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

As the Māori New Year rolls around, it’s time to celebrate Matariki once again.  As Matariki (the Pleiades) has re-appeared in the pre-dawn sky, it’s just a matter of waiting for the next new moon to begin the celebrations. This year Matariki celebrations kick off on 24 June.

I probably enjoy the revitalised traditions that go with Matariki more than finding the star cluster itself. Last year’s Matariki we got together as a whānau and ate traditional and not-so-traditional foods placed in kono (a small flax food basket ) woven by my daughters.  Nice food, warm fire, and inside.  On the other hand, the Matariki star-gazing show is beset by the twin problems of early mornings and freezing (ok, very cold) temperatures to deal with.  While my daughters are able to pick out the individual stars, I can only just make out a blurry shape, which is helped by looking at it slightly askance.

If you’re interested in early mornings and being very cold, then have a look at last year’s Matariki blog, which tells you how to find Matariki in the sky.

If you have an interesting story about how you - as an individual, whānau, family, organisation or tribe - have celebrated Matariki, we could be interested in incorporating it into our entry. You could send it to us, preferably with a photo, or leave a comment.

Album cover for 'Kaleidoscope world' by The Chills

This is New Zealand music month. We decided we should celebrate that fact by pointing out some of the Kiwi music to be found on Te Ara. I started looking and, to my consternation, found rather less than I would wish.

This isn’t because we’re all tone deaf and never attend gigs or enjoy music – if you were to walk into Te Ara’s office you’d see that about half of those hunched over computers are also wearing earphones, listening to music. Nor is it because the wonderful team that search out our photos and films and sounds have not looked hard enough for music – far from it.

Rather, it is because the cost of putting up clips of most New Zealand music is just too great. The Australasian Performing Rights Association (APRA) controls the licensing and collection of copyright fees for most New Zealand performers and song-writers; and their charges for use of most commercial music on a website is simply out of our league. This is not to criticise APRA – New Zealand musicians deserve recompense and few of them live in gilded palaces. But the effect is to exclude many fine songs from a site like ours.

So how have we coped with this dilemma? Not by making Te Ara silent, but by ingenuity. These are some of the ways we’ve got some really unusual Kiwi music onto Te Ara:

• We’ve asked others to sing for us. For instance, there is a fascinating sealer’s song that was recorded for us by the Bach Choir. It tells of some sealers abandoned for four years at Open Bay Island in Westland.

• We’ve made the most of our friendships. TrinityRoots were really kind to a Te Ara staff member and gave us a lovely piece from their album, Home, land and sea.

• We’ve been treated really generously by a number of record companies. Because of Festival Mushroom Records you can hear Split Enz perform ‘I see red‘. Kiwi Pacific Records have been really helpful and thanks to them, if religious music is your thing, you can a listen to Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral choir and the rather different but equally beautiful choir of the Samoan Congregational Christian Church in Grey Lynn. Another great Pacific sound came from Warm Earth Records, who allowed us to use Te Vaka in the entry on the Tokelauean community.

• We’ve found nice musical clips in television or radio programmes. Neither the decimal currency song nor Country Calendar’s musical fence are high art, but they are both worth a listen. Rather more serious and stirring is a waiata telling the story of the love between Kahungunu and Rongomaiwahine, which we found in the television archives. And in the Radio New Zealand Sound Archives our researchers tracked down the Ngāti Porou anthem, ‘Paikea’, Douglas Lilburn’s Drysdale Overture, and Ron Goodwin’s New Zealand suite.

• When we couldn’t get permission for the music, we’ve at least been able to show images of record covers (e.g. The Chills and, another Dunedin band, Straitjacket fits), photos of the singers in action (such as Bic Runga and Fat Freddy’s Drop and King Kapisi), or even the text of lyrics (see Peter Cape’s 1958 classic ‘Down the hall on a Saturday night‘).

All this is but a tiny portion of what we would like to have you hear, but it’s a start. Let’s finish with the song which an Encyclopedia of New Zealand simply had to have.

Te Ara’s latest regional entry was launched at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Friday, amidst a crowd of enthusiastic locals. Author Malcolm McKinnon takes you on a tour of the entry in his launch speech.

It’s usual in these circumstances to express one’s pleasure at being here, but this would be far from the truth – asked to write on Otago solely because of the accident of my names, I’m now asked to introduce that entry to a room full of Otago experts – museologists, archivists, politicians, lifetime Otago residents – good grief, there are even historians here. So I’ve taken precautions – I’ve invited all my Otago relatives – they’re distributed around the room, you won’t know who they are because, by lucky chance, they aren’t McKinnons. But they assure me – well they did – that they would ‘take care’ of anyone who was critical in any way of my efforts. And we’ve got a military tradition in our family so this is no joke. Though I’m flying out tomorrow, just to be on the safe side.

Otago's dramatic landscapes

That said, I’m in fact going to concentrate tonight not on my words but on Otago’s – your – images. And if there’s one justification for having an outsider do this it’s because these images, while of and by Otago, are not primarily for Otago. Such is the exhilarating nature of the web, even now someone in Dundee, Donetsk, Dalian or Dunedin, Florida – where when last I checked it was 29 degrees, dry and sunny – could be looking at the site.

Those images aren’t just pictures, if you know what I mean. Yes, Te Ara is an intellectual site, not a plaything, and challenges you with a variety of resources. And there’s an additional ‘trap for young players’ – the entry is in fact two entries – one which looks at the province as a whole and one – we call it amongst ourselves a gazetteer, although turns out no one under 25 knows what that means – that tours round the many places that make up the province.

Main entry

I start with the overview maps that allow you to match up topography, settlement, vegetation and landforms. And I’ll let you in on a secret here – we wrested back the upper Waitaki Valley for Otago. So if you’re wondering why the population gives an extra few thousand more than you expect – well that’s why.

From maps of the landscape to the landscape itself – what part of the country does it better? From the dramatic faulted landscape of central Otago, to the heights of Mt Aspiring, to the striking configuration of peninsula and harbour.

A key moment in Ngāi Tahu history in this part of the world was the signing of the deed of sale. You can ‘zoomify’ – is that a wonderful word or what? – to look at the detail, and there’s a translation as well. And while we’re talking about this toy, and moving on to the consequences of that sale, what about this map of the New Edinburgh block. Close up the peninsula and harbour, as in the photo we’ve just seen, are clear as anything.

And another map – because I have a liking for maps, but I promise this will be the last – a quixotic miner’s guide to the diggings from around 1863. And I can see you’re wondering about that thumbnail in the corner, so we’ll take a quick look at that too.

Well you don’t need me to tell you that gold helped make Dunedin and Otago rich and famous … and with it came rich and famous people. This Jewish family – the Hallensteins – are indelibly associated that era and were long afterward influential in Dunedin and indeed New Zealand life. The richness, even the exuberance, spilled over into the public building, and is there any building more exemplary of that than Dunedin railway station, and especially some of its stained glass. While, at the same time, we know that most people were not rich or famous, and maybe not even very exuberant, such as these women workers in 1921

Graphs are another way we test the intellect of our visitors, and this graph on town growth is interesting mostly because it reminds us that province’s towns did have a buoyant time in the decades after the Second World War, even if they weren’t growing quite as fast as their counterparts in the North Island. They were certainly growing a lot faster than remote Queenstown at the same time. That would all change of course, but here are some more mementos from those mid-century years: Joe Brown and his high stepping entertainers, and an interestingly multi-racial crowd outside Carisbrook, that temple to Otago rugby

I now move out of the era where I’ve been completely dependent on Erik Olssen’s History of Otago to the period where I’m only partially dependent on it – if only because the history is now a quarter century old! What about an update Erik?

And here’s one phenomenon of that last quarter century – well a little over in fact – Dunedin musicians, some of which feature on this double EP.

Gazetteer

Long lost relatives?

Now on to the gazetteer. As you can see from the index map, we cover the entire province and I’m going to dart around more or less in similar fashion, starting in the far north at Kurow, where Janine (our resources team leader) found these long lost relatives of mine.

On to Ōamaru, where this picture of bikes askew outside the town swimming pool gained poignancy from it being the pool where Janet Frame’s sister drowned, probably at a time not so far from when the photo was taken.

Skipping over many renowned towns, the new carvings at Puketeraki marae just south of Karitāne were worth a glimpse.

Then southwards to the peninsula and one of Otago’s most celebrated citizens – the albatross.

From living birds to dead bards: Thomas Bracken and a poem which my father could recite in full, ex tempore and unprompted. The northern cemetery, where he is buried, is a jewel in Dunedin’s crown.

And skipping through the rest of Dunedin and on to another family’s history, this time the Tsukigawa and particularly K. K. Tsukigawa, one of whose descendants is I believe here tonight.

And we don’t just have happy stories – the landscape and ecology of Otago is contested ground, and nowhere more so than in the Lammermoors, as this protest picture indicates, with an artist as renowned as the landscape he’s passionate about preserving

You may get the idea that this driving around looking at sights is fun – well not always and the Crown Range at midday in early September last year was no place for sunbathers.

Warbirds over Wānaka (click for video)

Whereas Warbirds over Wānaka had pulled in the crowds earlier in the year

That’s a quick survey folks but it’s all there for you to sample at your leisure and it’s free for the price of a broadband connection.

I’d like to thank those repositories – North Otago Museum, Early Settlers Museum, Hocken Library, South Otago museum – who were so enormously helpful, to Stephen Jaquiery of the Otago Daily Times and the many images – not to mention information – that we garnered from that estimable source, and many individuals throughout Dunedin and Otago who were hospitable, friendly and informative to either me others in our team. Thank you all.

One of the great things about the web is the way that it allows juxtapositions, allows you to play with time and place. If you ever thought Otago was unchanging – and I’m not sure that would ever have been true of anyone in this audience – think again. What on earth would Thomas Burns’ four daughters, photographed here around 1900, have found to say to Candy Box and Polly Petrie – photographed on the slopes of Coronet Peak around 2006 – if they’d chanced to meet?

My grandfather Toivo as a young man (click for full image)

Toivo Pärssinen (1911–2007), my Finnish grandfather, fought in two little-known wars (in New Zealand at least) within the Second World War – the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944). I am named after Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, who led the Finnish forces (he had a great moustache). Russia was the ’sleeping bear’ and whoever was Russia’s enemy was Finland’s ally. This proved to be Germany, once Hitler broke the non-agression pact with Russia in 1941.

During the wars Toivo (which means ‘hope’ in Finnish) was a cornet and later cavalry captain. In the summer of 1945, at the end of the fighting, my grandmother Saima was pregnant and had two children under six. The army flipped a coin. He lost, so he was sent to clear mines in Lapland – departing SS troops had razed the town of Rovaniemi and laid mines. Toivo’s eyebrows got burnt when his best friend stood on a mine. They picked his remains out of the trees.

Toivo's cavalry funeral in 2007 (click for full image)

Toivo did not talk much about the war, but he had a small map on his bedside wall of a horseshoe-shaped lake where he grew up in Karelia. At the end of the war Russia took a large chunk of eastern Finland as war reparations. The Finnish army burnt the Karelian farmhouses as they withdrew. By war’s end Toivo was something of a pacifist but, as he said, ‘if you don’t shoot them they’ll shoot you’. He was pensioned in 1959 and enjoyed a long retirement. If the Finns hadn’t resisted the Soviet invasion they would have ended up like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – behind the Iron Curtain. Finland’s war experience is chronicled in the novel The unknown soldier by Vaino Linna, which has been translated into English. The book is anti-war.

My New Zealand grandfather, Frank Walrond, ran a stamp shop in Auckland’s Queen Street. During the Second World War he trained soldiers before they went overseas, so he saw no active service. Technically, Frank and Toivo were enemies at times and allies at others. The war was messy and complicated – there were all sorts of dirty little wars, land grabs and attempts to settle old scores. Toivo’s friend died from a German landmine and many of his brothers-in-arms, and his brother in-law, died by Russian fire.

A vodka bottle carved by my great uncle in the trenches (click for full image)

So, on New Zealand and Australia’s day of remembrance, ANZAC Day, I thought of Toivo and my great-uncles who were wounded, and I remembered Saima’s only brother, who died fighting for German forces against the Russians in ‘White Russia’ (Belarus). His last word was ‘aiti’ (mother). A small corner of a Belarusian field is forever Finnish.

New Zealand as a young British lion

On Saturday thousands of New Zealanders will get up in the autumn cold to attend dawn services and hear speakers describe Gallipoli as the birth of New Zealand nationhood. It is worth asking whether this was actually the case.

On the surface it seems an incredible claim:

• Most countries looking for the origins of a nation would choose a glorious victory; Gallipoli was an ignominious defeat.
• Gallipoli was not a battle at home, or even close to home, but in a part of the world that New Zealanders knew, and still know, little about.
• In the context of the First World War, Gallipoli was a minor sideshow to the major action on the Western Front. Only 8,566 New Zealanders served there – a small proportion of the 100,000 who went overseas. While 2,721 New Zealanders died on that rocky shore, that is less than a sixth of the 18,000 who died in the war, and small by comparison with the horrifying losses in France and Flanders.
• Even in the Gallipoli battle, the Anzac sector was not the major focus of the British effort – it was a diversion from the main effort at the foot of the peninsula.
• The New Zealanders went to Turkey under the orders of the mother country; they fought in a division which was predominantly Australian; and their commanding officer, Sir Alexander Godley, was a Pom
• The landing that is remembered at dawn on 25 April was very much an Australian affair. Most Kiwis did not reach shore until the afternoon.
• Knowledge of the Gallipoli campaign back here did not come from New Zealand reports, but through the congratulations of the British – such as the King, reporter Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, or poet John Masefield, who spoke of the Anzacs as ‘the flower of the world’s manhood’.
• In the long term, the effect of Gallipoli on New Zealand attitudes was to strengthen, not weaken, a sense of devotion to the British Empire. On about 500 First World War memorials, which I have examined, the word ‘New Zealand’ appears on just 3, the word ‘Empire’ on 31.

However, there are two ways in which Gallipoli can be said to be the birthplace of the New Zealand nation:

• In 1915 New Zealanders at home thought of themselves as irrevocably part of the British Empire. Their sense of nationhood was always as the ‘best of British’ – the most loyal, courageous and capable people in the empire. Gallipoli could then be seen as the birthplace of New Zealand as a fully fledged member of the imperial family.
• Among the soldiers themselves the experience of fighting alongside the British and the Australians led to a revolution in attitudes. When they landed in Egypt in December 1914, Kiwi soldiers were keen to present themselves as gentlemen like the British and quite unlike those rough colonial uncouth Aussies. But after months at Gallipoli they began to grumble about the class snobbery and sheer inefficiency of the British and to praise their brothers from across the Tasman. There was also a growing pride in the stickability and can-do attitude of their fellow countrymen. They developed a stronger sense of New Zealanders as a people very different from their imperial overlords.

However, when the New Zealand soldiers returned, this second sense of independent nationalism was submerged by the loud trumpetings of people at home, proud to identify New Zealand with the first, imperial, sense of New Zealand nationhood.

It will be fascinating to listen to the sentiments this Saturday and discover which view of New Zealand nationhood is most often expressed.