor funds, to go whale-watching, but the place is thick with murals, and in some cases sculptures, of whales and whaling. I ended up taking no less than 15 different images of such works.

Now, I know that these murals are kitsch, and not usually great art. But they do often capture the human history of the activity, and they reinforce a sense of a distinct identity in a way that is more interesting and varied than slogans or even giant icons. It is worth just looking at the murals in small Taranaki towns to see how often and in how varied a way, the mountain which dominates the region is pictured.

So, next time you have the pleasure of driving through small town New Zealand, keep your eyes open for the public art, and give thanks to the local muralists, usually unnamed and unrecognised, who have tried to capture their place in paint on shop walls.

All the entries in the new Social Connections theme are now available on the Te Ara website. These entries explore the dynamics of birthing and the solemnity of state funerals. They record the pleasures of family holidays as well as moments of passionate political activism on the Treaty of Waitangi, abortion, the 1981 Springbok tour, homosexual law reform, parental discipline of children, protests about hospital closures and the decriminalisation of sex work.

Now that the Social Connections entries are online, you can view the 1964 opening of National Women’s Hospital and watch Judge Silvia Cartwright respond in 1988 to questions at a news conference after the release of her report on the treatment of women for cervical cancer at this important obstetric and gynaecological hospital. Or you can dip into entries on love and romance, sexualities and weddings or access information about more uncomfortable topics such as child abuse, ethnic and religious intolerance and domestic violence.

These entries explore the pleasures of childhood, but they also record the regimentation of children in orphanages and the spartan austerity of industrial schools. Youth club dances and scout jamborees feature in these entries as well as older people’s enjoyment of time with one another and the interactions between grandparents and their grandchildren.

You can find out about the development of Auckland hospital and also about health consumer advocacy or catch a glimpse of dental nurses in training in 1945. There is information about Māori women’s health activism and about the use of wahakura, or traditionally woven sleeping bassinets, to avoid cot death among Maori babies. Graphs provide information about the relationship between gender, income and life expectancy and also rates of preventable hospital admissions among Pacific Peoples. They highlight the consequences of persisting economic disparities.

New Zealanders are increasingly likely to have no religious beliefs but spiritual beliefs and the activities of religious organisations have been very important in the history of this country. Entries on religion explore traditional Māori beliefs and cosmologies as well as the activities of 19th century missionaries. Pacific Islanders’ churches, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and the Korean Presbyterian Church also receive attention. These entries do no just explore religious beliefs and practices, but the relationship between religious belief and action on peace and social justice issues. Te Ara also captures the way in which people may be divided in death through an interactive map of the Karori cemetery with pop-up images of different sections of the cemetery.

New entries on the Te Ara site include moments that connect people from very different walks of life. One such moment was captured after Robert Muldoon’s funeral in September 1992 when Thea Muldon got into conversation with Black Power gang members. The activities of the Sensible Sentencing Trust are documented, as well as arguments by prisoners’ rights activists for less imprisonment and more attention to the social determinants of offending.

The publication of these entries marks the end of my involvement with Te Ara. Work on the Social Connections theme has been a wonderful opportunity to extend my understanding of relationships between people in families, homes, neighbourhoods, rural communities, small towns and cities and a variety of voluntary and professional organisations. I have also enjoyed working with the professional, imaginative and creative people that put together the words, images, sound files, video clips, diagrams and maps that make up the taonga that is Te Ara. At the heart of this online project are the social connections among this very dynamic team – largely invisible to those who access the website. Congratulations to all the writers, resourcers, editors and designers who contributed to the Social Connections theme and best wishes for your work on the next set of entries!

Carl and friend

Yesterday Te Ara mourned the departure from the team of Carl Walrond, who has been the heart, soul and comic turn of the writing team for the past eight years. Over that time Carl has been responsible for writing no less than 51 entries for Te Ara, which amounts to over 125,000 words and over a thousand captions. Just type Walrond into our search engine and his entries will come up.

They are an amazing range, which reflected Carl’s span of interests. He came to us with a PhD on fish, so not surprisingly there are colourful entries on Coastal fish and Oceanic fish. Carl’s interest in fish was not simply scientific. He is a keen fly fisherman, so he was able to draw on his own experience for great entries on Freshwater fishing, Trout and salmon, Whitebait and whitebaiting and Recreational sea fishing. He is also a keen tramper and outdoors man – hence nice pieces about Tramping and Hunting.

What also surprised us historians was how quickly Carl the scientist wrote some truly outstanding historical entries. In particular he did a great series on some smaller immigrant groups – Africans, Cook Islanders, Dalmatians, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malaysians and Singaporeans, Niueans, Scandinavians, South Africans – a veritable United Nations, not to mention interesting essays on Māori overseas and Kiwis overseas.

Carl had a reputation as our ‘go to’ man when we needed an entry in a hurry or to fill a gap. When we were putting together the theme on Māori peoples, there were many entries that included a date for Māori arrival in this country, so we needed a standard date. This engendered a long internal debate and some research, and we slowly realised that it would be great to have a whole entry on ‘When was New Zealand first settled?’ So Carl sat down, did the research, consulted with experts and within a month we had a very fine entry on that subject. Similarly, as the theme on The Bush was being finished, I went tramping and painfully realised that a major experience of the bush for New Zealanders is being attacked by sandflies. We had to have an entry on the little bitey monsters; so Carl proceeded to write one – all done in his beautifully clear concise language perfectly attuned to the web. Indeed, the text was so good that we submitted that entry to Write Mark in 2008 and, thanks to Carl, Te Ara won an award for the best plain language website.

Carl was also a photographer of considerable skill and about 90 of his superb images are to be found scattered through Te Ara. He also regularly contributed enjoyable and informative blog posts to Signposts.

Carl does a spot of research in Asbestos Cottage

But, of all his many talents, Carl’s greatest skill was as the king of the topic box – those little nuggets of fascinating information that we like to lodge in our stories. One of his topic boxes in the Beachcombing entry made the front pages of several New Zealand newspapers. Carl wrote that a survey of beach litter between 1974 and 1997 found that 70% of the jandals washed up on New Zealand beaches were left footed. The media were intrigued by this Walrond fact. Among Carl’s other classic topic boxes, I particularly like one in his Rock, limestone and clay entry, where he added colour by reminding readers that ‘According to an old joke, only three things would survive a nuclear holocaust: ants, cockroaches and New Zealand Railways cups. And the first two would make it only if they were under the third’.

So, Carl, best of luck in your new job, but we will miss you, your wit, your laughter, and your sheer professionalism; and our readers will miss your incisive entries and their intriguing topic boxes.