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

NIWA – the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research – has just released the monthly climate summary for May 2011. Climate data indicates that the average monthly temperature was 12.9°C, which is 2.2°C higher than the 1971–2000 May average temperature and the highest since reliable records were first compiled in 1909. A difference of 2.2°C is a lot.

May was also wet in some places and dry in others. Nelson and the north-west South Island experienced 2.5–3.5 times the normal rainfall and many parts of the North Island received far more rain they ordinarily would. By contrast, southern Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, Banks Peninsula and Fiordland received less rain than usual.

The warmth and wet were caused by predominating north-westerly winds. Auckland’s deadly tornado at the start of the month occurred when this warm air came up against colder air during a storm.

Kōwhai blossoms are meant to herald the beginning of spring

Prior to NIWA releasing this information about May temperatures I observed some unexpected changes in my garden. Firstly, I noticed my young kōwhai tree had sprouted its first ever flower pods. This was probably in late April or early May, and it’s now flowering. Then, last weekend I discovered some daffodil bulbs had sent up shoots and that my beautifully scented daphne had started to flower.

This was all very nice, but rather surprising and a little strange. I associate all these changes with spring, not the end of autumn – perhaps winter at the earliest for daphne. I’ve since learned that kōwhai flowering is staggered between July and November so the trees do not compete for birds, which is very ingenious. But May is not July, and I’m sure my bulbs would not ordinarily have poked their shoots up this early.

I think awareness of climate change made me think about these changes in more detail, notwithstanding the fact that it’s not possible to say there’s a connection between climate change and May’s record average temperature. They felt odd – my feeling was ‘but it’s too early for you all to appear!’

When I heard May was so warm these changes started to make sense. The average temperature at Wellington Airport for May was 14.2°C, 2°C higher than normal and the highest since records were first taken there in 1962. In Kelburn, a suburb near the CBD, the average temperature was 13.7°C–2.2°C higher than normal and the highest since records began in 1928.

Has this unseasonably warm month tricked my plants into flowering early and will the colder winter months fell my blooms untimely? Have you noticed any environmental changes or phenomena which you can now relate to this warmth? This could even extend to people – I saw some wearing t-shirts and shorts in  Wellington recently. It wasn’t that warm!

Recently I spent a week in the King Country on a field trip because I’m writing the Places entry on this region for Te Ara. Published sources tell us so much – but only so much. Knowing the lie of the land solidifies research and provides new insights.

Some time before I left Wellington, I had browsed artist Peter McIntyre’s illustrated book New Zealand (1964). He included some King Country scenes, including the ‘village’ in which his holiday home was located. McIntyre didn’t give its name and his Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry didn’t record it either. I noted this as something to find out later.

South of Taumarunui I turned off State Highway 4 and headed towards Kākahi, which was only a name on a map to me then. The road from the highway heads down rolling hills. The farmland is pleasantly wooded and my travelling companion said it reminded him of a Capability Brown landscape – this may sound very peculiar, but it did have a park-like air to it.

Kākahi itself is no English village. It’s a very New Zealand little place, with one main street lined with a small group of old wooden shops and a town hall. On a side road we noticed and photographed an unusual old building – unusual because the weatherboards were placed horizontally on one part and vertically on another. No one was around, quietness ruled. The whole place felt quite special and I remembered it better than many of the other places I visited.

Kākahi in 2011

When I got back to Wellington I followed up Peter McIntyre for my section on the arts and culture of the region. I re-read his 1964 description of his village and the surrounding landscape, and his words felt familiar. I noted that he’d painted mounts Ruapehu and Ngāuruhoe. I scrutinised his painting of the main street. That looked even more familiar. I thought to myself ‘I bet his village is Kākahi’. I soon found out that McIntyre published a book called Kakahi in 1972. He’d even painted the unusual building – a blacksmith’s workshop – and included it in this book.

Mid-way through my King Country visit I wrote ‘King Country is made of hills, rocks, old derelict houses and wild goats’ on my facebook page. McIntyre ended Kakahi with a plate of an empty cottage and wrote ‘old abandoned houses like this are almost a symbol of the King Country, gazing with the sightless stare of empty windows to hills rising above the winter mornings.’ He even sketched a billy goat with great horns, noting that ‘wild goats are another feature of the riverside and bush. All sizes and colours, they come down to the river to drink and then toward evening they can be seen grazing their way up through the clearings.’ I think Peter McIntyre was with me on that journey, even if I didn’t realise it at the time.

Urban and rural populations, 1891–1976 – one of many Te Ara graphs sourced from census results

Tuesday 8 March 2011 was the day on which all New Zealanders were supposed to be counted and many aspects of their life circumstances recorded. Two weeks before this, on 22 February, the magnitude 6.3 Christchurch earthquake struck. One of the more unexpected outcomes of this destructive and tragic event was the cancellation of the census.

Statistics New Zealand showed admirable compassion in cancelling the census. That families in mourning would have had to record one less person on their census form so soon after their loss, had the census proceeded, seems cruel.

Carrying out census work would have been difficult and the data gathered problematic. Both Statistics New Zealand buildings in Christchurch were damaged, and one is within the cordon. Tens of thousands of people have left the quake-stricken zone. Filling in census forms would have been one of the last things on Cantabrians’ minds. Mapping people’s usual residence patterns, a census benchmark, would have been seriously compromised.

Statistics New Zealand would not have made this decision lightly. Central and local government, businesses, academics and other researchers use census data to track myriad trends, and to plan for the future. Regularly collected population data illuminates historical research projects and informs a diverse range of important issues, including:

• electoral boundaries
• the school decile system
• the New Zealand deprivation index
• district health board funding.

The census is a data touchstone – it provides a critical baseline for those who decide how resources are allocated. It also informs other Statistics New Zealand work. Census data provides the spatial information required to update sampling units which other surveys, such as the Household Labour Force Survey, draw from. The disability survey is also run off the census. New Zealand is undergoing huge changes in internal and external migration, and home ownership and renting patterns, which census data charts. The 2011 census would have illuminated the effects of the current economic crisis.

Researchers outside Statistics New Zealand also use census data. As the name suggests, the ground-breaking University of Otago Census-Mortality study, which documents the links between socio-economic position, ethnicity and other social factors with mortality, relies on timely census data.

The first census in New Zealand occurred in 1851 and was taken at three-yearly intervals until 1874. The Census Act 1877 created the requirement that a census be taken every five years. Since 1881 the census has, for the most part, happened on the first and sixth years of every decade. This is still the case in the 2000s, though recent events and historical precedent show this requirement is not iron-cast.

The census has been cancelled twice before. The first cancellation occurred in 1931, during the great depression. The second was 1941, when the Second World War was in full swing. Censuses took place in 1936 and 1945 – this meant there was a 10-year gap between counts in the 1920s and 1930s, and a nine-year gap in the 1930s and 1940s.

The depression and the war were major events in New Zealand’s history. The 2011 Canterbury earthquake is another signal event. The difference between 1931/1941 and 2011 is that census data is used far more, and for many more purposes, now than it ever was back then. Use of census data has grown exponentially since the 1990s and is increasing in the 2000s.

Historians of the future may wonder what happened to the 2011 census, but the earthquake’s guaranteed importance to the history of New Zealand means it surely won’t take them long to work it out. At the time of writing, the census had not been rescheduled.

The fruits of their labours

Last Saturday my son and I enjoyed the simple summer pleasure that is eating warm, ripe blackberries straight off the canes. We were rambling around the Berhampore side of Wellington’s municipal golf course on a sunny afternoon when we spied the shiny berries. We were joined by an intrepid golfer, who abandoned his clubs to climb halfway up the bramble-covered slopes (I hope he was wearing trousers), two dog walkers and two boys, who leaped off their bikes and joined in when they realised what we were up to.

The blackberry is an exotic plant and widely considered a pest. It has very weedy tendencies, spreading its roots in all directions. On Te Ara it mainly features as a pest. The Weeds of the bush entry tells us that it was considered the most harmful weed in New Zealand by 19th-century farmers. It was impossible to manage until hormone sprays were introduced in the 1940s.

I’ve noticed blackberry growing in other parts of the town belt, and I suppose the Wellington City Council has decided to manage and tame, rather than eradicate. The bushes on the golf course are on the slopes only and have not been allowed to invade the greens.

They are mingled with gorse, another pest. Gorse does act as a shelter for regenerating native seedlings though, and for this reason is not despised by environmentalists as we may imagine. As for blackberries, I don’t know whether they have similar useful properties. The dog walkers informed me that they do indeed create shelter, but for rabbits, yet another pest.

For all their pesky properties, I have to confess a fondness for my local blackberry wilderness. Plucking fruit and eating it straight from the source is not something many urban-dwellers get to do that often. There is a community-driven movement towards planting food-bearing species on urban public land. The Island Bay and Berhampore Community Orchard Trust has started to plant fruit trees just below the golf course for all to enjoy. I guess the blackberry was already doing this without any help from us.

The washed-up giant squid

One recent Saturday the family and I were milling around at home on a cold, grey day. Cabin fever appeared to be imminent on the part of the youngest member of the household, so a Radio New Zealand news item about an unusual landing on the shores of Wellington’s south coast was very timely.

This news was good for us (and about half the population of Wellington by the looks of the traffic that day), but not so good for a poor giant squid, which had washed up in a watery ditch created by a storm-water drain in Houghton Bay. It was attacked (and presumably died) at sea and floated into the bay with the tide.

Relative sizes of squid

Before I went to see the colossal squid at Te Papa, I had ridiculous expectations about the size of these creatures, probably due to watching Hollywood films and reading Twenty-thousand leagues under the sea and such things as a kid. The colossal squid is certainly big, but not nearly as big as that word conjures up. I was prepared to be more realistic this time round.

This squid was of the giant category, the next step down from the colossal squid. Giant squids can grow up to 13 metres in length, but this was a mere 4 metres. Still, it was an impressive sight, partly because it was right in front of our eyes, unmediated by a glass cabinet. Scientists had removed the beak so they could confirm its age, and its tentacles were very battered. It looked very dead, and it was quite sobering to see such a majestic, graceful sea creature stuck on dry land.

Some people were getting very up close and personal, sticking their hands inside its body and carting round pieces of tentacle. We found this a little disturbing and thought more respect was called for, but I suppose others would have seen it as a rare learning opportunity. I was glad to hear that the tide had taken it back out to sea later in the day though.

While rushing down to the coast felt a little like rubber-necking at an accident, I’m pleased we saw the squid. It reminded me how mysterious the sea – which I probably take for granted having it so close to home – still is in the 2000s.