Poet James K. Baxter

Today is Montana Poetry Day, which celebrates New Zealand poetry. All around the country poetry events are being held, and poets are performing their work.

When I started work at Te Ara earlier this year, I was delighted (being a good, keen poetry-fancier) to discover the number of poems included in the encyclopedia, to illustrate and enrich the entries. And today seems like an appropriate occasion to highlight some of them.

There are a number of poems evoking places in the Landscapes overview entry, including Denis Glover’s ‘Summer, Pelorus Sound‘, Fleur Adcock’s ‘Stewart Island‘ and Brian Turner’s ‘Otago Peninsula‘.

Poetry features in our regional entries, with Allen Curnow’s ‘Auckland poem‘ in our Auckland entry, and Hone Tuwhare’s, ‘A fall of rain at Miti-miti‘ in Northland.

A tragic event in our history is commemorated in Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Erebus voices‘ – part of the Air crashes entry – which was read by Sir Edmund Hillary at the 25th anniversary of the plane crash on Mt Erebus in Antarctica.

Some of our community contributions – ‘Your stories‘ – have been poems, such as Maggie Rainey-Smith’s ‘After the storm‘ and ‘Alpine awakening‘ by Sabina de Rooy.

If you can’t be bothered reading, you can listen to sound files of Hone Tuwhare, Denis Glover and Albert Wendt reading their work.

In our next theme, The Settled Landscape (about farming, rural life, and people’s impact on the land), you can look forward to poems by Blanche Baughan, Denis Glover (the wonderful ‘The magpies’) and a 19th century poem about weasels.

Short-tailed bat munching a dactylanthus flower

Dactylanthus taylorii, also known as wood rose, is rare and special among New Zealand’s flora because it’s our only completely parasitic flowering native plant. It grows on the roots of its host tree and has no leaves of its own.

It’s under threat because possums enjoy scoffing the flowers before they have time to go to seed. The cages keep the possums away, but let through rats and mice, which pollinate the flowers. Prior to the introduction of rats and mice, dactylanthus was pollinated by native short-tailed bats, which are attracted by pheromones, as can be seen in this video of a snacking bat from Te Ara’s ‘Evolution of plants and animals‘ entry.

The cages are part of DOC’s dactylanthus recovery plan, and they also want to locate populations of the plants – so should you happen to see any on your strolls through the bush, you can help by letting DOC know where they are.

The eager editor

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 opusA. 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 XMLOf 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 conclaveOf 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.

Edible Rita Angus

The cake creators included our colleagues from NZlive.com, who were inspired by the exhibition, Rita Angus: Life and Vision, which opened at Te Papa last weekend. This exhibition honours the centenary of her birth, and brings together almost 200 of her works, including paintings, sketches and studies.

Rita Angus is well known for her modernist interpretations of New Zealand landscapes. Two of these feature in Te Ara: ‘Central Otago‘ is part of our entry on New Zealand’s light, and ‘Mountains, Cass‘ illustrates our Mountains entry. Her watercolour of a Chatham Islands Moriori, in our entry on Ideas of Māori origin, is one of her many portraits and self-portraits. My favourite of these is Rutu, in which she depicts herself as a goddess of mixed Polynesian and European heritage.

Although she grew up in Palmerston North, she is mainly associated with the art scenes of Christchurch and Wellington. She lived for many years in a cottage in Sydney Street in Wellington, which is now used for an artists’ residency. I was lucky enough to be able to visit it once, when some friends were living there. According to them, artist Dane Mitchell was correct about the paranormal activity (he created an exhibition exploring paranormal activity in the Rita Angus Cottage and apparently interviewed her via a medium), as they believed Rita Angus’s ghost was still resident. But they told me he was wrong about which chair she liked to sit in.

Outside the Eastern Southland Gallery in Gore

This tribute to recent boom times in the southern province is very timely for Te Ara, as we’re now in the final stages of preparing our entry on Southland and Fiordland – the 11th out of 22 regions.

Southland has had a long history. In the early 19th century the shores of Foveaux Strait were one of the first meeting zones between Māori and Pākehā – mostly sealers and whalers.

The Wakatipu and other gold rushes in the early 1860s prompted a short-lived boom, as did Vogel’s immigration and public works programme in the early 1870s.

In the late 19th and early 20th century the province grew rapidly as swamps were drained, forests cleared, and dairy factories and meat freezing works thrived. Invercargill grew apace to match.

The 20 years after the Second World War was another golden age for farming, when Gore was reputedly the country’s richest town and Invercargill one of its most prosperous and established cities.

To help us in preparing our entry, we’re calling all Southlanders, past, present and future (more people are going to live in Southland than leaving). We’re looking for pictures and other resources about Southland and Fiordland, to bring the entry alive.

We’ve created a Te Ara group on Flickr, which anyone can join and contribute photos to. You can also contribute personal accounts or family stories about Southland or its history, by filling in a ‘Your Stories’ form online.

So help us make sure ‘our’ Southland meets ‘your’ Southland.

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

Alfred Hanlon defended Minnie Dean in her June 1923 trial. She was the only one of his clients in a murder case who did not escape the noose.

Friday the 13th marked 142 years since the Burgess Gang (led by Richard Burgess), continuing their South Island killing spree, murdered publican Felix Mathieu and his three associates, James Dudley, John Kempthorne and James de Pontius.

On 16 June 1923, Daniel Cooper, the Newlands baby farmer, was executed. Following months of fevered media attention, the jury of the Coopers’ month-long trial had convicted Daniel of murder and cleared his wife Martha of her charges.

18 June 1895 was the first day of the trial of one of New Zealand’s most notorious murderers, the ‘Winton baby-farmer‘ Minnie Dean. She appeared before the jury for three days before her conviction, and became the first – and only – woman to be hanged in New Zealand, less than two months later, on 12 August.

Another sensational trial followed a tragic murder in 1954, when, on 22 June, Pauline Parker and Juliette Hulme killed Pauline’s mother in Victoria Park, Christchurch. This teenage folie à deux has continued to captivate the nation and is one of our more famous murder cases. It has inspired both a play, Michaelanne Forster’s Daughters of Heaven, and a film, Peter Jackson’s Oscar-nominated film Heavenly Creatures.

Jean Sergent-Shadbolt researches, writes and edits for www.NZHistory.net.nz, and is media resource officer for the newly launched www.VietnamWar.govt.nz.

The Wanganui Places entry is launched

It was a record turnout for one of our regional launches – larger than Auckland or Canterbury, and even larger than Timaru, where the locals also did us proud. The next morning Te Ara made the front page of the Wanganui Chronicle and the local radio discussed the entry.

So why did Wanganui respond so magnificently? There are some practical explanations.

• The author, Diana Beaglehole, was born in the Wanganui region and, despite not having lived there since 1959, she has many friends and supporters who came along to see her present the entry.
• We’ve got better at organising these events.
• It was a beautiful night in Wanganui, calm and clear with the fresh snow of Mt Ruapehu glistening on the horizon – no rain or cold to dissuade people from venturing out.

Wanganui town in the 1850sBut the reason may be deeper – Wanganui is a region with a very long and dramatic history.

The river that defines the region was the main highway of Māori society. It’s lined with pa sites, and there are some amazing historic places such as Tamatea’s cave, where generations of Māori have slept as they paddled up or down the river.

Later, the port attracted the Wakefield settlers, but it was a precarious existence. For some 30 years after 1840 the town was the frontier of Māori–Pākehā conflict. The memorial at Pākaitore or Moutoa Gardens to the Battle of Moutoa in 1864, which was fought dramatically on an island in the centre of the river, was New Zealand’s first war memorial.

In the late 19th century, as farming expanded, Wanganui city prospered. The city is dotted with very handsome buildings such as the exquisite Opera House; and it was, until 1936, New Zealand’s fifth-largest city, after the four main centres. Then growth slowed, and in the 1980s and 1990s Wanganui city and district suffered from closures and loss of jobs.

The team that brought you the Wanganui entryBut today there has been a revival – based in part on presenting Wanganui as a region of history and tradition. Our launch was held in the War Memorial Hall, which, as our interactive shows, is one of an impressive centre of heritage buildings and institutions – the museum, the Sarjeant art gallery, the Alexandra Heritage and Research Library.

People turned out on Monday because they treasure their history and their region. They know that understanding their past and telling the stories of Wanganui’s history is central to the region’s future.

Michael Laws, the mayor of Wanganui, was effusive in welcoming the Wanganui entry. We share his hopes that these entries, presented by Diana Beaglehole with a real affection for the district, will awaken other New Zealanders to the richness of Wanganui’s past.

Earthquake damage in Napier, 1931

When a large quake (say magnitude 7.4) next occurs on the Wellington Fault during daylight hours, predictions are in the order of 500 deaths, 4,000 injuries and a $4 billion repair bill. Most earthquake deaths are from building collapse and this is why fatality guesstimates are higher for daytime quakes – people are in or around big high-rise concrete structures or old brick buildings. At night most are at home in generally more flexible wooden buildings. Building owners can face prosecution if they fail to reinforce at-risk buildings, which are recorded on a register.

How to reconcile the risk? It seems that Wellingtonians (like everyone else in the world) have optimistic bias – they believe that negative events are more likely to happen to other people. In Christchurch the risk is less, but an earthquake of over magnitude 7 hitting the city and causing fatalities and damage is a definite possibility. Our recent earthquake history may not be representative of our impending future. We have had big quakes since 1840, but only one in a populated area (Napier in 1931, with 258 people killed).

The biggest shake is likely to come from the Alpine Fault. Big quakes (called ruptures, as the ground is ruptured along the fault) have occurred on this fault in 1717, 1620, 1450, and 1100. It does not mean that we are overdue – just that as time passes from the last big rupture (1717) the probability of the big one occurring rises.

I spent a few weeks as a field assistant to my brother, a geologist, in 2000 around Fox Glacier. He was studying the layers of sediment that creeks had exposed along the Alpine Fault.

I asked, ‘What would happen if it ruptured now?’

‘They wouldn’t have to bury us.’

So what can you do? Well, I’ve bracketed all the heavy furniture to the walls, so at least the bookshelf shouldn’t topple onto the children. When it hits remember to drop, cover and hold – and don’t believe urban legend emails about the ‘triangle of life‘.

The loveliest loos in the world?

Based on the search terms, Signposts is exactly the kind of thing most of our searchers were looking for. But others will probably be a bit disappointed as they were obviously looking for quite a different sort of website.

I thought I’d share some of my fav delightful, lateral and downright hilarious search terms:

• what to do about a frog injured new zealand
• waikikamookau nz
• male+men+jocks
• the world’s loveliest loo
• what are some world events that happened between 1908 to 2008
• hot women around foxton
• what happens to a male spiny stick insect after it mates
• ara live sex
• man and his cave nz
• 4 jocks surfer fight
• obscene signposts competing for love with another suitor
• the way neanderthals speak- bagpipes
• helicopter nude
• is it a really interesting place new zealand?