6 Mum doing the washing that took all friggen day with the old agetator (sp), going blackberry picking and helping to make the jam, taking lunch down to the paddock for the men doing the silage or hay, hell I loved it back then, its all changed now.
7 My Mum used to do her own preserving i.e. bottled fruits, beetroot and tomatoes, jams, tomato relish, chutnies; salted beans into large crocks. Also fill large crocks with pickled onions and red cabbage.
Bread was bought at the store or made at home; milk was delivered.
Dad grew most of our veggies - he always had a couple of big compost bins going. If he was away or she needed something, a vendor came from memory once a week in much the way Mr Whippy comes around.
Chicken was a luxury and only bought for special occasions such as Christmas Day. Our refrigerator had just an icebox so it was up to the store when we wanted ice-cream for desert.
My Mom from time to time, did make homemade icecream and chocolate [no fancy machines to help her either].
Well when we moved to Hei Hei, the nearest grocery shopping was at Stills General Store over in Hornby which meant a long walk there and back if Dad was away which was quite often because of his job.
One car/Mum never learnt to drive.
There was a small rather expensive range available at Patel's Garage but we avoided buying there. Back in those days [the 50's], stores weren't allowed to sell certain items including toilet paper on a Sunday so Patel's had a smaller side store with a separate entrance for Sunday trading. From memory they were caught several times selling prohibited items!
At some stage, a fish and chip shop opened so that became a meal once in a blue moon.
At a later date, a strip 'mall' of stores was built locally in Hei Hei which included a grocery store and a 4 Square - both stores delivered!
There was a habadashery store and a radio store along with a Post Office and Chemist. Then a butcher and a newspaper/book store. Can still remember going to the book store to pick up my weekly comic! I still have my Mum's cane shopping basket.
Lunches were homemade but at least once a month, we were allowed to buy our lunch. This was either a pie or fish and chips [had to be ordered before class commenced]. My sister was one year, in an old classroom that was heated by a barrel type wood heater - they used to put spuds in it.
Biscuits - my Mum had been a cook so she baked everything. However now and again she would buy a box of Aulsebrooks broken biscuits. We'd all sit around the table sorting out the 'good' ones and putting them in cake tins; the rest went into other tins to be made into fudge.
Cake - a very special treat if one was bought!
Drinks: Tea [leaf no bags in those days]; bottled coffee with chicory, cocoa and I think Milo/Bournvita was around too.
Sodas - All I can remember was Ballins!
I still remember the day Pepsi first hit the stores.
We made our own ginger beer!
Breakfasts were usually toast, Weetbix or porridge.
We had supper before going to bed. In winter, we had this large blackened kettle that was filled and heated over the open fire in the lounge [which also was connected to the hot water tank].
Many a night we made toast over the fire using a long handled toasting fork!
In those days, there was no such thing as tv so we had our favourite radio programmes to listen to at night. Somewhere in my young school days, a thing called the Hit Parade started once a week on the radio!
The only cans I can remember were spagetti, baked beans and tomato sauce!
Other than sweets [candy], I can't remember any chips or the likes.
When I got married in the late 60's, I still continued with preserving and making relishes. In fact, I still today make my own tomato relish [and did so the whole 20 years I lived in the US!]. I gave up preserving in the 70's when canned fruit etc became more readily available.
When freezers became part of our lives, we switched to freezing veggies for the winter; and of course, supermarkets by then had changed our lives as we could buy meat in bulk to freeze.
I used to make my own bread during the time of bread strikes!
BTW I am in my 60's....and it's after 2am....
Sunday, January 17, 2010
1950s memories Food and Other
1 I can remember the old IGA van coming out to the farm to deliver our groceries, god knows what the labels said back then. The old Rawleys man use to come around and the family Priest for tea. Going to church on a Sunday was the highlight of the week lol. We probably didnt worry too much what food pkts said as Mum did home baking all the time (home made pies, youghurt etc) and Dad had a vegie garden
2 I will be 50 next year, hubby will be 50 in a couple of weeks.
No, there wasn't a lot of stuff in packets. The only thing I really remember was when the cake mixes came out and Mum thought they were great. I remember getting a packet mix birthday cake and I hated it!
Every week we would do a grocery shop. There were no big supermarkets, just corner shops like Keystore and Four Square. You bought your veges fresh, usually from the kiosks at the side of the road that belonged to farms, or you grew your own. Meat came from the butcher, again once a week you would go down with the list and bring it home. If you were lucky, you got fish n chips once a week. Fizzy drink was for special occasions, probably around twice a year, Christmas and birthdays. We bought that by the crate from Ballins, swap a crate they were. We had around sixpence or 5 cents spending money for lollies, again, once a week.
People ate good, healthy food. We had the meat and 2 vege type meals. My parents had immigrated from Holland so we had a lot of good Dutch cooking as well. I can't remember any families or friends that ate very differently. We usually had dessert as well, it would be icecream, or sponge cake, cream, custards in winter.
Our lunches were homemade, we didn't have packet biscuits much. In my class of 48 kids, only one girl brought packet biscuits to school and she was the envy of everyone else. There was only one type of potato chip available and that was Smiths, which I love and you can only get in Australia.
We didn't eat chicken much. It was very expensive and was kept for Christmas or New Years Day dinner.
People bottled excess stuff out of their gardens in Summer to take them through Winter. There wasn't a lot of frozen stuff available, it was mostly cans, or dried, both of which we had when we went camping.
Grocery stores were only open Monday to Friday. If you ran out of something you waited till Monday. No one bought from the dairy, far too expensive and usually stale. We did have Sunday bread, fresh bread from the dairy on a Sunday. Yum.
We had milk and bread delivered every day.
I don't remember ever being hungry and food tasted great.
3 Takeaways was Fish and Chips no more than once a week and usually on a Friday night. I was brought up on meat and 3 veg and eat whats on your plate or go hungry and yum who can forget the Sunday hogget roast. Chippies and lollies were a treat not everyday.
4 Gosh that brings back the memory, just a couple of things different in my life back then was we went to the Greengrocer for vegs and fruit, and we only had milk delivered every day to the letterbox not bread. I chuckle nowdays when I see the panic buying at the supermarket if they are to be closed the next day which is about three days a year because we managed fine when they were closed from Friday 5.30 till Monday 9am
5 I miss them as well...sunday roast.....sunday bath lol.....baking day thursday.....fresh home grown veggies fruit iff the trees and rows of bottled fruit and home made jams in the store cupboard
2 I will be 50 next year, hubby will be 50 in a couple of weeks.
No, there wasn't a lot of stuff in packets. The only thing I really remember was when the cake mixes came out and Mum thought they were great. I remember getting a packet mix birthday cake and I hated it!
Every week we would do a grocery shop. There were no big supermarkets, just corner shops like Keystore and Four Square. You bought your veges fresh, usually from the kiosks at the side of the road that belonged to farms, or you grew your own. Meat came from the butcher, again once a week you would go down with the list and bring it home. If you were lucky, you got fish n chips once a week. Fizzy drink was for special occasions, probably around twice a year, Christmas and birthdays. We bought that by the crate from Ballins, swap a crate they were. We had around sixpence or 5 cents spending money for lollies, again, once a week.
People ate good, healthy food. We had the meat and 2 vege type meals. My parents had immigrated from Holland so we had a lot of good Dutch cooking as well. I can't remember any families or friends that ate very differently. We usually had dessert as well, it would be icecream, or sponge cake, cream, custards in winter.
Our lunches were homemade, we didn't have packet biscuits much. In my class of 48 kids, only one girl brought packet biscuits to school and she was the envy of everyone else. There was only one type of potato chip available and that was Smiths, which I love and you can only get in Australia.
We didn't eat chicken much. It was very expensive and was kept for Christmas or New Years Day dinner.
People bottled excess stuff out of their gardens in Summer to take them through Winter. There wasn't a lot of frozen stuff available, it was mostly cans, or dried, both of which we had when we went camping.
Grocery stores were only open Monday to Friday. If you ran out of something you waited till Monday. No one bought from the dairy, far too expensive and usually stale. We did have Sunday bread, fresh bread from the dairy on a Sunday. Yum.
We had milk and bread delivered every day.
I don't remember ever being hungry and food tasted great.
3 Takeaways was Fish and Chips no more than once a week and usually on a Friday night. I was brought up on meat and 3 veg and eat whats on your plate or go hungry and yum who can forget the Sunday hogget roast. Chippies and lollies were a treat not everyday.
4 Gosh that brings back the memory, just a couple of things different in my life back then was we went to the Greengrocer for vegs and fruit, and we only had milk delivered every day to the letterbox not bread. I chuckle nowdays when I see the panic buying at the supermarket if they are to be closed the next day which is about three days a year because we managed fine when they were closed from Friday 5.30 till Monday 9am
5 I miss them as well...sunday roast.....sunday bath lol.....baking day thursday.....fresh home grown veggies fruit iff the trees and rows of bottled fruit and home made jams in the store cupboard
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
SOSPAN FACH
SOSPAN FACH: The Saga of the Little Saucepan
SYNOPSIS – ABRIDGED VERSION
On April 7, 1974, five people leave Auckland, New Zealand, aboard an amateur-built ferro-cement yacht, the Sospan Fach (Little Saucepan), named after a rugby song from in Wales. They are headed for Sydney, Australia. The vessel has no motor, radio, extra sails, or instrumentation. The skipper has a nine-dollar compass and an inexpensive sextant on which he has no professional training. There is a lifeboat designed to carry only one person and a single life preserver. They carry provisions sufficient for a three-week journey. None of the crew has any deep-water sailing experience. Their navigational plan is to sail three days north and then turn left; Australia is so large one couldn’t miss it. The crew ends up stranded for six weeks on Middleton Reef before being rescued by another vessel that happens only accidentally to be in the area.
ITHNAN NICKELSON is a carpenter by trade … now. As a kid in Wales, he sits by the side of the bay and dreams of building and owning his own yacht. Following one scrape after another, he is sentenced to serve in the British Merchant Service, where he continues to get into trouble. Involved in a fight in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Ithnan jumps ship and goes to work at the Bougainville Copper Project on Bougainville Island in the Solomons. After a year at the mines, he returns to Port Moresby and gets involved with the smuggling of exotic pets and brandy.
Stopped at sea by the Aussie Coast Guard, Ithnan discovers that the smuggling of these items is merely a ruse to move large quantities of heroin. He escapes capture, dumps the heroin overboard, and scuttles his boat, much to the chagrin of the syndicate kingpin, Mr. Asia himself, Martin Johnstone, who puts out a contract on Ithnan’s life. Ithnan catches a plane to Brisbane and takes a train to Sydney, where he tries to draw upon the bank accounts he has opened. Unable to do so, Ithnan flees to New Zealand, where for three years he works as a carpenter’s helper and builds his yacht, with the help of TONY BENETTI, a garage mechanic who teaches Ithnan to weld. Benetti’s real name is Terry Clark, an underworld figure operating in the New Zealand drug trade under an alias, and a member of the Mr. Asia syndicate. Aware of who Ithnan is, Benetti will settle the contract score, but not until Ithnan has performed an important service.
PHILIP LUNDQUIST is the oldest sibling of a very large family of boys. He has no job. He has no plans to pursue higher education, and he is about to graduate from secondary school. He lives with his family in a small and crowded home near Melbourne, Australia, and decides he might just as well travel. He knows he can get tourist season work in the hotels in Brisbane, Queensland, on Australia’s gold coast. During his train ride north he encounters another young man desirous to obtain a recruiting bonus if he can persuade Philip to go to New Zealand to pick apples. Philip joins the apple pickers in New Zealand. The work is hard and the money is good. But Philip, who has been a marijuana user, encounters some native drugs, including the so-called “magic mushrooms,” and a root known as Kava, which when ground and placed in an apple drink keeps him a little on the high side. He runs into trouble with the management of the apple picking effort, leaves, and finds work moving furniture. Thoroughly sick of it all, he now decides to go home, but he has no money for the airfare. While living at a hostel in Auckland, he sees a notice on a bulletin board that leads him to think he can get a ride back to Australia for free.
COLLEEN BAKER is an emotionally suppressed graduate of a college in Adelaide, South Australia. The daughter of a passive father and a straight-laced Anglican mother, Colleen is kept at or near home until she has completed her university work. She has a brief romantic encounter with a fellow student who is drafted for, and subsequently dies in, the Vietnam War. After university, she takes a teaching position in Darwin, Northern Territory, where, unfortunately, all the available suitors seem to be troops rotating to and from Vietnam. Running away from that, she accepts a research position with a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. She enjoys her work, and in the process lives with a co-worker from Ireland. Returning from a research trip she discovers that he has a wife and family back in Ireland and, in disgust, she moves out of the apartment they had shared and into an Auckland hostel. It is there that she reads the newspaper and sees the ad.
GEORGINA YARNELL is the stepdaughter of a barren couple who run a poultry farm south of Auckland. Adopted as a child from a Chinese orphanage run by their church, Georgina grows to young adulthood and subsequently pursues nurse’s training at another Auckland hospital. At the end of a very exhausting year, Georgina is faced with the question of how to spend the hiatus between schooling periods. Following a difficult interchange between herself and her supervision, Georgina decides to take a holiday, rather than to go home, and when a co-worker draws her attention to the ad in the newspaper, Georgina decides that a fortnight’s cruise to Sydney would be just the diversion she needs.
The ad is an invitation for an all-female crew for a shakedown cruise to Sydney. Ithnan places it in the New Zealand Herald in the belief that being surrounded by females for the trip could have possibilities. While the ad draws many curiosity seekers, all but two—Georgina and Colleen—take a look at the vessel and at its middle-aged skipper, bewhiskered, unkempt, and possessing sinister-looking eyes, and decide to pass up the offer. Of the two women, Georgina is the more foolhardy, as she spends much pre-voyage time at the boat and is warned against the trip by the man who had designed the rigging, MAX CARTER. Colleen, now close friends with a married doctor, accepts what she sees and what he says, but insists that there be a fourth crewmember, even if that person happens to be male. She places a notice on the bulletin board at the hostel.
Nickelson knows the vessel is ill equipped and he declares that because of his Welsh citizenship, it is not necessary to have the vessel licensed or inspected for approval of a deep-sea voyage by New Zealand authorities. Nobody disavows him of that notion. Further, because he is carrying contraband cargo, Nickelson avoids any potential inspection. To get some tips on handling the vessel, he takes a sailing lesson around the harbor, and grounds the yacht against a sea wall. Upon departure, he experiences an inordinate amount of difficulty leaving the Auckland harbor, and once out of the harbor he ignores the requests of the women to put about and return them to land. He finally “agrees,” but is reluctant to keep his word, owing to the contraband cargo. And suddenly, the vessel and its crew is clear of the northwestern tip of New Zealand and into the Tasman Sea, theoretically heading for Australia. There is physical conflict between Philip and Ithnan. Georgina is too sick to protest much. Colleen whines and complains.
Because of Ithnan’s ineptitude, the vessel runs aground on Middleton Reef, 800 miles off course, and the site of many prior shipwrecks. Within walking distance at low tide is a wrecked Japanese fishing trawler, and the four take up residence on the Fuku Maru #7, where they reside for six weeks, struggling to stay fed and healthy, and dealing with interpersonal relations problems. Philip develops his courage. Georgina finds her voice. Colleen continues to whine. On the vessel, the skipper appears to be going mad, attempting to keep the others from eating the available food and suggesting that he is capable of murder. The other three discuss mutiny. The Sospan Fach breaks up and both Ithnan and Philip discover cocaine powder floating in the bilge water.
DIETER WAGNER is the skipper of a fishing trawler, the Hammerblitz, operating out of Fiji. The vessel has recently received an equipment modification in the New South Wales (Australia) city of Ballina and is undergoing sea trials when a gale comes up and pushes the Hammerblitz 400 miles to the east, into the vicinity of Middleton Reef. Wagner’s crew discovers the presence of people on the stranded Japanese fishing trawler, while those stranded become aware of the new vessel’s presence, several miles away. For several days, until the seas calm, there are signal attempts, and eventually the crew of the Hammerblitz rescues the castaways and returns them to Ballina. Ithnan, aware of the incriminating nature of the contraband cargo, does not mention it. Neither does Philip, owing to a “gentleman’s agreement” not to spill the beans on the other’s contraband. What neither knows, however, is that the cocaine is merely the tip of the cargo, that several million dollars in gold are also secreted in the Sospan. The gold is lost in the Tasman Sea.
Once back on Australian soil, Philip, Colleen, and Georgina meet their parents and return to their respective homes. Ithnan proceeds to Sydney and takes a room in the city’s red light district, intent on using some of the local services. “Representatives” of the Mr. Asia syndicate follow Ithnan and dispense underworld justice. Back in Auckland, now very aware that neither the drugs nor the gold has found its way to Australia, Tony Benetti assumes that his days are numbered, and when syndicate “representatives” come to beat him, he assumes that they are there to kill him, and dispatches the men himself.
Now that there is a contract on him, Benetti adopts another alias and with an accomplice escapes to London, and now traveling under the alias Terence Alexander Sinclair, begins to settle scores all over the world. In the process, Mr. Asia, Martin Johnstone is attracted to London, where Sinclair, aware that he is a syndicate target, is gaily spreading the syndicate’s money. Johnstone personally goes after Sinclair. Johnstone’s syndicate bosses place a contract upon Johnstone and Sinclair picks up that contract. Johnstone’s body is found nude, weighted, hands severed, teeth extracted, and torso gutted in a flooded quarry north of Liverpool. And folks wonder why Sinclair, in the apparent peak of good health dies quite suddenly while in Parkhurst Prison.
SYNOPSIS – ABRIDGED VERSION
On April 7, 1974, five people leave Auckland, New Zealand, aboard an amateur-built ferro-cement yacht, the Sospan Fach (Little Saucepan), named after a rugby song from in Wales. They are headed for Sydney, Australia. The vessel has no motor, radio, extra sails, or instrumentation. The skipper has a nine-dollar compass and an inexpensive sextant on which he has no professional training. There is a lifeboat designed to carry only one person and a single life preserver. They carry provisions sufficient for a three-week journey. None of the crew has any deep-water sailing experience. Their navigational plan is to sail three days north and then turn left; Australia is so large one couldn’t miss it. The crew ends up stranded for six weeks on Middleton Reef before being rescued by another vessel that happens only accidentally to be in the area.
ITHNAN NICKELSON is a carpenter by trade … now. As a kid in Wales, he sits by the side of the bay and dreams of building and owning his own yacht. Following one scrape after another, he is sentenced to serve in the British Merchant Service, where he continues to get into trouble. Involved in a fight in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, Ithnan jumps ship and goes to work at the Bougainville Copper Project on Bougainville Island in the Solomons. After a year at the mines, he returns to Port Moresby and gets involved with the smuggling of exotic pets and brandy.
Stopped at sea by the Aussie Coast Guard, Ithnan discovers that the smuggling of these items is merely a ruse to move large quantities of heroin. He escapes capture, dumps the heroin overboard, and scuttles his boat, much to the chagrin of the syndicate kingpin, Mr. Asia himself, Martin Johnstone, who puts out a contract on Ithnan’s life. Ithnan catches a plane to Brisbane and takes a train to Sydney, where he tries to draw upon the bank accounts he has opened. Unable to do so, Ithnan flees to New Zealand, where for three years he works as a carpenter’s helper and builds his yacht, with the help of TONY BENETTI, a garage mechanic who teaches Ithnan to weld. Benetti’s real name is Terry Clark, an underworld figure operating in the New Zealand drug trade under an alias, and a member of the Mr. Asia syndicate. Aware of who Ithnan is, Benetti will settle the contract score, but not until Ithnan has performed an important service.
PHILIP LUNDQUIST is the oldest sibling of a very large family of boys. He has no job. He has no plans to pursue higher education, and he is about to graduate from secondary school. He lives with his family in a small and crowded home near Melbourne, Australia, and decides he might just as well travel. He knows he can get tourist season work in the hotels in Brisbane, Queensland, on Australia’s gold coast. During his train ride north he encounters another young man desirous to obtain a recruiting bonus if he can persuade Philip to go to New Zealand to pick apples. Philip joins the apple pickers in New Zealand. The work is hard and the money is good. But Philip, who has been a marijuana user, encounters some native drugs, including the so-called “magic mushrooms,” and a root known as Kava, which when ground and placed in an apple drink keeps him a little on the high side. He runs into trouble with the management of the apple picking effort, leaves, and finds work moving furniture. Thoroughly sick of it all, he now decides to go home, but he has no money for the airfare. While living at a hostel in Auckland, he sees a notice on a bulletin board that leads him to think he can get a ride back to Australia for free.
COLLEEN BAKER is an emotionally suppressed graduate of a college in Adelaide, South Australia. The daughter of a passive father and a straight-laced Anglican mother, Colleen is kept at or near home until she has completed her university work. She has a brief romantic encounter with a fellow student who is drafted for, and subsequently dies in, the Vietnam War. After university, she takes a teaching position in Darwin, Northern Territory, where, unfortunately, all the available suitors seem to be troops rotating to and from Vietnam. Running away from that, she accepts a research position with a hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. She enjoys her work, and in the process lives with a co-worker from Ireland. Returning from a research trip she discovers that he has a wife and family back in Ireland and, in disgust, she moves out of the apartment they had shared and into an Auckland hostel. It is there that she reads the newspaper and sees the ad.
GEORGINA YARNELL is the stepdaughter of a barren couple who run a poultry farm south of Auckland. Adopted as a child from a Chinese orphanage run by their church, Georgina grows to young adulthood and subsequently pursues nurse’s training at another Auckland hospital. At the end of a very exhausting year, Georgina is faced with the question of how to spend the hiatus between schooling periods. Following a difficult interchange between herself and her supervision, Georgina decides to take a holiday, rather than to go home, and when a co-worker draws her attention to the ad in the newspaper, Georgina decides that a fortnight’s cruise to Sydney would be just the diversion she needs.
The ad is an invitation for an all-female crew for a shakedown cruise to Sydney. Ithnan places it in the New Zealand Herald in the belief that being surrounded by females for the trip could have possibilities. While the ad draws many curiosity seekers, all but two—Georgina and Colleen—take a look at the vessel and at its middle-aged skipper, bewhiskered, unkempt, and possessing sinister-looking eyes, and decide to pass up the offer. Of the two women, Georgina is the more foolhardy, as she spends much pre-voyage time at the boat and is warned against the trip by the man who had designed the rigging, MAX CARTER. Colleen, now close friends with a married doctor, accepts what she sees and what he says, but insists that there be a fourth crewmember, even if that person happens to be male. She places a notice on the bulletin board at the hostel.
Nickelson knows the vessel is ill equipped and he declares that because of his Welsh citizenship, it is not necessary to have the vessel licensed or inspected for approval of a deep-sea voyage by New Zealand authorities. Nobody disavows him of that notion. Further, because he is carrying contraband cargo, Nickelson avoids any potential inspection. To get some tips on handling the vessel, he takes a sailing lesson around the harbor, and grounds the yacht against a sea wall. Upon departure, he experiences an inordinate amount of difficulty leaving the Auckland harbor, and once out of the harbor he ignores the requests of the women to put about and return them to land. He finally “agrees,” but is reluctant to keep his word, owing to the contraband cargo. And suddenly, the vessel and its crew is clear of the northwestern tip of New Zealand and into the Tasman Sea, theoretically heading for Australia. There is physical conflict between Philip and Ithnan. Georgina is too sick to protest much. Colleen whines and complains.
Because of Ithnan’s ineptitude, the vessel runs aground on Middleton Reef, 800 miles off course, and the site of many prior shipwrecks. Within walking distance at low tide is a wrecked Japanese fishing trawler, and the four take up residence on the Fuku Maru #7, where they reside for six weeks, struggling to stay fed and healthy, and dealing with interpersonal relations problems. Philip develops his courage. Georgina finds her voice. Colleen continues to whine. On the vessel, the skipper appears to be going mad, attempting to keep the others from eating the available food and suggesting that he is capable of murder. The other three discuss mutiny. The Sospan Fach breaks up and both Ithnan and Philip discover cocaine powder floating in the bilge water.
DIETER WAGNER is the skipper of a fishing trawler, the Hammerblitz, operating out of Fiji. The vessel has recently received an equipment modification in the New South Wales (Australia) city of Ballina and is undergoing sea trials when a gale comes up and pushes the Hammerblitz 400 miles to the east, into the vicinity of Middleton Reef. Wagner’s crew discovers the presence of people on the stranded Japanese fishing trawler, while those stranded become aware of the new vessel’s presence, several miles away. For several days, until the seas calm, there are signal attempts, and eventually the crew of the Hammerblitz rescues the castaways and returns them to Ballina. Ithnan, aware of the incriminating nature of the contraband cargo, does not mention it. Neither does Philip, owing to a “gentleman’s agreement” not to spill the beans on the other’s contraband. What neither knows, however, is that the cocaine is merely the tip of the cargo, that several million dollars in gold are also secreted in the Sospan. The gold is lost in the Tasman Sea.
Once back on Australian soil, Philip, Colleen, and Georgina meet their parents and return to their respective homes. Ithnan proceeds to Sydney and takes a room in the city’s red light district, intent on using some of the local services. “Representatives” of the Mr. Asia syndicate follow Ithnan and dispense underworld justice. Back in Auckland, now very aware that neither the drugs nor the gold has found its way to Australia, Tony Benetti assumes that his days are numbered, and when syndicate “representatives” come to beat him, he assumes that they are there to kill him, and dispatches the men himself.
Now that there is a contract on him, Benetti adopts another alias and with an accomplice escapes to London, and now traveling under the alias Terence Alexander Sinclair, begins to settle scores all over the world. In the process, Mr. Asia, Martin Johnstone is attracted to London, where Sinclair, aware that he is a syndicate target, is gaily spreading the syndicate’s money. Johnstone personally goes after Sinclair. Johnstone’s syndicate bosses place a contract upon Johnstone and Sinclair picks up that contract. Johnstone’s body is found nude, weighted, hands severed, teeth extracted, and torso gutted in a flooded quarry north of Liverpool. And folks wonder why Sinclair, in the apparent peak of good health dies quite suddenly while in Parkhurst Prison.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
The day a shadow fell
IT'S a wintry Auckland day, but the Mediterranean sun of nearly 70 years ago illuminates Jack Middleton's room at the Ranfurly Veterans Home.
The old soldier is at work on one of his tapestries, a hobby he began to while away the wet winter evenings when farming on the Hauraki Plains after his "overseas trip".
The tapestries are very good but, colourful as they are, his needlework can't compete with his war stories.
For the next hour the former carpenter, soldier and farmer is no longer 91 and plagued by angina and a gammy knee.
He's a 21-year-old back in a leaking eight-man army tent in Ngaruawahia in 1939; then on board the Orion a few months later as the converted passenger liner pulls away from the dock, taking the First Echelon to the Middle East.
That first day in Egypt monuments, mates and mischief. Good times.
Then Greece. Rumbling, oncoming tanks, hundreds of them. Crete, and parachutists, thousands of them. Bad times.
Back to Cairo. So many faces missing.
The colonel who saw him as officer material (no thanks).
Libya, and fixing bayonets for a night charge on Belhamid.
El Alamein, and shrapnel in the knee.
Coming home, and opening an unexpected letter from the War Department. It said he didn't have to go back to the war.
And the day he and his fellow carpenters on an Auckland state housing construction site put down their saws and hammers and went into town for a drink. World War II was over.
Jack's war started as it ended - on a building site.
He remembers the announcement on the radio but didn't stop hammering nails just because a world war had broken out. No one was hysterical about it, he said, and there was a job to be done for the Lands and Survey Department at Kerepehi, south of Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains.
A couple of days later Jack rode his pushbike 12 miles to Paeroa to sign on - the first in the town to do so when enlistment opened. There was another job to be done.
Besides, he adds: "I wasn't going to get a trip overseas otherwise."
Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage prophetically warned that it would be a long, bitter conflict. Even so, who would have predicted war between then-allies Germany and Russia, and World War I allies America and Japan?
The impact on New Zealand was enormous, perhaps more than Savage could have envisaged, had he lived to see it. In September 1939, the New Zealand Army numbered 2500. Three years later, one in eight Kiwis was in uniform, when the Home Guard is taken into account, and by then the war accounted for half the nation's economic activity. Twelve thousand New Zealanders died, one in 130.
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But Jack recalls that the mood on board the Orion was optimistic when she sailed on January 5, 1940. And why not? He had left school in the midst of the Great Depression, yet here they were, at the start of an experience they had never had before. Travelling in style, too; they had two-berth cabins, luxury compared to the army training camp at Ngaruawahia.There was even a full orchestra. And stewards.
"We still had to drill and march around the decks."
And when the First Echelon landed in Egypt, the overseas experience was everything it promised. On their first day at Maadi Camp their colonel marched them into Cairo for a look around, and they "saw everything there was to see", Jack says, with a twinkle in his eye. That's a reference to the Wagh el Birket, the infamous red-light district.
They visited the museums, the zoo, the brewery (where the Kiwis were not invited back). And the English tea gardens, until someone was rude to one of their hostesses, who turned out to be Lady Astor. The Kiwis were not invited back.
His mate, Bruce, would "drink like a fish, he wouldn't go to sleep until he'd kissed everyone good night".
The New Zealanders were seeing the world, but the bill was about to arrive. For all their training, Jack recalls, they had "no idea what was coming".
Of the 700 men in 18 Battalion who left Egypt for Athens at the start of March 1941, fewer than half assembled back at Maadi Camp after the disasters of Greece and Crete. "We had 420 reinforcements, that was how many we lost, killed or prisoner."
Their first night in Athens was spent in a cemetery after their arrival on the Ajax, and they were sent by train to Salonika.
"We had no equipment, just rifles, no tanks, or air support, they had everything."
He remembers the Germans pushing unwilling Italians in front, forcing them to fight.
"We were pushed back..." A slight pause. "Never mind."
Bitterly, the New Zealanders noted Winston Churchill's public claims that the Allies did have air support in Greece. "One bloke said, if the air force is in Greece then where the hell are we?"
At least Churchill showed up in Egypt later, Jack says. "He came tearing along in a jeep, he said 'hello, kiss my arse' and was gone again."
It's no surprise to hear that Jack was a PBP Poor Bloody Private from start to finish, even though battalion commander Colonel Jan Peart offered him officer training after Crete.
Jack was mentioned in dispatches after El Alamein, and nominated for a military medal, but in the end the only metalwork he collected was the shrapnel in his knee in the battle. The wound was "nothing" he says (Peart, the former headmaster of King's College, Auckland, died of wounds on September 4, 1942).
Jack wasn't to know it, but the Allied victories in North Africa meant his war was coming to an end.
"Strafed in the desert and bombed out in Crete
With sore dark eyes and hardened by the heat"
James K Baxter, "Returned Soldier"
In July 1943, after three years away, the first furlough draft of 2NZEF returned to New Zealand. To their disgust, they found they had been fighting a very different war from those at home who had found ways to gain exemption from active service.
"We all decided we wouldn't go back, there were so many jokers walking around in civvy clothes."
Public opinion swung behind the soldiers, and Jack says that those who did go back were mostly given tasks away from the front, such as driving. In his own case his mother was ill his father died in 1929 and Jack was given six months' compassionate leave, albeit without pay. Then in June 1944, to his complete surprise, the letter from the War Department arrived to say he was discharged.
The quiet life followed building, farming, working for Hellaby's in the bacon factory, and raising two children.
It's nearly spring now, meaning it's time to see the daffodils in bloom on his son's farm at Pukekawa. The Ranfurly has its own outings and activities they look after him well, Jack says, and he keeps himself busy with tapestries, surrounded by people who can identify with his war experiences.
But they've never been that far away. Years after the war, on an evening when he took his wife out for dinner at the Thames RSA, a familiar voice boomed across the room: "I kissed you good night over there and I'm going to kiss you good night again now!"
Keen Auckland sailor Con Thode went to work as usual on September 3, 1939, despite the morning news.
After all, he and his yachting friends had seen the war clouds gathering for months and had taken steps towards gaining the qualifications they would need to serve in the navy.
But although his first rank was "Acting probationary temporary sub-lieutenant", he never expected to see the war through a periscope.
The living room of the 98-year-old's home at Okura, north of Auckland, is testament to four years of service with distinction in submarines. In one corner is the ship's bell from the Scythian, which he commanded. On one wall is an artist's impression, published in the Illustrated London News, of a head-on collision between his first submarine, the Proteus, and an Italian destroyer off the Greek coast.
At 98, Con retains an alertness that belies his years, and, although some of the memories are a bit hazy now, he clearly remembers how he nearly didn't make it to sea at all.
In 1939 the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy wasn't recruiting, and would-be officers thinking of joining the Royal Navy in Singapore were advised that "private means" were a prerequisite.
Disgusted at the elitism, Con enlisted in the infantry, only to learn from a fellow crew member on the yacht Iorangi that an Auckland yachtmaster's ticket would open doors in London. Sailing community contacts helped him "un-enlist" and he left New Zealand for the first time, working his way to England on the Port Darwin, and arriving to a London of sandbags and gasmasks.
Training in Brighton and convoy escort duty on corvettes followed, where the only sign of the other side was a Focke-Wulf Condor circling out of range.
But Con's war changed course in 1941 when the Luftwaffe dropped a parachute mine on the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel, killing some of his fellow diners. "It just got to the stage when it all seemed so hopeless," he says.
It turned out to be a case of mood matching opportunity, because the next day, after he had picked his way through glass and rubble to report for duty, he learned that the Royal Navy was looking for submarine volunteers.
Over the next four years Con was twice mentioned in dispatches after patrols that sank troopships in the Aegean and protected the Allies' Arctic convoys.
And there was an enormous party for his crew and everyone else in Trincomalee harbour, Sri Lanka, on the day it was all over.
"There was supposedly a great shortage of booze, it was amazing how much appeared that night. Rockets and flares... it was a big night."
It was over, except it wasn't. Back in New Zealand, he married and returned to his old job of working for chemicals giant ICI, but could not fit back into civilian life. He cleared his head by going farming at Matakana, near where he now lives.
He has a fantastic view of the sea, and given those days and nights of dim lighting and stale air, he surely appreciates the sunshine and salt air more than most.
"Near miss", says the caption in neat capital letters. Understatement isn't the word, given that the image it accompanies is of a German bomb landing close to HMS Leander in the Mediterranean.
Leander veteran Des Price, 89, enlarges: "A near miss could be worse than a direct hit, a near miss alongside a ship could open her up."
This photo album is surreal, the result of some entrepreneurial spirit by a camera-toting crew member who would pin prints to a board and sell copies to willing buyers. Another picture shows a half dozen of the cruiser's crew grinning on a sunny day. It could be anyone's holiday snaps if not for the steel helmets and the neat handwriting noting that they have just helped fight off an air attack.
"That was taken on my 17th birthday," says Des's Leander shipmate Bill Morland, 85, pointing to a picture of himself and two other sailors. Shortly after the shutter clicked, the crew were at action stations to repel aircraft.
If you were an historian trying to capture the spirit of the New Zealand experience of World War II, you could give up on the words and just run these pictures a sepia world of Sydney swimsuit beauties and exotic ports of call Bombay, Colombo, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean. And the Solomons, when there was no "near miss". They were lucky to survive; 33 of their crewmates didn't.
Bill Morland clearly remembers September 3, 1939. He was on leave in his home town, Dunedin, and had already been in the navy since the age of 15-and-a-half "I used to see all the ships coming in with all the pomp and ceremony and thought it would be a good life."
No sooner had the radio announced the news when his brother appeared in the Octagon with a telegram ordering him to report back to HMS Philomel, the naval base in Auckland. The declaration of war came as a shock, he recalls. "When you're young you don't really think about world events."
Des, originally from Levin but now living in Auckland, heard the announcement on the Leander's tannoy, on the way back from the cruiser's first mission. New Zealand had not waited for the outbreak, given what happened at Fanning Island (now Kiribati) in World War I, when the German raider Nurnberg shelled the cable station and disrupted communications across the Pacific. The small garrison Leander was carrying 1 platoon A company, special Service Force became known as "The men who beat the gun", Des recalls.
The two veterans admit they had no idea what was in store; Des thought the war would last maybe a year while Bill hoped they would be "cruising the islands in winter and New Zealand and Australia in summer".
Des, whose father had been wounded and shell-shocked in World War I, expected at least to be safer at sea, although he had been keen on the navy since primary school.
"In the navy it's 99% boredom and 1%... well..." His meticulous "summary of places of call and events" records everything from "boredom" to "well..."
On February 21, 1941, the Leander sank Ramb I, an Italian armed raider. (Almost all the crew were rescued.) The previous day: Leander's ship's cat Minnie was unfortunately lost overboard. March 16, another disaster: the ship "ran out of rum".
He knows all this because, against regulations, he also kept a diary. There's a gap, but he's glad it was only the pages he lost.
They were both on board when the Japanese torpedo struck on the night of July 11, 1943, when Leander formed part of a Pacific task force.
Des, in particular, had a lucky escape. He was working in the boiler room as part of an electrical repair party when he was called away to the other end of the cruiser. "At midnight they wanted a job done in the after engine room and took me away. A chap from Devonport took my place. One hour later there wasn't anyone left."
They were lucky to get back, says Bill. The photos show a huge hole in Leander's port side, and the cruiser would have been an easy target as she limped to safety.
You'd think that by now Des might have been rethinking the relative safety of the navy but he only got in deeper, literally. A former motor mechanic before joining the navy, his fascination with submarines was prompted by a visit aboard a seized Italian sub in Aden in 1943. He was one of four friends who volunteered.
"We used to see them going out and coming back, somehow it just got us."
He served on the Otway, Tribune and Totem, and the eventual fate of the latter is a chilling reminder of the risks he faced. Sold to Israel after the war, the submarine disappeared en route and the wreckage was found only four years ago in the Mediterranean.
"These things happen," says Des.
At Submariners' corner in the Devonport RSA there is a list of Allied submarines lost in the war, and it's a long one.
Bill ended the war on HMS Norfolk (Leander was "paid off" in 1944), and saw the Norwegians' reaction when the cruiser brought King Haakon and his family to Oslo in June 1945 after five years in exile. It was a "quite interesting" occasion, notes Bill. He was in Malta when Japan surrendered "That was a bit of a relief. We were refitting on the way to the Pacific."
He remembers arriving back in Wellington on Christmas Day 1945 "That was great. We came back on a converted aircraft carrier, all the North Islanders got off at Wellington on Christmas Eve, we sailed for Lyttleton. We had leave 'til March."
Everyone else was being demobbed but Bill and Des, being regular navy, had to report back after their leave.
And for Bill, it started all over again in Korea. After that he joined the army and served 14 years as an instructor. But when offered a tour of duty in Vietnam, he declined: "I said I wouldn't trust my luck that far."
Des concurs: "I suppose we were lucky in many ways."
Near misses, and all that.
When Esther Cochran reads an Agatha Christie thriller, the page numbers take her on a voyage around the Pacific of 70 years ago.
It's one of the odd ways the memories of her war service return, says the former Waaf (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) weather specialist.
Page 115 is Auckland; page 172 is Hamilton. The numbers are weather codes memorised as part of her years of work for the air force weather department in Suva, when Fiji was the crossroads of the Allied war effort in the Pacific.
But the 94-year-old Aucklander wishes she could remember more and regrets not recording her experiences from 1939-45. Something as mundane as a cloud formation can set off a flashback she had to know her nimbostratus from her cumulus.
"I'm very angry at myself that I didn't write things down. When you're young and things happen, you don't really register that they'll be very important, you think it doesn't matter but it does."
The former shorthand typist does recall that when the conflict broke out the War Department visited the company she worked for.
"They wanted volunteers to join His Majesty's Armed Forces. I was no more an armed force than a pussycat but I put my hand up."
Esther considered herself patriotic and saw it as her duty, but learned very quickly that doing her part would involve personal sacrifice.
The occasion was an encounter with her former manager in Queen St.
"I had quite a thing about that boss. I had a bit of a crush on him. He pumped my hand and said I was looking as lovely as ever."
But there was a war on and the regulations demanded secrecy. She couldn't tell him where she was going or what she was doing.
She volunteered for overseas service and was posted to Suva, where she plotted maps for the air force forecasters around the clock.
Esther was one of 10,000 New Zealand servicemen and women in Fiji. The official history of New Zealand notes that they were overcrowded, under-resourced and endured boredom and tropical diseases while their contribution to the war effort went largely unnoticed.
Esther was lucky to have work she considered enjoyable, but she missed her Devonport home with its magnificent oaks and pohutukawa, blackberries in the back yard, cosy fireplaces and poetry library, including her own verses and short stories. She missed the concerts her family would attend at the Auckland Town Hall.
But she did make good friends in the Waafs and, after all these years, one of them still comes to her birthday parties at the Ascot retirement home in Devonport.
It's not far from the house Esther returned to after four years in Fiji, and where she lived from the age of three months to 88 years a home of happy family memories, except for the grief that World War I visited on her family.
Despite her sense of patriotism, Esther has never had any illusions about war.
"I feel very angry when I think about the war and any wars. They are diabolical, they just are. It ruined my sister's life."
Her sister Dorothy's husband was given six weeks' leave after their marriage. He knew he had a daughter, but never lived to see her. She was six weeks old when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme.
Her brother Hector was wounded but survived and won the Military Medal.
"Wars are just dreadful. That was my sister's life ruined. They were so in love. It's just unbelievably awful. There should always be another way of settling your arguments without having a war."
Tom Shaw never spoke much about the war.
His son John, a Devonport painter, says he and his siblings would ask about it but their mother would intervene "Don't upset your father".
The Wairarapa farmer took his memories and stories to the grave, but he did leave behind a suitcase full of clues.
Showing a sense of posterity and occasion and a disregard for army regulations Gunner Shaw used his Kodak Box Brownie to record scenes ranging from the Maori Battalion on parade to his artillery unit in action.
We can guess why he singled out certain graves in the El Alamein cemetery. But we won't know the circumstances and other consequences of the air raid that resulted in the Chevrolet 4x4 (used to tow the 6th Field Regiment's 25-pounder guns) catching fire, leaving the crew to frantically shovel sand on to the blaze.
In another picture of a Chevy, there's someone else's ammunition inside. It's a dud shell that landed right next to the steering wheel.
The memorabilia Tom Shaw was perhaps proudest of was his "one-way ticket" to Europe the berthing card issued on his departure from New Zealand. He kept it for the rest of his life in a precious leather wallet which also contains small head and shoulders photos with brief captions: "Gunner V.B. Silbery. Killed in action." "Gunner R. Townhill. Killed in action."
Intriguingly, one photograph (above) shows German paratroops landing only about 100m away. On the back, a single word: "Crete".
It could be an extraordinary snapshot taken in the heat of battle, but exactly when, where and by whom is unknown. The source best-placed to comment died in August 2006, aged 87.
Tom Shaw's family can only speculate that he might have been more forthcoming to someone outside the family. But today, Google says only: "Your search `6th field regiment' `Tom Shaw' did not match any documents".
By ARTHUR WHELAN - Sunday Star Times 30 -8 -9
The old soldier is at work on one of his tapestries, a hobby he began to while away the wet winter evenings when farming on the Hauraki Plains after his "overseas trip".
The tapestries are very good but, colourful as they are, his needlework can't compete with his war stories.
For the next hour the former carpenter, soldier and farmer is no longer 91 and plagued by angina and a gammy knee.
He's a 21-year-old back in a leaking eight-man army tent in Ngaruawahia in 1939; then on board the Orion a few months later as the converted passenger liner pulls away from the dock, taking the First Echelon to the Middle East.
That first day in Egypt monuments, mates and mischief. Good times.
Then Greece. Rumbling, oncoming tanks, hundreds of them. Crete, and parachutists, thousands of them. Bad times.
Back to Cairo. So many faces missing.
The colonel who saw him as officer material (no thanks).
Libya, and fixing bayonets for a night charge on Belhamid.
El Alamein, and shrapnel in the knee.
Coming home, and opening an unexpected letter from the War Department. It said he didn't have to go back to the war.
And the day he and his fellow carpenters on an Auckland state housing construction site put down their saws and hammers and went into town for a drink. World War II was over.
Jack's war started as it ended - on a building site.
He remembers the announcement on the radio but didn't stop hammering nails just because a world war had broken out. No one was hysterical about it, he said, and there was a job to be done for the Lands and Survey Department at Kerepehi, south of Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains.
A couple of days later Jack rode his pushbike 12 miles to Paeroa to sign on - the first in the town to do so when enlistment opened. There was another job to be done.
Besides, he adds: "I wasn't going to get a trip overseas otherwise."
Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage prophetically warned that it would be a long, bitter conflict. Even so, who would have predicted war between then-allies Germany and Russia, and World War I allies America and Japan?
The impact on New Zealand was enormous, perhaps more than Savage could have envisaged, had he lived to see it. In September 1939, the New Zealand Army numbered 2500. Three years later, one in eight Kiwis was in uniform, when the Home Guard is taken into account, and by then the war accounted for half the nation's economic activity. Twelve thousand New Zealanders died, one in 130.
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But Jack recalls that the mood on board the Orion was optimistic when she sailed on January 5, 1940. And why not? He had left school in the midst of the Great Depression, yet here they were, at the start of an experience they had never had before. Travelling in style, too; they had two-berth cabins, luxury compared to the army training camp at Ngaruawahia.There was even a full orchestra. And stewards.
"We still had to drill and march around the decks."
And when the First Echelon landed in Egypt, the overseas experience was everything it promised. On their first day at Maadi Camp their colonel marched them into Cairo for a look around, and they "saw everything there was to see", Jack says, with a twinkle in his eye. That's a reference to the Wagh el Birket, the infamous red-light district.
They visited the museums, the zoo, the brewery (where the Kiwis were not invited back). And the English tea gardens, until someone was rude to one of their hostesses, who turned out to be Lady Astor. The Kiwis were not invited back.
His mate, Bruce, would "drink like a fish, he wouldn't go to sleep until he'd kissed everyone good night".
The New Zealanders were seeing the world, but the bill was about to arrive. For all their training, Jack recalls, they had "no idea what was coming".
Of the 700 men in 18 Battalion who left Egypt for Athens at the start of March 1941, fewer than half assembled back at Maadi Camp after the disasters of Greece and Crete. "We had 420 reinforcements, that was how many we lost, killed or prisoner."
Their first night in Athens was spent in a cemetery after their arrival on the Ajax, and they were sent by train to Salonika.
"We had no equipment, just rifles, no tanks, or air support, they had everything."
He remembers the Germans pushing unwilling Italians in front, forcing them to fight.
"We were pushed back..." A slight pause. "Never mind."
Bitterly, the New Zealanders noted Winston Churchill's public claims that the Allies did have air support in Greece. "One bloke said, if the air force is in Greece then where the hell are we?"
At least Churchill showed up in Egypt later, Jack says. "He came tearing along in a jeep, he said 'hello, kiss my arse' and was gone again."
It's no surprise to hear that Jack was a PBP Poor Bloody Private from start to finish, even though battalion commander Colonel Jan Peart offered him officer training after Crete.
Jack was mentioned in dispatches after El Alamein, and nominated for a military medal, but in the end the only metalwork he collected was the shrapnel in his knee in the battle. The wound was "nothing" he says (Peart, the former headmaster of King's College, Auckland, died of wounds on September 4, 1942).
Jack wasn't to know it, but the Allied victories in North Africa meant his war was coming to an end.
"Strafed in the desert and bombed out in Crete
With sore dark eyes and hardened by the heat"
James K Baxter, "Returned Soldier"
In July 1943, after three years away, the first furlough draft of 2NZEF returned to New Zealand. To their disgust, they found they had been fighting a very different war from those at home who had found ways to gain exemption from active service.
"We all decided we wouldn't go back, there were so many jokers walking around in civvy clothes."
Public opinion swung behind the soldiers, and Jack says that those who did go back were mostly given tasks away from the front, such as driving. In his own case his mother was ill his father died in 1929 and Jack was given six months' compassionate leave, albeit without pay. Then in June 1944, to his complete surprise, the letter from the War Department arrived to say he was discharged.
The quiet life followed building, farming, working for Hellaby's in the bacon factory, and raising two children.
It's nearly spring now, meaning it's time to see the daffodils in bloom on his son's farm at Pukekawa. The Ranfurly has its own outings and activities they look after him well, Jack says, and he keeps himself busy with tapestries, surrounded by people who can identify with his war experiences.
But they've never been that far away. Years after the war, on an evening when he took his wife out for dinner at the Thames RSA, a familiar voice boomed across the room: "I kissed you good night over there and I'm going to kiss you good night again now!"
Keen Auckland sailor Con Thode went to work as usual on September 3, 1939, despite the morning news.
After all, he and his yachting friends had seen the war clouds gathering for months and had taken steps towards gaining the qualifications they would need to serve in the navy.
But although his first rank was "Acting probationary temporary sub-lieutenant", he never expected to see the war through a periscope.
The living room of the 98-year-old's home at Okura, north of Auckland, is testament to four years of service with distinction in submarines. In one corner is the ship's bell from the Scythian, which he commanded. On one wall is an artist's impression, published in the Illustrated London News, of a head-on collision between his first submarine, the Proteus, and an Italian destroyer off the Greek coast.
At 98, Con retains an alertness that belies his years, and, although some of the memories are a bit hazy now, he clearly remembers how he nearly didn't make it to sea at all.
In 1939 the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy wasn't recruiting, and would-be officers thinking of joining the Royal Navy in Singapore were advised that "private means" were a prerequisite.
Disgusted at the elitism, Con enlisted in the infantry, only to learn from a fellow crew member on the yacht Iorangi that an Auckland yachtmaster's ticket would open doors in London. Sailing community contacts helped him "un-enlist" and he left New Zealand for the first time, working his way to England on the Port Darwin, and arriving to a London of sandbags and gasmasks.
Training in Brighton and convoy escort duty on corvettes followed, where the only sign of the other side was a Focke-Wulf Condor circling out of range.
But Con's war changed course in 1941 when the Luftwaffe dropped a parachute mine on the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel, killing some of his fellow diners. "It just got to the stage when it all seemed so hopeless," he says.
It turned out to be a case of mood matching opportunity, because the next day, after he had picked his way through glass and rubble to report for duty, he learned that the Royal Navy was looking for submarine volunteers.
Over the next four years Con was twice mentioned in dispatches after patrols that sank troopships in the Aegean and protected the Allies' Arctic convoys.
And there was an enormous party for his crew and everyone else in Trincomalee harbour, Sri Lanka, on the day it was all over.
"There was supposedly a great shortage of booze, it was amazing how much appeared that night. Rockets and flares... it was a big night."
It was over, except it wasn't. Back in New Zealand, he married and returned to his old job of working for chemicals giant ICI, but could not fit back into civilian life. He cleared his head by going farming at Matakana, near where he now lives.
He has a fantastic view of the sea, and given those days and nights of dim lighting and stale air, he surely appreciates the sunshine and salt air more than most.
"Near miss", says the caption in neat capital letters. Understatement isn't the word, given that the image it accompanies is of a German bomb landing close to HMS Leander in the Mediterranean.
Leander veteran Des Price, 89, enlarges: "A near miss could be worse than a direct hit, a near miss alongside a ship could open her up."
This photo album is surreal, the result of some entrepreneurial spirit by a camera-toting crew member who would pin prints to a board and sell copies to willing buyers. Another picture shows a half dozen of the cruiser's crew grinning on a sunny day. It could be anyone's holiday snaps if not for the steel helmets and the neat handwriting noting that they have just helped fight off an air attack.
"That was taken on my 17th birthday," says Des's Leander shipmate Bill Morland, 85, pointing to a picture of himself and two other sailors. Shortly after the shutter clicked, the crew were at action stations to repel aircraft.
If you were an historian trying to capture the spirit of the New Zealand experience of World War II, you could give up on the words and just run these pictures a sepia world of Sydney swimsuit beauties and exotic ports of call Bombay, Colombo, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean. And the Solomons, when there was no "near miss". They were lucky to survive; 33 of their crewmates didn't.
Bill Morland clearly remembers September 3, 1939. He was on leave in his home town, Dunedin, and had already been in the navy since the age of 15-and-a-half "I used to see all the ships coming in with all the pomp and ceremony and thought it would be a good life."
No sooner had the radio announced the news when his brother appeared in the Octagon with a telegram ordering him to report back to HMS Philomel, the naval base in Auckland. The declaration of war came as a shock, he recalls. "When you're young you don't really think about world events."
Des, originally from Levin but now living in Auckland, heard the announcement on the Leander's tannoy, on the way back from the cruiser's first mission. New Zealand had not waited for the outbreak, given what happened at Fanning Island (now Kiribati) in World War I, when the German raider Nurnberg shelled the cable station and disrupted communications across the Pacific. The small garrison Leander was carrying 1 platoon A company, special Service Force became known as "The men who beat the gun", Des recalls.
The two veterans admit they had no idea what was in store; Des thought the war would last maybe a year while Bill hoped they would be "cruising the islands in winter and New Zealand and Australia in summer".
Des, whose father had been wounded and shell-shocked in World War I, expected at least to be safer at sea, although he had been keen on the navy since primary school.
"In the navy it's 99% boredom and 1%... well..." His meticulous "summary of places of call and events" records everything from "boredom" to "well..."
On February 21, 1941, the Leander sank Ramb I, an Italian armed raider. (Almost all the crew were rescued.) The previous day: Leander's ship's cat Minnie was unfortunately lost overboard. March 16, another disaster: the ship "ran out of rum".
He knows all this because, against regulations, he also kept a diary. There's a gap, but he's glad it was only the pages he lost.
They were both on board when the Japanese torpedo struck on the night of July 11, 1943, when Leander formed part of a Pacific task force.
Des, in particular, had a lucky escape. He was working in the boiler room as part of an electrical repair party when he was called away to the other end of the cruiser. "At midnight they wanted a job done in the after engine room and took me away. A chap from Devonport took my place. One hour later there wasn't anyone left."
They were lucky to get back, says Bill. The photos show a huge hole in Leander's port side, and the cruiser would have been an easy target as she limped to safety.
You'd think that by now Des might have been rethinking the relative safety of the navy but he only got in deeper, literally. A former motor mechanic before joining the navy, his fascination with submarines was prompted by a visit aboard a seized Italian sub in Aden in 1943. He was one of four friends who volunteered.
"We used to see them going out and coming back, somehow it just got us."
He served on the Otway, Tribune and Totem, and the eventual fate of the latter is a chilling reminder of the risks he faced. Sold to Israel after the war, the submarine disappeared en route and the wreckage was found only four years ago in the Mediterranean.
"These things happen," says Des.
At Submariners' corner in the Devonport RSA there is a list of Allied submarines lost in the war, and it's a long one.
Bill ended the war on HMS Norfolk (Leander was "paid off" in 1944), and saw the Norwegians' reaction when the cruiser brought King Haakon and his family to Oslo in June 1945 after five years in exile. It was a "quite interesting" occasion, notes Bill. He was in Malta when Japan surrendered "That was a bit of a relief. We were refitting on the way to the Pacific."
He remembers arriving back in Wellington on Christmas Day 1945 "That was great. We came back on a converted aircraft carrier, all the North Islanders got off at Wellington on Christmas Eve, we sailed for Lyttleton. We had leave 'til March."
Everyone else was being demobbed but Bill and Des, being regular navy, had to report back after their leave.
And for Bill, it started all over again in Korea. After that he joined the army and served 14 years as an instructor. But when offered a tour of duty in Vietnam, he declined: "I said I wouldn't trust my luck that far."
Des concurs: "I suppose we were lucky in many ways."
Near misses, and all that.
When Esther Cochran reads an Agatha Christie thriller, the page numbers take her on a voyage around the Pacific of 70 years ago.
It's one of the odd ways the memories of her war service return, says the former Waaf (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) weather specialist.
Page 115 is Auckland; page 172 is Hamilton. The numbers are weather codes memorised as part of her years of work for the air force weather department in Suva, when Fiji was the crossroads of the Allied war effort in the Pacific.
But the 94-year-old Aucklander wishes she could remember more and regrets not recording her experiences from 1939-45. Something as mundane as a cloud formation can set off a flashback she had to know her nimbostratus from her cumulus.
"I'm very angry at myself that I didn't write things down. When you're young and things happen, you don't really register that they'll be very important, you think it doesn't matter but it does."
The former shorthand typist does recall that when the conflict broke out the War Department visited the company she worked for.
"They wanted volunteers to join His Majesty's Armed Forces. I was no more an armed force than a pussycat but I put my hand up."
Esther considered herself patriotic and saw it as her duty, but learned very quickly that doing her part would involve personal sacrifice.
The occasion was an encounter with her former manager in Queen St.
"I had quite a thing about that boss. I had a bit of a crush on him. He pumped my hand and said I was looking as lovely as ever."
But there was a war on and the regulations demanded secrecy. She couldn't tell him where she was going or what she was doing.
She volunteered for overseas service and was posted to Suva, where she plotted maps for the air force forecasters around the clock.
Esther was one of 10,000 New Zealand servicemen and women in Fiji. The official history of New Zealand notes that they were overcrowded, under-resourced and endured boredom and tropical diseases while their contribution to the war effort went largely unnoticed.
Esther was lucky to have work she considered enjoyable, but she missed her Devonport home with its magnificent oaks and pohutukawa, blackberries in the back yard, cosy fireplaces and poetry library, including her own verses and short stories. She missed the concerts her family would attend at the Auckland Town Hall.
But she did make good friends in the Waafs and, after all these years, one of them still comes to her birthday parties at the Ascot retirement home in Devonport.
It's not far from the house Esther returned to after four years in Fiji, and where she lived from the age of three months to 88 years a home of happy family memories, except for the grief that World War I visited on her family.
Despite her sense of patriotism, Esther has never had any illusions about war.
"I feel very angry when I think about the war and any wars. They are diabolical, they just are. It ruined my sister's life."
Her sister Dorothy's husband was given six weeks' leave after their marriage. He knew he had a daughter, but never lived to see her. She was six weeks old when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme.
Her brother Hector was wounded but survived and won the Military Medal.
"Wars are just dreadful. That was my sister's life ruined. They were so in love. It's just unbelievably awful. There should always be another way of settling your arguments without having a war."
Tom Shaw never spoke much about the war.
His son John, a Devonport painter, says he and his siblings would ask about it but their mother would intervene "Don't upset your father".
The Wairarapa farmer took his memories and stories to the grave, but he did leave behind a suitcase full of clues.
Showing a sense of posterity and occasion and a disregard for army regulations Gunner Shaw used his Kodak Box Brownie to record scenes ranging from the Maori Battalion on parade to his artillery unit in action.
We can guess why he singled out certain graves in the El Alamein cemetery. But we won't know the circumstances and other consequences of the air raid that resulted in the Chevrolet 4x4 (used to tow the 6th Field Regiment's 25-pounder guns) catching fire, leaving the crew to frantically shovel sand on to the blaze.
In another picture of a Chevy, there's someone else's ammunition inside. It's a dud shell that landed right next to the steering wheel.
The memorabilia Tom Shaw was perhaps proudest of was his "one-way ticket" to Europe the berthing card issued on his departure from New Zealand. He kept it for the rest of his life in a precious leather wallet which also contains small head and shoulders photos with brief captions: "Gunner V.B. Silbery. Killed in action." "Gunner R. Townhill. Killed in action."
Intriguingly, one photograph (above) shows German paratroops landing only about 100m away. On the back, a single word: "Crete".
It could be an extraordinary snapshot taken in the heat of battle, but exactly when, where and by whom is unknown. The source best-placed to comment died in August 2006, aged 87.
Tom Shaw's family can only speculate that he might have been more forthcoming to someone outside the family. But today, Google says only: "Your search `6th field regiment' `Tom Shaw' did not match any documents".
By ARTHUR WHELAN - Sunday Star Times 30 -8 -9
The Pohutukawa Tree
IT'S one of our most famous plays, written by our most famous playwright, but it has never been professionally staged in our biggest city.
Now, nearly half a century after Bruce Mason penned The Pohutukawa Tree, Auckland Theatre Company will find out whether audiences are ready for a work that contains the line: "Where are our Maoris? Our lovely Maoris!"
The play was the country's first to deal with race relations issues. It has been studied by countless School Certificate English students and was dropped only last November from the national high school drama curriculum.
The lead role, Aroha Mataira, has been described as a "female King Lear". It was big enough to entice Rena Owen, Once Were Warriors film star, home from Los Angeles.
"This play is a slice of New Zealand theatrical history," says Owen. "But it's also a slice of who we are."
Didn't Owen's hackles rise when she heard the "lovely Maoris" line?
"That's the way it was in the 1950s," says Owen. "Maori were still very subservient, second-class citizens, trying to be very good little Maoris. A lot of people in the older generation say `what happened everybody used to get on fine'. And yes, they did. Because Maori never said boo."
The Pohutukawa Tree is the story of Aroha's ties to the land her ancestors battled for; her children who are trying to break free from her strict Christian ways; and her orchard-owning Pakeha neighbours who struggle to understand this proud and spiritual matriarch.
The Sunday Star-Times assembled director Colin McColl and the play's three Maori actors Owen, Tiare Tawera and Maria Walker to discuss the relevance of the work today.
"The unfortunate thing is that it was written in the late 1950s," says McColl. "And then we had the whole Maori renaissance, the land marches, Bastion Point, all those things, and it made the play unfashionable, because the last thing that Maori activists wanted was a play by a Pakeha that, in a way, denigrated Maori.
"Now, with the benefit of distance, we can look back and see it as a work of its time. We're trying to present it so people can say `wow, look how times have changed'. Or maybe they haven't."
Tiare Tawera plays Johnny, Aroha's wayward son. His character can't speak te reo Maori. In real life, Tawera has just voiced Spongebob Squarepants for a Maori Language Week version of the American cartoon.
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Some of the play's dialogue, says Tawera, "is definitely something to laugh about but it does bring back how it was for people back then".
Maria Walker plays his sister Queenie. "I've read that in 1951, 57% of Maori were 20 years old or younger. There was that whole thing of being colonised by the music and dance and all this wonderful stuff, that if you were a rural Maori you wanted to go to the city to experience..."
Today: "When I was 17, I could Google stuff! Back then, that naivety isolated everything."
In the play, Johnny gets drunk, Queenie gets pregnant and Aroha loses a cast-iron Christian grip on her kids. There is plenty, say this trio of actors, that is pertinent today.
"It's the lesson that happens to every generation," says Owen. "You cannot control other people."
Bruce Mason, who also wrote The End of the Golden Weather, Blood of the Lamb and Awatea, died in 1982. In a 2002 interview, his wife, Diana, said The Pohutukawa Tree was born of direct experience. Her parents ran an orchard, and the play's Pakeha protagonists were loosely based on them. It was the work, she said, that prompted Mason's realisation "that what he wanted to do with his life was write".
By 1957, he had a play. But no audience. The director of the New Zealand Players agreed to a workshop performance. Richard Campion (father of The Piano filmmaker Jane) believed the script was too risky for a full production.
"Audiences wouldn't have stomached this," confirms McColl. "Things were very, very conservative in New Zealand in the late 50s . . . the only risk today is people might think it's a dusty old piece."
It was produced by BBC TV in 1959, and McColl says a 1984 reprisal by Campion was, "a very fine production, except for the role of Aroha there were no Maori actresses of that age around. The other thing that makes it right to do now is we've just got this wealth of talent to draw from".
Rena Owen has a Maori father and a Pakeha mother. In the play, her pregnant daughter is spurned by her European lover, Roy. "My mother had been disowned by her family for marrying my father," says Owen. "When Roy rejects Queenie because he can't have brown babies, that's exactly the attitude my mother faced."
As an actor returning from London in the 1980s, Owen says she became caught between cultures. "Because back then, you had to be a `typical Maori'. Dark-as skin, bushy hair and I didn't fit that mould."
She got the part of Beth Heke in Warriors, and then watched while it took another decade for Maori film roles to emerge. "Which was in Whale Rider. Ten years. What are you supposed to do in the meantime?"
McColl: "Play Mexicans?"
And maybe it's a further sign of the times that the actors, huddled together under a blanket for warmth, burst out laughing.
A NZ Book Council essay on Mason records that, in the early 1960s, as editor of Maori news magazine Te Ao Hou, he challenged readers to ask themselves: "Since I am Maori, what part do I want it to play in my life?"
Ask that question today, and the thing is, says Owen, "being Maori ... it's not a coat that you take off and hang in the wardrobe. It's a part of your essence".
Walker says her Maori father was strapped at home and school for speaking Maori. Her world is so far removed from his, she was shocked when she discovered that in the 1950s, some establishments erected "No Maoris" signs. Now, "we've got so much to offer as young Maori and there's so much on offer for us ... so many doors open for us".
Tawera says the play is an opportunity to show how things have changed. So do the actors believe Mason's depiction of 1950s' New Zealand rings true?
"Writers are the only recorders of history," says Owen.
"If you ever want to find out what's going on in a civilisation, don't listen to the politicians. Read the writers, listen to the lyrics, go and see the stage plays. You will get more truth about your society through your artists than your politicians."
McColl says Mason simply wrote what he saw. "He was extremely sensitive to Maoris' place in New Zealand society. He wasn't the sort of man who said `let's write a provocative play that will shock everyone'. I think he was just saying... "
Owen finishes his sentence: "...this is us."
The Pohutukawa Tree, by Bruce Mason, Maidment Theatre, Auckland, September 3-26.
The way we were By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times 30 08 2009
Now, nearly half a century after Bruce Mason penned The Pohutukawa Tree, Auckland Theatre Company will find out whether audiences are ready for a work that contains the line: "Where are our Maoris? Our lovely Maoris!"
The play was the country's first to deal with race relations issues. It has been studied by countless School Certificate English students and was dropped only last November from the national high school drama curriculum.
The lead role, Aroha Mataira, has been described as a "female King Lear". It was big enough to entice Rena Owen, Once Were Warriors film star, home from Los Angeles.
"This play is a slice of New Zealand theatrical history," says Owen. "But it's also a slice of who we are."
Didn't Owen's hackles rise when she heard the "lovely Maoris" line?
"That's the way it was in the 1950s," says Owen. "Maori were still very subservient, second-class citizens, trying to be very good little Maoris. A lot of people in the older generation say `what happened everybody used to get on fine'. And yes, they did. Because Maori never said boo."
The Pohutukawa Tree is the story of Aroha's ties to the land her ancestors battled for; her children who are trying to break free from her strict Christian ways; and her orchard-owning Pakeha neighbours who struggle to understand this proud and spiritual matriarch.
The Sunday Star-Times assembled director Colin McColl and the play's three Maori actors Owen, Tiare Tawera and Maria Walker to discuss the relevance of the work today.
"The unfortunate thing is that it was written in the late 1950s," says McColl. "And then we had the whole Maori renaissance, the land marches, Bastion Point, all those things, and it made the play unfashionable, because the last thing that Maori activists wanted was a play by a Pakeha that, in a way, denigrated Maori.
"Now, with the benefit of distance, we can look back and see it as a work of its time. We're trying to present it so people can say `wow, look how times have changed'. Or maybe they haven't."
Tiare Tawera plays Johnny, Aroha's wayward son. His character can't speak te reo Maori. In real life, Tawera has just voiced Spongebob Squarepants for a Maori Language Week version of the American cartoon.
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Some of the play's dialogue, says Tawera, "is definitely something to laugh about but it does bring back how it was for people back then".
Maria Walker plays his sister Queenie. "I've read that in 1951, 57% of Maori were 20 years old or younger. There was that whole thing of being colonised by the music and dance and all this wonderful stuff, that if you were a rural Maori you wanted to go to the city to experience..."
Today: "When I was 17, I could Google stuff! Back then, that naivety isolated everything."
In the play, Johnny gets drunk, Queenie gets pregnant and Aroha loses a cast-iron Christian grip on her kids. There is plenty, say this trio of actors, that is pertinent today.
"It's the lesson that happens to every generation," says Owen. "You cannot control other people."
Bruce Mason, who also wrote The End of the Golden Weather, Blood of the Lamb and Awatea, died in 1982. In a 2002 interview, his wife, Diana, said The Pohutukawa Tree was born of direct experience. Her parents ran an orchard, and the play's Pakeha protagonists were loosely based on them. It was the work, she said, that prompted Mason's realisation "that what he wanted to do with his life was write".
By 1957, he had a play. But no audience. The director of the New Zealand Players agreed to a workshop performance. Richard Campion (father of The Piano filmmaker Jane) believed the script was too risky for a full production.
"Audiences wouldn't have stomached this," confirms McColl. "Things were very, very conservative in New Zealand in the late 50s . . . the only risk today is people might think it's a dusty old piece."
It was produced by BBC TV in 1959, and McColl says a 1984 reprisal by Campion was, "a very fine production, except for the role of Aroha there were no Maori actresses of that age around. The other thing that makes it right to do now is we've just got this wealth of talent to draw from".
Rena Owen has a Maori father and a Pakeha mother. In the play, her pregnant daughter is spurned by her European lover, Roy. "My mother had been disowned by her family for marrying my father," says Owen. "When Roy rejects Queenie because he can't have brown babies, that's exactly the attitude my mother faced."
As an actor returning from London in the 1980s, Owen says she became caught between cultures. "Because back then, you had to be a `typical Maori'. Dark-as skin, bushy hair and I didn't fit that mould."
She got the part of Beth Heke in Warriors, and then watched while it took another decade for Maori film roles to emerge. "Which was in Whale Rider. Ten years. What are you supposed to do in the meantime?"
McColl: "Play Mexicans?"
And maybe it's a further sign of the times that the actors, huddled together under a blanket for warmth, burst out laughing.
A NZ Book Council essay on Mason records that, in the early 1960s, as editor of Maori news magazine Te Ao Hou, he challenged readers to ask themselves: "Since I am Maori, what part do I want it to play in my life?"
Ask that question today, and the thing is, says Owen, "being Maori ... it's not a coat that you take off and hang in the wardrobe. It's a part of your essence".
Walker says her Maori father was strapped at home and school for speaking Maori. Her world is so far removed from his, she was shocked when she discovered that in the 1950s, some establishments erected "No Maoris" signs. Now, "we've got so much to offer as young Maori and there's so much on offer for us ... so many doors open for us".
Tawera says the play is an opportunity to show how things have changed. So do the actors believe Mason's depiction of 1950s' New Zealand rings true?
"Writers are the only recorders of history," says Owen.
"If you ever want to find out what's going on in a civilisation, don't listen to the politicians. Read the writers, listen to the lyrics, go and see the stage plays. You will get more truth about your society through your artists than your politicians."
McColl says Mason simply wrote what he saw. "He was extremely sensitive to Maoris' place in New Zealand society. He wasn't the sort of man who said `let's write a provocative play that will shock everyone'. I think he was just saying... "
Owen finishes his sentence: "...this is us."
The Pohutukawa Tree, by Bruce Mason, Maidment Theatre, Auckland, September 3-26.
The way we were By KIM KNIGHT - Sunday Star Times 30 08 2009
Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish
The past is another country (or town)
THERE'S A lot of local history about. Over the past couple of decades New Zealand communities have shown a growing interest in recording and publishing their backstories. Most of our small towns have colourful histories, being entwined with such dramatic events as pioneer farming, bush clearances, gold mining, coal mining, the coming of the automobile and the impact of the world wars.
And there is now an awareness that if these stories are not written down, they could be lost forever. There is also a substantial readership for local histories, probably because our ageing population has a developing curiosity about the places where they grew up or spent family holidays. While they were young they were too preoccupied with the present to bother looking back. Now, they want to.
Local histories are usually initiated from within the community. Sometimes it's the local historical society, sometimes the town librarian, or the ratepayers' association, or a group of well-read citizens, or an interested individual. For example, Janet Riddle of the Mercury Bay Museum in Whitianga wrote and published Salt Spray and Sawdust, the history of her local area, in 1996. Its first print run of 1000 sold out, necessitating a reprint. Print runs for such books are usually short, but they sell steadily. Over on the peninsula's western coast, the Coromandel Town History Research Group collectively wrote and published In Search of the Rainbow The Coromandel Story in 2002, then followed it up with two sub-regional books, True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2002) and More True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2005). As Colleen Carmichael of the Coromandel Library points out: "Such books sell because they're written by local people whose extended families and friends all buy one." Jeanette Grant, project treasurer of The History of Epsom (2006), which had 50 contributors under the overall editorship of historian Graham Bush, reports that their book, too, was reprinted and has to date sold 1700 copies, at $65 each.
Commercial publishers generally shy away from local histories because they don't consider them a viable proposition. Penguin NZ publishing director Geoff Walker says local histories "have a local readership, and nothing wrong with that. But it depends how local and narrowly focused the book is. A history of Canterbury or the West Coast or the Coromandel, for example, would almost certainly have a wider market. And sometimes with a little editorial tinkering a book's readership can be broadened."
Local publishing of such histories places the entire production process in the hands of the people who inaugurate the project. This saves money, because the book is produced largely by a voluntary labour of love. But a crucial question still has to be answered: just who is to write it? That's a decision for the organising committee.
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My involvement with a local history project began with a phone call, in May 2008. An author was needed, to write the history of Whangapoua, on the eastern Coromandel coast. Local resident Judy Drok, one of the project's management team, showed me over Whangapoua and neighbouring New Chums beach. On the walk there we passed a long homestead, surrounded by native trees and a stone wall.
"That's the house that Alberta McLean built," Judy told me. I didn't know who Alberta was, although I was soon to find out. We walked along a track to New Chums, which I hadn't seen before. Native bush overlooked an arc of white sand. It was even more beautiful than Whangapoua beach. I decided to accept the offer.
The project was instigated by the beachside settlement's ratepayers' association, who had accorded the writing of Whangapoua's history top of a priority list of its long-term aims, the rest being environmental protection concerns. I was not a trained historian, but I have a keen interest in New Zealand history, and as I was already the author of several books of non-fiction as well as historical fiction, I was deemed suitable.
Judy Drok had been accumulating material for some time, from people who had lived or holidayed at Whangapoua, and she handed me over several file boxes of notes.
I started with Whangapoua's Maori history. The district's tangata whenua is the Mangakahia family, their tribe the Ngati Huarere, who had suffered grievously in pre-European times from incursions by Tainui and Ngapuhi war parties. In the early 1960s the family had been obliged, for financial reasons, to subdivide and sell their remaining foreshore land. In the 1990s the Mangakahia family had lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal for compensation for land alienation after a succession of allegedly unjust deals with timber merchants and the Crown during the 19th century.
The published testimonies of Mangakahia family representatives mentioned their charismatic forebear, Hamiora Mangakahia (1838-1918), who had campaigned unsuccessfully for compensation from the Crown in Victorian times. I contacted the family's legal counsel, Charl Hirschfeld. In 2006 the tribunal had found in favour of the Mangakahia claim, Charl told me, but a counter-claim meant that no compensation had yet been paid.
Timber milling played a huge part in Whangapoua's past. All over the district there had been stands of kauri trees. From the 1860s onwards Pakeha timber merchants sought to fell the trees and sell them, but disputes arose over cutting rights. Some Maori sold the rights when they weren't entitled to do so; some payments were manifestly inadequate. In the 1870s the disputes spilled over into what became known as the "Log Wars". In spite of this the forests were annihilated.
As early as 1868 the land in Whangapoua's hinterland had been found to be auriferous, or gold-bearing. But it was quartz gold, meaning that substantial capital was needed to crush the rock and process it, to extract the bullion. A company was formed, the Kauri Freehold Gold Estates, and a share issue floated in 1896. In the Opitonui valley a boom town sprang up, including hotels, stores and a school. But the rock-to-bullion ratio proved uneconomic, a bust followed, and Opitonui became a ghost town, then vanished altogether.
All these events had been fully reported in the newspapers of the day, such as The Daily Southern Cross. The website http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz proved a tremendous help. There were also illuminating photographs in the Auckland Weekly News.
In the Kiwi way, the news that a book on Whangapoua was being written soon spread. People rang to tell me their stories, called in to talk, emailed or sent photos.
Chapter headings for the book now suggested themselves: pre-European tribal life, kauri deforestation and milling, the mining boom and bust, pioneer farming, "rehab" farming, reafforestation, coastal subdivision. Writing a local history, I came to realise, is like working on a very large jigsaw puzzle. Key pieces were missing but had to be found to complete the picture.
Several people had recollections of Whangapoua's most extraordinary resident, Alberta McLean (1886-1964). She was the daughter of an upper-class English couple, Henrietta and Charles Ridley, who had been the controller of the English royal household. Alberta drove an ambulance in World War I, married and divorced twice, and in 1929 emigrated to Whangapoua. There she bought land, built a 13-bedroom homestead, farmed sheep and bred Siamese cats and polo ponies. Childless, she left her estate to various charities, including the SPCA.
A founding family of Whangapoua were the Denizes, whose story runs right through the district's narrative. "Punga" Denize was a pioneer farmer and it was pastoralist Bert Denize who allowed people to camp on his land by the Te Punga stream from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
Bert's son Rob and his wife Wendy, who taught at the local school at Te Rerenga for longer than anyone else, today live in the homestead that Alberta McLean had built. It's virtually the same as it was in the 1930s with its frontage deck, grand dining room and stone wall surround. And in the hall, along with Denize family photos, is a portrait of the formidable Alberta, still looking as if she owns the place.
Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish by Graeme Lay, is published by the Whangapoua History Project Group (256pp, $70) By GRAEME LAY - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 30/08/2009
Are you local?: When it came to stories, Whangapoua turned out to be a figurative and literal gold mine.
Relevant offers
THERE'S A lot of local history about. Over the past couple of decades New Zealand communities have shown a growing interest in recording and publishing their backstories. Most of our small towns have colourful histories, being entwined with such dramatic events as pioneer farming, bush clearances, gold mining, coal mining, the coming of the automobile and the impact of the world wars.
And there is now an awareness that if these stories are not written down, they could be lost forever. There is also a substantial readership for local histories, probably because our ageing population has a developing curiosity about the places where they grew up or spent family holidays. While they were young they were too preoccupied with the present to bother looking back. Now, they want to.
Local histories are usually initiated from within the community. Sometimes it's the local historical society, sometimes the town librarian, or the ratepayers' association, or a group of well-read citizens, or an interested individual. For example, Janet Riddle of the Mercury Bay Museum in Whitianga wrote and published Salt Spray and Sawdust, the history of her local area, in 1996. Its first print run of 1000 sold out, necessitating a reprint. Print runs for such books are usually short, but they sell steadily. Over on the peninsula's western coast, the Coromandel Town History Research Group collectively wrote and published In Search of the Rainbow The Coromandel Story in 2002, then followed it up with two sub-regional books, True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2002) and More True Tales of Northern Coromandel (2005). As Colleen Carmichael of the Coromandel Library points out: "Such books sell because they're written by local people whose extended families and friends all buy one." Jeanette Grant, project treasurer of The History of Epsom (2006), which had 50 contributors under the overall editorship of historian Graham Bush, reports that their book, too, was reprinted and has to date sold 1700 copies, at $65 each.
Commercial publishers generally shy away from local histories because they don't consider them a viable proposition. Penguin NZ publishing director Geoff Walker says local histories "have a local readership, and nothing wrong with that. But it depends how local and narrowly focused the book is. A history of Canterbury or the West Coast or the Coromandel, for example, would almost certainly have a wider market. And sometimes with a little editorial tinkering a book's readership can be broadened."
Local publishing of such histories places the entire production process in the hands of the people who inaugurate the project. This saves money, because the book is produced largely by a voluntary labour of love. But a crucial question still has to be answered: just who is to write it? That's a decision for the organising committee.
Ad Feedback
My involvement with a local history project began with a phone call, in May 2008. An author was needed, to write the history of Whangapoua, on the eastern Coromandel coast. Local resident Judy Drok, one of the project's management team, showed me over Whangapoua and neighbouring New Chums beach. On the walk there we passed a long homestead, surrounded by native trees and a stone wall.
"That's the house that Alberta McLean built," Judy told me. I didn't know who Alberta was, although I was soon to find out. We walked along a track to New Chums, which I hadn't seen before. Native bush overlooked an arc of white sand. It was even more beautiful than Whangapoua beach. I decided to accept the offer.
The project was instigated by the beachside settlement's ratepayers' association, who had accorded the writing of Whangapoua's history top of a priority list of its long-term aims, the rest being environmental protection concerns. I was not a trained historian, but I have a keen interest in New Zealand history, and as I was already the author of several books of non-fiction as well as historical fiction, I was deemed suitable.
Judy Drok had been accumulating material for some time, from people who had lived or holidayed at Whangapoua, and she handed me over several file boxes of notes.
I started with Whangapoua's Maori history. The district's tangata whenua is the Mangakahia family, their tribe the Ngati Huarere, who had suffered grievously in pre-European times from incursions by Tainui and Ngapuhi war parties. In the early 1960s the family had been obliged, for financial reasons, to subdivide and sell their remaining foreshore land. In the 1990s the Mangakahia family had lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal for compensation for land alienation after a succession of allegedly unjust deals with timber merchants and the Crown during the 19th century.
The published testimonies of Mangakahia family representatives mentioned their charismatic forebear, Hamiora Mangakahia (1838-1918), who had campaigned unsuccessfully for compensation from the Crown in Victorian times. I contacted the family's legal counsel, Charl Hirschfeld. In 2006 the tribunal had found in favour of the Mangakahia claim, Charl told me, but a counter-claim meant that no compensation had yet been paid.
Timber milling played a huge part in Whangapoua's past. All over the district there had been stands of kauri trees. From the 1860s onwards Pakeha timber merchants sought to fell the trees and sell them, but disputes arose over cutting rights. Some Maori sold the rights when they weren't entitled to do so; some payments were manifestly inadequate. In the 1870s the disputes spilled over into what became known as the "Log Wars". In spite of this the forests were annihilated.
As early as 1868 the land in Whangapoua's hinterland had been found to be auriferous, or gold-bearing. But it was quartz gold, meaning that substantial capital was needed to crush the rock and process it, to extract the bullion. A company was formed, the Kauri Freehold Gold Estates, and a share issue floated in 1896. In the Opitonui valley a boom town sprang up, including hotels, stores and a school. But the rock-to-bullion ratio proved uneconomic, a bust followed, and Opitonui became a ghost town, then vanished altogether.
All these events had been fully reported in the newspapers of the day, such as The Daily Southern Cross. The website http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz proved a tremendous help. There were also illuminating photographs in the Auckland Weekly News.
In the Kiwi way, the news that a book on Whangapoua was being written soon spread. People rang to tell me their stories, called in to talk, emailed or sent photos.
Chapter headings for the book now suggested themselves: pre-European tribal life, kauri deforestation and milling, the mining boom and bust, pioneer farming, "rehab" farming, reafforestation, coastal subdivision. Writing a local history, I came to realise, is like working on a very large jigsaw puzzle. Key pieces were missing but had to be found to complete the picture.
Several people had recollections of Whangapoua's most extraordinary resident, Alberta McLean (1886-1964). She was the daughter of an upper-class English couple, Henrietta and Charles Ridley, who had been the controller of the English royal household. Alberta drove an ambulance in World War I, married and divorced twice, and in 1929 emigrated to Whangapoua. There she bought land, built a 13-bedroom homestead, farmed sheep and bred Siamese cats and polo ponies. Childless, she left her estate to various charities, including the SPCA.
A founding family of Whangapoua were the Denizes, whose story runs right through the district's narrative. "Punga" Denize was a pioneer farmer and it was pastoralist Bert Denize who allowed people to camp on his land by the Te Punga stream from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
Bert's son Rob and his wife Wendy, who taught at the local school at Te Rerenga for longer than anyone else, today live in the homestead that Alberta McLean had built. It's virtually the same as it was in the 1930s with its frontage deck, grand dining room and stone wall surround. And in the hall, along with Denize family photos, is a portrait of the formidable Alberta, still looking as if she owns the place.
Whangapoua: Harbour of the Shellfish by Graeme Lay, is published by the Whangapoua History Project Group (256pp, $70) By GRAEME LAY - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 30/08/2009
Are you local?: When it came to stories, Whangapoua turned out to be a figurative and literal gold mine.
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Saturday, August 29, 2009
An Obituary- London Times
oday we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.
No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies
(adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place.
Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school
for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do
in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to
administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and
wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment
than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own
home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot.
She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death,
by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on.
If not, join the majority and do nothing
No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.
He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
- Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
- Why the early bird gets the worm;
- Life isn't always fair;
- and maybe it was my fault.
Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies
(adults, not children, are in charge).
His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place.
Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school
for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.
Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do
in disciplining their unruly children. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to
administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and
wanted to have an abortion.
Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment
than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own
home and the burglar could sue you for assault.
Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot.
She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement. Common Sense was preceded in death,
by his parents, Truth and Trust, by his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son, Reason.
He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim
Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on.
If not, join the majority and do nothing
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Locals band together to save church
By Simon Wong ⋅ May 22, 2009 ⋅
It is truly a community affair as local groups in Mt Eden join forces to upgrade a local icon.
The Mt Eden Village Society Centre, the Methodist Church and the Eden-Albert Community Board are working together to restore the historic Mt Eden Rd church and hall into a community facility.
The hall was destined to be redesigned as a commercial site for shops and had resource consent, but strong local opposition stopped the plan going ahead.
Community board member Virginia Chong says the hall is the only community facility from Sandringham Rd to Gillies Ave in Epsom.
“We were not prepared to sit and let it disappear.”
Village society centre member Penny Hansen says the change of plan is a win for both the community and the church.
“It was a victory in finding a way to work together. All the problems are in the past now.”
The annex that joined the church with the hall, which was used as a Sunday school, was destroyed by a fire several years ago.
The project will reconnect the church with the hall and will provide a new kitchen and toilet facilities. The exterior will also be repainted and the interior refurbished.
It is projected to cost around $1.5 million.
Some funding has been guaranteed, but the three parties, which have formed a trust, are still seeking additional funding.
Dr Bill Peddie, who looks after the Mt Eden church, says the partnership between the three parties is unique.
“Usually churches do their own thing and offer their place for hire. The trust will lease the premises from the church which has ownership of the land and the building.”
Dr Peddie says the church, which was established in 1899, has lost some of its character by doing things “on the cheap”.
“Its historic value will be increased by tidying up the premises.”
Chong says she is keen to get the project done before the proposed super city structure takes effect.
“We’ve waited a long time for this. It’s been about six years in the making.”
During the construction period, which is hoped to begin next January and finish in August 2010, Dr Peddie says the church will “either find some way of keeping the hall open, or shift to another church”.
Dr Peddie says the community has been extremely supportive of the project.
“There is enough goodwill in the community to ensure we won’t lose sight of what we’re aiming to do.”
Hansen says the hall is already used by several local groups, but hopes the new development will encourage more people to use the facility.
“The motto for Mt Eden is ‘The place where people meet’ and the church will be the heart of the place.”
It is truly a community affair as local groups in Mt Eden join forces to upgrade a local icon.
The Mt Eden Village Society Centre, the Methodist Church and the Eden-Albert Community Board are working together to restore the historic Mt Eden Rd church and hall into a community facility.
The hall was destined to be redesigned as a commercial site for shops and had resource consent, but strong local opposition stopped the plan going ahead.
Community board member Virginia Chong says the hall is the only community facility from Sandringham Rd to Gillies Ave in Epsom.
“We were not prepared to sit and let it disappear.”
Village society centre member Penny Hansen says the change of plan is a win for both the community and the church.
“It was a victory in finding a way to work together. All the problems are in the past now.”
The annex that joined the church with the hall, which was used as a Sunday school, was destroyed by a fire several years ago.
The project will reconnect the church with the hall and will provide a new kitchen and toilet facilities. The exterior will also be repainted and the interior refurbished.
It is projected to cost around $1.5 million.
Some funding has been guaranteed, but the three parties, which have formed a trust, are still seeking additional funding.
Dr Bill Peddie, who looks after the Mt Eden church, says the partnership between the three parties is unique.
“Usually churches do their own thing and offer their place for hire. The trust will lease the premises from the church which has ownership of the land and the building.”
Dr Peddie says the church, which was established in 1899, has lost some of its character by doing things “on the cheap”.
“Its historic value will be increased by tidying up the premises.”
Chong says she is keen to get the project done before the proposed super city structure takes effect.
“We’ve waited a long time for this. It’s been about six years in the making.”
During the construction period, which is hoped to begin next January and finish in August 2010, Dr Peddie says the church will “either find some way of keeping the hall open, or shift to another church”.
Dr Peddie says the community has been extremely supportive of the project.
“There is enough goodwill in the community to ensure we won’t lose sight of what we’re aiming to do.”
Hansen says the hall is already used by several local groups, but hopes the new development will encourage more people to use the facility.
“The motto for Mt Eden is ‘The place where people meet’ and the church will be the heart of the place.”
Sunday, July 19, 2009
There's gnome business like a good old business
Something there is that does not love a gnome, and that something lurks in Otaki.
I was sad to see, last week, the image of an 80-year-old chap clutching the last remains of his precious gnome collection and factory, after an arson attack there. It was a soot-blackened gnome fellow, this survivor, moulded with a container suitable for a small cactus, and the chap looked for all the world, bearded as he was, like the model for the quirky product he held. Such things had earned him a modest living in his old age. It was a mean trick that was played on him, and whoever did it is a scoundrel.
Arthur Ray had devoted the past decade to making gnomes and other garden ornaments, and lost his entire collection of 450 rubber and fibreglass moulds in the deliberately lit fire. As local policeman Stephen Yates observed, "It has totally destroyed an elderly man's livelihood, cottage industry and passion." And a little joy has gone out of the world.
I am an admirer of the gnome in all his garden guises. A gnome lends a garden a touch of levity; he greets passers-by as a friend. I especially enjoy those gardens where the gnome lives with an entire family of spotted toads, flamingoes, toadstools, bird baths and lurking plaster cats. There may be little room for plants, but there is a whole cheerful world to enjoy, entirely and blissfully artificial. No weeding needs to be done.
The gnome is the cornerstone of much suburban pride. He has suffered in recent years from knives in the back, and from seemingly being run over by trucks - but he endures. With him thrive the metal butterfly stuck to the side of the house, the whirring legs of Roadrunner nailed to a post, and large artificial sunflowers with smiles painted on their faces. It is a sourpuss indeed who cannot raise a smile at such nonsense.
I would rather see the works of Arthur Ray lurking in a backyard than the dismal "native" gardens that puritans make, all lack of colour and all politics. The Great New Zealand God did not create suburban back yards in the Great Beginning. They are in themselves unnatural, and do not become more beauteous because they hold clumps of dull flax and a withered titoki bush, along with a large dog relieving himself liberally therein, and barking between-times out of boredom and ill temper. How much more harmless is the child's wonderland of story book characters that men like Arthur Ray produce, for the pleasure of children and old ladies. And it is tactfully silent.
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A pox upon the arsonist, and a pox, too, on the dismal world of business where yet another New Zealand brand hit the asphalt last week. I am sorry to see the Canterbury brand go the way of so many others, all of which gave not only work, but a sense of cautious national pride.
I do not need a gnome in my garden, or - god forbid - a pair of track pants with stripes down the side to understand the kind of loss this is. It was a bad thing when the All Blacks abandoned the brand, and maybe things have been downhill for it since then.
We who scavenge in junk shops find there a whole world of good things that were once made in New Zealand, too, but which long ago went to the wall in the interest of some greater purpose that quite eludes me. Think of Crown Lynn pottery, now so collectable, for a start. It was once a household mainstay, and a cup of tea in a chunky NZR Crown Lynn cup was a proper kiwi experience, a rite of passage: you had to be quite grown up to handle the thing with one arm.
And what about the woolen mills we once had, producing warm blankets and knitwear that dressed generations of us well? You find those blankets now and wonder what on earth happened, what with this being a country of sheep. I love their woven labels: Maori chieftains, Pania of the Reef, tikis, images of factories, Robins (why?) and the memories of being tucked up on lumpy kapok mattresses under layers of their warmth. Are duvets really the same? And then there were the tartan picnic rugs we made that traveled in the backs of many cars, and covered old sofas when the upholstery gave way. You can't have a decent picnic on a duvet, but you could on a proper tartan blanket, pure wool, with a fringed edge.
Nowadays you can buy a synthetic imitation of those blankets, cold and light, and not the same, and we have no skilled workers holding down steady jobs in mills that kept communities alive. This, we are told, is a fine thing. It is better to have idle hands here, and cheap rubbish to buy from overseas. So we are left with backyard gnome factories. And somebody burns them down. Rosemary McLeod - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 19/07/2009
I was sad to see, last week, the image of an 80-year-old chap clutching the last remains of his precious gnome collection and factory, after an arson attack there. It was a soot-blackened gnome fellow, this survivor, moulded with a container suitable for a small cactus, and the chap looked for all the world, bearded as he was, like the model for the quirky product he held. Such things had earned him a modest living in his old age. It was a mean trick that was played on him, and whoever did it is a scoundrel.
Arthur Ray had devoted the past decade to making gnomes and other garden ornaments, and lost his entire collection of 450 rubber and fibreglass moulds in the deliberately lit fire. As local policeman Stephen Yates observed, "It has totally destroyed an elderly man's livelihood, cottage industry and passion." And a little joy has gone out of the world.
I am an admirer of the gnome in all his garden guises. A gnome lends a garden a touch of levity; he greets passers-by as a friend. I especially enjoy those gardens where the gnome lives with an entire family of spotted toads, flamingoes, toadstools, bird baths and lurking plaster cats. There may be little room for plants, but there is a whole cheerful world to enjoy, entirely and blissfully artificial. No weeding needs to be done.
The gnome is the cornerstone of much suburban pride. He has suffered in recent years from knives in the back, and from seemingly being run over by trucks - but he endures. With him thrive the metal butterfly stuck to the side of the house, the whirring legs of Roadrunner nailed to a post, and large artificial sunflowers with smiles painted on their faces. It is a sourpuss indeed who cannot raise a smile at such nonsense.
I would rather see the works of Arthur Ray lurking in a backyard than the dismal "native" gardens that puritans make, all lack of colour and all politics. The Great New Zealand God did not create suburban back yards in the Great Beginning. They are in themselves unnatural, and do not become more beauteous because they hold clumps of dull flax and a withered titoki bush, along with a large dog relieving himself liberally therein, and barking between-times out of boredom and ill temper. How much more harmless is the child's wonderland of story book characters that men like Arthur Ray produce, for the pleasure of children and old ladies. And it is tactfully silent.
Ad Feedback
A pox upon the arsonist, and a pox, too, on the dismal world of business where yet another New Zealand brand hit the asphalt last week. I am sorry to see the Canterbury brand go the way of so many others, all of which gave not only work, but a sense of cautious national pride.
I do not need a gnome in my garden, or - god forbid - a pair of track pants with stripes down the side to understand the kind of loss this is. It was a bad thing when the All Blacks abandoned the brand, and maybe things have been downhill for it since then.
We who scavenge in junk shops find there a whole world of good things that were once made in New Zealand, too, but which long ago went to the wall in the interest of some greater purpose that quite eludes me. Think of Crown Lynn pottery, now so collectable, for a start. It was once a household mainstay, and a cup of tea in a chunky NZR Crown Lynn cup was a proper kiwi experience, a rite of passage: you had to be quite grown up to handle the thing with one arm.
And what about the woolen mills we once had, producing warm blankets and knitwear that dressed generations of us well? You find those blankets now and wonder what on earth happened, what with this being a country of sheep. I love their woven labels: Maori chieftains, Pania of the Reef, tikis, images of factories, Robins (why?) and the memories of being tucked up on lumpy kapok mattresses under layers of their warmth. Are duvets really the same? And then there were the tartan picnic rugs we made that traveled in the backs of many cars, and covered old sofas when the upholstery gave way. You can't have a decent picnic on a duvet, but you could on a proper tartan blanket, pure wool, with a fringed edge.
Nowadays you can buy a synthetic imitation of those blankets, cold and light, and not the same, and we have no skilled workers holding down steady jobs in mills that kept communities alive. This, we are told, is a fine thing. It is better to have idle hands here, and cheap rubbish to buy from overseas. So we are left with backyard gnome factories. And somebody burns them down. Rosemary McLeod - Sunday Star Times
Last updated 05:00 19/07/2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
The storyteller
esley Dowding, 58, collects stories, all sorts of stories from all sorts of places. Lesley is a storyteller. She writes a lot of her own stories and other storytellers pass on their stories.
"Just like ancient people. If you hear a story that someone tells you, say from Ireland, and you really like that story and think, wow, I could tell that, you ask permission. Can I tell that story?"
She doesn't read them out. Neither does she learn whole stories by heart. Instead, she learns the skeleton of the story.
"There are things you don't want to lose, so you might learn a phrase by heart."
And then the more she tells it, the more it changes. And it changes to fit the audience. Lesley doesn't just sit down and relate the story to her audience, she performs it for them.
"I get involved in the story, so I'm actually in the story. When I'm telling the story, I can see a picture of everything I say. It's like little videos going on in my head."
She goes to libraries, schools, anywhere she is invited, to weave her tales in such a way that she brings the imagination out in the audience through her words.
And fostering children's imaginations is one of the things she likes about storytelling.
"We live in a visual world, where children's imagination is almost stifled. Because, if you think about it, every picture, image, that a child gets is actually someone else's image. It's not theirs. But, if you give them words without the image, they have to start to put their own picture to it."
And she doesn't just tell stories to children.
She has written a fairy tale for adults called When Apples Were Golden, which takes an hour to tell. "That's quite tiring and you have to make sure you have your audience with you the whole way."
If Lesley was telling her own story, she would start by putting on the appropriate hat.
Then she would begin: "The trees were blowing, the leaves captured the dappled light of the sunshine, which cast shadows over the baby's face ..."
That's because she can remember lying in her pram looking up at the leaves. It was post-war London and her mother looked after a number of foster children, so the pram was probably a good place for her to put Lesley for periods of time, she says.
Lesley was born in southeast London, when London was still a bomb site, and was brought up listening to stories. Her mother always insisted she listen to story time on the radio. There was no TV. Even now Lesley prefers the radio to TV.
In London, Lesley went to the first comprehensive school. Before that, there was either a grammer school, which was the pathway to university and students had to pass an exam to get into, or, for the less academic, a secondary school. Lesley's school, Catford County Girls' School, was the first to combine both types of students.
The government put a lot of money into the school to ensure it worked, so it had the best of everything. It had a theatre and became well known for its drama.
"I did drama all the time. I didn't do any acting. I hated acting. I was a very shy person ... probably can't say that now."
Lesley wanted to be a stage lighting technician, so worked on all the drama productions at her school. She had a lot of opportunities because of the school's drama syllabus and when she left, she had all the relevant O and A levels necessary for the position. But when she applied for a job at the BBC, there was an unexpected problem: Lesley was a girl. It was 1968 and the BBC couldn't insure women to climb scaffolding. She could have got a job in the industry as a secretary, but she wasn't interested.
So she went to Nottingham University, in Lincoln, to study to teach drama. The course was another first. Prospective drama teachers had previously studied English and did a bit of drama on the side.
When she was a student, Lesley saw a job at the art school for an off loom weaver. Having no idea what that was, but needing the cash, she went to the library and looked it up. She found about two paragraphs on off loom weaving, figured out what it was, went home and made one. She got the job.
Off loom weaving is making pictures in wool. It uses Turkish knots and different textures to get different effects. "You always leave one loose thread, so the spirit of the weaver will go into the next weaving."
Lesley made one weaving, picturing New Zealand bush, that she gave to friends who have taken it to Antartica four times.
"It was so they had the New Zealand bush with them."
Lesley moved to New Zealand in 1975. She had been boarding with a family who had been to New Zealand and who often had visitors from New Zealand. Then Lesley got married to a man who was keen to come to New Zealand and farm. The couple came to Taranaki because they had met people from here. They have since separated, but have two daughters, Emily, a solicitor in Wellington, and Naomi, who works in banking in London.
When Lesley first came to Taranaki, she taught history, English and religious education at a high school. Drama was not on the syllabus. In England, history and theology had been compulsory, but here, theology was not on the syllabus, either.
Lesley is a lay minster for the Anglican church and takes services once a month in Okato and Oakura.
Her first job in New Zealand was teaching history at St Mary's Diocesan School, an Anglican secondary school in Stratford. Now she teaches at St John Bosco School, a Catholic primary school in New Plymouth.
"It's all the same God. I like sharing. I like seeing them grow. It's a great privilege being a teacher."
Lesley has taught at nearly every secondary school around the coast and finally got to teach drama when she was at Opunake High School.
"I wrote two courses for them, so we were able to offer students pure drama for fourth form and sixth form. It was really great to be able to do some really indepth training and a lot of those students went on to do performing arts and very successfully, actually."
She got into storytelling when she was taking extramural papers to enable her to teach primary school. One assignment required her to write a story, which the tutor then suggested Lesley send in to the School Journal. The story was published and later put on to CD. Someone from the journal put Lesley on to storytelling and she went to a storytelling festival, Glistening Waters, in Masterton. That was about 20 years ago.
The difference between reading a story and telling a story is the sound and rhythm of the words, she says.
Lesley has written a children's book called Midnight at the Lighthouse, which is written as a storytelling book. A linguist at the University of Waikato critiqued it for her.
He told her that when he read it aloud to his daughter, he felt like a storyteller for the first time, she says.
"Because it has a rhythm, which is different to when are you reading a book ... when I wrote that, I was really keen to keep the sound of the voice as much as the sentence structure.
"The book was edited to make sure it has a rhythm, so when you are reading it out loud, you feel you've got a rhythm to the words and you can put your own mood to the words."
Lesley's storytelling name is Lesley 2 Hatts. She actually has more than two and numerous costumes.
For Christmas, Lesley got a little striped tent designed for changing clothes at the beach. It is tall and narrow and Lesley plans to have it on stage with her and use it to change costumes in during a performance. She keeps talking while she's changing to ensure she doesn't lose the audience.
Sometimes, Lesley will put the hats in a circle in front of her and ask the children to pick a hat. "I wonder if there is a story in here. If I put it on, a story might pop out."
She goes overseas to tell her stories, but doesn't take many of her hats with her.
"The last one I took, I couldn't bring it back because it had a feather in it and it had to go into quarantine.
"My partner [Robert] paid a lot to get it out."
Lesley plans to get a big Lesley 2 Hatts sticker that she can put on and peel off her car, Miss Morrie, a 1950 Morris Minor, that goes "like a bomb".
Lesley loves vintage cars and has done since she was little. She has model cars given to her by her father dotted around her lounge.
"I would love a Model T, but can only afford a Morrie Minor."
Lesley's story isn't finished, so it doesn't have an end as such. She would wind it all up by saying: "Now is the night warm sleep to dream, dream to sleep."
By HELEN HARVEY helen.harvey@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki Daily News | Wednesday, 14 January 2009
"Just like ancient people. If you hear a story that someone tells you, say from Ireland, and you really like that story and think, wow, I could tell that, you ask permission. Can I tell that story?"
She doesn't read them out. Neither does she learn whole stories by heart. Instead, she learns the skeleton of the story.
"There are things you don't want to lose, so you might learn a phrase by heart."
And then the more she tells it, the more it changes. And it changes to fit the audience. Lesley doesn't just sit down and relate the story to her audience, she performs it for them.
"I get involved in the story, so I'm actually in the story. When I'm telling the story, I can see a picture of everything I say. It's like little videos going on in my head."
She goes to libraries, schools, anywhere she is invited, to weave her tales in such a way that she brings the imagination out in the audience through her words.
And fostering children's imaginations is one of the things she likes about storytelling.
"We live in a visual world, where children's imagination is almost stifled. Because, if you think about it, every picture, image, that a child gets is actually someone else's image. It's not theirs. But, if you give them words without the image, they have to start to put their own picture to it."
And she doesn't just tell stories to children.
She has written a fairy tale for adults called When Apples Were Golden, which takes an hour to tell. "That's quite tiring and you have to make sure you have your audience with you the whole way."
If Lesley was telling her own story, she would start by putting on the appropriate hat.
Then she would begin: "The trees were blowing, the leaves captured the dappled light of the sunshine, which cast shadows over the baby's face ..."
That's because she can remember lying in her pram looking up at the leaves. It was post-war London and her mother looked after a number of foster children, so the pram was probably a good place for her to put Lesley for periods of time, she says.
Lesley was born in southeast London, when London was still a bomb site, and was brought up listening to stories. Her mother always insisted she listen to story time on the radio. There was no TV. Even now Lesley prefers the radio to TV.
In London, Lesley went to the first comprehensive school. Before that, there was either a grammer school, which was the pathway to university and students had to pass an exam to get into, or, for the less academic, a secondary school. Lesley's school, Catford County Girls' School, was the first to combine both types of students.
The government put a lot of money into the school to ensure it worked, so it had the best of everything. It had a theatre and became well known for its drama.
"I did drama all the time. I didn't do any acting. I hated acting. I was a very shy person ... probably can't say that now."
Lesley wanted to be a stage lighting technician, so worked on all the drama productions at her school. She had a lot of opportunities because of the school's drama syllabus and when she left, she had all the relevant O and A levels necessary for the position. But when she applied for a job at the BBC, there was an unexpected problem: Lesley was a girl. It was 1968 and the BBC couldn't insure women to climb scaffolding. She could have got a job in the industry as a secretary, but she wasn't interested.
So she went to Nottingham University, in Lincoln, to study to teach drama. The course was another first. Prospective drama teachers had previously studied English and did a bit of drama on the side.
When she was a student, Lesley saw a job at the art school for an off loom weaver. Having no idea what that was, but needing the cash, she went to the library and looked it up. She found about two paragraphs on off loom weaving, figured out what it was, went home and made one. She got the job.
Off loom weaving is making pictures in wool. It uses Turkish knots and different textures to get different effects. "You always leave one loose thread, so the spirit of the weaver will go into the next weaving."
Lesley made one weaving, picturing New Zealand bush, that she gave to friends who have taken it to Antartica four times.
"It was so they had the New Zealand bush with them."
Lesley moved to New Zealand in 1975. She had been boarding with a family who had been to New Zealand and who often had visitors from New Zealand. Then Lesley got married to a man who was keen to come to New Zealand and farm. The couple came to Taranaki because they had met people from here. They have since separated, but have two daughters, Emily, a solicitor in Wellington, and Naomi, who works in banking in London.
When Lesley first came to Taranaki, she taught history, English and religious education at a high school. Drama was not on the syllabus. In England, history and theology had been compulsory, but here, theology was not on the syllabus, either.
Lesley is a lay minster for the Anglican church and takes services once a month in Okato and Oakura.
Her first job in New Zealand was teaching history at St Mary's Diocesan School, an Anglican secondary school in Stratford. Now she teaches at St John Bosco School, a Catholic primary school in New Plymouth.
"It's all the same God. I like sharing. I like seeing them grow. It's a great privilege being a teacher."
Lesley has taught at nearly every secondary school around the coast and finally got to teach drama when she was at Opunake High School.
"I wrote two courses for them, so we were able to offer students pure drama for fourth form and sixth form. It was really great to be able to do some really indepth training and a lot of those students went on to do performing arts and very successfully, actually."
She got into storytelling when she was taking extramural papers to enable her to teach primary school. One assignment required her to write a story, which the tutor then suggested Lesley send in to the School Journal. The story was published and later put on to CD. Someone from the journal put Lesley on to storytelling and she went to a storytelling festival, Glistening Waters, in Masterton. That was about 20 years ago.
The difference between reading a story and telling a story is the sound and rhythm of the words, she says.
Lesley has written a children's book called Midnight at the Lighthouse, which is written as a storytelling book. A linguist at the University of Waikato critiqued it for her.
He told her that when he read it aloud to his daughter, he felt like a storyteller for the first time, she says.
"Because it has a rhythm, which is different to when are you reading a book ... when I wrote that, I was really keen to keep the sound of the voice as much as the sentence structure.
"The book was edited to make sure it has a rhythm, so when you are reading it out loud, you feel you've got a rhythm to the words and you can put your own mood to the words."
Lesley's storytelling name is Lesley 2 Hatts. She actually has more than two and numerous costumes.
For Christmas, Lesley got a little striped tent designed for changing clothes at the beach. It is tall and narrow and Lesley plans to have it on stage with her and use it to change costumes in during a performance. She keeps talking while she's changing to ensure she doesn't lose the audience.
Sometimes, Lesley will put the hats in a circle in front of her and ask the children to pick a hat. "I wonder if there is a story in here. If I put it on, a story might pop out."
She goes overseas to tell her stories, but doesn't take many of her hats with her.
"The last one I took, I couldn't bring it back because it had a feather in it and it had to go into quarantine.
"My partner [Robert] paid a lot to get it out."
Lesley plans to get a big Lesley 2 Hatts sticker that she can put on and peel off her car, Miss Morrie, a 1950 Morris Minor, that goes "like a bomb".
Lesley loves vintage cars and has done since she was little. She has model cars given to her by her father dotted around her lounge.
"I would love a Model T, but can only afford a Morrie Minor."
Lesley's story isn't finished, so it doesn't have an end as such. She would wind it all up by saying: "Now is the night warm sleep to dream, dream to sleep."
By HELEN HARVEY helen.harvey@tnl.co.nz - Taranaki Daily News | Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Winnie-the-Pooh in comeback after 83 years
Reuters | Saturday, 10 January 2009
HONEY LOVER: Winnie-the-Pooh is making a comeback.
The first official sequel to the original Winnie-the-Pooh books will appear in October, more than 80 years after the honey-loving bear first appeared in print.
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is the follow up to AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner, which were famously illustrated by EH Shepard.
The new book, published by Egmont Publishing in Britain and Pengiun imprint Dutton Children's Books in the United States, will be written by David Benedictus, who produced an audio adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh starring actress Judi Dench.
Mark Burgess, who has already drawn classic children's characters including Paddington Bear and Winnie-the-Pooh, is to provide the illustrations.
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will hit shelves on October 5.
HONEY LOVER: Winnie-the-Pooh is making a comeback.
The first official sequel to the original Winnie-the-Pooh books will appear in October, more than 80 years after the honey-loving bear first appeared in print.
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is the follow up to AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner, which were famously illustrated by EH Shepard.
The new book, published by Egmont Publishing in Britain and Pengiun imprint Dutton Children's Books in the United States, will be written by David Benedictus, who produced an audio adaptation of Winnie-the-Pooh starring actress Judi Dench.
Mark Burgess, who has already drawn classic children's characters including Paddington Bear and Winnie-the-Pooh, is to provide the illustrations.
Return to the Hundred Acre Wood will hit shelves on October 5.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
True resting place for war veteran
By NEIL DUDDY - Western Leader | Saturday, 20 December 2008
He was a colourful and well-travelled character who ended up forgotten in an unmarked grave – until now.
American Civil War veteran and diplomat Andrews Andrew St John has finally been acknowledged 106 years after his death.
A headstone was unveiled on his grave at Waikumete Cemetery this month during a service attended by dignitaries from the United States consulate.
Mr St John’s story came to light after investigations by Glendene historical researcher Audrey Lange.
She discovered the unmarked grave last year and began to look into its background.
Her digging unearthed a colourful story.
Mr St John was born in 1835 in Connecticut and was a dentist by profession.
He was 27 when he joined the 141st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment that fought on the union side during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
Mr St John was involved in several major incidents during the conflict, including the second Battle of Bull Run and the defence of Washington.
He returned to a dental practice in New York after the war before being appointed to a diplomatic post in Fiji in 1886.
A further stint as American Consul to Indonesia followed in 1893, and he then spent a short period in Australia before shifting to Auckland and retirement in 1894 with his wife and two children.
He died in 1902 and was buried at Waikumete. The remaining family later returned to the United States.
The new headstone on Mr St John’s grave has been provided by the United States Department of Veteran Affairs.
Ms Lange says it was a special moment to see it unveiled.
"It has taken almost a year from my spotting the grave to this dedication ceremony. It’s great because Mr St John’s family members in America now have closure because they believed he had died somewhere in Fiji."
Mr St John is survived by one granddaughter, Winifred Mont-Eton, now aged 97 and living in California.
There are also several great-grandchildren and their families.
Great-granddaughter Lorry Wagner says the installation of the headstone came as wonderful news.
"I have tears in my eyes and goose bumps all over, and my mom Winifred is speechless and crying too. It’s just overwhelming and I cannot express our thanks and appreciation enough."
American Consul General John Desrocher says the ceremony and headstone were a fitting tribute.
"We are absolutely thrilled and happy to be able to honour one of our own in this way. Diplomats like Mr St John made great sacrifices for their country for very little reward, so we are very grateful to Ms Lange for bringing his story to light so that we can honour him correctly."
He was a colourful and well-travelled character who ended up forgotten in an unmarked grave – until now.
American Civil War veteran and diplomat Andrews Andrew St John has finally been acknowledged 106 years after his death.
A headstone was unveiled on his grave at Waikumete Cemetery this month during a service attended by dignitaries from the United States consulate.
Mr St John’s story came to light after investigations by Glendene historical researcher Audrey Lange.
She discovered the unmarked grave last year and began to look into its background.
Her digging unearthed a colourful story.
Mr St John was born in 1835 in Connecticut and was a dentist by profession.
He was 27 when he joined the 141st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment that fought on the union side during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
Mr St John was involved in several major incidents during the conflict, including the second Battle of Bull Run and the defence of Washington.
He returned to a dental practice in New York after the war before being appointed to a diplomatic post in Fiji in 1886.
A further stint as American Consul to Indonesia followed in 1893, and he then spent a short period in Australia before shifting to Auckland and retirement in 1894 with his wife and two children.
He died in 1902 and was buried at Waikumete. The remaining family later returned to the United States.
The new headstone on Mr St John’s grave has been provided by the United States Department of Veteran Affairs.
Ms Lange says it was a special moment to see it unveiled.
"It has taken almost a year from my spotting the grave to this dedication ceremony. It’s great because Mr St John’s family members in America now have closure because they believed he had died somewhere in Fiji."
Mr St John is survived by one granddaughter, Winifred Mont-Eton, now aged 97 and living in California.
There are also several great-grandchildren and their families.
Great-granddaughter Lorry Wagner says the installation of the headstone came as wonderful news.
"I have tears in my eyes and goose bumps all over, and my mom Winifred is speechless and crying too. It’s just overwhelming and I cannot express our thanks and appreciation enough."
American Consul General John Desrocher says the ceremony and headstone were a fitting tribute.
"We are absolutely thrilled and happy to be able to honour one of our own in this way. Diplomats like Mr St John made great sacrifices for their country for very little reward, so we are very grateful to Ms Lange for bringing his story to light so that we can honour him correctly."
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
UK village wants to bring back the donkey
Reuters | Friday, 08 February 2008
What does one do when modern transport just can't get the shopping to the front door?
The central English village of Chalford has decided to take a page from its past by employing donkeys to haul groceries to homes atop a slope so steep that cars can't get to them.
"There's about 30 houses that don't have car access so everyone who lives there has this long, winding, torturous path to climb," resident Anna Usborne said describing the 100m hill.
Usborne is now raising money to buy village donkeys, plans to keep them on her land and to organise volunteers who will guide them up the hill when locals have heavy loads to carry.
Older residents may find the sight conjures up distant memories of the past when donkeys delivering coal and provisions to remote hillside cottages were a common sight.
"They were very much a part of village life," said Usborne of Chalford's donkey past.
"It's touching a note with people, bringing back traditions of the past."
The village has already purchased special panniers in anticipation of the arrival of the donkeys.
Usborne said she needed to raise enough money to buy two donkeys – as one would get lonely – and says they can cost up to stg600 ($NZ1521) each.
The hills in the local area, known as the Cotswolds, may literally be a pain in the back for some Chalford villagers, but for others they are a thrill.
The Cotswolds is also home to the centuries-old annual cheese-rolling contest in which competitors hurl themselves at great speed down a hill in hot pursuit of a wheel of Double Gloucester.
What does one do when modern transport just can't get the shopping to the front door?
The central English village of Chalford has decided to take a page from its past by employing donkeys to haul groceries to homes atop a slope so steep that cars can't get to them.
"There's about 30 houses that don't have car access so everyone who lives there has this long, winding, torturous path to climb," resident Anna Usborne said describing the 100m hill.
Usborne is now raising money to buy village donkeys, plans to keep them on her land and to organise volunteers who will guide them up the hill when locals have heavy loads to carry.
Older residents may find the sight conjures up distant memories of the past when donkeys delivering coal and provisions to remote hillside cottages were a common sight.
"They were very much a part of village life," said Usborne of Chalford's donkey past.
"It's touching a note with people, bringing back traditions of the past."
The village has already purchased special panniers in anticipation of the arrival of the donkeys.
Usborne said she needed to raise enough money to buy two donkeys – as one would get lonely – and says they can cost up to stg600 ($NZ1521) each.
The hills in the local area, known as the Cotswolds, may literally be a pain in the back for some Chalford villagers, but for others they are a thrill.
The Cotswolds is also home to the centuries-old annual cheese-rolling contest in which competitors hurl themselves at great speed down a hill in hot pursuit of a wheel of Double Gloucester.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
After art deco, here comes Victoriana
5:00AM Wednesday January 09, 2008
Gisborne's historic Albert Buildings could be restored to equal the charm of Napier's Daily Telegraph building. Photo / Herald on Sunday
Gisborne has the chance to brand itself the "Victorian City" because of last month's earthquake, says Mayor Meng Foon.
Some buildings are going to need to be replaced and he wants Gisborne to "do a Napier" and try to bring some good out of misfortune.
"I know it has been a disaster for some people, particularly those in homes, and commercial buildings and offices have been affected, but there is always good that comes out of it.
"There is a great opportunity for our commercial sector to take advantage of this, especially with the buildings that have been built with contemporary-type materials like aluminium and tin facades.
"We have some precious architecture of which about 70 to 80 per cent is actually Victorian.
"It would be a shame for those buildings to be put back into their tin-shed profiles."
Mr Foon has spoken to some of the landowners whose buildings suffered substantial damage and has encouraged them to rebuild in the profile of a Victorian-style building.
This did not need to be expensive as they could use modern materials that looked like Victorian buildings, he said.
Mr Foon has written to all the city's architects who would have an influence in the design of the buildings to encourage their clients to build in this profile.
"This would give us a unique place both in New Zealand and in the world as one of the cities that feature a distinct and special type architecture," he said.
"It would give us the ability to attract events and tourism."
He believes the city should follow the example of Napier, which rebuilt itself as the art deco capital of the world after the devastating earthquake in 1931.
"So I hope that the building owners will be persuaded to build in the Victorian form.
"They would not only be contributing to the value of their building but also to the values of our community," he said.
Mr Foon has had a very positive response from the landowners he has approached.
He has also received advice from architects, who have suggested making the new buildings environmentally sustainable by using appropriate building materials that would keep them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and use natural light to reduce energy consumption as well as solar energy.
Mr Foon said he appreciated those suggestions because they could be incorporated into the urban development strategy the council was preparing.
Commercial buildings would be a key focus of that.
- NZPA
Gisborne's historic Albert Buildings could be restored to equal the charm of Napier's Daily Telegraph building. Photo / Herald on Sunday
Gisborne has the chance to brand itself the "Victorian City" because of last month's earthquake, says Mayor Meng Foon.
Some buildings are going to need to be replaced and he wants Gisborne to "do a Napier" and try to bring some good out of misfortune.
"I know it has been a disaster for some people, particularly those in homes, and commercial buildings and offices have been affected, but there is always good that comes out of it.
"There is a great opportunity for our commercial sector to take advantage of this, especially with the buildings that have been built with contemporary-type materials like aluminium and tin facades.
"We have some precious architecture of which about 70 to 80 per cent is actually Victorian.
"It would be a shame for those buildings to be put back into their tin-shed profiles."
Mr Foon has spoken to some of the landowners whose buildings suffered substantial damage and has encouraged them to rebuild in the profile of a Victorian-style building.
This did not need to be expensive as they could use modern materials that looked like Victorian buildings, he said.
Mr Foon has written to all the city's architects who would have an influence in the design of the buildings to encourage their clients to build in this profile.
"This would give us a unique place both in New Zealand and in the world as one of the cities that feature a distinct and special type architecture," he said.
"It would give us the ability to attract events and tourism."
He believes the city should follow the example of Napier, which rebuilt itself as the art deco capital of the world after the devastating earthquake in 1931.
"So I hope that the building owners will be persuaded to build in the Victorian form.
"They would not only be contributing to the value of their building but also to the values of our community," he said.
Mr Foon has had a very positive response from the landowners he has approached.
He has also received advice from architects, who have suggested making the new buildings environmentally sustainable by using appropriate building materials that would keep them cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and use natural light to reduce energy consumption as well as solar energy.
Mr Foon said he appreciated those suggestions because they could be incorporated into the urban development strategy the council was preparing.
Commercial buildings would be a key focus of that.
- NZPA
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Online cemetery faces grave problem
Western Leader | Saturday, 12 January 2008
Cemetery records at Waikumete may soon be available online.
Burial and cremation details for the rest of Auckland’s large cemeteries can already be viewed on the internet.
But a few problems are holding Waikumete back.
"Some families don’t want dead members’ records online," cemetery manager Daniel Sales says.
"It’s become a very sensitive issue."
More than 70,000 people are buried at Waikumete, one of the biggest cemeteries in the southern hemisphere that has about 5000 visitors a year.
"Many people come looking for information about their geneaology," Mr Sales says.
"And many people are interested in viewing inscriptions on tombstones."
He says a number of people oppose having the records online for various reasons – a black sheep in the family, a tragedy or a murder.
Mr Sales is concerned the matter could become a legal issue for the cemetery.
He says staff are meeting next week to find a solution before proceeding.
The cemetery is able to release information such as names, dates of death, and plot details but not addresses or occupations.
Cemetery records at Waikumete may soon be available online.
Burial and cremation details for the rest of Auckland’s large cemeteries can already be viewed on the internet.
But a few problems are holding Waikumete back.
"Some families don’t want dead members’ records online," cemetery manager Daniel Sales says.
"It’s become a very sensitive issue."
More than 70,000 people are buried at Waikumete, one of the biggest cemeteries in the southern hemisphere that has about 5000 visitors a year.
"Many people come looking for information about their geneaology," Mr Sales says.
"And many people are interested in viewing inscriptions on tombstones."
He says a number of people oppose having the records online for various reasons – a black sheep in the family, a tragedy or a murder.
Mr Sales is concerned the matter could become a legal issue for the cemetery.
He says staff are meeting next week to find a solution before proceeding.
The cemetery is able to release information such as names, dates of death, and plot details but not addresses or occupations.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Thousands follow soldier's fate in WW1 'blog'
5:00AM Tuesday January 08, 2008
Thousands of people have been following the fate of a British soldier fighting in the trenches of World War 1 on a website publishing his letters home exactly 90 years after they were written.
Like William Henry Bonser ("Harry") Lamin's real family almost a century ago, the modern reader visiting www.wwar1.blogspot.com does not know when the next letter is coming, or whether the one they are reading is in fact his last.
Many are braced for the dreaded telegram from the army notifying relatives of a soldier's death.
"There are a lot of people saying how keen they are to follow him and are rooting for Harry," said Bill Lamin, the 59-year-old IT teacher who found his grandfather's letters when he was a boy and decided to turn them into a blog.
"They get hooked as if it is happening now. People are rooting for a guy who is in the thick of it," he told Reuters.
The most recent entries from Harry, who served with the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment, were on December 30, 1917, after he had moved from the battlefields of northern Europe to Italy.
He thanks his brother, Jack, for the box of biscuits he sent and wishes his sister Kate a happy Christmas and New Year.
Many of the letters are mundane and focus on his wife and child in England, but some offer a glimpse of the horrors of trench warfare that young men faced.
"We have had another terrible time this week," Harry wrote on June 11, 1917, when describing his part in the Battle of Messines Ridge.
"The men here say it was worst (sic) than the Somme advance last July. We lost a lot of men but we got where we were asked to take. It was awful I am alright got buried and knocked about but quite well now and hope to remain so.
"It is a rum job waiting for the time to come to go over the top without any rum too. The CO got killed and our captain, marvellous how we escaped."
In another entry from October the same year, details of British casualties are pencilled out, possibly by army censors seeking to maintain morale back home.
Lamin said the daily number of visitors to his site reached around 20,000 last week after several media reports appeared, although the daily total was normally lower.
"World War 1 has always been fascinating for people, the horrors of it," he said.
Dozens of people have written to the site to comment on Harry's experiences, including many from the United States.
One anonymous contributor wrote: "As a boy I was taught that war was glorious, I now know that it is exactly the opposite and will teach my children the same."
Lamin refused to give any clues as to Harry's fate, listing only his birth date as 1887.
- REUTERS
5:00AM Tuesday January 08, 2008
Thousands of people have been following the fate of a British soldier fighting in the trenches of World War 1 on a website publishing his letters home exactly 90 years after they were written.
Like William Henry Bonser ("Harry") Lamin's real family almost a century ago, the modern reader visiting www.wwar1.blogspot.com does not know when the next letter is coming, or whether the one they are reading is in fact his last.
Many are braced for the dreaded telegram from the army notifying relatives of a soldier's death.
"There are a lot of people saying how keen they are to follow him and are rooting for Harry," said Bill Lamin, the 59-year-old IT teacher who found his grandfather's letters when he was a boy and decided to turn them into a blog.
"They get hooked as if it is happening now. People are rooting for a guy who is in the thick of it," he told Reuters.
The most recent entries from Harry, who served with the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment, were on December 30, 1917, after he had moved from the battlefields of northern Europe to Italy.
He thanks his brother, Jack, for the box of biscuits he sent and wishes his sister Kate a happy Christmas and New Year.
Many of the letters are mundane and focus on his wife and child in England, but some offer a glimpse of the horrors of trench warfare that young men faced.
"We have had another terrible time this week," Harry wrote on June 11, 1917, when describing his part in the Battle of Messines Ridge.
"The men here say it was worst (sic) than the Somme advance last July. We lost a lot of men but we got where we were asked to take. It was awful I am alright got buried and knocked about but quite well now and hope to remain so.
"It is a rum job waiting for the time to come to go over the top without any rum too. The CO got killed and our captain, marvellous how we escaped."
In another entry from October the same year, details of British casualties are pencilled out, possibly by army censors seeking to maintain morale back home.
Lamin said the daily number of visitors to his site reached around 20,000 last week after several media reports appeared, although the daily total was normally lower.
"World War 1 has always been fascinating for people, the horrors of it," he said.
Dozens of people have written to the site to comment on Harry's experiences, including many from the United States.
One anonymous contributor wrote: "As a boy I was taught that war was glorious, I now know that it is exactly the opposite and will teach my children the same."
Lamin refused to give any clues as to Harry's fate, listing only his birth date as 1887.
- REUTERS
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
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