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

A portrait of Noda Asajiro, one of the newly added photographs in the DNZB

While the main focus of our work at Te Ara is on producing new material for the Te Ara website, there is a small group of us who also work on the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB) which, a year ago, was incorporated into Te Ara.

We celebrated the event with ‘the publication of 11 new biographies of some of the movers and shakers of this country in the last half century,’ as we announced on our blog at the time, and a number of new biographies are on their way.

Alongside this, we regularly receive images of people already in the DNZB, some of whom we have found images for, but most of whom don’t have images at all.

We have just updated 13 biographies with new images. These folk cover the gamut from early settler to aviator.

They are not all movers and shakers, but all do have interesting tales. Like world champion pedestrianist Joe Scott, who wasn’t able to escape bankruptcy even after pawning his championship belt. Or Horowhenua midwife and centenarian Hannah Retter.

Others include pioneer aerial photographer and surveyor Piet van Asch, who started the New Zealand Aerial Mapping company, and marine biologist and reviver of the Portobello Marine Laboratory, Betty Batham.

Then there’s the story of Noda Asajiro, a Japanese national whose wedding to a Ngāti Mahuta woman is said to have been presided over by the Māori king, Te Rata Mahuta Pōtatau Te Wherowhero.

As someone with an interest in the history of photography it has also been interesting to see the changes in portrait photography over the years from whaler James Jackson to architect George Allen to choirmaster Robert Parker to broadcaster Herb Mullon.

If you have photos or paintings or illustrations of anyone in the DNZB, whether they’ve already got an image or not, do please send them through because it not only improves the biographies, it makes for a fascinating time for me too.

There are a number of people in the Ministry for Culture and Heritage who have an obsession with war memorials.

Chief amongst them is Te Ara’s general editor Jock Phillips. In 1990 he and fellow historian Chris Maclean published a book on war memorials around our country – The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials. There’s also the online memorials register over at NZHistory.net.nz, and Te Ara has an entry on memorials in its upcoming Government and Nation theme.

I don’t count myself as a war memorial obsessive (… yet), but I do like them very much and have indeed photographed many memorials over the years (which you can view here and here). On a recent North Island road trip I, again, photographed a number of memorials, and was once again reminded of the similarities and the differences between them.

From random observation it seems that we have four types of war memorial – the plinth/statue, the gate, the hall and the park. At the risk of protesting too much, I feel I should point out that I wasn’t actively seeking war memorials, merely regularly coming upon them.

Bunnythorpe war memorial statue

The war memorial in Bunnythorpe has long been one of my favourite memorials, even before I visited it, thanks to a wonderful Laurence Aberhart photo. Its location on the corner of a rugby ground, with farmland on one side, and industry on the other, seems to encapsulate the New Zealand male stereotype.

Tikitiki war memorial

Equally I love the memorial in Tikitiki. Like Bunnythorpe, the statue itself is stunning, but so is the location on a hilltop looking towards the rising sun. The other week I was lucky to arrive in Tikitiki an hour or so before sunset and the light was just beautiful.

A little way south of Tikitiki is Tolaga Bay, and there you can find a large memorial gate. There’s also one in Taranaki, at Normanby School from memory, which always catches my attention as I drive past saying I must stop and photograph it one day.

War memorial gates in Tolaga Bay

Many of those communities which don’t have a statue or gate, and indeed some that do, often have a Memorial Hall, a hall for the community, such as the one in Mahoenui. Occasionally the building has some other public function, such as the War Memorial Library in Lower Hutt or the War Memorial Baths in Millers Flat, Otago.

Mahoenui memorial hall

Lastly there are the parks. It seems to me that naming a park ‘Memorial Park’ was easier than coming up with some other name. There’s not always any memorial of any kind, or even suggestion of it being a memorial aside from the name. Sometimes, as with the park in Taihape, there’s quite an entrance.

Entrance to Taihape war memorial park

The newest memorial I came across on my trip was one in Rongotea. At the centre of town they have a statue and little park, but the Te Kawau Memorial Recreation Centre is on the edge of town … which is only 500 metres or so from the centre of town. And while the rec centre is reasonably new, the gate on the left confirms that the park has been a memorial for some decades.

Rongotea's new memorial hall

And while it’s not a war memorial, this rugby ground not far from Tikitiki also caught ­my fancy, and does (I suppose) memorialise battles of another sort.

George Nepia Memorial Park

In February English singer/songwriter P. J. Harvey released an album called Let England shake. It’s a great album, and in what may be a world first, New Zealand writer Maurice Shadbolt is credited with inspiring lyrics for a couple of the songs, including the beautiful song that really grabbed me on the first listen.

The opening lines of ‘The colour of the earth’ are ‘Louis was my dearest friend / Fighting in the Anzac trench’. For every Australian and New Zealander there is only one possible location for ‘the Anzac trench’ and beyond the fact that the song is a present-day retelling written by an English woman (though the lead vocals are sung by men), it got me wondering about the role of contemporary songs as folk songs, as aides-memoire and as (war) memorials.

Anzac Day commemorations at one of New Zealand's many physical war memorials

A quick think and I came up with a couple of Australian songs, the 1971 Gallipoli epic ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda’ by Scottish-born Eric Bogle (made famous by the Irish band The Pogues), and the 1983 minor hit and Vietnam requiem ‘I was only nineteen‘ by Redgum. The Pogues were often inspired by historical events, ‘A pair of brown eyes’ being another of their ‘war’ songs. And of course there are plenty of tracks about various wars by American writers – the thoughts of a returned soldier in Lyle Lovett’s ‘Pontiac’ being a favourite of mine.

If there was any local band from the last 20-odd years who might have attempted writing a song recalling the events or aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign, I would have put The Warratahs at the top of the list, but I can’t recall any them doing anything.

There are, however, a few examples of more recent events being commemorated in song. Generations of punk bands have written highly politicised songs, but generally they rarely enter the mainstream public consciousness. I have vague memories of a punk band writing a song about Neil Roberts, who blew himself up in 1982 outside the building that housed the Wanganui police computer. Andrew from the Mysterex blog reminded me of Harry Death’s ‘Maintained a silence’, though that wasn’t the one I was thinking of.

‘Murder in Manners St’ by Wellington punk band The Mockers (prior to their reinvention as a chart topping pop/new wave band) was about the unprovoked, broad daylight stabbing of a 20-year old student, but could also be seen as a reference to the Second World War ‘Battle of Manners Street‘. Later the pop/new wave version of The Mockers released ‘One black Friday’ recalling the 1984 Queen Street riot, which occurred after an outdoor concert they were due to perform in was cancelled part-way through (though the band’s chief songwriter was safely ensconced in Wellington during the proceedings).

There were two reasonably quick musical responses to the 1990 Aramoana massacre – the heartfelt but unambiguous ‘Strange case,’ with its chorus of ‘never trust a man in camouflage gear’, from The Chills album Soft bomb, and probably my favourite Don McGlashan song, The Muttonbirds’ beautifully understated ‘A thing well made’, from their debut album, which imagined the story of a gunshop owner – ‘It’s Wednesday so I do the mail orders … one of those AK47s for some collector down the line’.

On a somewhat lighter note, more recently, ‘Billy the Hunted One’ by Robbie Robertson (the Cantabrian, not the Canadian) wrote a song about the fugitive William Stewart quick smart.

I think it’s quite interesting that we live in a nation in which every town has at least one public war memorial, and while many writers and visual artists have responded to these and the circumstances of their being, few of our better-known songwriters tend to dwell much on our country’s history. With public participation in Anzac Day on the increase, maybe it’s time for some new folk songs to add to the commemorations.

In case you were unaware, 2011 is the year of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. Alongside the rugby there will be a mass of other cultural events going on as part of the REAL New Zealand Festival.

Over the last few months, in the guise of one of my non-Te Ara roles, I have been working on a couple of proposals for photographic exhibitions to coincide with the cup. As I was working on the proposal, I became acutely aware that rugby was not a subject examined much by our art photographers.

Prince of Wales Park, Mt Cook, Wellington

Around 10 years ago Stephen Rowe and Brett Whincup produced the book The full 80 minutes and the touring exhibition ‘The New Rugby’. Beyond that, few other artists, art photographers and painters alike, have looked at the sport (or any other sport for that matter).

Over the years, photographers other than art photographers have focused on rugby though, most famously Peter Bush, and pretty much every local photojournalist, and masses of amateur and commercial photographers have also taken photos of rugby and rugby players from grass roots to internationals.

Recently, Pataka had an exhibition looking at sheep in New Zealand art. Again, sheep are a subject that has been well-covered by photojournalists in numerous books and magazine articles, but something that has been somewhat neglected by local artists – though a number of people have made works examining the meat works closures during the 1980s, most notably Robert Jahnke.

At Pataka there was a nice collection of paintings and sculpture with sheep as their subject, but the 10 or so photos, ranging from farmlands to science labs, were pretty much all that could be found from our art photographers, as Paul McNamara pointed out in a talk he gave during the show.

I do find it interesting that these two bastions of New Zealand culture have been largely neglected by our artists, and art photographers in particular, but maybe that in itself is a strong statement about New Zealand culture.

One aspect of our culture that hasn’t been so overlooked by our artists is war. In the lead up to Anzac Day I often find myself reflecting on the artists’ take on war. New Zealand has had a number of official war artists, most notably Peter McIntyre and, most recently, Matt Gauldie.

Bunnythorpe War Memorial, Bunnythorpe, Manawatū

A few years ago our 2011 Venice Biennale representative Michael Parakowhai produced some beautiful works responding to places in France and Flanders where the Pioneer Maori Battalion made a contribution in the First World War. Photographer Laurence Aberhart is widely known for, amongst other things, his beautiful images of memorials of war and other events – a subject he is still exploring. Michael Shepherd and Matt Pine have also explored war in their artworks.

I don’t think artists’ disregard of certain subjects is a purely New Zealand phenomena, but it does make me wonder if art does truly hold a mirror up to nature, as Shakespeare asserted, or if it just holds a mirror up to the nature of the artist.

When most people think of science in New Zealand they probably think biology and geology. Certainly it is difficult to escape our habitation in such a volatile locale, what with all our faultlines and geothermal activity. We are also renowned for our unique flora and fauna, and our groundbreaking conservation projects – both species survival and species eradication.

2011 marks the centenary of the publication of Ernest Lord Rutherford’s Nobel Prize-winning paper describing the discovery of the atomic nucleus. By coincidence, amongst other things, it is also the International Year of Chemistry.

We’re not exactly a nation known for our chemists, but beyond the natural environment, broadly speaking, chemistry is incredibly important to New Zealand as well. Just think where our horticultural and agricultural industries would be without fertilising and topdressing, not to mention the processing of these primary products into such essential things as wine, cheese, crackers, etc.

Equally, a number of New Zealander’s have been integral to some of the most significant chemistry discoveries of the last century. Our three Nobel Prize winners were all involved to some degree in chemistry, with two of them winning that particular Nobel Prize, and the other sharing one in medicine and physiology.

Though known as a physicist, Ernest Rutherford’s work on the structure of atoms (the building blocks of all chemicals) straddled both chemistry and physics, opening up new areas of study leading all the way to the Large Hadron Collider. Alongside his Nobel Prize, he is also commemorated with the synthetic chemical element Rutherfordium (Rf) and his portrait on our $100 bill.

Rutherford monument in Brightwater

Maurice Wilkins was a biophysicist, an expert in X-ray crystallography, but his most renowned work was the complex co-operation/competition with Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, and Francis Crick in deciphering the chemical makeup and structure of DNA, thereby pioneering the discipline of biochemistry.

Wilkins monument in Pongaroa

Our most recent Nobel Laureate, Alan MacDiarmid, was a plastics chemist. He was particularly interested in plastics which conducted electricity, principally sulfur nitride derivatives, inadvertently helping to create the field of nanotechnology.

Pleasingly, all three are celebrated at our universities with various buildings, memorials, and research institutions named in their honour. Another factor common amongst these men is that they all did their most important work overseas. Many others, though, have based themselves here, and among some of our lesser-known chemists are Theodor Rigg (fertilisers), James Maclaurin (food safety), Dave Lowe (greenhouse gases), Meto Leach (traditional medicines), Cornel de Ronde (recent re-discoverer of the Pink Terraces), and um … my dad (processes for production of electricity).