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

The Tasman Glacier, by Gottfried Braun-Elwert

We are very sorry to hear of the sudden death of alpine guide Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, who passed away yesterday while on a back-country expedition with Prime Minister Helen Clark and her party.

Gottfried Braun-Elwert was a former nuclear physicist who had been guiding for over 30 years. He was also a talented photographer and was very generous to Te Ara, kindly allowing us to use three of his photographs on our website. His impressive image of the Tasman Glacier is in the South Canterbury places entry, and photos of climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook and the prime minister skiing are both in The Bush theme.

Mountain guiding has had a long and notable history in New Zealand since the 1890s, when the government employed professional guides to aid climbers on Aoraki/Mt Cook. The advent of new technologies and equipment encouraged more amateurs to try mountaineering, but guiding re-emerged in the 1960s, and Gottfried Braun-Elwert was one of the new generation of experts who succeeded the pioneering guides Peter and Alec Graham, Joe Fluerty, Harry Ayres and other notable characters.

Here’s a historical footnote: Gottfried Braun-Elwert was not the first German-born guide to accompany a New Zealand prime minister in the mountains. That honour may well have belonged to Harry Peters (born Peter Hinrik Peters), who in 1890 assisted the ageing ex-premier Sir William Fox on a marathon 18-hour ascent of Mt Taranaki. Fox had intended to demonstrate that a man of 78 who had been a teetotaller all his life would be ‘as active and enduring as a man of 45′. The contention was apparently not borne out.

The eager editor

Another departure from Te Ara prompts a trip down memory lane and a chance encounter with an embarrassing archive of institutional memories.

Way back when, in the days when Te Ara had gestated from a sparkle in Jock Phillips’s eye to a rapidly growing neonate, its gross weight was bulked up by the incorporation of a fully formed, indeed rather mature, fellow encyclopedia.

McLintock’s magnum opus

A. H. (Archibald) McLintock’s classic An encyclopaedia [sic] of New Zealand was published by the Government Printer in three volumes in 1966. The print run of 30,000 sold out in three months and it was never reprinted though remains widely available in second-hand bookshops, a copy in every library in the country, quite a few to be found gathering dust on the top shelves of small-town junk shops throughout the land. Digitised in India, TEI-ised in Wellington by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Te Ara swallowed it whole and incorporated it as a stopgap until we finished our coverage of the entire world of Kiwi knowledge. We skited (skote? skate?) about it to the world (or at least to anyone who read the DigiCULT.Info newsletter in November 2004).

Taming the unruly XML

Of course it didn’t happen entirely automagically and this post was prompted by the departure of our long-serving production editor, Fiona Oliver, who delivered the not-so-small but perfectly formed behemoth, tamed and caged the beast. It (and this) is a tribute to her strength of purpose, patience, and reach.

I doubt if there’s anyone in the country, or on the planet, who knows so much about what lies between its brown buckram boards.

A civilised conclave

Of encyclopedic interest only, perhaps, is this hilarious period piece – a re-enactment of a Te Ara ‘resource meeting’, at which resourcers tremble, writers wail, and editors harrumph from the distance among the tendrils of the vineyard in which we labour. Another sow’s ear? You’d never know it from this candid shot of creativity in action. Butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. O tempora, o mores.

The parting gift (Moon Explorer Cupcake by Sam Broad)

Wailing and gnashing of teeth at Te Ara as another one gets away. We bid farewell to Helene Coulson, our lead designer, who joined us fresh out of Wanganui design school in 2003.

As well as designing leads, Helene’s masterminded the standards we set for maps, graphs and interactives. A large part of what makes the site special is due to her.

There are thousands of imaginatively thumbnailed images created under her eagle eye, and she really has been able to make something quite palatable out of some pretty unpromising raw material.

Shy Helene retiring

Of course she’s surrounded herself with a great team blah blah blah but, hey, this is Helene’s parade, and she is a bit special. And we mean that in the nicest possible way.

She also bakes the best cupcakes. And the macaroons are to die for.

Follow these links for some Helenean highlights:

• Te Ara’s first interactive, a devil of a swampland of blood, sweat and consultation came together to make this tiny masterpiece.
• The Auckland Islands shipwrecks map.
• The gracefully sinking ships are Helene’s little touch of genius.
• The diagram from hell. Measure your own earthquake.
• Solar water heating – you thought it was simple?
• Helene makes the earth move.
• Some nice pies, and a mean line.

Now that’s art – and who says she can’t be both beautiful and faithful?