Posts by Jolisa
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That was a very nasty rash of aftershocks, going by the Twittoseismograph.
And @Kalena's newfound ability to locate them by street address* adds another level of precision freakout to the whole thing, I imagine??
* by feeding the geonet coordinates into Google Maps: genius.
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Thanks, Chris, for abetting the sudden surge in my PAS stock value!
I thought there must have been a suppressed story of editorial judgement and intrigue to explain the non-appearance.
I suspect the hand of the poet herself in assisting the editor to find space for the review at last :-) Squares of ectoplasmic gingerbread flying round the Listener offices, and all that.
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Everything changes, at ground level.
So true: a motto for all historiography, eh.
ChrisW, thanks for clarification. I got "Ngati Awa" from here but freely admit to being nothing like an expert. Reading the history though, I think back to walking some of the random bush tracks up behind Naenae - probably wrong side of the valley, but still cool to think that the tracks may have been older than even six-year-old I imagined.
So, several parties all complex, not just heroes and villains, goodies vs baddies, Maori vs Pakeha - a challenging heritage for "marketing", to put across in sound-bites, even if a golf course has 18 or 19 holes/sites to build an overall story.
I am suddenly taken with a vision of a series of historical reenactments of various incidents, one per hole. Like a sort of Stations of the Cross. I'm just not sure whether you'd have to pause to watch the reenactment before teeing off -- or whether they would be sprung on you along the way. That's not just a sand-trap, it's an AMBUSH!
It could provide useful employment for all those Toi Whakaari/ Drama School grads. Not to mention, something for the golf-mad heritage tourist, surely an important and currently under-served demographic?
Seriously, though: heritage sites, where complex but really important things happened - how best to bring them to life?
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That's what I'm wondering... gets a bit complicated, eh, what with the "friendly Maori" Ngati-Awa lining up alongside the Hutt militia, and the Whanganui crew coming back down for more after the first attack.
It would be really interesting if they can find a way to present all sides of the story. Starting with the New Zealand Company, I guess? Or further back?
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Fascinating, Ewan - thanks for that link. I'm struggling to understand the heritage marketing angle, though:
The outcome was not just a name but a story to support it, along with a potential future marketing concept for the club.
[...]
It has already been suggested that the first hole be called The Bugler with an appropriate plaque."On this spot on May 16, 1846, during the Battle of Boulcott Farm, 16 year-old bugler, William Allen, continued to sound the alert, warning his comrades of attack, even as he was hacked to death by tomahawk."
"Blow your own horn at Boulcott's Farm Heritage Golf Club, then get totally slaughtered at the 19th hole"?
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On the question of literacy, absolute numbers are hard to come by, because the definitions are variable - the ability to sign your own name as the most minimal measure (and was the one applied to one set of Irish ancestors, who arrived with their eight or so children in the ?1880s? and were all marked as "literate"). It definitely varied by class.
But it seems that colonial New Zealand was very big on reading and that people were eager to catch up once they got here. Lydia cites J.E. Traue on the "explosion" of lending libaries: apparently NZ had the highest density of libraries per person "ever reached in any country or state in the world."
And for me, at least, the contemporary Maori-language newspapers that are mentioned in the book, along with the treasured translations of the Bible and other books in te reo that the Beetham family held (and read) are also a welcome reminder that bilingual literacy was eagerly embraced early on. We've got a lot of catching up to do,in that regard, for which earnest Willie Beetham is a useful role model. Want to live somewhere? Learn the language as soon as you get there so you'll fit in.
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I stand corrected about Homebush vs Dean's Bush. You guys are the best copy editors in the world.
a great blow for Australian mining, people who can find faultlines, and future book reviewers, then. Not quite sure what that would have implied.
In other words, me and my friend Steve who told me about the Chch earthquake risk in the first place. Hmm. Could have been a real disaster, then!
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Bit like living with a going-on-9-year-old boy in your head, then? (Or just my going-on-9-year-old boy).
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Jolisa, it is not just the Tasmania part of the story, nor the Whanganui links that need to be told. Few Wellington and Hutt locals know about the injustices that happened in the Hutt Valley.
That's a good point, Hilary. As you say, the novel covered a lot of ground other than Tasmania and Whanganui -- the Hutt Valley and the Highland Clearances, too (not to mention Rhodesia, the least successful part of the novel) -- and like Gillian Ranstead's Girlie, it seemed to be working towards making an argument about the commensurability (or otherwise) of different experiences of historical dispossession.
This is an open-ended project that will continue to be addressed by many of our writers, I hope.
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From someone in a bowler hat, no less! Too much to hope for suspenders as well?
Now that picture is filed away with the song by the young Jon Bridges about being a lonely musician on the road, which began "[strum] The road can be your lover...[strum]... but it will probably give you a really bad case of gravel rash." That was the whole song.