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

Wine and cheese evening (click for image credit)

Does alcohol mean good fellowship and heavenly tastes, or is it a route to poverty and despair? Is gambling just the excitement of a flutter at the races, or an addiction which can become a ruinous burden? Are recreational drugs a harmless way to see life differently, or poisons which befuddle the mind and eventually kill the body? Is it always ‘time for a Capstan’; or is smoking the country’s greatest killer?

If there is one lesson that emerges from the five new stories we have just released, it is that one person’s pleasure is another person’s vice.

The history of alcohol, drugs, gambling and smoking which are told in these entries, along with a fifth entry that examines the Māori experience, is a fascinating story of changing perceptions and judgements. What were once innocent pleasures to some became addictive vices for others. Take alcohol. In the early 19th century most UK immigrants regarded alcohol as an essential food and a way of relaxing from a tough physical life. They normally drank spirits – brandy and rum, not the beer they were used to at home – but drink they did, unashamedly. In the 19th century it was only in the Māori community that alcohol was initially regarded as waipiro (foul water) and something to be avoided. However, by the end of the century public perceptions had changed. A powerful prohibition movement had emerged and the struggle between drink as pleasure and drink as vice led eventually to that strange Kiwi compromise, six o’clock closing. Eventually from the 1960s restrictions were lifted. Surely we had grown up and overcome the vicious social and personal impacts of alcohol – or so we thought until the sight of teenagers pre-loading with RTDs and then vomiting on sidewalks sparked a new perception of alcohol as vice.

Smoking has a different story. In colonial New Zealand it was fine for Pākehā men to puff away on their pipes, but not for Pākehā women. Māori made no such distinction. From the earliest times, kuia as well as kaumātua were smokers. In the first half of the 20th century, as cigarettes replaced the pipe, smoking became regarded as a universal pleasure – ‘Whatever the occasion’, as Players said. By the 1950s three-quarters of all men and a third of all women smoked. Then medical discoveries provided a new perspective, setting in motion a war on smoking as the worst of vices. Today a small minority, under a fifth of adults, smoke – although the figure is much higher among Māori women.

The drug story is also a fascinating study of changing perceptions. In the 19th century cannabis and opium were freely available, usually consumed as patent medicines – laudanum for middle-class women, Chlorodyne for the kids. The main recreational users were Chinese gold miners, but in one of the most remarkable acts of self-discipline in our history, the Chinese community petitioned to make opium illegal and succeeded in driving the addiction from their community. But New Zealand was slow in restricting drugs – cannabis was not restricted until the 1920s, and we had one of the world’s highest rates of heroin use in the 1940s. Then, just as the counter-culture began to discover dope and LSD in the late 1960s, others began to see these as dangerous vices which needed repressing. Today we have an unusual pattern – high use of cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines, low use of heroin and cocaine – with some in the community arguing that it is time that drugs were no longer treated as vices at all.

As for gambling, here too there have been contrasts in attitude. In the early 20th century there were restrictions on bookmakers and lotteries. Then the state came in and saw gambling as a source of revenue and fun. The government, it was felt, could keep a kind of six-o’clock-closing balance between vice and pleasure. But the revenue and tourism possibilities became stronger, restrictions were eased, and now with New Zealanders spending over $30 million each week on a flutter, new perceptions of gambling have emerged. The pokies, especially, are viewed by some as a vicious industry which hurts the poor and the vulnerable.

Te Ara cannot give the final word on these matters. We have no doubt that perceptions of pleasure and of vice in these matters will continue to evolve. But for now enjoy these entries, and think about where you stand. Which are the real vices, which the innocent pleasures?

War memorial, Lawrence (click for image credit)

As Anzac Day approaches it is easy to become overwhelmed with a sense of the First World War as a huge cataclysm which crushed all in its path.  We read about the scale of the casualties – almost 10 million deaths in battle, over 1 million among the soldiers of the British Empire alone. Bringing it back home we remember the over 18,000 New Zealanders who died – about 5% of the eligible men – and the almost 50,000 wounded.

And if you go to small-town New Zealand and look at the names on the war memorial you confront directly at a local level the scale of the loss. In 1914 the population of Lawrence in Otago was under 1,000 people, yet there are 84 names spelled out on its beautiful memorial.  And even as we contemplate the severity of that loss, we need to be reminded, as a graph in our First World War story tells us, that New Zealand’s level of deaths was small by comparison with Scotland’s or Serbia’s or Turkey’s.

But it is important that we get beyond the figures and the collective impact of the war. For each of those names on the Lawrence memorial was an individual soldier, a person with a mother, a father, siblings, perhaps a lover, and many close friends. And although the war was a machine which gobbled up ‘manpower’, all who participated, and even those who did not do so directly, had their own particular Great War. When we get down to that personal level, the emotional cost of the war, the tragedy and the trauma and for some the joy of returning home, become more meaningful and human, and in many ways easier to contemplate.

It is with this in mind that as the centenary of the First World War approaches, we are setting out to tell a few stories of ordinary Kiwis caught up in the global conflict. We have begun with one story, of George Bollinger, which can be found in our First World War entry. Bollinger was of German background, but he was also a typical young Edwardian New Zealander, a bank clerk who played rugby, and a passionate believer in the British Empire, which led him to volunteer within nine days of the declaration of war. He went off to Gallipoli, and quickly realised that fighting Turks on a steep hillside was very different from the glorious adventure he had anticipated, but stuck it out bravely amid the stench and the flies and the deaths of mates. While he was at Gallipoli the Anti-German League discovered his presence and wrote to the government complaining about a German traitor in the front line. I will leave you to find out about the tragic denouement to his story. The point here is that his was just one person’s war with its own twists and turns; and it is partly by living through that individual experience that we can capture the real human cost of the conflict.

With this in mind we are beginning to prepare more of these individual stories from the Great War – not only of men at the front, but of mothers at home, of deserters and dissenters and critics, of brave people and frightened people, of those who served in Turkey, in the muddy trenches of France, in the burning deserts of Palestine, or in offices and homes back here. It is our hope that through these personal stories, we will be able to comprehend rather better the meaning of that war.

Look forward to these ‘war stories’ over the next year. But for this Anzac Day it is worth setting aside the numbers and the sheer awful scale of the conflict and finding out about just one person and their war. In the end the tragedy which we remember in Anzac Day is not just a global event or a national coming of age. It is a set of individual tragedies.

The Wahine disaster – front-page news

Today marks 45 years since that big storm – or rather two big storms – hit Wellington and the good ship Wahine sank. No-one who was in Wellington that day can ever forget the grim mood that enveloped the city on the evening after the storm had subsided and we knew that lives had been lost. But if you weren’t there, or are younger than 45, then how do we evoke the memory of that terrible few hours?

The conventional way to do it is through a macro approach. We can talk about the two weather systems that collided over Wellington, the fierce winds and the huge seas; we can describe the Wahine going on the rocks and eventually keeling over with the loss of 51 lives. In Te Ara we tell this story, and provide the full context. Our Shipwrecks entry has a good factual account of the sinking. It includes dramatic footage of the ship listing rapidly and eventually settling on its side, and there is a nice Roadside Story about Cook Strait and its many dangers. The entry also locates the Wahine within the long sad history of New Zealand shipwrecks. The Weather entry helps set the storm in its wider context, as does the climate section of our entry on Wellington. The Wellington entry even has a clever ’still life’ image of the grim news which greeted Wellingtonians at breakfast the morning after the disaster.

But there is another way to evoke these events, and that is through the personal account. The macro approach gives the larger picture. But if you really want to understand what the impact of the storm and the sinking were, then you must listen to individual voices. And for such voices Te Ara also has rich material. Some 10 years ago we invited people to send us stories about disasters and how they had experienced them. Not surprisingly, a number of accounts focused on Wahine Day. They remain gripping reading. What they illustrate particularly is how that day 45 years ago brought trauma and fear to many people on land. It did not just affect those thrown into the water in Wellington Harbour. Here are some of those accounts:

• Stuart Young lived in the ‘last house on the south coast of the North Island’, in Wellington’s Breaker Bay. He describes ‘quite a day’ as he battled to keep the roofing iron on his house while watching the Wahine also battling for survival.
• In a powerful story John Laker tells of his house in Kingston being ripped apart. To add insult to injury, while he and his wife were sheltering in Wellington town hall, people came and scavenged the food from their fridge.
• Bob Maysmor describes being in the last car through to Eastbourne the night before Wahine day, and combing the coasts the next day for bodies.
• Brian Hollis writes of how there was ‘nowhere to hide’ as he tried to get out of his car in Kent Terrace that morning.

Over the next few years New Zealanders will try to evoke the memory and come to grips with the meaning of another anniversary, the First World War. If the Wahine anniversary is any guide, then it is the personal account, the touching human drama, not the high-level account or bald figures of death and casualties, which will bring the impact home.

Some iconic Kiwi fare

If so, then enjoy the fare we serve up with our four latest stories. To enjoy the whole feast follow the sequence – from Food to Cooking to Eating, and then, if you are lucky, to eating outside at Picnics and barbecues.

Together the stories tell a rich account of the diverse rituals and tastes which have graced our national table. The extent of change is striking.

Take the first entry on Food: Māori, the first people to inhabit these lands, largely lived off the bush and the sea. Birds, fish and fern root were their staple diet. Kūmara was really their only important introduced food. The British settlers, however, turned their backs on bush and sea. Instead they transformed the land into an English farm which might produce the foods they had enjoyed, or rather aspired to, at home – mutton and beef (three times a day was the proud colonial claim) accompanied by traditional veggies such as cabbage, carrots and onions. Fish was regarded as poor man’s food; crayfish, so the entry tells us, was considered good only for drunkards.

Then after the Second World War things changed. Overseas travel, television cooking shows, an urban culture and immigrants from different societies brought about a revolution. New Zealanders began to realise that they were an island where fish were bountiful and of good quality; and that their climate was more Mediterranean than North Sea. They began to grow and eat eggplant, capsicums, zucchini and avocados. Asian migrants introduced tastes for bok choy and lemongrass. White bread was replaced with grainy brown.

Cooking also saw dramatic change over time, affected in the first instance by technology. For both Māori and early Pākehā, most food was cooked outside – in a hāngī or over an open fire. The introduction of Shacklock’s coal range in the 1870s was a revolution which made possible the famous scones and baking that expressed the culinary creativity of the colonial housewife. Gas stoves and then electrical ones added to the baking repertoire and facilitated New Zealand’s (Australians please note!) invention of pavlova in the 1920s. But cooking of meats and vegetables showed little refinement up to the 1970s. In 1953, so the Cooking entry tells us, Eric Linklater described the way New Zealanders treated their famous hogget: it ‘appeared to have been killed by a bomb and the fragments of its carcase incinerated in the resulting fire.’ But if Linklater were to return half a century later he would not recognise the ingenuity and energy that New Zealanders, both men and women, spend on creating culinary masterpieces as they aspire to become television masterchefs.

Eating too has seen significant change. The midday meal, which until the 1940s was the big feed of the day, has fallen out of favour, including the big Sunday roast lunch. Eating out and takeaways have become far more common. Picnics remain an important ritual for New Zealanders, but they are no longer the huge community occasions that they were up to the 1930s. Now they more often happen as part of a family outing. Barbecues, complete with huge metal gas-fired equipment, are a more recent development.

What has not changed is the centrality of food and the rituals of its consumption to patterns of hospitality and celebration. From the Māori hākari or feast, to the birthday or Christmas dinner, New Zealanders have always enjoyed breaking bread with their fellow human beings. So fill your glasses and enjoy the feast of the four new entries which we lay before you. Cheers!

Fred Flutey in his pāua-shell house (click for image credit)

Today we release two new stories – Collecting and Furniture – which together provide a fascinating study of New Zealand’s cultural relationships with the outside world. They invite the question, ‘Are we no more than Europe’s most distant outpost?’

As author Richard Wolfe explains, the initial collecting impulse in this country came from European explorers who were interested in showing off the wonders of a strange new world to collectors and savants at home. So James Cook and his crew collected plants and Māori crafts and sent them to European museums. In the early 19th century there was a huge trade in moa bones, which were sent to naturalist collectors across the seas.

Then the flow began to reverse. Prominent New Zealanders began to put together collections which might remind their fellow colonials of the wonders of European civilisation. George Grey gave his collection of medieval manuscripts to the Auckland Public Library. Ronald and Zillah Castle put together a remarkable collection of musical instruments, mostly of a European origin. And of course people with money throughout New Zealand collected antique furniture, mostly from Britain, as a reminder of a more genteel civilisation across the globe.

Collecting was not always just nostalgia for ‘home’. Inevitably people began to collect distinctly New Zealand things – those two great bibliophiles Thomas Hocken and Alexander Turnbull both centred their collections on this part of the world. In the 20th century many Kiwis began to invest in local art or, at a different level, in Kiwiana from buzzy bees to Crown Lynn pottery. But inevitably the exotic and the foreign, whether Middle Eastern rugs or American records, remained always attractive items of collecting.

The Furniture story equally explores the interchange of New Zealand and the wider world. From the very start of European settlement there were local furniture makers using local woods. But what is striking is how they drew on international styles, such as art nouveau and art deco. There was a constant echo in New Zealand homes of the styles that had flowered in London, Paris or New York a few years before. And they had to compete continually with the import of furniture from across the seas.

It would be wrong to draw from this a lesson that New Zealand was just a subservient colonial offshoot. Rather, New Zealanders have always been in touch with foreign influences and trade, and have tried to keep up with new ideas and influences. We have been in constant communication with collectors, museums, fashion designers and stylists. This something to admire – it kept us moving and kept a small society thinking. The histories of collecting and furniture in this country reflect our willingness to take from the larger world in order to give us a sense of being at home.