The Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre would like to announce the publication of the Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde, edited and annotated by Dr. Nikki Hessell (Massey University).

On the 25^th of June 1925, the then nineteen-year-old Robin Hyde sat for the first time in the Ladies’ Gallery overlooking the New Zealand House of Representatives. Employed by the conservative Dominion newspaper, her job was to produce a daily column about events in the House—‘Peeps at Parliament’. Using the pseudonym ‘Novitia’, Hyde wrote in the persona of a naïve but sardonic female observer of New Zealand political life. After she left the Dominion, Hyde would reprise her role as parliamentary reporter for the Mirrorand New Zealand Observer newspapers.

These columns have now been collected, edited, and extensively annotated, and are freely available through the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Dr. Hessell has also written a scholarly introduction to Hyde’s political journalism, and provided a biographical key to the figures mentioned in the columns. The Collected Parliamentary Reports of Robin Hyde provide both a valuable addition to Robin Hyde scholarship, and an illuminating insight into New Zealand’s social and political culture in the years leading up to the Great Depression.

The Parliamentary Reports and their supplementary texts are hosted here.

NZETC wins "Topic Maps Project of the Year" award at Topic Maps 2008

At the Topic Maps 2008 conference dinner in Oslo tonight, the NZETC picked up the annual "Topic Maps Project of the Year" award for its online library website http://www.nzetc.org/, described as a model for other digital libraries.

2007's Best New Zealand Poems online today

You have been warned: the 2007 Best New Zealand Poems collection could make you laugh, weep or even want to write your own poem.

Best New Zealand Poems is an online anthology of the finest poetry by New Zealand writers in the preceding year. It is published annually by the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) and hosted by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, both based at Victoria University.

This year's editor, poet Paula Green, says the task of selecting 25 poems in a year "rich in good poems" was difficult.

"A good poem has the ability to lift us out of the mundane and make us laugh, weep, reflect and wonder, to entice us to re-read it again and again, or to write poems of our own," she says.

A NZ Listener review by Gerry Webb describes Ms Green's poetry as "musical, sensuous, tender, quick witted…she sketches subtle emotional shapes that only real writing talent can bring to light".

IIML director Bill Manhire says the aim of the Best New Zealand Poems is to introduce readers to leading contemporary New Zealand poets. He says poems are chosen to show the vitality and range of current writing, and over half the site's readers come from beyond New Zealand.

"This year we stretched the contributor rules slightly to include a poem by the visiting US writer Dora Malech. It's a lovely riff on her habit of mishearing certain parts of the New Zealand accent."

Other poets published this year include Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Jenny Bornholdt, and C K Stead.

Best New Zealand Poems is supported by a grant from Creative New Zealand which goes entirely to the contributors and editor.

The 2007 edition, of 25 poems, can be viewed online at: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/bestnzpoems.

New Texts

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre would like to draw your attention to another batch of texts which have recently been made available online. Details are given below. As always, we would be thankful for any feedback on the selection of material. Among other things we are currently working on the 1897 Cyclopedia of New Zealand the New Zealand Railway Magazines which we hope to make available in the next few months.

In this batch of texts several are related to Pacific Exploration and the Journals of Joseph Banks include many of his famous illustrations:

The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771 [Volumes One & Two] edited by J. C. Beaglehole
Explorers of the Pacific by Te Rangi Hiroa
Discoverers of the Cook Islands and the Names they Gave by Alphons M.J. Kloosterman

We also have a number of biographies and autobiographies by or about notable New Zealanders: nurse and hospital matron Hester Maclean, cricketer Daniel Reese, politician Sir Donald MacLean, teacher and farmer Helen Wilson, Nga Puhi leader Eruera Maihi Patuone, taxidermist and collector Andreas Reischek, and agent and farmer E Earle Vaile,

Nursing in New Zealand: History and Reminiscences by Hester Maclean
Sir Donald Maclean by James Cowan
The Life and Times of Patuone by C. O. Davis
My First Eighty Years by Helen Wilson
Was It All Cricket? By Daniel Reese
Yesterdays in Maoriland by Andreas Reischek
Pioneering the Pumice by E. Earle Vaile

Finally we have another eight texts which we hope further enriches the cluster of New Zealand and Pacific history material online:

Maori and Missionary, by T. A. Pybus
The Maoris of the South Island by T. A. Pybus
The Maori Situation by I. L. G. Sutherland
Anthropology and Religion by Peter Henry Buck
An Introduction to Polynesian Anthropology by Te Rangi Hiroa
A Sketch of the New Zealand War by Morgan S. Grace
Historic Poverty Bay and the East Coast, N.I., N.Z. by Joseph Angus Mackay
Takitimu by Tiaki Hikawera Mitira

Moko; or Māori Tattooing

The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is pleased to announce a new collection of historical texts on Ta Moko as the result of a project which tries to take into account sensitivities around the digitisation of mātauranga Māori and textual taonga.

The collection can be found here

The project was centred on the digitisation of an annotated copy of the 1896 publication “Moko; or Maori Tattooing” by Horatio Gordon Robley. An additional six texts have also been digitised to provide contextual information about Ta Moko, mokamokai, Robley himself and his art. These texts include

• A manuscript on moko prepared by Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikaheke in the 1850s for Sir George Grey
• "Robley — Soldier with a Pencil" by L. W. Melvin (1957)
• "Mokomokai: Commercialization and Desacralization" by Christian Palmer and Mervyn L. Tano (2004)
• "Smoked Heads" by Christina Thompson (2006)
• "Robley: Te Ropere, 1840—1930" by Timothy Walker (1985)

The project raised various issues for the NZETC because, notwithstanding the status of the Robley text as a significant part of our documentary heritage, the Centre recognised that the mātauranga that it contained belonged to the wider Māori community and providing online access to this material had the potential to offend as much as to inform. The NZETC therefore undertook consultation with a range of groups such as academics, librarians and the general public, as well as source groups, Māori and Ta Moko artists. As a result of these conversations “Moko; or Māori Tattooing ” has been made freely accessible online with additional contextual material and those images depicting mokamokai or human remains have been suppressed and cannot be viewed. The same approach has been taken to all other images in the NZETC collection.

The decision to provide contextual resources and to suppress parts of the digitised book is an attempt to balance the interests of scholarship in the integrity of the work, the importance of free public access to New Zealand’s documentary record, the need to respect the tupuna depicted in Robley’s illustrations, and the need to inform readers about the context in which the text was created. A full report of the project provides more details on the issues that were considered. It can be read here

We would welcome feedback on the project and the paper.

Further Information:

Horatio G. Robley came to New Zealand, as an officer in the British Army, in 1864. While here he had many opportunities to sketch those Māori he encountered and he became interested in moko design. Later, after Robley had retired from the army, he began to collect mokamokai (preserved heads), buying them from dealers, auction houses and the owners of private collections. He used his collection as well as those available for viewing in Europe as the basis for his sketches that he included in his book.

The copy of “Moko; or Māori Tattooing ” which was digitised is part of the J C Beaglehole Room collection at Victoria University of Wellington Library. It is particularly interesting because it contains both handwritten annotations by Horace Fildes, a Wellington book collector and historian, and several letters from Robley to Fildes about the text and its content. Robley’s memoirs, organised and annotated by Fildes, are also held in the University Library and the NZETC intends to digitise these in the coming months.

Remote Writer released!

As Conal mentioned in an earlier post, we've been working on a browser-based word processor to allow people to create content for collections and projects such as the NZETC via a simple interface without having to learn the intricacies of TEI XML.

Well, the good news is that it's finally free for all to use (and extend if desired), and can be found at remotewriter.wordpress.com.

If you follow that link, it should explain the features and answer questions about it, including what it is, what it's good for and how to install it, but briefly, Remote Writer is an open-source tool for collaboratively creating documents using a simple-to-use interface in a similar fashion to other browser-based word-processors such as Google Docs and Zoho Writer.

Like Zoho Writer, Remote Writer even allows the creation and maintenance of documents using your browser while offline (for example, when travelling). When online again, all changes are synchronised to and from the server, though it is also possible to use Remote Writer as a stand-alone client.

However, what makes Remote Writer unique is:

• the ability to define custom block-level and inline styles
  
  
• its status as the only open-source solution (at least to this point) that features both online and offline functionality
  

Because Remote Writer is open-source, and is built on other open-source efforts (including the tinyMCE Javascript content editor, and Google Gears), it is freely available to anyone for use and further modification / enhancement.

We're happy to make it freely available, and would be interested if anyone has any feedback to offer about it.

New texts for Xmas!

Just in time for Christmas ... the NZETC has added several new texts to our collection. A bit of a mixed bag this time; something for everyone I hope.

In collaboration with the University of Waikato Library we're especially pleased to be able to make the six volumes of John White's 1888 "The Ancient History of the Maori" accessible online. In 2002 the University of Waikato Library created PDF versions on CD-ROM and new print editions of the documents. Earlier this year they generously gave us permission to produce new versions for the web. This is massive!

Botanists are going to love the Plantarum Novarum Ex Herbario Sprengelii Centuriam by Johann Friedrich Theodor Biehler. (Well ... when we say "novarum" ... these plants aren't as new as they were in 1807). Seventeen species and one genus of plants from New Zealand and the South Pacific were first described and named in this Latin text published in 1807. Professor Phil Garnock-Jones from the School of Biology at Victoria University who has written about the significance of this work, reset the text and kindly agreed to allow us to publish it as part of the NZETC collection.

Bird Life on Island and Shore By H. Guthrie-Smith is a good quick read for those interested in NZ bird life - "should be swallowed at a single gulp" according to the author. Some good photos there too.

Another natural history addition is A Leaf from the Natural History of New Zealand by Richard Taylor, from 1848.

Infantry Brigadier by Sir Howard Kippenberger, from 1949, is a worthy addition to our substantial World War II collection.

In 1949 Kippenberger’s own account of the war, Infantry Brigadier, was published to wide acclaim. The book is a detailed and well-written account of his part in the Second World War, and shows much of its author’s modesty, reflectiveness, soundness of judgement, humane concern for his men, and dry sense of humour. It has been translated into seven languages, and is still used as a textbook of infantry tactics.

Harper, Glyn. 'Kippenberger, Howard Karl 1897 - 1957'.
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, updated 22 June 2007

Aucklanders should find something of interest in Some Interesting Occurrences in Early Auckland By E. Earle Vaile:

In those days anything might happen to folk in the streets. Judge Munro told me that on one occasion he was walking up Queen Street with a “new chum” when a tattooed Maori chief spoke to him. The new chum asked “What does this curious looking old savage want with us?” The Maori asked “What the Pakeha say, e hoa”? Judge Munro replied “He is admiring your tattoo”. The Maori responded by exposing his rump saying “my moko (facial tattoo) is nothing, let him see this”. Maori men were often so closely tattooed from the waist to the knees as to appear clad in knickerbockers.

(from Chapter 11)

Last but not least, the fabulous War Economy Recipe Book will surely provide one or two (perhaps as many as 3) recipes suitable for your Yuletide feasting! In all seriousness, some of the recipes in this book (mostly named after battles and military leaders) are not for the faint-hearted:

A Very Good Home-Made Coffee.

5 cups of bran, 2 cups of treacle.

Put in a piedish and heat in oven, continually stirring. Care must be taken not to leave too long without stirring, as it will burn. Cook till dry—may take an hour—in a moderate oven. When cool put in airtight tin. Similar in flavour to “Instant Postum.”

Oh yeah ... Instant Postum ... look out for that in the shops eh?

Other recipes are definitely worth a try. I've tried and I can recommend the Tripoli Biscuits (you may know them as ANZACs), and I have a 5-year plan to try out Stalin Gingerbread. Because of war-time rationing, many of the recipes are egg-free.

From all of us here at the NZ Electronic Text Centre, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!