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

Lord Howe Island skink – probably unaware that it has just switched genus

Getting it right is a major expectation of Te Ara. But sometimes it’s not us, but our committed users, who put us right. Their emails can take us on fascinating journeys in the pursuit of truth. Recently we had three interesting examples.

The week began when Geoff Patterson wrote in to say that his colleague Dr David Chapple had determined in a recently published research paper that there was only one skink genus (Oligosoma), not two as we claimed in our lizards entry. So I sent this off to the author, Kerry-Jayne Wilson, who read the paper and agreed. Going to change the entry, I found it a little more difficult than I had imagined. The entry stated that of the two skink genera, one was endemic to New Zealand but the other had relatives only on Lord Howe and Norfolk islands (and we had a nice image of the Lord Howe cousin). So I was left wondering whether the Lord Howe Islander was also part of this expanded skink genus, or not. So back to Kerry-Jayne, who confirmed that it was indeed.

A couple of days later a representative of Ngāti Kuia wrote in to say that in the dolphins entry we had incorrectly named the dolphin which accompanied Hinepoupou on her legendary 80-kilometre swim from Kapiti to Rangitoto (D’Urville Island). He pointed out that Hinepoupou was from Ngāti Kuia and they believed the dolphin was called Kaikaiawaro, while we had it as Kahurangi. This time I wrote to John and Hillary Mitchell, who wrote the entry on Te Tau Ihu (the tribes at the north of the South Island). The Mitchells confirmed that Ngāti Kuia’s accepted name for the dolphin was Kaikaiawaro, but that kaumātua of other iwi in the area agreed the name was Kahurangi. So we changed the entry to acknowledge both traditions. Interestingly, it was not only the dolphins entry which needed changing. The open water swimming entry also had the story of Hinepoupou and Kahurangi/Kaikaiawaro (so we updated that too).

The third letter came in from Stephen King, whom I quickly recognised as the famous person who sat on top of the tōtara tree in Pureora Forest in 1978 as a protest against clear-felling. Stephen, now the forest ecologist at Waipoua Forest, asked us to change the reference to toatoa from being common in northern forests to being rare in Northland. He said that at Waipoua the species was found only on one ridge, and he was concerned that people collected bark from the trees for dye. It was important to get the facts right to dissuade people from unnecessary collection. Again, I referred the comment to the original author, in this case Maggy Wassilieff, who noted that she confined the use of the term ‘rare’ to those species that appeared on the published list of ‘Threatened and uncommon plants in New Zealand’. But she accepted that it was indeed not often found in Northland, so we made an appropriate change.

It’s great that our users want to see us get these things right. It shows they care and it is a huge help to us. The job does not stop - just one day after a new law came in banning the use of cell phones while driving, I received an email telling us that we say New Zealand is one of the few developed countries that has not banned cell phones when driving. So, the corrections, and keeping Te Ara up-to-date, continue.

New Zealand has more to offer than just the oval ball

Wednesday 9 September marks two years until the kick-off of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. The event provides a huge opportunity for New Zealanders to impress on an overseas audience that while we may (or may not!) be good at playing with the oval ball, our country also has a rich history and culture.

Some 70,000 visitors are expected and rugby supporters from other parts of the world are generally well-educated well-heeled people. During the 44 days of the cup they will be looking for enjoyments beyond the games for themselves and their partners.

So the Ministry for Culture and Heritage is working with the New Zealand 2011 office to encourage a creative and multi-faceted festival alongside the World Cup. Our websites will also work together to present an exciting range of material for visiting rugby fans.

NZHistory.net.nz

NZHistory.net.nz will become the key resource for people who are interested in the story of rugby in New Zealand. The site already has three excellent web exhibitions on rugby:

• A fascinating account of the New Zealand Natives’ tour of 1888–89, in which the team’s 21 Māori and five Pākehā members played a staggering 107 matches in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, and won 78. They also played eight games of Australian rules and two of soccer. The essay includes images of perhaps the first rugby haka and the first rugby use of the silver fern.
• An account of the traumatic Springbok tour of 1981, with some excellent television clips.
• The story of the 1987 Rugby World Cup, featuring, of course, the famous image of David Kirk kissing the cup.

Rugby enthusiasts should also not miss a sound recording of Winston McCarthy (‘Listen, it’s a goal’) describing the 1956 All Black–Springbok match. Since his departure, rugby has never been quite the same.

NZLive.com

Visitors wanting interesting suggestions as to what to do between games will find NZLive.com the essential guide. For someone who is hoping to be in Nelson on 20 September 2011 to watch Italy play, the site already has 36 things to do, which range from Lillia’s Lace Museum to the World of Wearable Art Museum.

NZLive.com also has feature articles about matters of interest to rugby fans, including:

• a short history of Eden Park, once a lake called Cabbage Tree Swamp and now the site of the cup finals
• a preview of the Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, featuring 100 life-sized images of rugby players.

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Te Ara will be offering visitors a number of resources:

• The Places entries will provide in-depth guides about the history, geography and culture of the different regions of New Zealand for anyone visiting the country.
• The entries about New Zealand Peoples will give interesting stories about some of the people who settled in New Zealand from the countries represented in the tournament. For example, when Scotland plays in Invercargill on the second match of the tournament, the visitors from the old country can find out in the Scots entry about their compatriots who settled the far south.
• Other entries will enrich people’s understanding of the places they visit. When on 18 September, the French play Canada at Napier, visitors can learn about the story of the French and the Canadians in New Zealand, and they can learn all about Napier and Hawke’s Bay. But they will also be encouraged to learn about the gannets they can see down at Cape Kidnappers, or the 1931 earthquake, which transformed the landscape around them.

Exactly how we pull all this together into one easy way for visitors is our challenge – a geo-portal is one obvious solution. But what is certain is that NZLive.com, NZHistory.net.nz and Te Ara believe that together they have much to offer in presenting New Zealand to the world. We look forward to the challenge.

This post is cross-posted on Lively.

Before you folks in Auckland and Wellington get your pens poised to continue slugging it out as to who has more galleries and plays and general sophistication, let me say that this post is not about your fair cities but about Hawke’s Bay.  And it is not only about high culture either – it is rather drawing on the original meaning of the word which as the OED says means ‘cultivation or husbandry’. Culture in this sense is opposed to wild or uncultivated, and is found in such words as ‘agriculture’, ‘horticulture’ and ‘viticulture’.

After reading Kerryn Pollock’s wonderful new entries on Hawke’s Bay and attending the launch in Napier on Thursday, the overwhelming impression of the region is of a land radically transformed by human beings. Kerryn points out that only 6% of the land is now indigenous forest, the smallest proportion of any region in the country. The process began early – just look at our map of forest loss, and you will see that Māori settlers had cleared or burnt nearly all the forest of the region down to Dannevirke before Pākehā set foot in the area.

Once the Pākehā landed they set about transforming it further. Tussock was replaced by imported grasses, and large areas were fenced for sheep. Hawkes Bay, along with Canterbury, became the centre of large-scale pastoral farming. The best evidence of this today are the huge homesteads still to be found there. Other cultures quickly sprang up - as Kerryn explains, horticulture began with J. N. Williams’s  orchard in 1892. Twelve years later the first canning factory opened, the forerunner of James Wattie’s ‘tin can alley’. It’s worth clicking the interactive in Te Ara’s stonefruit entry to see how far Hawkes Bay still dominates the acreage of those fruits. Viticulture began very early with French Catholic missionaries bottling the first vintage in 1851 and it still has the second highest area in vines of any New Zealand region.

Other forms of cultivation also took place. The region is noted for its innovative architecture – not only the splendid art deco style which was the response to the destruction of the 1931 earthquake, but the James Chapman-Taylor Tudor-style houses before the quake and the John Scott churches and houses after the quake. And Hawke’s Bay is proud to have two amateur scientists, each in their way unique personalities, who were able to document the transformation of the land – Joan Wiffen who discovered dinosaur bones in the Mangahouanga Stream in the north of the Bay; and Herbert Guthrie-Smith whose Tutira, the story of his farm and the way it was transformed by the impact of European plants and animals has become a New Zealand classic.

So if you really want to look at how human beings have cultivated the land and erected a civilisation upon it, take a virtual visit to our two new entries on Hawke’s Bay – and then perhaps you might want to go to our cultural capital for real.

Conference participant, public law specialist Mai Chen

I have just returned from the most stimulating conference of my life. It was the Rising Dragons, Soaring Bananas conference held in Auckland over the past weekend. There were about 350 people there, mostly Chinese New Zealanders who had come to talk about and celebrate their New Zealand story. There was some history, with a magisterial address by James Ng on the discrimination suffered by the Chinese here, but for me it was the fascinating stories of contemporary New Zealand Chinese that were truly inspiring.

In one session entitled ‘High Flying Bananas’ four New Zealand Chinese told their stories of achievement in modern New Zealand. Mai Chen’s story began when she landed in Christchurch aged six. It was such an unwelcoming environment that on her first day, the sight of Mai and her three sisters walking together along the street to the botanic gardens led an astonished passing motorist to drive into the car in front which in turn bashed the next car. From that point Mai decided that discrimination would make her more determined; and she learned not to conform, but to treasure her difference, and make it count for her. As one of the country’s leading public law specialists the strategy has clearly worked.

Next up Don Ha described himself as very different from Mai – ‘neither good looking and without a university degree in sight’. Yet he is now one of Manukau’s most successful realtors and clearly a very rich man indeed. He arrived as a Chinese boy from Vietnam and spent his first few months in New Zealand in a refugee camp. He quickly learned how to survive in Auckland. One of his jobs was collecting watercress from the drains around Auckland, packaging it up and selling it to the New World supermarket. He earned $300 a week – which was fine until the council closed off the supply by spraying all the drains! He sold cars, had a stall in a flea market, worked in a bakery, and eventually set up his own real estate firm. He sold 86 houses in his first year – 98% of them to Pākehā buyers. Now he lives in a mansion where his bedroom is larger than his first house, buys race horses and sponsors the local rugby club.

If rags to riches was not your taste, then the session ‘Visually Chinese’ was certain to inspire. Five artists talked about how their Chinese experiences in New Zealand had shaped their art work. They ranged from street artist Peap Tarr, to brilliant architect Ron Sang, to graphic artist Liyen Chong – who drew using human hair. I especially liked the work of Susan Louie. Brought up on a market garden outside Gisborne, she now fashions in glass the vegetables her family grew in the fields.

And for us webbies there was also something. I tried, until the technology failed(!), to show off Te Ara’s immigrant stories, especially the wonderful piece on the Chinese by one of the conference organisers, Manying Ip. And the New Zealand Chinese Association and Auckland City Libraries launched their fabulous new site, Chinese Digital Community. This is a wholly community-built site, and the local Chinese have responded magnificently by uploading their precious images and telling their stories. Check it out.

At the banquet the former boss of New Zealand Post and new boss of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade, John Allen, spoke of how New Zealand needed Chinese New Zealanders precisely because their difference of perspective was a source of innovation and creativity. If the sheer exuberance and imagination on show at the conference is any guide, then New Zealand has a great future.

A fleece (AKA a dead sheep) as featured on New Zealand's coat of arms

This post was inspired, not by our fiercely cold winter, but by my discovery the other day that a considerable number of New Zealand coats of arms include woolly fleeces on them.

Coats of arms were designs on medieval shields to distinguish one knight from another – just like a sporting uniform. In time the coats became insignia for individuals and families, and the shield was usually enriched with a crest sitting above a helmet, motifs along the side (‘supporters’) and a motto underneath. Often these insignia became transferred to seals for use on documents, and the heralds in the College of Arms in London were given powers to grant individuals and institutions official coats of arms.

As a loyal colony, New Zealand began to adopt these strange medieval customs from the late 19th century. New Zealand itself got one in 1911, and so did quite a number of schools, universities and cities, not to mention businesses.

There are a host of heraldic conventions governing coats of arms, and they are described in language which is only accessible to cogniscenti. The city of Dunedin’s arms are described in the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand as ‘Arms: Argent above a Fess Dancette Vert, a Castle Triple-Towered Sable on a Rock issuing from the Fess, Masoned Argent, with Windows, Vanes and Portcullis Gules.’ Its ‘supporters’ are ‘On the dexter a Scotsman Habited with Philabeg and Plaid of the Clan Cameron, supporting in His Exterior Hand a Cromach…’ Get all that?

What struck me looking at these New Zealand insignia was the high number with sheep or fleeces. The 1911 New Zealand Coat of Arms includes, on the right (‘in the second quarter’ is the technical term), a hanging fleece of wool. So do the cities of Wellington and Christchurch. Dunedin makes do with ‘a Ram’s Head Affrontee Horned Or between Two Garbs’. The University of Canterbury has three golden fleeces. Even more revealingly, the leading economic institution of the country, the Reserve Bank, has a fleece separated out from a bull’s head by two crossed keys.

The woolly symbol expressed, of course, the enormous economic importance of wool to the country. For over a hundred years – from the mid-1850s to the mid-1960s – New Zealand lived on the sheep’s back.  During those years the grasslands of the east coasts of both islands became sheep kingdoms. In most years wool comprised well over 40% of the value of our exports. The only exception was the depression years of the 1930s. Shearing became central to our mythology, knitting woollen jerseys became a national pastime, and in Australia – no stranger to the beast – we became known as ‘sheep-shaggers’.

Shrek the sheep and his enormous fleece

Well, the days when wool was king are well and truly past. The decline began in the mid-1960s, when synthetics began to have an impact and the Wool Board purchased thousands of bales in a vain attempt to hold up the price. Wool dropped to around 20% of the value of our exports. Then the bottom really fell out of the market. By 2008 wool constituted just over 1.7% of our exports. We still get briefly bemused by Shrek with his enormous fleece, and both Hastings (with its flock of sheep) and Te Kuiti (with its shearer) find new civic symbols from their woolly pasts. But these are more tributes to history than to present economic realities.

The other day I drove from Christchurch to Geraldine and didn’t see a single sheep - they were hidden by the herds of dairy cows. Is it time perhaps to redesign our coats of arms (bungy jumpers or 747s might look good on a shield)? Or are we, perhaps, old enough and brave enough to do without coats of arms at all?