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

A haven for urban farmers – The Stricklaw Street community garden in Christchurch

Over the past few years or so I’ve noticed that urban people have become more interested in growing their own food than in the recent past. Vegetable and herb gardens, and to a lesser extent small fruit orchards, are cropping up in suburban sections again, and on council reserves and even city streets.

Personal food production is not new in New Zealand – in the past people had to grow their own food or perish. Traditional Māori communities spent a lot of time growing food, mainly introduced plants like kūmara (sweet potato) and later potatoes. Food production was a do-or-die task for early European settlers.

The vegetable plot became a typical feature of the suburban backyard. It’s part of the quarter-acre section romance. Most families were self-sufficient in this way until the 1950s. After this, increased use of pesticides and fertilisers by market gardens meant that it was cheaper and easier to buy produce than grow it yourself. Sections became smaller and busy urbanites were less inclined to maintain them. Have a look at Te Ara’s Gardens entry if you want more history.

What has changed? The rise of the contemporary urban farmer is part of wider interest in issues of environmental sustainability in the 2000s. People are starting to think about how they, as individuals and community members, can work towards feeding themselves rather than relying on national and international food distribution chains. Some are also pursuing an organic lifestyle free of pesticides.

Though commercially grown produce is plentiful and relatively cheap, increasing prices have pushed people back to the vegetable plot. Even apartment dwellers are cultivating tomatoes and lettuces in boxes on balconies. Councils have set aside land for community gardens. In Wellington, olive trees line the streets of inner-city Mt Victoria, and the olives are harvested for oil. At the moment there’s a petition on the Wellington City Council’s website asking the council to plant more food-bearing trees on reserves and roadsides. Many schools, urban as well as rural, have vegetable gardens cultivated by the kids.

It will be interesting to see whether the interest in urban food production is sustained – it is fad, fashion, or are urbanites in it for the long haul?

Black singlets, as worn by all self-respecting shearers

Happy Friday the 13th all. In honour of Black Friday, and the fact that black seems to have become our national colour (especially here in Wellington, I’m told), here’s a not-at-all-exhaustive list of black things featured in Te Ara:

• black robins
• black singlets
• a black goat on Black Peak
• ‘George’, a black African
• black stilts in flight
• black spot on an apple
• black coral (which is actually white when alive)
• blackbirds (and the female blackbird isn’t actually black either)
• black beetles
• Black Magic (crossing the line to win the America’s Cup
• black flounder
• black sand beaches
• Black Grace dancers
• black swans (how can something so graceful be so bad tempered?)
• black matipo (or kōhūhū)
• black-water rafting
• black tunnel-web spiders
• black-eyed geckos
• black shags with chicks
• and, despite my un-patriotic lack of interest in rugby, I couldn’t leave out the All Blacks.

Great spotted kiwi

The kiwi has been named the Forest & Bird Bird of the Year. This was a great comeback after failing to make the top 10 last year, which I suspect was partly due to cultural cringe. Even this year the kiwi was lampooned as a ‘flightless national bore’ during voting. However, enough New Zealanders showed loyalty to our iconic national symbol to see it fly to the top of the list in 2009.

Though there may be a love-hate relationship with the kiwi it’s an important icon for New Zealanders who have named themselves, their currency, a Melbourne Cup-winning horse, a lottery and national league team after it. Well-known kiwi characters include Goodnight Kiwi, Fighting Kiwi (kiwi with taiaha on flag), Kapai Kiwi and Tahi the one-legged kiwi.

Just recently someone’s managed to find a kiwi in space, though it may be a bit like seeing ET in a nutrigrain – you see what you want to see.

Goodnight Kiwi

Golden Kiwi

Kiwi in space?

The kiwi has at times suffered a bit of an identity crisis. After seeing a kiwi skin in the 1800s a traveller claimed, ‘The emu is found in New Zealand, though we were never fortunate to meet with one.’

Americans (for whom kiwi means kiwifruit) must be confused by New Zealanders claiming to be a ‘fuzzy edible fruit with green meat’. Though not as confused as the child  who not so long ago approached a passerby outside Wellington zoo with a shoebox in tow. The child asked what he should do with the kiwi he had caught in his shoebox. The passerby asked to look at it. The lid was then removed to reveal a not-so-cuddly hedgehog.

Not kiwis

A kiwi?

Not a kiwi

Confidence trickster Amy Bock – an early Tasmanian import

Have you ever seen those postcards with a map of New Zealand – showing the North Island, the South Island, and the West Island (Australia)? In Tasmania I saw postcards with Australia identified as ‘North Tasmania’. As this suggests, the attitude of Tasmanians to the mainland is not so different from the New Zealand attitude to its bigger brother.

But what about the relationship between New Zealand and Tasmania? In a tour of Te Ara I found many links. In the animal world, the forest-loving black possum is a Tasmanian import; and so is New Zealand’s most common frog.

Abel Tasman himself provides a first human link, sailing as he did between the island he named Van Diemen’s Land and the west coast of the South Island – he took 19 days.

Tasmanian aborigines had an even tougher  time of it than Māori in New Zealand once Europeans came to stay. But it’s striking to see parallels to the Ngāi Tahu experience – intermarriage, and the survival of muttonbirding on offshore islands through many generations. Those offshore islands also drew sealers and whalers – many of whom worked in both Tasmanian and New Zealand waters.

The convict experience differentiated the two colonies. For convict-free New Zealand, self-government in 1854 was a fairly easily gained status. However, for Tasmanians 1853, the year the transportation of convicts ended, was fundamental. Even the colony’s name was changed – from Van Diemen’s Land – as a way of burying the convict past.

Through the later 19th century, the human traffic went both ways. Tasmanian-born Gabriel Read, who made the first important gold strike in Otago in 1861, in fact spent most of his life on Tasmania, apart from four or so years in Otago.

Cross-dresser and confidence trickster Amy Bock also hailed from Tasmania (born in Hobart in 1859), as did trade unionist Stephen Boreham (born 1857). Retail baron John McKenzie was in business in Tasmania when he came on a motorcycling tour of New Zealand and decided to migrate, opening his first store in Dunedin in 1910.

People who crossed in the other direction included missionary son and New Zealand official George Clarke Jr, who was a church minister in Hobart from 1851 and, at the turn of the century, chancellor of the University of Tasmania for nine years.

Both premier Frederick Weld and governor Thomas Gore Browne did tours of duty as governor of Tasmania, the latter from 1861 to 1868, and the former from 1875 to 1880.

A more unusual ‘crossover’ was that of W. B. Perceval, New Zealand’s agent general in London from 1891 to 1896. Replaced without warning by William Pember Reeves, he served as agent general for Tasmania for another two years.

For the contemporary visitor to Tasmania there are reminders of New Zealand links. The British 99th Regiment, based in Hobart from 1846 to the 1850s, erected a memorial, still in the grounds of the Anglesea barracks, to the 24 of its number who died in fighting in New Zealand in 1845–46. (Jock comments: it’s Australia’s very first war memorial.)

There are Mawhera and Waimea streets in Hobart – and at the top of the latter a Waimea Heights primary school. Otago Bay is at one remove – named after the only ship ever commanded by mariner and novelist Joseph Conrad, which was broken up at the bay in 1931.

Tasmania, like New Zealand, has a settlement called National Park. When the park – now called Mount Field National Park – was established in 1916 it was the only one, just as Tongariro once was in New Zealand.

A recent theatrical link was Wellington actor Stuart Devenie’s performance in Geoff Chapple’s play on Joseph Hatch’s controversial exploitation of Tasmania’s remote Macquarie Island (1889 to 1920), which was performed to acclaim in Hobart in April 2009. A few months later, when I visited, a television reviewer was recommending the ‘quality Kiwi series’ Go girls, whilst a dress shop owner’s favoured label was that of Trelise Cooper of Auckland. And everyone seems to be wearing Kathmandu branded clothing - there are three outlets in Tasmania and countless others through the mainland states.

But one New Zealand product that you can’t find in Tasmania are our apples – though that’s not too surprising in this, the biggest apple-producing state in the Commonwealth.

The man in black (photo courtesy of NZPA)

With a good All Blacks‘ win on the weekend, it’s worth reviewing the positives. Their victory over Australia in Sydney last month saw them retain the Bledisloe Cup. Additionally, a bet on the game in Sydney with our prime minister, saw the Aussie PM wearing the ‘All Black’ tie following Australia’s loss. Sportingly, he dressed in a dark suit that emphasised the silver fern on the tie.

The bet on the rugby illustrates the history between our countries. New Zealand was briefly governed from New South Wales, and the first two white women to settle in New Zealand were from Australia (both convicts).

We also have a history of humour. A somewhat apocryphal friend of mine, when was visiting Australia, was asked by a customs officer at Sydney airport if he had any criminal convictions.  ‘No!’ he replied. ‘Do you still need them to get in?’

Following the final tri-nations match against the Wallabies, I’ve put together a subjective list of the top 10 things we share with Australia.

Top 10 things we share with Australia

1. Australian Federation. New Zealand is included in the Australian constitution as one of its states. They asked us to become part of the Australian Federation, but our then premier, Richard Seddon, wouldn’t let God’s Own Country (as he called it) be swallowed up.

2. The Ditch (Tasman Sea). At various times they have crossed it in large numbers to settle here, and vice versa. Former prime minister Robert Muldoon quipped that New Zealanders moving to Australia raised the IQ of both countries. More recently this movement has prompted fears of a ‘brain drain’, though research by Treasury has suggested that it’s a ‘same drain‘.

3. Sheep. We have a lot of them, though we are getting less sheepish.  Australia’s unofficial anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, is about a guy stealing a sheep.

4. Pavlova. Invented in New Zealand and claimed by Australia (or is it vice versa?)

5. Phar Lap. They have his skin and heart and we have his bones. (Outside Australasia that might be considered odd.)

6. The ‘underarm incident‘. (Reminds me of the ‘don’t mention the war‘ episode from Fawlty Towers)

7. The Bledisloe Cup. Gifted by former New Zealand governor general Lord Bledisloe.  He also gifted the Ahuwhenua trophy, and Waitangi treaty grounds to the nation.

8. The Southern Cross. Both countries have the Southern Cross on our respective national flags. Designed at around the same time, ours became official in 1902 while theirs became official in 1954. I can’t help thinking one of the flag designers was looking over the other’s shoulder when these flags were designed.

9. Possums. We got them from Australia and they ran rampant.  Ironically, indigenous Australians rediscovering the art of traditional possum fur cloaks have had to import our possum skins, as theirs are protected.

10. ANZAC Day. Past the joking and nose tweaking, our Aussie cousins share this day with us on 25 April.