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

In Te Ara, as in life, one thing leads to another, and the outcome is pleasantly uncertain.

A friend told me recently that a second-hand bookshop in town was selling the sheet music for a song called ‘Puhihuia’. He thought I’d be interested because I’d been researching a Māori legend about a pair of lovers named Ponga and Puhihuia. I went to the shop and bought the song for 20 bucks. That seemed pretty good for eight pages of sheet music from the 1940s, with the cover printed in a marvellously tacky typeface incorporating Māori designs.

The cover of the sheet music for 'Puhihuia'

The song had a pretty tune and lyrics that, like our national anthem, could be sung in either Māori or English. These showed me that it was indeed based on the legend I was interested in. The story had been collected (some say invented) in the early 19th century by the pioneering, and somewhat dodgy, ethnologist John White. He had grown up in the Hokianga from 1835 and spoke fluent Māori.

The introduction to 'Puhihuia'

Both the music and the lyrics were attributed to Mari Hamutana, a musician I’d never heard of. A bit of internet searching revealed that the name was a pseudonym for a Pākehā composer named Ruby King. She had been brought up in the King Country, the daughter of a schoolteacher, in the 1880s and, like John White, learned to speak Māori fluently. She wrote many songs in Māori and English, and some were broadcast on New Zealand radio. ‘Puhihuia’, her only published song, was also broadcast by the BBC in London in 1937. A Miss Eileen Driscoll of Wellington sang several Māori songs, including ‘Puhihuia’, on programmes beamed to Australia and Shanghai.

The sheet music for 'Puhihuia'

That’s about as far as I’ve got with this bit of pure and unplanned research, but if anyone can add more information on either this song or its composer, I’d be interested to hear it. In the meantime I’m thinking of passing ‘Puhihuia’ on to the ukulele orchestra that’s been formed here at work, in case they want to add this song to their repertoire.

The research skills developed while working here at Te Ara can be hard to leave behind when we knock off for the day.

The other night I was winding down by reading a recent novel called The dream of the Celt, by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa. It’s about the real-life character Roger Casement, an Irish patriot, humanitarian and convicted traitor. Most of the book is set in the jungles of the Congo and Amazon, so it’s satisfyingly remote from the material we work with daily on Te Ara.

But then I came across a mention of Casement’s friend Herbert Ward, an English sculptor and explorer. He was said to have travelled to such far-flung parts as Australia, central Africa, San Francisco, Borneo – and New Zealand. Was Ward also a real person, I wondered, and if so, did he leave any traces of his time in this country?

The magnificent Papers Past website instantly confirmed that Herbert Ward arrived in Auckland in January 1879, direct from his English public school and aged just 16. I have a son that age myself, and I wondered what Ward’s parents thought of him taking such a journey unaccompanied. But he appears to have been a resourceful fellow.

A young Herbert Ward (from A valiant gentleman, facing p. 9)

Ignoring standard tourist destinations such as the hot lakes, Ward headed for the King Country, at that time the nearly inaccessible refuge of the Kīngitanga (Māori King movement). There he met King Tāwhiao and got on so well with his people that they proposed to tattoo him. On the night before this ceremony was to take place, Ward’s courage failed and he slipped away.

He worked as a stock rider, circus performer and miner before spending two years among headhunters in North Borneo. Then this exceptionally adventurous young man, still aged only 24, travelled to central Africa where he worked closely with the legendary explorer Henry Stanley, the man who coined the immortal phrase, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’

I next learned that Ward is the subject of a biography (A valiant gentleman: being the biography of Herbert Ward, artist and man of action), and I had a look at it the next time I contacted the Hocken Library on Te Ara business. The book confirmed that the young Englishman had ‘lived for nearly a year among the Maoris’ and had learned, among many other skills, to ‘execute a passable war dance … and managed, as youngsters do, to pick up their language.’

I finished The dream of the Celt eventually, and enjoyed it, despite being led far astray by my own adventures in the archives.

Mt Tongariro in the foreground, Mt Ngāuruhoe behind and Mt Ruapehu in the background (click for image credit)

The news that Mt Tongariro is blowing its top once again has sent Te Ara staff hunting for background information in earlier entries of the encyclopedia. Our Earth, Sea and Sky theme gave us a summary of volcanoes themselves, and also an account of historic volcanic activity, which noted previous eruptions at Tongariro in 1868 and 1896–97. The Volcanic Plateau entry of the Places theme explained more about the traditions and history of Tongariro and its two neighbouring volcanoes.

From there, some of us turned for more details to the magnificent Papers Past website, where reports of the 1896 eruption of Tongariro sounded similar to the current upheavals:

At 12.40 Te Mare [Te Maari], a steam hole on Tongariro, burst into violent eruption, emitting an immense volume of steam and the smoke rising to a great height, travelling against the wind. It presented a grand spectacle … Ruapehu also appeared to be emitting a small column of steam. (Marlborough Express, 16 November 1896, p. 2)

Tongariro's Te Maari crater erupting in the 1890s (click for image credit)

Te Maari crater, as Te Ara points out, had been formed by another eruption in 1868. Mt Tongariro is actually a complex of craters that have been active at different periods, and Mt Ngāuruhoe, although usually regarded as a separate peak, is Tongariro’s main active vent. The current volcanic activity on Tongariro is the first since the 1896–97 eruption, but Ngāuruhoe has been active much more recently.

In 1926 John Cullen, a former police commissioner and later a self-appointed warden at Tongariro National Park, witnessed Ngāuruhoe in action from his hut ‘about halfway between Waimarino and Ngāuruhoe Mountain’. The volcano was erupting in a series of loud explosions:

[E]very shot that went up gave a great display of fireworks. A smelting-furnace or foundry as seen at night is a good representation in miniature of Ngāuruhoe’s after-dark discharges. Everything would appear quiet in the crater; then a small puff of steam rise about the rim of the volcano; next a great body of fiery matter would be hurled high into the heavens, to spread out fall over and roll down the mountain-sides. (‘Eruption of Ngāuruhoe’, AJHR 1926 C–13 p. 5)

To have a look at the kind of spectacular performance that Cullen was watching take a look at the eruption of Ngāuruhoe in 1954 which you can find on Te Ara, and for more information check out NZHistory’s Today in History feature on the 1896 eruption.

A fox walks past the South London house of Peter Campbell, in his last cover illustration for the London Review of Books. Image: London Review of Books

The 1997 New Zealand historical atlas is much like a pre-internet version of Te Ara, with its swarm of little graphics and sidebars expanding on the subject of each of its large-format double-page maps. From the perspective of how specific places have altered over time, the Atlas deals with many of the subjects covered in Te Ara – earliest Polynesian settlement, glaciers, the Waikato wars of the early 1860s, Presbyterians and the ‘demon drink’, and mid-20th-century life in small-town New Zealand.

Here at Te Ara we refer to the Atlas all the time, and some of us have worked on both projects, including Malcolm McKinnon, who was general editor of the Historical atlas and has overseen Te Ara’s Places theme, the section that covers every geographical region in New Zealand, and urban historian Ben Schrader, responsible for Te Ara’s city entries.

But many talented individuals contributed to the success of the Atlas and it is sad to have to record the passing of one of them. Peter Campbell was a New Zealand artist best known for his airy, elegant cover illustrations for the London Review of Books (LRB), the erudite fortnightly which provides authoritative commentary on history, politics and literary criticism. He worked on the LRB since its first issue in 1979, and the cover of the current issue bears his drawing of a fox walking past the South London house where he and his wife Winifred, also New Zealand-born, had lived since 1963.

In a tribute to Peter Campbell in the current issue its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, says that he graduated from Victoria University in 1958 with a philosophy degree and an extra-curricular enthusiasm for book design, developed while working with the pyrotechnic poet, publisher, typographer and boxer Denis Glover. ‘Tramping trips at Christmas settled the New Zealand landscape in my mind,’ he wrote, and his homeland’s mountains, trees, architecture and fauna recurred in his writings and artwork throughout a life spent mainly in London. There he began working for the BBC on the richly illustrated books that accompanied major series such as Civilisation, The ascent of man and Life on earth. Once he began producing the covers for the LRB, his witty, meticulous style came to define the review. Mary-Kay Wilmers says, ‘More adjusted than most to his own wants and necessities, and so better able to accommodate other people’s, he was an exemplary person to work with.’ Campbell also wrote articles for the LRB on a bewildering variety of subjects – architecture and art history, dandelions, cycling, doors, ducks and his favourite places in the British Isles.

He played a critical part in the early development of the Historical atlas. ‘We called for design proposals in 1990–91,’ recalls Malcolm McKinnon. ‘Peter Campbell and Margaret Cochrane – a very accomplished typographer and graphic designer in her own right – submitted a proposal. Theirs was by far the best and we adopted it as our template. We made some changes, however, so they are not specifically credited with the design. But they are thanked in the preface to the Atlas, and that thanks was very heartfelt.’ It is gratifying to learn that an exhibition of Peter Campbell’s superb artwork will open in Wellington next year.

Te Ara salutes and farewells this panoptically curious, polymathic son of Aotearoa. E te tohunga mahi toi no ngā mea katoa – hoki atu ki a rātou kua whetūrangihia, moe mai ra, takoto mai ra, okioki e.

More than 50 countries have erected monuments to their citizens who chose to take part in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). This powerfully symbolic yet bitter conflict erupted after a military coup overthrew the elected government of Spain. The rebels, under General Franco, received military support from the governments of Germany and Italy. Volunteers from dozens of countries, including New Zealand, also arrived in Spain to defend its Republican government.

The handful of New Zealanders included the renowned journalist Geoffrey Cox, a surgeon from Cromwell named Doug Jolly, several nurses including René Shadbolt, a fighter pilot from Wellington named Eric Griffiths, and Griff Mclaurin, a young mathematician from Auckland.

Plaque to New Zealanders who served in the Spanish Civil War

At a ceremony in Wellington this week a memorial was unveiled to the New Zealanders who took part in the civil war. It is a bronze plaque bearing the words ‘For Spain and Humanity’ in Spanish and English. This was the motto of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, the main relief organisation for victims of the civil war.

The plaque was provided by the Spanish Embassy in New Zealand. At the unveiling ceremony the ambassador, Marcos Gomez, said that until he came to New Zealand he didn’t know that this country had sent volunteers to his homeland during its civil war. The memorial, he said, was to commemorate and thank them for defending democracy in Spain.

Mayor of Wellington Celia Wade-Brown, holding the book 'Kiwi Companeros – New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War,' and Spanish Ambassador Marcos Gomez, with a 1939 poster for a public meeting commemorating the New Zealanders who died in Spain

Wellington’s mayor, Celia Wade-Brown, also spoke at the ceremony. She said this plaque would be placed on the seaward wall of Frank Kitts Park, on the Wellington waterfront. This wall already displays plaques recording other significant arrivals and departures, such as Edmund Hillary’s 1956–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the young Polish refugees who landed here in 1944, and survivors of the shipwrecked inter-island ferry Wahine in 1968.

Among the guests at the unveiling ceremony were the surviving family of Jim Hoy, who fought with the British Battalion of the International Brigades in the civil war, and later spent many years working on the Wellington wharves. It is satisfying to think that he, and the other New Zealanders who travelled to the far side of the world to support another country’s defence of democracy, will finally have a permanent memorial.