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

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.

NZ nurses who served in the Spanish Civil War (click to view on NZHistory.net)

Te Ara staff are always up to something. Not content with the interesting things we do in our day jobs, we’ve usually got some other kind of project or interest on the go.

Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War (Canterbury University Press, 2009), edited by Te Ara writer Mark Derby, is one such project which has recently come to fruition.

New Zealand is as far away from Spain as you can get – well, without heading into space. In the 1930s New Zealanders generally knew virtually nothing about Spain, and there had only been a handful of Spanish migrants. Nevertheless, this book tells the stories of a number of New Zealanders who cared enough about the Spanish Civil War that they volunteered as soldiers, doctors, nurses or journalists.

Some of the New Zealanders who joined up were already based overseas, while others travelled all the way from here. Mark says they were generally motivated by anti-fascist beliefs and concern about the overthrow of a legitimately elected government.

Kiwi Compañeros has contributions from leading academics and historians, but also includes a chapter by the daughter of two people who fought in the war. It grew out of a seminar in 2006 looking at New Zealander’s involvement in and attitudes to the Spanish Civil War.

Mark is pretty sure he’s tracked down all of New Zealand’s participants. One of his odder leads had the ring of an urban legend. A friend told him of a friend who had said that his primary school teacher had said he’d been in the Spanish Civil War. Mark thought it was pretty unlikely, but followed it up anyway. He found that the teacher was still alive and indeed had actually fought in the war.

In tandem with this book coming out, and all the new research it contains, NZHistory.net has published a new feature on New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. And if that whets your appetite, come along to next week’s History Group talk by Mark and fellow-contributor Peter Clayworth about New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War, and how studying them can provide insights into the New Zealand of the 1930s.

The city: civilisation or cesspool?

I know that many of you, our dear readers, are literary types; and when I was asked earlier today about how cities are represented in New Zealand literature, I thought immediately of you.

Ben – one of our theme editors for the Economy and the City theme, which we’re working on at the moment – is writing an entry about how the city has been represented in New Zealand art. He’s got the visual art and movies sussed, but would like some help with literature.

I’ve been having a bit of a think, and have some ideas of my own, but this seems like a good job for the online community. So:

What are some New Zealand novels, poems or stories that feature cities?

How was the city represented? Positive or negative, freeing or caging, civilised or cesspool?

Also, if you know of any studies of cities in New Zealand literature, we’d love to know about them too.

Thanks!

Captain James Cook, who arrived in New Zealand after the mystery skull

Back in August last year, we asked ‘Was Captain Cook beaten by a girl?‘ when carbon dating indicated that the skull of a European woman, which had been found in a river in Wairarapa, was around 296 years old.

This challenged what we know about New Zealand history, as it would mean that a woman, or her skull at least, had made it to New Zealand at least 23 years before Captain Cook’s first voyage in 1769. And long before the first documented white women, Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger (two escaped convicts from New South Wales), who are thought to have arrived in 1806.

This week forensic anthropologist Robin Watt has suggested an answer to the mystery. The 40–45 year old woman could have been a Dutch shipwreck victim.

Dr Watt says, ‘At this time there was a tremendous amount of movement by the Dutch. We know they were exploring the southern coast of Australia. Anything sailing this way has a chance of being stopped by New Zealand, so for my money there was either a visit here or a wreck. I’d say it was probably a wreck.’ Apparently the Dutch took their wives and families along for the trip.

Mystery solved? I doubt it.