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

Souda Bay war cemetery in Crete (click for full image on Flickr)

I’ve recently returned from Europe after spending five weeks travelling. We were in Greece for a family wedding, but also ended up tiki-touring around western Europe.

My family has quite a few connections to Europe, mainly through war, so we made an effort to pay our respects to a few of these places.

First, we travelled to Ireland – my great-great-grandmother, who married Īhāia Hūtana in Waipawa, was Irish – so we went to her birthplace Dun Loaghaire just outside of Dublin.

We then travelled to London and managed to go to Guildford. Clandon Park in Guildford is home to the original Hinemihi meeting house from the Tarawera eruption (my partner is a descendant). Ngāti Rānana Māori Club use her as their ‘base’ in England. She is truly beautiful up close!

After that we made our way towards Greece, visiting places like Paris, Venice, Vienna and Munich.

After the wedding we travelled to Chania, Crete. We paid our respects at the Commonwealth cemetery, Souda Bay. We have family who fought on Crete and an uncle who died there during the Battle for Crete.

Lastly, we travelled to Rome. We had a day’s outing to Cassino. My pa, like many others, fought in Cassino as part of the Māori Battalion (and was later captured in Florence). So it was amazing to see Monte Cassino and be able to walk around the monastery. We also visited the Commonwealth cemetery in Cassino – one of the largest in Italy, with more than 4,000 people buried there.

I am now missing the sunshine and settling back into working life.

Jackson Bay – no relation

Yes, it’s true. The talented artist sometimes disparagingly referred to as Wacko Jacko has heard the last trump, and he never got mentioned in Te Ara. It could still happen, of course, but it won’t do him much good now. Passed over by New Zealand’s national online encyclopedia, and now he’s passed over Jordan himself, it’s the final insult really.

And we tried. Search Te Ara for Jackson and you’ll get plenty of hits (just like Michael) but they’re mainly about Jackson Bay in South Westland. Not that it isn’t interesting – it was the site of a government special settlement in 1884. This was a complete fiasco. They shipped in Germans, Poles and Italians to work in farming and forestry, but the combination of extremely wet weather  (Jackson Bay has one of the highest rainfalls on the already wet West Coast), the rugged bush-clad landscape and the fact that they couldn’t understand each other’s languages, meant they soon shipped out.

One of the sodden survivors was Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk, born in France of Polish heritage (and his mother was said to be the illegitmate daughter of King George IV of England) and notable as the grandfather of the card-carrying barking right-wing poet ‘Count’ Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (pretender to the Polish throne and briefly imprisioned in the UK for obscenity in the 1930s).

But I digress. Edmond de Montalk (as far as we know, no relation to Michael Jackson) had been teaching at the University of Otago in Dunedin until he spat the dummy in desperation and headed for the West Coast ‘to do the best I can for my family, as I could do nothing for them in the Scottish, cantish Dunedin, where it is useless to teach anything unless your mother has had the wisdom to give you birth north of the Tweed.’

What’s that got to do with Michael Jackson? Well, nothing, by the looks of it, but everyone else is blogging and twittering about him so let’s get on the bandwagon and see if our blog gets a few more hits this week.

NZ nurses who served in the Spanish Civil War (click to view on NZHistory.net)

Te Ara staff are always up to something. Not content with the interesting things we do in our day jobs, we’ve usually got some other kind of project or interest on the go.

Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War (Canterbury University Press, 2009), edited by Te Ara writer Mark Derby, is one such project which has recently come to fruition.

New Zealand is as far away from Spain as you can get – well, without heading into space. In the 1930s New Zealanders generally knew virtually nothing about Spain, and there had only been a handful of Spanish migrants. Nevertheless, this book tells the stories of a number of New Zealanders who cared enough about the Spanish Civil War that they volunteered as soldiers, doctors, nurses or journalists.

Some of the New Zealanders who joined up were already based overseas, while others travelled all the way from here. Mark says they were generally motivated by anti-fascist beliefs and concern about the overthrow of a legitimately elected government.

Kiwi Compañeros has contributions from leading academics and historians, but also includes a chapter by the daughter of two people who fought in the war. It grew out of a seminar in 2006 looking at New Zealander’s involvement in and attitudes to the Spanish Civil War.

Mark is pretty sure he’s tracked down all of New Zealand’s participants. One of his odder leads had the ring of an urban legend. A friend told him of a friend who had said that his primary school teacher had said he’d been in the Spanish Civil War. Mark thought it was pretty unlikely, but followed it up anyway. He found that the teacher was still alive and indeed had actually fought in the war.

In tandem with this book coming out, and all the new research it contains, NZHistory.net has published a new feature on New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. And if that whets your appetite, come along to next week’s History Group talk by Mark and fellow-contributor Peter Clayworth about New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War, and how studying them can provide insights into the New Zealand of the 1930s.

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.

Captain James Cook, who arrived in New Zealand after the mystery skull

Back in August last year, we asked ‘Was Captain Cook beaten by a girl?‘ when carbon dating indicated that the skull of a European woman, which had been found in a river in Wairarapa, was around 296 years old.

This challenged what we know about New Zealand history, as it would mean that a woman, or her skull at least, had made it to New Zealand at least 23 years before Captain Cook’s first voyage in 1769. And long before the first documented white women, Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger (two escaped convicts from New South Wales), who are thought to have arrived in 1806.

This week forensic anthropologist Robin Watt has suggested an answer to the mystery. The 40–45 year old woman could have been a Dutch shipwreck victim.

Dr Watt says, ‘At this time there was a tremendous amount of movement by the Dutch. We know they were exploring the southern coast of Australia. Anything sailing this way has a chance of being stopped by New Zealand, so for my money there was either a visit here or a wreck. I’d say it was probably a wreck.’ Apparently the Dutch took their wives and families along for the trip.

Mystery solved? I doubt it.