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

Black singlets, as worn by all self-respecting shearers

Happy Friday the 13th all. In honour of Black Friday, and the fact that black seems to have become our national colour (especially here in Wellington, I’m told), here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive list of black things featured in Te Ara:

• black robins
• black singlets
• a black goat on Black Peak
• ‘George’, a black African
• black stilts in flight
• black spot on an apple
• black coral (which is actually white when alive)
• blackbirds (and the female blackbird isn’t actually black either)
• black beetles
• Black Magic (crossing the line to win the America’s Cup
• black flounder
• black sand beaches
• Black Grace dancers
• black swans (how can something so graceful be so bad tempered?)
• black matipo (or kōhūhū)
• black-water rafting
• black tunnel-web spiders
• black-eyed geckos
• black shags with chicks
• and, despite my un-patriotic lack of interest in rugby, I couldn’t leave out the All Blacks.

The waka, suspended above its tank (photo by Fin Bird)

The word got around at morning tea time: there was a waka (canoe) in our building. It had arrived earlier that morning, and was being welcomed with karakia (prayers).

In small groups, we were allowed to venture down and see it, so we set off down the stairs and through a maze of chilly corridors. And there it was, suspended above a tank and being carefully tended by conservator Dilys Johns.

Actually, it’s only part of a waka – the prow. It was found in the Hutt River, near Woburn, in 2006, and has been kept wet in a container ever since. Who made it, which iwi (tribe) they were from, or when they made it are all unknown. But it is thought to date from before Europeans came to New Zealand, so is at least 200 years old.

Apparently it was never completed, but I noticed that the inside of the waka had been worked to a very smooth surface. The outside was rougher, but that may have been due to sitting in the mud at the bottom of the river for so long.

It was this mud that Dilys – with the help of various interested and very keen Ministry for Culture and Heritage staff over the course of the day – was working at removing; gently scraping with ice-cream sticks, then hosing the surface. Once the mud is removed it will be submerged in a chemical – polyethylene glycol, or PEG. If it was just left to dry out, it would crack because it has been wet for so long. PEG will replace the water in the wood, so it can keep its shape and eventually be dried out.

This is the same conservation method that was used on the English warship the Mary Rose and the Swedish warship the Vasa. Like those ships, this waka prow may eventually end up as a museum piece. But, before then, it has to do two years of time soaking in its tank, and then around two years slow drying.

The arrival of the waka was the culmination of several months work by the ministry’s Heritage Operations unit, who had to put their thinking caps on to find a home that was big enough to house the enormous tank the waka is submerged in. Security and climate were also considerations – the room needs to be a constant temperature and preferably cool and dry.

You can find out more about this waka in this article in the Dominion Post, or in this piece on Māori Television’s news show Te Kāea (you’ll find it 9 minutes and 50 seconds in).

An iconic image of Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont)

Taranaki is the next region to get its very own Te Ara Places entry. We’re currently editing the text and pulling together images and other resources, and it will be launched in early December.

And you can contribute to it by adding your pictures of Taranaki to our Flickr group pool!

We’ll be including in the entry an exhibition of photographs of the region. To have your Taranaki snaps considered for the exhibition, add them to Te Ara’s Flickr group pool in the next couple of weeks, as we’ll be making our decisions soon. Some images that have already been contributed include New Plymouth’s foreshore, the Wind Wand and Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont).

We’ve found these exhibitions to be a great way of including more wonderful images than we otherwise could. You can look at similar exhibitions for Otago, Hawke’s Bay, Southland and the West Coast.

Another cultural organisation that is using keen Flickr photographers to help record our country’s heritage is the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. They have started an NZHPT Images Project group on Flickr, and are inviting people to contribute their images of historic places in New Zealand.

They’re posting lists of specific places they want photos for, and their latest list includes many in the Taranaki region – perhaps you might have photos you could add to both their pool and ours!

Montana Poetry Day

Today is New Zealand’s annual poetry day. In celebration I wanted to share a couple of my favourite poems on Te Ara.

In our Wanganui entry you can read one of James K. Baxter’s wonderful Jerusalem Sonnets: ‘Poem for Colin–25‘, in which he personifies the Whanganui River as a taniwha.

And in our entry on introduced land birds you can read Denis Glover’s wonderful tragedy in poetic form, ‘The magpies‘. And you no longer have to imagine the ‘quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle’ of the magpies – it’s accompanied by a sound file of magpies quardle oodle ardle wardle doodling.

There’s lots of poetry-related events going on today around the country – for more information visit NZLive.com, or the official Montana Poetry Day site.

Souda Bay war cemetery in Crete (click for full image on Flickr)

I’ve recently returned from Europe after spending five weeks travelling. We were in Greece for a family wedding, but also ended up tiki-touring around western Europe.

My family has quite a few connections to Europe, mainly through war, so we made an effort to pay our respects to a few of these places.

First, we travelled to Ireland – my great-great-grandmother, who married Īhāia Hūtana in Waipawa, was Irish – so we went to her birthplace Dun Loaghaire just outside of Dublin.

We then travelled to London and managed to go to Guildford. Clandon Park in Guildford is home to the original Hinemihi meeting house from the Tarawera eruption (my partner is a descendant). Ngāti Rānana Māori Club use her as their ‘base’ in England. She is truly beautiful up close!

After that we made our way towards Greece, visiting places like Paris, Venice, Vienna and Munich.

After the wedding we travelled to Chania, Crete. We paid our respects at the Commonwealth cemetery, Souda Bay. We have family who fought on Crete and an uncle who died there during the Battle for Crete.

Lastly, we travelled to Rome. We had a day’s outing to Cassino. My pa, like many others, fought in Cassino as part of the Māori Battalion (and was later captured in Florence). So it was amazing to see Monte Cassino and be able to walk around the monastery. We also visited the Commonwealth cemetery in Cassino – one of the largest in Italy, with more than 4,000 people buried there.

I am now missing the sunshine and settling back into working life.