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

A haven for urban farmers – The Stricklaw Street community garden in Christchurch

Over the past few years or so I’ve noticed that urban people have become more interested in growing their own food than in the recent past. Vegetable and herb gardens, and to a lesser extent small fruit orchards, are cropping up in suburban sections again, and on council reserves and even city streets.

Personal food production is not new in New Zealand – in the past people had to grow their own food or perish. Traditional Māori communities spent a lot of time growing food, mainly introduced plants like kūmara (sweet potato) and later potatoes. Food production was a do-or-die task for early European settlers.

The vegetable plot became a typical feature of the suburban backyard. It’s part of the quarter-acre section romance. Most families were self-sufficient in this way until the 1950s. After this, increased use of pesticides and fertilisers by market gardens meant that it was cheaper and easier to buy produce than grow it yourself. Sections became smaller and busy urbanites were less inclined to maintain them. Have a look at Te Ara’s Gardens entry if you want more history.

What has changed? The rise of the contemporary urban farmer is part of wider interest in issues of environmental sustainability in the 2000s. People are starting to think about how they, as individuals and community members, can work towards feeding themselves rather than relying on national and international food distribution chains. Some are also pursuing an organic lifestyle free of pesticides.

Though commercially grown produce is plentiful and relatively cheap, increasing prices have pushed people back to the vegetable plot. Even apartment dwellers are cultivating tomatoes and lettuces in boxes on balconies. Councils have set aside land for community gardens. In Wellington, olive trees line the streets of inner-city Mt Victoria, and the olives are harvested for oil. At the moment there’s a petition on the Wellington City Council’s website asking the council to plant more food-bearing trees on reserves and roadsides. Many schools, urban as well as rural, have vegetable gardens cultivated by the kids.

It will be interesting to see whether the interest in urban food production is sustained – it is fad, fashion, or are urbanites in it for the long haul?

Local people – a hunt at Ōmarunui, in Hawke's Bay

Should the authors of Te Ara’s Places entries be locals?

Out of the 14 places entries up on the site so far, seven were written by people who were from that region, and seven by in-house writers with connections elsewhere. Having written the recently launched Hawke’s Bay entry from my desk in Wellington (with my roots in the rural settlement of Tauwhare near the Waikato town of Cambridge), this was something I often thought about. (An entry on Waikato is coming to Te Ara, via my colleague and former Hamiltonian Nancy Swarbrick, in 2010.)

One of the times authorship is discussed publicly is when these entries are launched. People – usually locals – often want to know if the author is also local. This is to be expected. Place informs an individual or community’s identity, and a strong attachment to birthplace or home town (whether long-standing or adopted) often follows. When something is written about your place you take notice, and perhaps go through the text with your fine-toothed comb in a way you might not if you went to Te Ara for a quick account of a cicada’s lifecycle or the seasonal stars in the night sky.

Obviously I concluded that an author didn’t have to be a local – if I hadn’t it would have been hard for me to write the thing. Rather, I decided that the most important requirements were those crucial to writing any Te Ara entry: thorough research, careful identification and analysis of the relevant issues, sensitive treatment of tricky or controversial topics, and rigorous in-house peer review further down the track. Specific to writing a good Places entry is contact with local people for information, getting good advice and reviews of the draft text, and paying the region a good, investigative visit.

It’s true that it would be very useful to have the existing knowledge of a local, but this can be accrued during the research process. The fact is, nobody – local or otherwise – can know all there is to know about a place without doing a lot of research. Though I spent the first 18 years of my life in Waikato, and go back regularly enough to retain my native status, I’d need to do the same amount of research as a non-local before I could write about it properly. And, while outsiders are often seen to be more impartial, a good local writer will not take sides or shy away from the tricky issues that often have to be written about in Places entries.

I don’t think that local status can be the final arbiter of whether a Places entry is authoritative. We’re not that parochial, are we? It’s the writing and the underlying research that counts. Local status is more like the icing on an already rich cake – but only if it’s made out of the right ingredients.

What do you think?

Art deco for the art deco fans

Recently I had the good fortune to visit Hawke’s Bay because I’m writing about this region for Te Ara’s ‘Places‘ theme. It wasn’t a research trip as such, rather an exploratory tour. When you’re studying a place, its people and environment, it’s essential to go there and experience it first hand – especially if you’re an outsider to the place, like I am. I can do a lot of research from Wellington, but I learned that personal observation is an important way of making the desk-based research process real.

One of the best things I did on my trip was spend some time exploring rural Hawke’s Bay. As art deco fans arrived in Napier, aboard their vintage cars, I left in my Toyota Corolla rental for the back blocks. I spent one day driving along the east coast, and another up the Taihape road, and then over to State Highway 5, stopping at the settlements along the way. I hardly saw another person during these two days, so I relied on personal observation as a way of gathering information.

On the way back down SH5 I saw a road heading towards the Maungaharuru Range marked by a heritage site sign, so I decided to head down it. I found myself going up hill and down dale along a winding, narrow gravel road, through forestry and farming country, and Department of Conservation reserves.

Road to nowhere?

My roadmap was pretty basic, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going. I prayed I wasn’t heading for a dead end (this happened the day before down the coast, when I mistook a four-wheel-drive track on the map for a road). I was a bit disconcerted to see regular signs warning me to watch out for logging trucks, but as it turned out I was the only person on the road that afternoon.

Though you’re never really that far from signs of human life in Hawke’s Bay, I was struck by the relative isolation of much of the region. The accounts I’d read about lonely farming wives and the back-breaking task of turning forested hill country into (often barely profitable) farms made complete sense. The gravel roads that populate the rural districts provide a tangible link to these past lives, and still makes a trip to town for some farming families (and visiting writers) a moderate expedition in 2009.

The signpost to civilisation

I was very pleased when I came across the squiggle on the map that was the road out of the ranges and down to Tutira on State Highway 2. By this stage the shearing shed and flock of sheep I drove past was a welcome sign of civilisation.

I never did come across that heritage site. But I saw and learned enough during my drive along this road, and others like it, to make my expeditions worthwhile.

Branding Wellington

We live in branded world, and unless we choose to remove ourselves to a cave on Wellington’s rocky coastline, as one chap has done, it’s hard to avoid absorbing its messages.

These days even local councils have got in on the act, and the brand-free town or city is a rare one. I’ve been thoroughly diverted by the range of regional slogans I’ve come across when writing an entry on city boosters and promoters for Te Ara’s Economy, Business and City Life theme (due to go live in late 2009).

Cooked up by advertising types, these slogans can reveal a lot about a place’s sense of itself, though not always in the way the creators intended.

There are many choice examples to choose from. My favourite from the mixed-messages category is Dunedin’s old slogan ‘It’s all right here’ – fairly presentable when read correctly, but too vulnerable to the alternative interpretation, ‘It’s alright here’.

A close second is Hamilton’s discarded tag ‘More than you’d expect’, which went out of its way to highlight the low expectations the rest of the nation seems have about this city. Hamilton provides a case study on how not to brand a city, but you’ll have to read the entry for more on that.

Some slogans are just plain weird, and you have to wonder what kind of refreshments their creators were enjoying during the brainstorming session. Timaru was inflicted with ‘Touch, taste, feel’ for a couple of years, and this has now been replaced by ‘Feel the heartbeat’. Timaru must be a tactile kind of place.

And how about ‘Stop and taste Te Puke’? This slogan made it into Lonely Planet’s Signspotting 2, and in their ignorance (or perhaps on purpose) the authors of this book mistook the Bay of Plenty town’s name for the colloquial version of vomit. With a slogan like that who can blame them?

It’s a perilous business coming up with a slogan, and I’m surprised more councils haven’t chosen to steer clear of them, as Hamilton recently has. Still, they have provided this researcher with a great deal of entertainment. I’ll leave you with a few more crackers, past and present.

Dannevirke: ‘Take a liking to a Viking’

Mayfield (near Ashburton): ‘Blink and you will miss out’

Matamata: ‘You matter in Matamata’