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

Kapa haka group

Over the last couple of months, I have been travelling between Wellington and Pōrangahau to attend kapa haka practices with Tamatea Arikinui. It is one of six kapa haka groups practising for the Kahungunu regionals. The competition will be held on 13 March at Te Aute College and the top two teams will go through to Te Matatini. There are 13 regions, and each are having their own regionals.

The performances consist of seven different types of waiata (songs).

• Waiata-ā-tira - choral singing
• Whakaeke - choreographed entry
• Mōteatea - traditional chants or dirges
• Poi - movement with poi (ball attached to string)
• Waiata-ā-ringa - action song
• Haka - war dance
• Whakawātea - choreographed exit.

The regionals are being held all around the country from now until August. Kahungunu regionals are now only a week away and, with our dress rehearsal over, it’s time for us to rest our voices and bodies to prepare for the big day.

One of the images to look forward to in our Hawke's Bay Flickr exhibition

Our Flickr work has taken us to many places – with our Hawke’s Bay entry nearly complete and launching this week (Thursday), we are now starting to work on the Taranaki entry.

We love people contributing their images, and we’re now looking for images of Taranaki. It doesn’t matter what it is, we want to see it. Some possibilities are photos of people, places, towns, landscapes, beaches, animals, farms or buildings.

We’ll use images we source from Flickr either in the main entry or a Flickr exhibition, such as this one we created for Otago. Our exhibitions use a Flash slideshow called Pictobrowser to pull the Flickr images into the entry. It has been a helpful tool in allowing us to showcase other images of the regions that we haven’t been able to use in the entries.

So far we have three very successful exhibitions – for the West Coast, Southland and Otago. Hawke’s Bay will be up very soon, and our Hawke’s Bay exhibition pool will give you a taste of what’s to come in the exhibition!

We now have over 200 Flickr contacts who contribute regularly. We hope you’ll join us and start adding images to our pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/teara/.

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.