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

Even though we love the internet, we don't think books are history

‘You work for that Te Ara thing, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Can’t say I have ever looked at it myself. I don’t really believe in websites. Books are my thing.’

‘He’ was my host at a New Zealand Book Month event two weeks ago. It’s great that we celebrate books – I was happy to take part and, it must be quickly said, my host was a gracious gentleman. But his attitudes to the web are not unusual in the book fraternity and sorority. To such people, the web still seems cheap and nasty, full of superficial ‘sound bites’, appealing only to the 30-second mind, and with no serious ideas. I’m sure you will have heard views like this – similar to comments about film or television in their early days.

It’s true that the web requires new modes of presentation – sites that are simply a digitisation of books don’t work well. The paragraphs and sentences are too long, the words too allusive, the images too sparse. Just compare Te Ara with encyclopedias that began their life as large volumes – such as the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Canadian Encyclopedia.

But, done really well, the web can deliver outstanding information with a richness of media and a layering of experience not possible on the printed page. At Te Ara, we are passionate about the ability of the web to tell important stories.

This doesn’t mean we think that books have past their use-by date. In fact, over the last two weeks two members of the Te Ara team have published books: Helen Rickerby, one of our editors, has put out a book of poems, My iron spine; and Carl Walrond, a writer, explores how people survived in the New Zealand outdoors in Survive! Earlier in the year I published a book, Settlers, about the non-Māori who came to New Zealand in the century and a half after 1800. We agree that books have a hugely important place in people’s lives. As is often said, you can’t read a website in the bath, and there are few things more enjoyable than being absolutely hooked into a good novel.

Yet, websites are the friend, not the enemy, of books. Writing for the web actually improves your ability to write for the printed page. We’ve discovered that while books don’t usually translate well into websites, good websites can make excellent books. The hard work we’ve put into making Te Ara’s text readable, such as reducing the length of sentences, using headings and sidebars, and illustrating creatively, pays off on paper. It produces accessible books with great images.

So far we have published three books from Te Ara – Māori peoples of New Zealand, Settler and migrant peoples of New Zealand, and Life on the edge: New Zealand’s natural hazards and disasters. Māori peoples has sold so well that we’re now reprinting.

Shortly, we’ll be publishing two more books – New Zealanders and the sea, which is drawn from 39 entries in Earth, Sea and Sky, and Māori tribes of New Zealand, which reprints the short stores of the iwi entries on the site. Both read well and look gorgeous.

So, in our view, websites should be praised, not despised, by bibliophiles. Next year, let’s have a New Zealand website month alongside book month.

Film Festival programme and tickets

It’s been raining for about six weeks – not the weather for walking in the hills, but just perfect for the 37th annual Wellington film festival. The high points for me have been two New Zealand films.

Vincent Ward’s incredibly powerful Rain of the children is a return to his early film, In spring one plants alone, which told the story of an old Tūhoe woman, bent double, and her handicapped son. In his new film, Ward brilliantly uncovers layers of history that go to the very heart of Tūhoe culture. Inevitably Rua Kenana, that fascinating millennial prophet, looms large. If you go, look at Te Ara’s entry on Ngāi Tūhoe first for a bit of helpful background.

You might also like to read our entry on New Zealand’s Indian community before going to Sima Urale’s Apron strings. This is a beautifully polished drama – or rather double-drama, as it follows two families, one Pākehā and one Indian, as they sort through their family crises. It’s all told around scenes of preparing food. Worth seeing, but it will make you hungry.

It’s obviously hard to compete with the full-screen spectacular on a website. We are confined to about 30 seconds of film on Te Ara, so that people can download clips relatively easily. Yet, it is interesting how a really well-chosen 30 seconds can make for particularly intense viewing.

There are now over 170 video clips on Te Ara, with many great ones among them. Natural History New Zealand provided some wonderful footage of our birds and animals, such as the breaching whales or the scrapping gannets. Television New Zealand has given us a classic example of Robert Muldoon in all his glory, and a couple of comic masterpieces by Fred Dagg and Lyn of Tawa. From Archives New Zealand we have sourced some nice clips from the Film Unit,complete with that fruity voice-over accent. They include an amusing piece on waka-racing and a clip of Kiwi blokes heading off into the hills to build a hut.

In November we launch the next theme – The Settled Landscape – and you will be able to enjoy two particularly nice examples: a sonata played on no. 8 fencing wire, and a lovely clip from TV3 of a cyclist trying to ward off attacks from magpies with a large face stuck to the back of his helmet.

Te Ara is not a film festival – but at least you can watch it at home without having to brave that awful weather!

Volume four of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

At times, preparing a complete encyclopedia of New Zealand can seem like a long road without an end. How do you possibly include everything important about this fascinating little country?

One great advantage we have over most aspiring encyclopedists is that we already have access to biographies of famous Kiwis. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand included no less than 722 biographies, and we can depend on the more than 3,000 thoroughly researched and beautifully written stories in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (DNZB). This was put together by a team in the Department of Internal Affairs led by Bill Oliver and Claudia Orange, and was published in five very handsome volumes from 1990 to 2000.

The DNZB includes the great and famous – the Richard Seddons and the Katherine Mansfields are there – but there are also many ordinary people and some wonderful eccentrics. A particular favourite of mine is Henry Poingdestre, who came out to Canterbury from the Isle of Jersey, and established a sheep station, Blue Cliffs. There, he lined the homestead paths with gin bottles, and would ride around in a home-made gig built from packing cases, driven by a mule and a white mare.

More than 500 biographies of Māori people were also translated into te reo Māori.

In 2001 the DNZB went online, with many images added to the biographies. To make full use of the DNZB biographies in Te Ara, we decided to set up a biographies tab and introduce people who were relevant to each entry. We included short blurbs, but to get the full story you had to go off to the eDNZB. At present, this is what you see:

Over the next year we will be integrating the eDNZB into Te Ara as a new theme. So you’ll no longer have to leave us to reach the biographies, and Te Ara will suddenly become a real encyclopedia – with people as well as events and objects. At the same time, we’ll stop including short blurbs and simply list the biographies at the foot of each page, which will look something like this (click the picture for a larger view):

We hope this will be easier for users, and make the biographies more visible. But we are keen to receive your feedback. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography is one of this nation’s great taonga. We need to do it justice.

The Wanganui Places entry is launched

On Monday night (16 June) more than 150 citizens of the Wanganui district came along to help us celebrate the launch of our latest Places entry: Wanganui.

It was a record turnout for one of our regional launches – larger than Auckland or Canterbury, and even larger than Timaru, where the locals also did us proud. The next morning Te Ara made the front page of the Wanganui Chronicle and the local radio discussed the entry.

So why did Wanganui respond so magnificently? There are some practical explanations.

• The author, Diana Beaglehole, was born in the Wanganui region and, despite not having lived there since 1959, she has many friends and supporters who came along to see her present the entry.
• We’ve got better at organising these events.
• It was a beautiful night in Wanganui, calm and clear with the fresh snow of Mt Ruapehu glistening on the horizon – no rain or cold to dissuade people from venturing out.

Wanganui town in the 1850s

But the reason may be deeper – Wanganui is a region with a very long and dramatic history.

The river that defines the region was the main highway of Māori society. It’s lined with pa sites, and there are some amazing historic places such as Tamatea’s cave, where generations of Māori have slept as they paddled up or down the river.

Later, the port attracted the Wakefield settlers, but it was a precarious existence. For some 30 years after 1840 the town was the frontier of Māori–Pākehā conflict. The memorial at Pākaitore or Moutoa Gardens to the Battle of Moutoa in 1864, which was fought dramatically on an island in the centre of the river, was New Zealand’s first war memorial.

In the late 19th century, as farming expanded, Wanganui city prospered. The city is dotted with very handsome buildings such as the exquisite Opera House; and it was, until 1936, New Zealand’s fifth-largest city, after the four main centres. Then growth slowed, and in the 1980s and 1990s Wanganui city and district suffered from closures and loss of jobs.

The team that brought you the Wanganui entry

But today there has been a revival – based in part on presenting Wanganui as a region of history and tradition. Our launch was held in the War Memorial Hall, which, as our interactive shows, is one of an impressive centre of heritage buildings and institutions – the museum, the Sarjeant art gallery, the Alexandra Heritage and Research Library.

People turned out on Monday because they treasure their history and their region. They know that understanding their past and telling the stories of Wanganui’s history is central to the region’s future.

Michael Laws, the mayor of Wanganui, was effusive in welcoming the Wanganui entry. We share his hopes that these entries, presented by Diana Beaglehole with a real affection for the district, will awaken other New Zealanders to the richness of Wanganui’s past.

Memorial to the battle of Tūtūrau

This post is for the two wonderful women I met at the Otautau Museum last Thursday afternoon.

It was bitterly cold. I was trying to find the local sheep yards to take a photo. As I drove around the sleepy mid Southland town, I noticed the door of the local museum - once the court house - was ajar. I went in to ask where the yards were. Two women were just taking down an exhibition with some powerful photos of Otautau men going off to the Great War (the First World War). They were putting up an exhibition of lace and women’s work. They told me, to my embarrassment, that the yards had closed in the 1960s and there was not a trace to be seen. And one of the women, with a North American accent, who had been in Otautau for five years, said she knew about Te Ara - even read our blog. That made my day.

So this is a tribute to those Otautau women, and others like them, who have done such a great job in preserving history in Southland.

Everywhere I went I found that stories I had read in Te Ara were also being told in heritage trail plaques, murals, or stone monuments. They include, for example:

• Memorials to the battles between Māori. The last great battle between Ngāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu in the early 18th century is marked by a big stone boulder in the Five Rivers area. To recall the defeat of invaders from the north by Ngāi Tahu in 1836 there is a huge obelisk at Tūtūrau that records, as if it were an interisland football match, that this was ‘the last fight between North and South Island Maoris in which the Southerners were victorious’!
• Memorials to whalers, especially at Riverton where John Howell gets pride of place beside the Aparima River.
• A wonderful tribute to the large number of Scots settlers of Southland at Glencoe where a memorial recalls the Massacre of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands in 1692.
• A sad memorial in a deserted field to the 131 people who drowned in the wreck of the Tararua on Waipapa Point in 1881.
• A tribute to coal-mining history at Ōhai, where Solid Energy have set up a display of mining equipment beside the main road.
• And, of course, the province is thick with war memorials – some slightly heroic, like the handsome Boer War trooper on the main corner of Invercargill; others with long lines of the dead from the Great War such as the hugely impressive memorial at Otautau itself, which is surrounded by captured Turkish and German field guns. Unusually, many of the war memorials in Southland also record those who served as well as those who died.

Southlanders, it seemed, have long memories and are intent on ensuring that we shall not forget. We are in your debt.