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

Cross-posted on Lively.

Howard Morrison (far left) and the Howard Morrison Quartet, 1962

It’s a song that many throughout the world know. A song that was given to our local tongue by Howard Morrison when he sang ‘Whakaaria Mai‘ for the queen at a royal command performance in 1981. It’s a song that today is in my mind, and perhaps in the minds of many, as we remember Sir Howard Morrison, who died in Rotorua today, 24 September 2009, aged 74.

Known as ‘The Sinatra of New Zealand’ and ‘Ol’ Brown Eyes,’ he first came to prominence with the Howard Morrison Quartet in the 1950s and went on to establish himself as a successful solo performer. With a career spanning five decades, his influence extended beyond entertainment through to work with the Department of Māori Affairs and concern about achievement among young Māori.

Accolades followed him throughout his life. He was recognised first in 1976, becoming a member of the Order of the British Empire, and again in 1990 when he received a knighthood. When, in 2007, Dr Ngahuia Te Awekotuku (then Chair of Te Waka Toi) presented Sir Howard with the Te Tohu Tiketike a Te Waka Toi, she characterised Morrison as ‘Not just a great artist and entertainer but an outstanding New Zealander.’

With the closing lines of ‘Whakaaria Mai’, we remember you.

Ki kona au
Titiro atu ai
Ora, mate
Hei ahau koe noho ai

There I will be
looking
In life, in death
let me rest in thee

———-

For more on Sir Howard Morrison:
• biographies from NZHistory.net.nz and NZMusic.net.nz
• television clips from NZOnScreen and their discussion forum
• the New Zealand Herald obituary
• the cover of Te Ao Hou from March 1962, featuring the Howard Morrison Quartet, and the full-text article.

New Zealand has more to offer than just the oval ball

Wednesday 9 September marks two years until the kick-off of the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand. The event provides a huge opportunity for New Zealanders to impress on an overseas audience that while we may (or may not!) be good at playing with the oval ball, our country also has a rich history and culture.

Some 70,000 visitors are expected and rugby supporters from other parts of the world are generally well-educated well-heeled people. During the 44 days of the cup they will be looking for enjoyments beyond the games for themselves and their partners.

So the Ministry for Culture and Heritage is working with the New Zealand 2011 office to encourage a creative and multi-faceted festival alongside the World Cup. Our websites will also work together to present an exciting range of material for visiting rugby fans.

NZHistory.net.nz

NZHistory.net.nz will become the key resource for people who are interested in the story of rugby in New Zealand. The site already has three excellent web exhibitions on rugby:

• A fascinating account of the New Zealand Natives’ tour of 1888–89, in which the team’s 21 Māori and five Pākehā members played a staggering 107 matches in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, and won 78. They also played eight games of Australian rules and two of soccer. The essay includes images of perhaps the first rugby haka and the first rugby use of the silver fern.
• An account of the traumatic Springbok tour of 1981, with some excellent television clips.
• The story of the 1987 Rugby World Cup, featuring, of course, the famous image of David Kirk kissing the cup.

Rugby enthusiasts should also not miss a sound recording of Winston McCarthy (‘Listen, it’s a goal’) describing the 1956 All Black–Springbok match. Since his departure, rugby has never been quite the same.

NZLive.com

Visitors wanting interesting suggestions as to what to do between games will find NZLive.com the essential guide. For someone who is hoping to be in Nelson on 20 September 2011 to watch Italy play, the site already has 36 things to do, which range from Lillia’s Lace Museum to the World of Wearable Art Museum.

NZLive.com also has feature articles about matters of interest to rugby fans, including:

• a short history of Eden Park, once a lake called Cabbage Tree Swamp and now the site of the cup finals
• a preview of the Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, featuring 100 life-sized images of rugby players.

Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Te Ara will be offering visitors a number of resources:

• The Places entries will provide in-depth guides about the history, geography and culture of the different regions of New Zealand for anyone visiting the country.
• The entries about New Zealand Peoples will give interesting stories about some of the people who settled in New Zealand from the countries represented in the tournament. For example, when Scotland plays in Invercargill on the second match of the tournament, the visitors from the old country can find out in the Scots entry about their compatriots who settled the far south.
• Other entries will enrich people’s understanding of the places they visit. When on 18 September, the French play Canada at Napier, visitors can learn about the story of the French and the Canadians in New Zealand, and they can learn all about Napier and Hawke’s Bay. But they will also be encouraged to learn about the gannets they can see down at Cape Kidnappers, or the 1931 earthquake, which transformed the landscape around them.

Exactly how we pull all this together into one easy way for visitors is our challenge – a geo-portal is one obvious solution. But what is certain is that NZLive.com, NZHistory.net.nz and Te Ara believe that together they have much to offer in presenting New Zealand to the world. We look forward to the challenge.

This post is cross-posted on Lively.

Pit bull cross

Man bites dog

Journalists are taught that ‘Dog bites man’ is not newsworthy, but ‘Man bites dog’ is. Paea Taufa found this out when he was discovered cooking his pitbull terrier cross in an umu (oven) pit in Māngere.  Apparently, dogs are cooked and eaten in Tonga.  As it turns out, because the pit bull cross was killed humanely, what he did wasn’t illegal. So why the fuss? Ultimately, it’s a cultural issue surrounding eating pets.

Lambs at pet day

No eating pets

My grandmother used to get a pet lamb for her birthday when she was little. Every year her lamb would disappear not long before Christmas dinner. Naturally, she refused to eat Christmas roast the year she discovered it was her pet. Because we build emotional ties with pets, the thought of eating them upsets us. This aversion is even stronger to animals that are solely pets. While in New Zealand we may make pets out of animals we raise for food (chickens, lambs, calves, ducks), we will not eat animals that are domestic pets (cats or dogs). This is a cultural aversion, described in Te Ara’s Pets entry as the pet paradox. While we have a strong aversion to eating cats or dogs, in other parts of the world the cultural aversion to pork or beef is as strong, or stronger.

Kurī - Polynesian dog

Dog eating in New Zealand history

Cooking and eating dogs, was for a while, an important way to access protein in New Zealand. The four main meat animals today are the pig, sheep, cow and chicken. In Polynesia the four meat animals were the pig, dog, rat and chicken. Māori only managed to bring the dog (kurī) and rat (kiore) to Aotearoa New Zealand. As the sole edible land mammals, both were considered delicacies. The explorer James Cook, following Polynesian custom, ate dog, as did Joseph Banks. Cook said it was as tasty as English lamb. West Coast explorer Thomas Brunner was forced to eat his dog Rover and earned the name ‘Kai Kurī’ (dog eater) for his troubles. As various stock animals were introduced into New Zealand from the late 1700s, kurī gradually fell off the menu.

Before you folks in Auckland and Wellington get your pens poised to continue slugging it out as to who has more galleries and plays and general sophistication, let me say that this post is not about your fair cities but about Hawke’s Bay.  And it is not only about high culture either – it is rather drawing on the original meaning of the word which as the OED says means ‘cultivation or husbandry’. Culture in this sense is opposed to wild or uncultivated, and is found in such words as ‘agriculture’, ‘horticulture’ and ‘viticulture’.

After reading Kerryn Pollock’s wonderful new entries on Hawke’s Bay and attending the launch in Napier on Thursday, the overwhelming impression of the region is of a land radically transformed by human beings. Kerryn points out that only 6% of the land is now indigenous forest, the smallest proportion of any region in the country. The process began early – just look at our map of forest loss, and you will see that Māori settlers had cleared or burnt nearly all the forest of the region down to Dannevirke before Pākehā set foot in the area.

Once the Pākehā landed they set about transforming it further. Tussock was replaced by imported grasses, and large areas were fenced for sheep. Hawkes Bay, along with Canterbury, became the centre of large-scale pastoral farming. The best evidence of this today are the huge homesteads still to be found there. Other cultures quickly sprang up - as Kerryn explains, horticulture began with J. N. Williams’s  orchard in 1892. Twelve years later the first canning factory opened, the forerunner of James Wattie’s ‘tin can alley’. It’s worth clicking the interactive in Te Ara’s stonefruit entry to see how far Hawkes Bay still dominates the acreage of those fruits. Viticulture began very early with French Catholic missionaries bottling the first vintage in 1851 and it still has the second highest area in vines of any New Zealand region.

Other forms of cultivation also took place. The region is noted for its innovative architecture – not only the splendid art deco style which was the response to the destruction of the 1931 earthquake, but the James Chapman-Taylor Tudor-style houses before the quake and the John Scott churches and houses after the quake. And Hawke’s Bay is proud to have two amateur scientists, each in their way unique personalities, who were able to document the transformation of the land – Joan Wiffen who discovered dinosaur bones in the Mangahouanga Stream in the north of the Bay; and Herbert Guthrie-Smith whose Tutira, the story of his farm and the way it was transformed by the impact of European plants and animals has become a New Zealand classic.

So if you really want to look at how human beings have cultivated the land and erected a civilisation upon it, take a virtual visit to our two new entries on Hawke’s Bay – and then perhaps you might want to go to our cultural capital for real.

For two days a week I can usually be found doing copyright administration for Te Ara. This year, as part of my non-Te Ara work, I’ve been photographing sites connected with New Zealand science history. These have included buildings, monuments, streets and landscapes.

Around 7.30 a.m. on Saturday 20 June I met up with Robin Adams just north of Napier airport and, after picking up his friend Frances, we headed into the Mōhaka Forest for the day. Because it’s a commercial forestry area, Robin was my driver, guide, radio monitor (listening out for logging-truck movements) and gate-opener. We were headed for the Mangahouanga Stream – the site where New Zealand’s most famous (amateur) paleontologist, Joan Wiffen, found evidence that dinosaurs had lived in New Zealand.

Dinosaur stream – the Mangahouanga

Robin and Frances have been coming up here for years, joining Joan on her expeditions, helping find fossils in the stream, carting the rocks out of the bush for preparation, and just hanging out.

That Saturday was a classic four-seasons-in-one-day kind of day, quite suited to a day in the mountains just south of the Ureweras. We arrived at the fossil hunters’ huts around 10.30 a.m., just in time for tea and cake. Afterwards, I was directed towards the bush, where I followed the track to Top Beach. Having a deep affection for the bush round here, and with nothing better to do, Frances joined me for some of the walk.

It was a fairly short walk through lovely native forest – I’d hazard a guess that it’s beech forest, but I’ve never been too good with my trees. There are a couple of ladders you need to climb down to get to the stream itself. I spent the best part of an hour down there, photographing, videoing, trying to keep my feet dry, and soaking in the atmosphere. (Visit http://www.acpalmer.com/wiffen/index.html to view photos.)

I was hoping for a find of my own, but no such luck. Talking to Robin and Frances afterwards they said that summer is the best time for fossil hunting, when the stream is low and the rocks more visible. But even then you’re not likely to stumble across something, as you need to know what you’re looking for in the rocks.

Robin said Joan hadn’t been up there for a couple of years probably, as she was getting on a bit. When you’ve only ever known someone from 15-year-old photos, sometimes you need reminding that they aren’t as young as you imagine them. Somewhat presciently, Robin said he wasn’t sure if Joan would ever be back to the huts.

I never got to meet Joan, though I was planning to pop in on her next time I was up in Hawke’s Bay. Joan was always happy to talk about her work, and I was looking forward to having a cup of tea and a chat with her.

From what I’ve seen and heard, Joan was a rare scientist. Beyond the fact that as an amateur she did incredibly important work, she was also passionate about fossils, and loved to share her passion with others in a way that got her audience truly enthused. She wrote a book about her fossil hunting, and there’s at least one decent documentary about her work, work which changed the geological history of our country.

In my photography notes I’ve usually referred to the Mangahouanga Stream as Joan Wiffen Valley. Now may be a good time to put a case to the New Zealand Geographic Board.