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

Who knew that poet John Keats had a connection to New Zealand? Not me.

A couple of months ago I watched the movie Bright Star, directed by New Zealander (though overseas-based) Jane Campion. It’s about the relationship between Keats and his fiancée Fanny Brawne.

Brawne and Keats were interesting in themselves, but I found the most fascinating character in the movie to be Keats’s close friend Charles Brown. In the film version he’s an outspoken Scotsman who spars with Fanny Brawne, but who is devoted to his friend Keats and acknowledges his greater poetic talent. His spark is subdued somewhat after he gets the maid pregnant and finds himself a father.

Knowing Campion’s penchant for difficult men in her films, I wondered how much of her portrayal of Charles Brown was accurate. Well, apparently he wasn’t Scottish at all, but the basic facts of his friendship with Keats and other noted artists of the time are true. And, outside the scope of the movie, he ended up over here.

His son, also Charles Brown (sometimes called Carlino), is generally thought to have been illegitimate, though he himself said his parents had married in a secret ceremony. Charles Brown senior was a shareholder in the Plymouth Company, which colonised New Plymouth, and felt that his son (then 17) would have better prospects as a civil engineer in New Zealand. So father and son both emigrated. Wikipedia notes that when Charles Brown senior arrived in New Zealand, ‘his disappointment was profound. Unlike its namesake in England, this Plymouth was wilderness, with a treacherous coast instead of a harbour. He proposed an early return to England.’

An idealised New Plymouth, to encourage settlers. Charles Brown senior begged to differ.

Instead, Charles Brown senior died in New Plymouth, aged 55, of that Victorian ailment, an apoplectic fit. His ambitions for his son were fulfilled, however, as Charles Brown junior rose to become one of New Plymouth’s (and New Zealand’s) leading citizens.

Apparently more practical than his poetically minded father, he’d brought a sawmill with him, and set up his first company. In 1853 he became the first superintendent of the Taranaki province, responsible for instituting the provincial system of government. He was later elected to the House of Representatives and was even colonial treasurer (the modern equivalent is the minister of finance), though only very briefly (May–June 1856).

Outside of politics, he continued with his business interests, including founding and running the Taranaki News newspaper, and served in the Taranaki militia. He married twice, and had several children, including a son he named Charles Keats Brown.

When retired, he used his knowledge of Māori language as an interpreter in the New Plymouth Police Court. He died on 2 September 1901, aged 81, on his way home from interpreting a case, when he was struck by a train on New Plymouth’s main street.

Despite the distance, Charles Brown junior and his descendents kept their Keatsian connection alive by donating Keats memorablia to the Keats House museum. The museum is the house in Hampstead that Keats and Charles Brown senior had shared during Keats’s most productive time; the time Campion portrays in Bright Star.

Huntly power station – one of the photos you'll be seeing in the Waikato entry

Last time we blogged about Flickr, we were asking people for images for the Taranaki Places entry.

Busy as usual, we’ve moved on since then and will be launching the Waikato Places entry at the end of May. As usual, our Flickr friends have contributed dozens of fantastic images of the region. As well as images we’ve sourced from Flickr that will appear as part of the entry, we’ll also be staging our fifth Flickr exhibition (the link goes to our Otago Flickr exhibition). The Waikato exhibition isn’t online yet, but you can take a look at the exhibition pool to get an idea of what’s in store.

Now that the Waikato entry is well underway, we’ve started work on the Nelson entry. For Te Ara’s purposes, the Nelson region comprises Nelson city and Tasman district; the latter takes in Golden Bay, Abel Tasman National Park, Motueka, Murchison, Nelson Lakes and nearby areas.

We would love for you to start adding your Nelson photos to the Te Ara pool. We’re looking for photographs of Nelson landscape, culture and people, but in particular inland Nelson and Murchison are on our list. Thank you to the photographers who have already started adding images!

In a new feature, you can view thumbnails of recent additions to Te Ara’s Flickr pool at the bottom of Te Ara’s redesigned homepage ( which was launched in January).

On Thursday and Friday of last week I attended my second Webstock web conference. Basically it involves someone new bombarding you with ideas and examples and insights every forty minutes. Despite having had a weekend to recover and reflect, I’m still trying to sift though it all. The next step is to figure out how to actually use some of the ideas and inspiration on Te Ara.

It’s obviously impossible to encompass the whole thing in a short blog post, but I’ll share some of my impressions and highlights, and hope you’ll do the same by leaving a comment.

One thing I liked about Webstock 2010 was that several speakers made time for questions. Last time, despite a lot of discussion about the importance of interaction on the web, there was very little interaction with the speakers. I also liked speakers who had something to say (most of them), and didn’t like the ones (fortunately few) who didn’t have anything to say or who didn’t really manage to say it.

The main theme of the second day seemed to be internet startups (new entreprenuerial companies). While I don’t see starting a startup in my future, there were still lessons we could learn from the experiences of the entrepreneurs who have been there, such as Eric Ries, Mike Davidson and Kevin Rose – like the advantages of taking an iterative approach and the importance of looking at how your users use your site. It did seem a pity though that all those speakers (and in fact a vast majority of the speakers overall) were from the US, which surely is a very different environment for startups than here. My co-attendees and I agreed it would have been nice to have had a New Zealand perspective.

My three favourite speakers were on day one, and I’ve realised that there is some commonality about them, even though they all work in different areas: they passionately believe in what they’re doing and they’ve made it personal.

The first was designer Scott Thomas, who kicked off the conference. He talked about being the web designer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He showed how they used design to change the way people perceived this junior senator – so the public could start to imagine him as president. Clearly they were very successful.

I had been lucky enough to see Shelley Bernstein speak last year about her social media work for the Brooklyn Museum. She’s passionate about audience engagement, and had lots of great examples of how the Brooklyn Museum has been using technology to connect with people. After her session I got all excited about the idea of running a Te Ara video competition (based on this one), where our users could contribute short films they’ve made about something somehow relevant. In the sober light of day, I’m still considering the merits of this.

Despite being a poet myself, I have to confess that I was a bit dubious about Rives, the final speaker of day one, who was described as a poet and pop-up-book designer. I needn’t have worried – he was awesome. He did perform some poetry, but mainly showed us digital stuff he’d made – videos, photos and other kinds of multimedia. While Shelley Bernstein made me want to make you make videos, Rives made me want to go out and make more videos of my own – especially ones with poetry.

I can’t remember who said this first, but someone earlier in the day said ‘People love things made with love’, and things made with love were certainly the things that got me excited.

Maybe it’s a sign that summer has finally arrived — a couple of short comments we’ve recently received from Te Ara users have been about insects.

Giant dragonfly

Giant dragonfly shopper

Blair McLauchlan sent in the above picture and says:

Today, 4 February 2010, a colleague bought a set of shelves from a store in Tory St, downtown Wellington. As he tried to leave, a frighteningly big dragonfly scared him by ‘buzzing’ him and then insisting on landing on him, and then his purchase.

He took a quick photo with his cellphone camera.

Black pine beetle infestation

Robin Roche’s insect problem is more ongoing, and more annoying:

We live in Whakamaru and this year we have had an infestation of black pine beetles. They come into the house just on dusk, through any opening and carry on for a couple of hours. We have never had this before and are wondering why.

If you know anything about black pine beetles, and can give Robin some advice, please leave a comment below.

Te Ara's new homepage

We’ve just launched the new Te Ara homepage, and we’re very proud.

Heath, our lead designer, blogged recently about our new homepage and other improvements you can expect on Te Ara this year. But now that it’s live, let’s have a wee tour.

The first thing you’ll notice – apart from how much more attractive it is – is the bigger, better featured-entry slideshow at the top. You’ll also notice that the page is much less brown.

Perhaps the biggest change is that the ‘Browse Te Ara’ Flash tool (we just call it our ‘browser’) isn’t immediately obvious. But it isn’t gone – just click the ‘Browse Te Ara’ button (right below the featured image, and next to the search box), and the ‘browser’ jauntily slides down. From here you can browse Te Ara’s entries by A–Z, by theme or by topic, and also you can browse ‘Your stories’ (stories contributed by members of the community) and entries that are translated into Te Reo Māori. Even better, the browser button is available at the top of every page of Te Ara.

You’ll also notice some new things down the side of the homepage:

• a new improved ‘Don’t miss’, where we feature one of our favourite resources (photos, videos, interactives, sound files and more)
• ways to contribute a story or subscribe to our newsletter
• a snippet of our latest blog post
• a slideshow of interesting things (this currently includes our most popular resource: Mr Blobfish).

Back in the main part of the homepage, you’ll find the ‘What’s inside…’ section, which shows the themes we already have in Te Ara. If you’re a frequent Te Ara user, this will be very familiar to you, and is a major way that people navigate through the encyclopedia. Below that you’ll find featured links from our sister sites NZLive.com and NZHistory.net.

And probably my favourite thing about our new homepage (apart from the lack of brown) is the thumbnails of photos that have been recently added to our Te Ara Flickr pool – a sneak peek at the photographic riches you’ll find there.

I hope you’ll love it as much as we do.