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

Hedgehog day, when New Zealand hedgehogs wake up (courtesy of Bob Brockie)

Great news that Bob Brockie was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the recent Queen’s Birthday honours. Bob’s award is richly deserved for his eclectic achievements in science and cartooning. We celebrate especially because Bob is a long-term friend of Te Ara, writing three major biological entries in The Bush theme – Native plants and animals, Introduced animal pests and Weeds of the bush – as well as allowing us to use his cartoons to illustrate a variety of entries.

Bob is possibly unique in being a Te Ara contributor whose scientific work was quoted in Te Ara’s predecessor, the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand. His PhD research on hedgehogs was then the definitive work on the subject and, almost 50 years later, he is still the acknowledged expert.

By training Bob is an ecologist, and he has mainly worked on the impact of introduced animals. In this video clip he illustrates the impact that possums have had on our native forests. As well as being an expert on possums and hedgehogs, he has an amazingly broad biological knowledge and has published scientific papers on topics as diverse as sparrows, magpies, starlings, mange mites and flax flowering patterns.

One of Bob’s most fascinating projects has been a study of road kill (animals hit by cars) throughout the North Island. Repeated surveys in 1984, 1999 and 2005 have shown dramatic changes – rabbit numbers rose, hedgehogs fell dramatically, and possum numbers rose and then declined. These results were analysed and written up in a scientific paper, but it is typical of Bob’s approach that he has repackaged the information in a number of articles so that the research results are available to a wide range of non-specialist readers.

Bob is probably best known to the general public for his regular weekly science columns in the Dominion Post, covering a wide range of topics, both local and international – the first page I look for in the paper every Monday morning. A selection of his articles were reprinted in The prehistoric boy-racer gene and other tales from modern science (Random House, 2003). One of the distinctive features of his columns is that he has forthright opinions and does not shy away from confronting non-scientific beliefs and practices that rarely get challenged in the media. Topics such as homeopathy, post-modern philosophy, iridology, organic ideology, Rudolf Steiner beliefs, alternative medicine, anti-fluoridation campaigns and the safety of genetically engineered products have come under his gaze, ensuring that readers get a critical evaluation of some of the unscientific ideas that float around.

Among his many other talents, Bob is an accomplished cartoonist, with enough self-confidence not to worry about milking sacred cows. He started providing cartoons for the Victoria University magazine Salient in 1953, and has been contributing a weekly cartoon to the National Business Review since 1975. While not a magazine I normally read, it was always a regular stop at the supermarket news stand to look up the latest Brockie cartoon. Sadly, the proprietors of the NBR seem to have got wind of this and have recently started wrapping their magazine in plastic.

Bob suggests what's going through the minds of All Blacks when the national anthem is sung (click for image credit)

Bob has been most generous in allowing Te Ara to use many of his cartoon as illustrations – and here is a selection of my favourites:

• buck-passing about leaky buildings
• pay equity
• All Blacks and the national anthem
• comparing qualifications.

Bob, we salute you as a scientist and social commentator, and look forward to more of your articles and cartoons.

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!

Jock proudly wears his Te Ara T-shirt before the launch of our Settled Landscape theme

At Te Ara we are very pleased and proud that our own Jock Phillips became an ONZM (an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit) in the 2013 Queen’s Birthday honours. As we bask in his reflected glory, we also congratulate him on this well-deserved recognition of his services to historical research and publishing.

Many people know Jock as a historian, a familiar voice on Radio New Zealand National, a commentator on New Zealand’s war commemorations and memorials, immigration history and national identity, and the author of an accessible book on masculinity (A man’s country?). That’s quite a list already, and probably qualifies him as the nearest thing New Zealand has to a public intellectual.

Jock, a bit of a Renaissance man, has adventures of the physical, as well as intellectual kind

It’s really not possible to list all Jock’s achievements here, so I’ll concentrate on his remarkable work in publishing and promoting New Zealand history and more on the web, initially through his support of NZHistory and subsequently his leadership of Te Ara. He has tirelessly promoted the internet as a channel for serious research, and taken great pains to ensure that the sites he’s associated with have never lost their focus on their audience.

What really distinguishes Jock from us ordinary mortals is the combination of energy and attention to detail he brings to everything he does. The way Jock rushes down the room to bail up an incorrect statistic or a misplaced comma puts us in mind of the genial infinite capacity for taking pains.

Jock features several times in Te Ara, in this case with his whānau illustrating a blended family

Jock was clearly a born historian. He wrote his own obituary at the age of 14 (he read it out to the guests at his 50th birthday party). He still has a few goals to reach for – including a farm in Hawke’s Bay and a few more children – to achieve complete historical accuracy.

He’s a great guy, and we salute him.

Mervyn Thompson on the cover of the script of Coaltown blues (click for image credit)

Last week saw the welcome return to Wellington of Mervyn Thompson’s play Coaltown blues. The play, a one-person musical, was brilliantly performed by Chris Green, under the direction of Lindsey Rusling, with piano accompaniment by Sue Windsor.

Coaltown blues is a semi-autobiographical play following the birth, childhood and youth of a character called Mervyn Thompson in Blacktown, a small West Coast mining town. While the lead character bears the name of the playwright, the town of Blacktown is fictional. It is, however, largely based on the town of Rūnanga, where Thompson spent much of his childhood. Coaltown blues focuses on the economic and physical hardships endured by West Coast mining families, along with their socialist visions of a better world arising from those hardships.

In the play, each stage of the young Thompson’s life is set against wider historical events that make their mark on his family and town. His birth in 1935 is set against the election of the first Labour government, while further life stages are marked by the war in 1942, the end of the war on VJ Day in 1945, the defeat of the Labour government in 1949 and the miners’ strike in sympathy with the 1951 waterfront lockout.

A strong theme running through the play is that of the dangers and hardships of the miners’ lives. One section centres on the mining death of Stu Kennedy, a friend of Thompson’s father. Kennedy’s Roman Catholic funeral highlights the differences between the children of the ‘Mickey Doos’ (aka Mickey Doolans, meaning Catholics) and ‘Proddies’ (Protestants), but also emphasises the solidarity of the local union.

Thompson’s father, a staunch union man, has dreamed of a new utopia under the Labour government, but is instead disillusioned that Labour has led the country into war and has failed to prevent mining accidents. Thompson senior, who admires the Soviet Union’s war effort despite being a pacifist, is further disillusioned when Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser supports compulsory military training in 1949.

Despite his socialist idealism and supposed pacifism, Thompson’s father is dictatorial to his family and occasionally violent to both his wife and son. The struggle of women in mining families to cope with poverty, while bringing up large families and dealing with the everyday sexism of their men, is another theme running through the play. Unequal power struggles are as evident between Thompson’s mother and father as they are between the miners’ union and the state coal management.

Coaltown blues is not all grim social realism. Some aspects of Thompson’s childhood are presented as great fun, such as the VJ Day parade. There are also obvious times of family affection and closeness, but the abiding theme is the degrading nature of poverty, despite constant hard work. The vision of the past presented in Coaltown blues has no aspect of romance or nostalgia for the ‘good old days’. Small-town life is shown in its narrowness, with the school bullies persecuting anyone who shows signs of difference or weakness.

The fact that Blacktown is in some ways an atypical New Zealand town is only revealed to Thompson when he goes to work in Christchurch during the 1951 dispute. He is surprised to learn that, unlike Blacktown where people solidly support the unions, most Christchurch people appear to see the ‘strikers’ as Communist stirrers who should be crushed.

Thompson is portrayed as the sensitive youth who wants to escape from the confines of Blacktown and a future of life down the pit. He nevertheless gives in to his father’s insistence and becomes a miner. The irony is that Thompson finds he enjoys the miner’s life and the camaraderie he finds in the mines. The joys and struggles of the miner’s work, the strength of the union and the Blacktown way of life are all brought to an end, however, with the closing of the mine.

Coaltown blues was first performed in 1984 by the playwright himself, but the play soon became overshadowed by a controversy that arose around Thompson. The playwright was subjected to a vigilante attack after allegations of sexual assault were made against him. No legal case over the allegations was ever brought against Thompson, but performances of his plays, including Coaltown blues, became the subject of protest and bitter debate.

In a modern performance of Coaltown blues the play can be seen on its own merits, rather than as a framework to discuss the playwright’s personal behaviour. As Chris Green points out in the play’s programme, recent events such as the Pike River disaster have shown that the issues that Coaltown blues deals with continue to have strong relevance in the modern world.

Samoa

Afio mai, talofa lava. O le gagana e tasi e le lava.
Welcome. One language is never enough.

It is my personal shame that although I once spent a month walking round Upolo and Savai’i looking at Samoa’s wonderful churches, I have almost no knowledge of the Samoan language. This is despite the fact that it is the third most common language in New Zealand, after English and Māori. But this is Samoan language week, so I thought we should recognise the importance of Samoan culture to New Zealand and its place in Te Ara.

Te Ara has a major entry on Samoans, and has substantial coverage of Samoan history and experience in other stories such as the Pacific Islands and New Zealand, Pacific churches in New Zealand, Pacific Island health and South Pacific economic relations. There will also be extensive coverage in our forthcoming sections on sport and the creative arts.

Let’s focus on the entry on Samoans in New Zealand, which was the sixth most popular story in Te Ara last year (after History of immigration, Māori, Matariki, History and Gold and goldmining). It attracted about 40,000 visitors just to the text pages alone, not counting the accompanying images and media.

The story in those pages, written by Melani Anae, is not all comfortable reading for palagi New Zealanders. In the early years of New Zealand’s administration of Samoa there were a series of unfortunate and insensitive mistakes:

• The Talune, carrying people with influenza, was allowed to dock in Apia in 1918. The result was the deaths of one in five Samoans.
• On 28 December 1929 at least nine Samoans were shot dead by military police during a demonstration by the independence movement, the Mau.
• Samoan leaders were stripped of their titles.

Then, after Samoans had been attracted to New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s to help provide labour for the growing industries of Auckland and Wellington, regulations on immigration visas began to be enforced as the economy soured, and in 1974 came the infamous dawn raids against overstayers. Our entry includes an image of the Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua who was forced to creep through the back streets of Auckland for fear of being seen by police or taunted by bystanders. A 1982 law that restricted New Zealand citizenship to those resident in New Zealand at that time is also a cause for continuing resentment and attracted 90,000 signatures calling for its repeal in 2003. Samoans in New Zealand continue to have comparatively higher levels of unemployment and lower incomes than other New Zealanders.

Yet there are also very positive stories about the Samoan people and New Zealand. It is a credit to this country that in 2002 the Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised formally for the early events. And the experience of Samoans in settling here is a fascinating example of a people who have been able to retain their own cultural traditions, especially their Christian faith and their commitment to the aiga (family), while entering proudly into New Zealand life.

Discus thrower Beatrice Faumuina – one of the many Samoans who have greatly enriched New Zealand's cultural and sporting life (click for image credit)

The last section of our entry on the Samoan contribution to New Zealand is a hugely impressive testament to the Samoan impact on our creative arts – literature, drama, comedy, dance, painting, sculpture – and their remarkable success in major New Zealand sports. The All Blacks, Silver Ferns and New Zealand’s Olympic Games teams would be very much poorer without the enormous contribution of the Samoan community.  Just think of some names of Samoans who have greatly enriched New Zealand’s cultural and sporting life - Michael Jones, Albert Wendt, Michel Tuffery, Oscar Kightley, Bernice Mene and Beatrice Faumuina.

The 1st of June (tomorrow) is Samoan Independence Day and our entry includes an image of the day being commemorated in Porirua in 1990. Below this image you’ll find eight enthusiastic comments from Samoan people. We hope that this year the day will be celebrated not merely in memory of independence 51 years ago, but also in recognition of the talent and richness the Samoan people have brought to this country. And for my part, I hope that Te Ara’s words about Samoan culture will continue to bring knowledge and pride to the Samoan community. We recall the Samoan proverb:

‘O fānau a manu e fafaga i fugālā’au, ‘ae ‘o fānau a tagata e fafaga i ‘upu,’ which means in English: ‘The offspring of birds are fed with flower nectar, but the children of men are nurtured with words.’