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

Lynley Dodd reading one of her books

There are lots of ways you can celebrate New Zealand Book Month.

You can attend one of the many events around the country, you can visit the New Zealand Book Month blogs on the official website, and you can read 30 reasons to love NZ books and writing on NZHistory.net and have a go at their book month quiz.

And you can tell us what your favourite New Zealand book is, and why!

To get the ball rolling: I think my favourite New Zealand book is Plumb by Maurice Gee. This novel had a big impact on me when I first read it, back in my second year at university. I’d been going through a bit of a religious crisis, and Plumb deals with a lot of similar issues, so resonated with me. It’s a skilfully written novel about important and deep stuff, but has characters that are very real and particular – not just puppets to make a point. Thinking about it now makes me want to go and re-read it (again).

Other favourite books are The Curative by Charlotte Randall, the Hairy Maclary books by Lynley Dodd, and more poetry than I can list, so I’ll just mention Catullus for Children by Anna Jackson.

Your turn…

Poet James K. Baxter

Happy Poetry Day!

Today is Montana Poetry Day, which celebrates New Zealand poetry. All around the country poetry events are being held, and poets are performing their work.

When I started work at Te Ara earlier this year, I was delighted (being a good, keen poetry-fancier) to discover the number of poems included in the encyclopedia, to illustrate and enrich the entries. And today seems like an appropriate occasion to highlight some of them.

There are a number of poems evoking places in the Landscapes overview entry, including Denis Glover’s ‘Summer, Pelorus Sound‘, Fleur Adcock’s ‘Stewart Island‘ and Brian Turner’s ‘Otago Peninsula‘.

Poetry features in our regional entries, with Allen Curnow’s ‘Auckland poem‘ in our Auckland entry, and Hone Tuwhare’s, ‘A fall of rain at Miti-miti‘ in Northland.

A tragic event in our history is commemorated in Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Erebus voices‘ – part of the Air crashes entry – which was read by Sir Edmund Hillary at the 25th anniversary of the plane crash on Mt Erebus in Antarctica.

Some of our community contributions – ‘Your stories‘ – have been poems, such as Maggie Rainey-Smith’s ‘After the storm‘ and ‘Alpine awakening‘ by Sabina de Rooy.

If you can’t be bothered reading, you can listen to sound files of Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover and Albert Wendt reading their work.

In our next theme, The Settled Landscape (about farming, rural life, and people’s impact on the land), you can look forward to poems by Blanche Baughan, Denis Glover (the wonderful ‘The magpies’) and a 19th century poem about weasels.

Short-tailed bat munching a dactylanthus flower

No, this post isn’t about a V. C. Andrews novel, it’s about Department of Conservation (DOC) staff in Taranaki putting plants in cages. But this isn’t some kind of strange botanical punishment – it’s to protect endangered dactylanthus plants from being munched by possums.

Dactylanthus taylorii, also known as wood rose, is rare and special among New Zealand’s flora because it’s our only completely parasitic flowering native plant. It grows on the roots of its host tree and has no leaves of its own.

It’s under threat because possums enjoy scoffing the flowers before they have time to go to seed. The cages keep the possums away, but let through rats and mice, which pollinate the flowers. Prior to the introduction of rats and mice, dactylanthus was pollinated by native short-tailed bats, which are attracted by pheromones, as can be seen in this video of a snacking bat from Te Ara’s ‘Evolution of plants and animals‘ entry.

The cages are part of DOC’s dactylanthus recovery plan, and they also want to locate populations of the plants – so should you happen to see any on your strolls through the bush, you can help by letting DOC know where they are.

Edible Rita Angus

We’re a creative bunch here at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, as evidenced by a recent social club cake decorating competition. For my money, the outstanding entry was the three-dimensional recreation of Rita Angus’s well-known painting ‘Cass’, which depicts the rural Cass railway station and the looming mountains beyond (pictured at left). You will be pleased to know that, as well as looking gorgeous, the mountains – which were painstakingly constructed from blocks of chocolate cake, cemented with ganache and covered with melted white chocolate – were delicious.

The cake creators included our colleagues from NZlive.com, who were inspired by the exhibition, Rita Angus: Life and Vision, which opened at Te Papa last weekend. This exhibition honours the centenary of her birth, and brings together almost 200 of her works, including paintings, sketches and studies.

Rita Angus is well known for her modernist interpretations of New Zealand landscapes. Two of these feature in Te Ara: ‘Central Otago‘ is part of our entry on New Zealand’s light, and ‘Mountains, Cass‘ illustrates our Mountains entry. Her watercolour of a Chatham Islands Moriori, in our entry on Ideas of Māori origin, is one of her many portraits and self-portraits. My favourite of these is Rutu, in which she depicts herself as a goddess of mixed Polynesian and European heritage.

Although she grew up in Palmerston North, she is mainly associated with the art scenes of Christchurch and Wellington. She lived for many years in a cottage in Sydney Street in Wellington, which is now used for an artists’ residency. I was lucky enough to be able to visit it once, when some friends were living there. According to them, artist Dane Mitchell was correct about the paranormal activity (he created an exhibition exploring paranormal activity in the Rita Angus Cottage and apparently interviewed her via a medium), as they believed Rita Angus’s ghost was still resident. But they told me he was wrong about which chair she liked to sit in.

The loveliest loos in the world?

Many readers of this blog arrive here via a search engine. We don’t know who these people are but, thanks to the wonders of technology, we can tell what search terms they used to get here.

Based on the search terms, Signposts is exactly the kind of thing most of our searchers were looking for. But others will probably be a bit disappointed as they were obviously looking for quite a different sort of website.

I thought I’d share some of my fav delightful, lateral and downright hilarious search terms:

• what to do about a frog injured new zealand
• waikikamookau nz
• male+men+jocks
• the world’s loveliest loo
• what are some world events that happened between 1908 to 2008
• hot women around foxton
• what happens to a male spiny stick insect after it mates
• ara live sex
• man and his cave nz
• 4 jocks surfer fight
• obscene signposts competing for love with another suitor
• the way neanderthals speak- bagpipes
• helicopter nude
• is it a really interesting place new zealand?