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

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Poetry Day 2011

Today is National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Today is also the 30th anniversary of the first game of the 1981 Springbok Tour. That first game in Gisborne was the beginning of 56 days of protest, violent clashes between protesters, supporters and police, and division in communities and even families.

Not that I remember that much about it – I was seven. But it seems to me that afterwards this enormous country-wide experience wasn’t much talked about in society at large – or at least not around me. But I think that’s changing, and more people are able to look at what happened in context, see what it meant for the country, and examine the many different threads that led to this sort-of civil war.

Protestors and police at the Hamilton game, 25 July 1981

In commemoration of the tour we’re planning a series of blog posts from a variety of people looking at what happened or sharing their personal memories. For a good overview of the tour, check out NZHistory.net.nz’s coverage, which includes an interactive map of the games and what happened at them.

And, because it’s National Poetry Day afterall, I’m going to kick it all off (pun intended) with a poem that I wrote not long after the 20th anniversary of the tour. At the time I worked at the National Library, which is on Molesworth Street in Wellington, site of the infamous Battle of Molesworth Street.

Memories of the civil war

When the Springboks came
we were six or seven or eight.
I didn’t know much
about that
but I knew all about
the Royal Wedding.

Karen says
that she was probably
making veils for her
friend’s Barbie. They’d play weddings
‘But don’t worry,
we’d always drown her afterwards.’

I was in standard one
and my friend Catherine
was English and had the
same haircut as Lady Di. In class we
wrote stories about royal visits
but not about riots in
the streets of Wellington.

Brian was fifteen
and lived in the Waikato.
‘We were very pro-tour and pro-rugby.’
He begins to explain how
it was the last straw
for the Kiwi blokes
who’d recently been
told they were racist and
sexist and now
they couldn’t even watch the footy.

I think we must have watched
one game on television, because
I remember my South African mother
saying she wanted the Springboks to win.
I remember some other kid
telling me that his mum said
South Africans were bad. Most kids
just said ‘Your mum can’t be South African –
she’s not black!’

Joeli says she remembers being
scared, but she hadn’t been
back long from Iran, escaping
during the revolution. Loud noises
still terrified her.

We’re watching footage on the television
twenty years later. There’s a riot and
I can see the building
where I work.
I had no idea
what was going on
outside my window.

(Source: Helen Rickerby, Abstract internal furniture. Wellington: HeadworX, 2001)

Webstock 2011

It’s only 10 days since Webstock, New Zealand’s biggest web conference, but it feels like longer. My post-conference excitement faded into the background last week as, like many, I became glued to the internet for information and updates about the earthquake in Christchurch.

Social media wasn’t such a star at Webstock this year as it has been in some previous years, but last week, in the aftermath of the quake, it certainly was in ascendency. Twitter was how, in our office, we found out about the quake, and where we came across the first pictures of damage and devastation, even before there was anything on news sites. Twitter and Facebook were how many people found out their friends and family were ok. Last week a friend (in Wellington) asked on Twitter if anyone in a particular isolated Christchurch suburb could help an elderly man there. A few minutes and many retweets later, she’d had several offers of help from total strangers.

Many people have used the internet to raise money for organisations helping with quake relief. In just one example of this, some people I know have put together a bundle of role-playing game pdfs, which they’re selling for US$20 instead of the $338 they would cost separately. By this morning, after only a few days, they’d already raised US$34,680 for the Red Cross.

It’s this kind of thing – genuine, meaningful connections – that I love about the internet, and at Webstock the talks that dealt with the internet as a place of meaning were the ones that got me the most excited.

Webstock began on Thursday morning with one of those, with Frank Chimero talking about the importance of story on the web. He said that content can be warm or cold, and that the way to warm content up is to use story. Using the story of WALL-E, Chimero suggested that robot plus story = human, while human minus story = robot – essentially, that we relate to and empathise with people because of their stories. Encyclopedias are not traditionally warm-content publications – though I hope we manage to make Te Ara warmish with our images and media, topic boxes, contributed stories and plain-language approach – but it got me thinking about how else we might warm up our content, while still being authoritative.

One way we try to make information on Te Ara more accessible is by using graphs, charts and diagrams, which are created by our design team. The ‘it’ word for these things are infographics, and the infographic king, David McCandless, of Information is Beautiful fame, was a definite highlight of Webstock for me. His talk– which was very entertaining, especially considering a great deal of it involved showing us graphs – really brought home to me how powerful and meaningful it can be to show information visually. A particularly stunning example is his animation Debtris, which simply shows the relative amounts of various things such as the cost of the Iraq war and US credit card debt (there is a US and a UK version – he said he’d get on to doing a NZ version ASAP). He also showed how our fears seem to be seasonal, a lot of Facebook users break up on Mondays, and that US adults spend a lot more time watching TV in one year than was needed to create Wikipedia.

This year’s Webstock seemed to have a little bit more about website content than other years, which, as a content-focused person, I was happy about. Sometimes, when all you hear about is design and coding, you’d start to think that a website didn’t need to have any content at all. And, according to content strategist Kristina Halvorson, leaving content to the last minute is a common problem when websites are developed. I’d also suggest that having a content strategy still doesn’t mean you actually have content, but I suppose it’s a start.

Other highlights for me were:

• Jason Santa Maria on typography. Turns out you can make websites typographically beautiful.
• Peter Sunde on the benefits of internet piracy, and his site Flattr, through which you can directly financially reward people whose work you like on the net
• Tom Coates on all kinds of things – I can’t entirely remember what his point was now, it was fun getting there. On the way we took in ancient Persian roads, his bathroom scales that tweet his weight, and networked cities
• cartoonist Scott McCloud, who didn’t just talk about comics on the web, but on visual communication and how the human brain will always want to make a story or connection out of two, possibly unrelated, images
• and Amanda Palmer, of whose music I am a big fan, both for her talk/Q&A on how musicians can survive and thrive without a record label in the new world of the music industry, but even more for her special after-conference concert with Jason Webley on Friday night.

It seems to me that Webstock is well named – it’s like a soup: you throw a lot into it, some things give it flavour, some things rise to the top, some things are a bit meatier, other things seem a bit unnecessary. But each year this soup has shown me some visions of where the web is heading, and what we need to think about for Te Ara, to keep it relevant in the future.

What were your highlights or lowlights? What did you take away from the conference that you’ll be able to use in your work?

Goldie, in the blue corner

Lindauer, in the red corner

Last week I had a short non-work-related excursion to Auckland (unlike everyone else, I was there for a book launch rather than U2). While I was there, I had a day of wandering around the city, and I wandered into the Auckland Art Gallery.

One of the exhibitions running at the moment (until the end of May 2011) features paintings by C. F. Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer. It is impossible not to compare these two artists, even though they are separated by a generation, because they are both best known for their portraits of Māori.

Goldie, the younger of the two, is much better known, and his works are much more expensive. Lindauer is probably less known than the sparkling wine that I assume is named after him, but I’ve always preferred his paintings over Goldie’s. Lindauer’s portraits always have a golden glow about them – a soul, a life. Compared to Goldie’s (and you can’t help but compare them) they seem at once less realistic in a photo-realistic sort of way, but also more real – the people seem living and breathing.

A typical Goldie: 'Darby and Joan'

Goldie’s paintings may be more technically brilliant, but they seem cold to me. There is more of a sadness about them, a despair almost. I’ve read that Goldie thought he was painting a dying noble race, which is why his sitters look so sad. But the idea that Māori were dying out had been around for a while, and apparently in 1901 Goldie’s brother William published an article in which he contradicted these predictions of the demise of Māori.

In any case, the difference in tone and energy between their paintings was most apparent when comparing their portraits of Ngāpuhi chief Tāmati Wāka Nene. Both portraits were apparently painted from the same photograph (Nene himself having died in 1871), which accounts for the similarity of pose.

A typical Lindauer: King Tāwhio

In Lindauer’s 1890 portrait, Nene is standing in a landscape. He’s shown almost half-length, and his arm emerging from his cloak, holding a staff-like weapon, is strong and powerful. While perhaps not happy exactly, there seems a hint of smile in his mouth. And, like all Lindauer’s paintings, everything is bathed in a golden light.

In contrast, in Goldie’s portrait from 1934 Nene is almost crowded into the frame – cut off at chest height, and trapped next to a blank wall. His shoulders on either side are also out of the picture, leaving him armless, defenceless. He is depicted as much older – his face more wrinkled, and his expression subtly grim and defeated.

I think I’ve probably made my preference for Lindauer over Goldie quite clear, but that isn’t to say I have no appreciation for Goldie’s work. The painting of his that I responded to most was ‘Night in the whare‘, which depicts a Māori woman lighting her pipe. Everything is in deep shadows, except what has been lit up by the light of the match. Her face, in particular, glows with a red/gold light (obviously I have a thing for glowing). It’s just amazing.

What are your feelings about Goldie or Lindauer? Do you have a favourite?

A couple of weeks ago I returned to Cape Rēinga – Te Rerenga Wairua. In corporeal form, I hasten to add. Cape Reinga is, in Māori tradition, the departing place for the souls of the dead as they leave for Hawaiki.

When you visit, there is no denying it is special place – you can just feel it. It’s like being in a cathedral – if the cathedral’s roof was the sky, the floor a clifftop, and the choir was the meeting of two oceans and the wind over the barren hillsides.

Cape Rēinga – Te Rerenga Wairua

Cape Rēinga is at the top of the North Island – though not the very top, as Surville Cliffs takes that honour. In any case, it’s a very long way from Wellington. Driving there was like a pilgrimage; we’d travelled there because of a hard winter – one with a sudden, serious, and then resolved health problem. We journeyed there to let it go.

Despite our purpose, we’d meandered up the island, staying for a few days at Russell and Mangōnui, both places with a lot of history. The night before we stayed at Waitiki Landing – as far as you can go and still buy dinner, and have a cabin to sleep in.

‘You’ve been here before,’ said one of the ladies who run the office, and the café, and the bar and everything else up there. It was seven years ago since we’d been here. ‘It’s changed,’ they said. I said I’d heard they’d sealed the road from here. I was sad when I heard that, because before, with the gravel road, you had to slow down before you got there, you had to prepare. They said that wasn’t the only change, but they wouldn’t tell us any more than that. ‘We’ll let you see for yourselves,’ they said, ‘then come back and tell us what you think.’

The next morning we got up before it was properly light, woken by the people who were heading off for the annual fishing competition. The drive to the cape was certainly quicker on the sealed road, but, strangely, seemed hillier than in my memory.

The first change we noticed was that they’d moved the car park and toilets – this was in response to a request from local iwi Ngāti Kurī, as previous the toilets were too close to the tapu (sacred) site.

Now, to get from the car park to the path, you have to walk through a waharoa (gate/tunnel). (On the wall of the waharoa is a reproduction of this map – which you can view fullscreen – from 1790; the oldest known map made by a Māori.) When you enter the waharoa, a sensor starts a sound recording of Māori instruments – I think it was the whirring of a purerehua and the cry of a wind instrument such as a putātara (made of a conch shell) – and a karanga (welcome call). I couldn’t decide whether it was moving and appropriate, or theme-park tacky. Or possibly both (it did give me a lump in my throat).

One of the many helpful and informative signs

A new, immaculate path of red stones winds its way down from the car park to the lighthouse, replacing the unadorned asphalt one that used to be there. And every five steps along it a different sign or plaque tells you interesting tidbits about where you are and what you’re seeing. It felt like someone had taken a little piece of Te Papa and sprinkled it over this windswept coast at the end of the earth. I tried to ignore them – I was there to experience this special place, to feel it. To be there.

We reached the lighthouse – which is as far as you can go – to find a new stone wall all around it on the seaward side, which meant we couldn’t sit on the grass and watch the ocean, as we did seven years ago (there is a bench, but it faces the wrong way). But, I was relieved to find that the landscaping, designing and attempts at taming hadn’t taken away the power of the place. It is still amazing.

The lighthouse and path, as it used to be

On the way back up I did read some of the signs, and they told me helpful things about the meaning and history of the place, about the geology, geography and birdlife. While they give you an excuse to pause and catch your breath on the climb back up, as one of our hosts at Waitiki Landing pointed out later, for me it felt like it was trying to explain the experience for me while I was having it, or instead of me having it. Like someone sitting next to me at the movies, giving me a critical interpretation while I’m still watching the film.

That said, I know tourists visit Cape Rēinga by the bus-load every day. Having good paths stops the landscape from being damaged, and having signs tells them about the importance of the site.  I know I liked it better before, but I also know some changes did have to be made.

There are other sites around New Zealand, and the world, that have been ‘landscaped’ and ‘interpreted’ to make them more accessible, and better for tourists. Should they be? What do you think? Which ones have you been to?

The great uranium rush of the 1950s features in Te Radar's show, and in Te Ara

We’re doing something right, I think, because Te Ara has made it into works of art – or at least the two I discovered this weekend.

Te Ara on mermaids

The weather wasn’t that flash on Saturday morning, so I was doing a bit of reading in bed – the warmest place in the house. I was reading the latest issue of Sport literary magazine, and was quite engrossed in a short story by Alison Glenny, ‘Mermaid Fever’. Its form is a series of extracts from ‘reference works’ and ‘novels’ which relate to the New Zealand mermaid.

Unlike the European version, the New Zealand mermaid apparently has a dark complexion and hair like kelp. People who see one apparently experience ‘a mysterious sense of being “unlocked” or “lifted”‘, and are ‘blessed with the gift of a unique poetic or artistic inspiration’.

I noticed that an ‘extract’ from Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand had been included in this miscellany - a biography of one Olive Burling (1922-) an artist who saw a mermaid at Raumati, on the Kapiti coast. Soon after she painted the artworks that made her name. (The eagle-eyed among you may have noted that Te Ara doesn’t have biographies, yet, though we will soon be integrating the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.)

Perhaps, inspired by this work of fiction, you will find a new entry for the New Zealand mermaid on Te Ara on the first of April next year.

Te Ara on stage

One of my colleagues had already noted that Te Radar’s new comedy show, Eating the Dog, covered some similar ground to our fine encyclopedia, and I was delighted to discover that he gave us a plug as one of his useful sources of material (along with NZ On Screen and others).

Te Radar, who is a comedian, writer, tv star, among other things, is currently touring Eating the Dog around the country. It mines New Zealand history for ‘the history that history tried to forget … It is an irreverent and educational look at some of the more notable characters and events from New Zealand’s past, commemorating the bumblers and the near-do-wells, the ones who personify the archetypal “She’ll be right” spirit that made this country great.’ (http://www.radarswebsite.com/projects/eating-the-dog/about).

Using visual aids, he takes you through New Zealand’s ‘uranium rush’, first aeronautical death, incompetent military leaders and more.

So, it isn’t a standard history of New Zealand, but nevertheless is informative as well as fun. And it’s great to see our information used as raw material for a show like this.