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

Ōhura's main street, 2011

Te Ara’s new entry on the King Country is the last of the major regional entries to be published – only Stewart Island and the off-shore islands remain. Te Ara’s encyclopedic map of the North and South islands is now complete.

It seems fitting that the King Country should be the last: it’s off the well-beaten track of State Highway 1, has no cities and no official regional identity, being part of the Waikato and Manawatū-Whanganui regional councils. It’s also popularly associated with Taranaki in the west. However, as the entry attempts to assert, the King Country musters a good argument for regional independence and a cultural and historical identity distinct from these places.

Te Rohe Pōtae (King country) boundaries, 1880s

The English name ‘King Country’ refers to the period in which the Māori King Tāwhiao lived in Ngāti Maniapoto territory after the Waikato wars and land confiscations. He lived in various places within region from 1864 until not long before his death in 1894. Māori referred to the area as Te Rohe Pōtae – the area of the hat. The story goes that King Tāwhiao threw his hat onto a map of the North Island to mark independent Māori territory. Because of this, you could make the argument that Waikato is the true ‘King Country’.

Te Rohe Pōtae hat monument

When I told someone I was writing about the King Country and relayed the story behind its name, they told me they’d always believed it referred to the British king. I don’t know how common this belief is, but I hope Te Ara’s King Country entry will help to reinstate King Tāwhiao in the minds of those who hold this mistaken belief! You can read more about this topic here.

I think the King Country’s 19th century history is what makes the region so fascinating and distinct, but the entry is about more than Māori-European relations in that period. It covers the natural environment – landforms, plants and animals – major elements of the regional economy and its arts, culture and heritage, among other things. The section on the places of the King Country takes readers on a virtual tour of the region, from the beautiful west coast right down to National Park in the volcanic zone, including the region’s three major towns, Ōtorohanga, Te Kūiti and Taumarunui. As I discovered, the mining township of Benneydale is sadly neglected in the published and on-line literature, so it has been great to add a little information about this place.

If you haven’t before, I suggest you take a left or right off State Highway 1 next time you’re driving up the North Island and travel through the King Country instead – hopefully having read the entry first!

Blogger Melanie Lovell-Smith enjoying the 150th-anniversary edition of the Otago Daily Times

The Otago Daily Times (ODT) turns 150 today. Founded by Julius Vogel in 1861, the newspaper was the first daily newspaper in New Zealand and still proudly states today that it is independent and privately owned.

As an image researcher, I’ve been very lucky – Te Ara’s relationship with the ODT dates from 2003, and has enabled us to include many wonderful images in the encyclopedia from the Otago region. Currently we have 340 ODT images up on Te Ara, and more to come.

The first ones we received included such diverse images as the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, visiting Dunedin; an elderly Japanese rugby player; and traditional New Zealand dress as interpreted by a new citizen. Later, when we started working on the themes Earth, Sea and Sky and The Bush, one of the great joys was being able to include some of chief photographer Stephen Jaquiery’s bird photographs, such as this one of a silvereye, or this, of a New Zealand pipit.

As someone who grew up in Dunedin, the ODT was my newspaper, and researching it for work was like coming home, in a odd way. Interestingly, there were some things that other staff who had also grown up in Dunedin remembered. One of them was the sex workers’ advertisements in the Personal columns, letting prospective clients know which small towns they would be visiting in the upcoming week.

The ‘Regions’ section of the ODT is also a section I remember well, with its local news and rural focus – and some wonderful photographs of things I remember from my childhood, such as hoar frosts and bad rabbits. And the mutton pies at Palmerston … travelling for a different job, one of my colleagues would insist on stopping there to get a mutton pie and a cheese roll – signs we were back down south.

There are many, many others – cute children, scarfies (both historical and contemporary), beautiful landscapes, and of course, our national hero, Shrek.

So thank you to the management for allowing us to reuse these images, to all the ODT photographers, who have taken such great photos, and thank you also to Glenda at the Star Shop for all her efficient assistance over the years – happy birthday to you from all of us at Te Ara!

During the REAL New Zealand Festival, which runs alongside Rugby World Cup 2011, our Jock is roaming the country and blogging about it for the REAL New Zealand Festival Insider blog.

Haka on the cathedral steps

It began, like all good rugby games should do, with a haka. It wasn’t on the field of play, mind you; it was on the steps of Nelson Cathedral with over 1,000 young males, Nelson College boys, performing it. Stirring stuff, indeed! I loved it and so did the huge crowd.

The haka was actually a bit of an anachronism. For we were about to move to the ‘Botanics’, a field near the alleged ‘Centre of New Zealand’, to watch a re-enactment of the very first game of rugby in New Zealand, on 14 May 1870. There would have been no haka that day. Although Māori had adopted the game within about four years of its introduction to New Zealand, haka were not regularly performed until the turn of the century.

14 May 1870 rugby game in Nelson

In other respects the re-enactment was carried out close to the historical record. The soccer goal-posts (which ironically adorn the Botanics reserve normally) had been replaced by manuka poles. As in 1870, there were 18 players on each side, and the two sides were Nelson Club (’The Town’) and Nelson College dressed in the correct uniforms. They also played as much as possible according to the rules of the day. This meant that you got no points for a touchdown – that merely provided ‘a try’ to kick a goal. Passing was not encouraged, being considered cowardly. There were also differences from 1870 – there was a referee (in 1870 the captains controlled the play), there was a microphone describing the action, and there were about 3–4,000 spectators, whereas in 1870 there had been only 200…

Read more on the Real NZ Festival blog…

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

I watched Tom Scott’s drama Rage about the 1981 Springbok Tour on the tele last Sunday night. Though I didn’t think much of the femme fatale storyline – it centred on a Māori police graduate who infiltrated an anti-tour protest group, hopped into bed with a Pākehā protest leader and then fed the pillow talk back to her bosses – the premise that the tour was profoundly personal rang true.

The tour divided families, friends and fraternities. In my case, the tour strained the closest relationship I had at the time: with my twin brother Tom. As kids we were best friends. We shared the same room, played the same games and were in the same classes at school. By the 6th form (year 11) we had begun to find our own identities. He started wearing rugby jerseys and threw himself into the first-15 culture; I bought a Clash T-shirt and drifted towards the art-room gang of politicos and punks.

In the lead up Tom and I had a few talks about the forthcoming tour. He spouted the rugby boofhead line that the sports and politics should not be mixed and all he was interested in was the rugby. I retorted that such an ideal was absurd and had been since Hitler staged the 1936 Olympics – but he hadn’t done 5th form history so didn’t get the allusion. We decided we wouldn’t change each other’s view, so we formed a kind of détente where we agreed we would try and get along for the length of the tour. At that stage I was still hoping Muldoon would come to his senses and pull the plug before the Springboks arrived. But of course he didn’t and the team arrived on 19 July – which was also Tom’s and my 17th birthday.

The pitch invasion at the Hamilton game

After the pitch invasion that stopped the Hamilton game I shouted in triumph and Tom got surly. Following the batoning of anti-tour protesters in Molesworth Street, he bluntly told me they got what they deserved. The détente was cracking. When the Wellington test came I joined a protest march trying to invade Athletic Park; he went to a friend’s place to drink beer and watch the game on the tele. In the following weeks the curtain that hung down the middle of our room to prevent disturbance from reading lamps became permanently drawn: our ‘iron curtain’. And the conversations that we used to have about our days before going to sleep ceased. Sneers replaced smiles.

In retrospect, Tom had it harder than I did. We were a family of woolly liberals. Dad had been involved in the 1960 ‘No Maoris, No Tour’ campaign and had recounted tales of joining a moving picket around the Square in Palmerston North and being pelted with abuse. Tom no doubt felt isolated from the rest of us and clammed up. But I think we did all watch the final Eden Park (flour bomb) test together and cheered when Allan Hewson kicked the series-winning penalty. For Tom I imagine it a great All Black rugby moment; for me it was relief that it wasn’t a propaganda victory for the apartheid regime. Not long after the tour our older brother left home and Tom moved into the vacated room. We were soon speaking again but, since then, have never mentioned our ‘cold war’. Perhaps, like many other battle-weary New Zealanders, we just wanted to forget that the tour’s 56 surreal days had ever happened and get on with living.

It seems to me that the only winner out of the fiasco was Muldoon. The pro-tour rural vote saw him narrowly win the 1981 election. One of the things Rage depicted was the extent (unknown to me) to which his officials tried to get him to call off the tour even as it was proceeding. That he ignored this advice and was prepared to let his country rip its own guts out for political gain highlights the deep cynicism of the man. So this Monday – 12 September and the 30th anniversary of the end of the tour – I’ll celebrate that we’ve never had another leader like him. I’ll also give Tom a ring.

‘I could hear the children screaming in the classrooms, I kept calling out ‘turtle turtle’ like we’d practised but they were too scared to remember what to do.

This story by ‘Katie‘ on the QuakeStories.govt.nz website is just one of over a hundred that have been submitted since the site was ‘soft launched’ at the beginning of August. QuakeStories has been developed by Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in partnership with NV Interactive, a Christchurch-based web-design company. The goal is to create a ‘living memorial’ of the earthquakes of 2010–11, which are among the most significant events in New Zealand history.

The stories submitted so far range in length from a couple of sentences to highly detailed 5,000+ word diary-like entries. It is estimated that more than 100,000 words – an average PhD thesis – have been contributed in the first month. Some are light-hearted, many are harrowing – on the site’s Twitter account one person posted, ‘Thank you these are amazing stories, I can only read 1 or 2 at a time’.

They include stories from a lawyer stuck on the 15th floor of the Forsyth Barr building, an ex-nurse who found herself on triage duty in the CBD, an eight-year-old boy who had to quickly escape his classroom, and an amazingly detailed and powerful account of the four hours a man spent with his two pre-schoolers trying to get to his older daughter’s school following the 22 February quake.

While people’s experiences of the main quakes and their aftershocks will inevitably be popular topics, we’re also keen to encourage stories about what is happening to people now and how the ongoing rebuilding of Canterbury continues to affect their lives in the months to come. We also welcome stories from non-Cantabrians who have been impacted by the quakes in different ways.

QuakeStories has a simple design which encourages visitors to browse the stories that have been submitted and makes it easy for them to contribute their own. This is very much phase one of the site and there are big plans for its future. In the coming weeks the contributors will be able to upload images, with provision for adding audio and video further down the track. The collected memories will start to be sorted and arranged by date, location (maps) and topics, giving readers new ways to explore the material.

One model that we looked to when we were setting up the site was the Hurricane Katrina archive. While this is an excellent resource, recent developments in technology mean we can add new dimensions to our record such as harvesting and categorising the #eqnz twitter feed, encouraging people to record video and audio with their smart phones and creating 3-D models of the former cityscape. We can also draw on the rich content in Te Ara and other websites to present contextual information back to the public in accessible ways. Encouraging school teachers and their students to both contribute to the site and use it for projects is definitely on our radar.

If you have memories of the Canterbury earthquakes and their aftermath – whatever your age, whether you’re an individual, part of a community, a business or an organisation, whether you were in Christchurch or involved in other ways – please consider sharing your experiences on QuakeStories. It is history in the making.