Lake Taupo lies in the caldera of an active supervolcano, the site of the world’s most violent eruption of the last 70,000 years. Just 10 km beneath it sits another lake of molten rock 50 km wide and 160 km long. With a growing need for alternative energy sources, plans for tapping this latent reservoir are hotting up.
This nation was born beneath a tent of ship’s sails on a lawn in front of a modest wooden house overlooking the sea. Hone Heke scratched his name into parchment, followed by 42 others, and with each, the naval captain-turned-Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson shook hands and said “He iwi tahi tatou”. It meant, loosely, ‘we are one people’, a phrase which has framed our search for identity for 170 years. From the outset, New Zealand Geographic has been determined to enhance that discussion of identity. The fifth issue was largely produced on those Waitangi treaty grounds at the celebration of New Zealand’s sesquicentenary, and over 100 issues the magazine has become a definitive record of our culture and society. But it has also been fundamentally concerned with the New Zealand environment, its landscape, wildlife and ecology. And in those causes, also, there have been some landmarks. Half a century ago New Zealanders opposed a government proposal to raise the level of Lake Manapouri for a massive hydroelectrical power station. As Kennedy Warne reveals in this issue, it was an inflexion point in New Zealand’s conservation movement, where the ideals of a few resonated with many and environmental issues became public concerns: that rivers and forests in their natural state had intrinsic value above and beyond hydroelectric or mineral potential. Since that decision, tourism has eclipsed primary industries as the biggest foreign exchange earner, attracting nearly 2.5 million visitors annually with the slogan “100% Pure”. However it is now understood that fully functional ecosystems also provide real economic value for services such as water articulation and filtering, nutrient cycling and erosion prevention, which underpin sustainable development and economic growth. A study commissioned by the Department of Conservation quantifies the economic value of West Coast conservation land at $220 m per year and 1800 jobs. Fiordland, $196 m per year, 1600 jobs. All of which makes recent suggestions of mining national parks for minerals a little ill-considered. Conservation land has extraordinary value, but only in its natural state, a state which would be compromised with the addition of highways, trucks, mine tailings and the unavoidable impact that even the most discreet subterranean treasure hunts have on the landscape. It was precisely this sentiment that raised the ire of those who opposed the development of Manapouri, but history seems doomed to repeat itself. Long after we’ve reaped from the soil every mineral commodity, what will remain is the earth beneath our feet, sold for development, flooded for hydroelectric potential, prostituted for profit or otherwise compromised by utilitarianism. Ultimately these considerations of identity and environmental responsibility are without end, but not without milestones. Manapouri was one. And this month MP Keith Locke’s Head of State (Referenda) Bill, drawn from the private member’s ballot at Parliament, will surely be another. It proposes a referendum on New Zealand’s sovereignty—whether the country remains as a monarchy with an absentee British head of state selected by birth, or a republic with the head of state nominated by the people of New Zealand. It is one of the most significant questions of governance since those considered beneath a tent of sails in the summer of 1840. And if it passes the parliamentary readings and select committee process early next year, we will once again be forced to examine Hobson’s remark, “He iwi tahi tatou”.
On September 30 this year a subduction zone 18 km beneath the Pacific seafloor lurched violently upwards, displacing a massive wave which travelled 204 km to strike the low-lying coast of Samoa and American Samoa to devastating effect at least 139 people were killed in Samoa, 22 people in American Samoa and seven people on Niuatoputapu, Tonga. Damage was particularly widespread in Pago Pago, American Samoa, where a wave over three metres high engulfed the village and travelled 100 m inland. Sixty per cent of recorded tsunamis have occurred in the Pacific Ocean which lies above highly active plate boundaries putting New Zealand at very high risk. In 1960 the largest recorded earthquake (magnitude 9.5) which struck Chile in 1960, created a tsunami that crossed the entire Pacific in just 12 hours and arrived completely without warning as a four-metre wave on the east coast New Zealand. A maximum wave height of 5.5 metres was recorded in Lyttleton Harbour While the Samoan tsunami only eventuated in a 40cm wave on the Northland coast, it was the first test for the tsunami gauge network installed just 18 months ago, designed to give an early warning and measure wave heights. However New Zealand is more at risk from a local tsunami, for which there will be little or no warning. Generated by earthquakes, underwater landslides or volcanoes along our plate subduction zones, these movements can create potentially enormous wave heights that can strike land within minutes a 10-metre-high tsunami generated after a minor earthquake off the coast of Gisborne in March 1947 struck the coast within 30 minutes. As the water receded it took dozens of small buildings and six hectares of pumpkins out to sea.
Anthocyanins, the molecules that turn fruit red and blue, are usually produced at a particular time and for a particular purpose, such as when a plant wants to advertise the fact that its fruit is ripe, or during times of stress. Anthocyanins are particularly powerful anti-oxidants, those molecules that mop up the free radicals that damage cellular components such as DNA, protein and lipids which is why blue and red fruit are so in vogue among health-conscious consumers In Central Asia there are ancient apple trees in which anthocyanin production runs amok and everything is turned red flowers, fruit, leaves, bark, even the roots. Scientists now know that this is the result of a natural alteration in the DNA of the gene that controls the anthocyanin pathway in apples, MYB10. This gene is a transcription factor, a class of genes that produce proteins which bind to other genes and swtich them on or off in other words, it’s the controlling gene, or boss, that determines the working lives of the rest of the anthyocyanin producing genes. Anthocyanin production is usually achieved in a controlled manner, but in red-fleshed apples this controlling gene contains a section of additional DNA that promotes it to a whole new level. This alteration was identified by Richard Espley, a molecular biologist at Plant & Food Research, and the work won him the Adding Value to Nature Award at this year’s MacDiarmid Young Scientist of the Year awards. Espley is actually aged 48, but qualified as Young Scientist because he came to science in his 30s, and completed his PhD only recently. “I’ve never had so much flak, I can tell you,” he says. The research helps Plant & Food with its development of a red-fleshed apple, or more specifically an apple that has all the novelty value of red flesh but also the other desirable characteristics of a modern apple. Espley notes that in the forests of Asia, where the world’s apples originated, there are all sorts of strange fruit. “There are red apples, orange apples, yellow apples, apples the size of cherries and extremely large apples. There is real weirdness in wildlife. People are so used to Foodtown, and seeing maybe four varieties of apples. Out there, there are thousands.”
It was the first week of spring and during a solitary week of sunshine in months of rain, a pair of kokako from the King Country were released into the Waitakere Ranges in West Auckland. The area is owned by the Auckland Regional Council and, for several years now, has benefited from the actions of the volunteer group Ark in the Park. Like many similar organisations around the country, its aim is to rid the area of mammalian predators, although the Ark is doing this on a particularly grand scale. So far, its members have installed 2160 bait stations, 50 m apart, covering 1200 ha of bush. Robins, whiteheads and stitchbirds have been reintroduced over the past few years, and on September 8 the first two kokako were also ready for release. Though the birds were still in their boxes, bell-like sounds were already ringing out from the trees, thanks to speakers around the release site broadcasting looped kokako song. Researchers call it acoustic anchoring, and the theory is that the birds will think that if the area is good enough for other kokako then it’s good enough for them, ensuring they stay there. The first bird was tenderly removed from his box by DOC scientist Hazel Speed, who has spent 20 years working on kokako and much of the past decade studying a population in the Hunua Ranges, just southeast of Auckland. The bird was held aloft, confronted by a television crew, at least a dozen whirring cameras and a crowd of enthralled spectators. The bird’s response was to bite Speed’s hand, repeatedly. Speed flinched but valiantly held on long enough for everyone to get a close-up view of the striking grey creature with the ninja’s mask and vivid blue wattles. “It’s not really a flesh-eater,” she said. ARC chairman Mike Lee tried to feed it a banana. Eventually Speed sat the bird down on a fallen tree trunk and it promptly hopped up the nearby trees and disappeared into the canopy. Soon after, a female was removed from the box and similarly showcased before she, too, was allowed to fly away. Someone sang a waiata, an elderly gentleman began to incant in Maori, a stitchbird raised its alarm, and a couple of North Island robins fluttered nearby. Ark in the Park Chairman John Sumich stared up into the canopy where the bird had disappeared. When he lowered his head, he was grinning deliriously. He then flung out his arms and hugged the first person he saw, who happened to be the New Zealand Geographic journalist. This event was conservation staged largely for the benefit of the media and stakeholders, but behind it lay years of hard labour by volunteers prepared to spend their weekends on the mundane tasks of weeding, baiting, monitoring and raising money for such releases. (Ark had to raise $70,000 for the kokako release.) People like Sumich first talked about getting the kokako back into the Waitakere Ranges 10 years ago the birds were last seen in the forest 50 years ago but back then, few took the idea seriously. There simply weren’t enough kokako left for DOC to take such a risk. Now, contemporary conservation is reaping results that, not so long ago, were dismissed as pipe dreams. Three more birds were released two days later, and Speed hopes to release 30 over the next two years. “It’s good for the health of the forest, because [the birds] are fulfilling whatever role they had. And it gives people more of an opportunity to see these things.”
In fading light, a fairy prion returns to its roost on Mana Island as a host of nocturnal creatures are just beginning their day. After concerted conservation efforts, the island is now a hive of activity after dark.
I look forward to October, traditionally the opening month of the trout fishing season in the south, very much, and have done every year since 1953–54. That’s when I first became attracted to, then entranced by, rivers and streams. I found rapture, excitement, mystery and magic there. Which is why, undoubtedly, rivers have kept turning up and running through me and my poems ever since.
“My God, you’re still alive!” read the email, from a former colleague, with which Emeritus Professor Roy Kerr opened his public lecture at Cambridge University. Kerr was evidently thriving on the attention he’d received since being headhunted out of retirement to join the International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics in Italy. Officially, his job is researching solutions to General Relativity but, with news of his “reincarnation” having spread, he is now in constant demand as a speaker. His lecture, Unravelling Einstein’s Secrets, detailed his elegant solution to Einstein’s horrendously difficult equations describing the geometry of space-time around all rotating bodies, including the violent whirlpool-like continuum around rapidly spinning massive black holes. Known simply as the Kerr metric, it has been described as the most important exact solution to any equation in physics, providing the mathematical breakthrough which took General Relativity from what Cornell University astrophysicist Thomas Gold called a “magnificent cultural ornament” into mainstream theoretical physics. Despite an emotionally bleak childhood in Christchurch, where he grew up separated from his mother and sister, Kerr’s prodigious mathematical ability was recognised early, though not exactly nourished. At secondary school there were no maths teachers, at Canterbury University the only books on theoretical physics in the library were two 19th-century texts on the ether theory, and later at Cambridge, his supervisor left soon after his arrival—all of which left him free to develop his own ideas without the limitations of establishment ones. And so, between marriage, a child, renovating a terrace house, boxing, badminton, golf and bridge, he did. “I was always good at solving problems, especially if the solution required having a cute idea,” he says. The “cute idea” he had for his PhD provided a major advance on the motion of orbiting bodies in relativistic fields, and attracted considerable attention. Not having a supervisor to help him leverage this success proved a temporary handicap, but genius will out. In 1962, after a brief stint at Syracuse University and a few years with the U.S. Air Force (“the best job I ever had”), he joined Alfred Schild’s Center for Relativity at the University of Texas as a top-ranking relativist. This was the beginning of the Golden Age of Astrophysics and a time of intense activity and anticipation. Advances in quantum physics and radio astronomy, which had extended exploration of the universe beyond what was visible using optical telescopes, had indicated that Einstein’s gravitation theory might be crucial to understanding how the universe works. In particular, scientists had begun to suspect that its weirdest prediction, dense concentrations of mass in which time and space are forever disconnected from the real world, might actually exist. Although the term was not coined until 1967, black holes had become astrophysics’ Holy Grail. One exact solution to Einstein’s field equations had been found decades previously by the German astrophysicist, Karl Schwarzschild. This simplified metric described the geometry of space around non-rotating objects. But real stars spin. What’s more, they are usually gravitationally bound together in binary or multiple systems, and subject to chaotic ejections and transfers of matter spin-ups and spin-downs, cataclysmic collapses and explosions all the while dragging the cloak of space-time around them. It is one thing to have a set of equations to describe what theoretically happens as a particle approaches a nicely symmetrical, stationary object, but it is quite another to calculate the effects of gravity on the shape of space and flow of time around physically realistic, massive, spinning objects such as stars, planets and even black holes. In less than a year, Kerr had cracked Einstein’s code, solving the enigma of black holes. Coincidentally, in the same year, astronomers discovered plausible black-hole candidates: extraordinarily energetic and distant objects called quasars. Both discoveries were announced at the inaugural Texas Symposium of Relativistic Astrophysics in 1963. Kerr’s discovery went unnoticed by the astronomers, but not by the relativists. A lone wolf, albeit a gentle one, Kerr was unprepared for the academic “feeding frenzy” his solution unleashed, or for the savage competitiveness of the elite pack. Disillusioned, he retreated to Christchurch and the University of Canterbury, remarried, modernised the maths department and became a bridge champion. It’s the stuff of legend: maverick Kiwi solves world’s hardest problems then retires to play cards. The significance of the Kerr metric now an everyday tool for astrophysicists continues to grow as new telescopes reveal the fundamental role of black holes in determining the structure of the universe. But the greatest test lies ahead, as instruments such as the Square Kilometre Array promise to probe these extreme objects to see if, and where, general relativity breaks down. For Kerr, it’s a roller-coaster ride he’s still enjoying. “We have this fantastic lab [a supermassive black hole] at the centre of the galaxy, and I’ve been promised a seat on the first spaceship.”
Readers may be familiar with the eight-metre-high facsimile of the Treaty of Waitangi enshrined in glass and on permanent display at Te Papa, but the original treaty is made up of nine documents kept in the Constitution Room at Wellington’s National Archives. Here you will find the Waitangi sheet, named after the site at which the first document was signed, as well as the various sheets that were sent around the country and which collectively represent the agreement signed between Māori and representatives of the Crown in 1840. It is displayed in a temperature-regulated room built to withstand earthquakes, behind a heavy-duty bank-vault door, beneath subdued lighting and bullet-proof glass. It wasn’t always so well preserved, which is more than apparent from its condition. The Waitangi Sheet has suffered most, and is faded, water-marked and a good section has been chewed away it is one of two sheets made of parchment, which rodents find more digestible than paper. In the latter part of the 19th century, and particularly in the decades following Chief Justice James Prendergast’s declaration that the treaty was a legal “nullity”, the treaty was largely ignored and neglected, and little attention was given to its preservation. In 1908, it was discovered in the basement of Government Buildings by Dunedin doctor and collector Thomas Hocken, but by then time, weather and animals had left their marks. Afterwards, it was kept in a custom-made tin container at the Department of Internal Affairs, although it didn’t get the conservation work it deserved until the 1970s. It was then moved around various locations until 1991, when the Constitution Room was opened to the public. Each of the sheets has its own idiosyncrasies. The Waitangi Sheet is tightly packed with around 240 names and signatures William Hobson had initially hoped to get everyone’s names on one sheet. The Waikato-Manukau Sheet is the only one to have been written in English (translated from the Māori version) but carries only around 35 of the treaty’s 540 signatories. The Cook Strait Sheet, otherwise known as the Henry Williams sheet, is the most orderly, with 132 names neatly divided into the geographic regions and meticulously arranged in vertical rows. The printed sheet is the least legal looking: missionary William Colenso had printed 200 copies of the treaty’s text to be distributed among Māori, one of which was returned, with five signatures on the bottom of the page. A faded sentence written above the names and signatures states: “We all the undersigned, have signed up to the talk.” “This is probably true for all the sheets,” says archivist Graham Langton. “They signed up to what they had heard, not what was written.” Hone Heke was the first to sign up, and his mark can be made out, just, in the top left-hand corner of the Waitangi Sheet. Three other chiefs then squeezed in their signatures above his, possibly to make a competitive point. A number of chiefs signed with a complete signature, although the majority left an “x” or some other mark that, contrary to popular belief, probably wasn’t a moko. Most probably made up a sign of some sort at the time, one that was distinct from the one above. The treaty was written hastily; it took less than a week between Hobson’s first draft and the first signing. It revolves around three articles, but various key points were lost in translation. The Māori version translated the word “sovereignty” to kawanatanga (governance), which Māori believed gave the government only limited power over their lands the impact of British sovereignty would have been downplayed. The English version guaranteed Māori “undisturbed possession” of all their “properties”, while the Māori version guaranteed them “tino rangatiratanga”, or full chieftainship over their taonga. The Māori understanding of the treaty was at odds with those negotiating the agreement on behalf of the Crown, and the document has been contentious ever since. It is the country’s most influential artefact, its founding document, that is in so many ways representative of the country’s colonial history of trust and betrayal, goodwill and disregard, honour and warfare, appropriation and reparation. It remains a quasi-legal document, having never been ratified in New Zealand law, but it has obliged New Zealand governments and the judiciary to recognise the spirit in which people signed, and its principles of justice, equality and protection.
Mt taranaki is the sort of mountain you never tire of looking at, and one of the best places to view it from is the neighbouring Pouakai Range. This excellent weekend tramp accesses the Pouakai Range using the northern part of the Around-the Mountain Circuit, and ends back at North Egmont. It’s a great round trip, traversing all the varied terrain in this northern part of Egmont National Park. From the North Egmont carpark near The Camphouse, take the Veronika Loop Track, which plunges into forest immediately, beginning a steep climb onto a razorback ridge. At a track junction (where the Veronika Loop Track branches off) keep heading uphill. After crossing a couple of gullies, you intercept the high level Around-the-Mountain Circuit, where you should head right. The track passes beneath the angular columns of the Dieffenbach Cliffs, then continues sidling around to cross Boomerang Slip named for its shape. About halfway to Holly Hut, past a signposted turnoff to the Kokowai Track, the benched track sidles across a series of gorges cut by numerous streams radiating like spokes from Mt Taranaki. Finally, there’s a long but gradual descent to Holly Hut. From Holly Hut, head back to the track junction and begin a gentle descent towards the Ahukawakawa Swamp a long series of boardwalks lead across the swamp to the Stony River. After crossing the Stony River on an arched footbridge, a series of steps lead up through forest to the exposed tops of the Pouakai Range. Increasingly good views of Mt Taranaki expand as you gain height. Once on the range crest, the route to the Dover Track branches off to the west. Head right for about 20 minutes along the range, until a five-minute track branches off to Pouakai Hut. Beyond the knoll above the hut, the track leads across a flattish section of tops, past some small tarns, which often reflect Mt Taranaki in some splendour. More wooden steps descend from Henry towards the forest encasing the lower slopes. After crossing a stream near the shelter, the track sidles across more forested slopes intersected by some deep gullies before descending to the Waiwhakaiho River, which is spanned by a swingbridge near the confluence with Ram Stream. From here the Ram Track ascends a spur towards the road. Either end at the Kaiauai carpark (about a 2-kilometre walk along the road up to the carpark); or continue up the Ram Track to North Egmont.
Fifty years ago, plans to raise the levels of two of the country’s most scenic lakes sparked a green awakening in New Zealand.
SH 4, 97 km, 2–2.5 hours
The perfect curve of the rainbow suggested to ancient peoples that it must be the work of a god, while its shape suggested its use as a weapon. One of the Hindu myths from the Rig Veda, created more than 3000 years ago, tells how Indra, the god of thunder and war, shoots arrows of lightning from a rainbow to kill the demon serpent Asura Vrtra. In Scandinavia, the Saami thunder god, Tiermes, also uses the rainbow to fire arrows at evil spirits. In the Illiad, the Greek poet Homer’s epic account of the Trojan War that was written around 2700 years ago, Zeus stretches a rainbow across the sky as a portent of war. The rainbow was also a sign of the presence of the goddess Iris, who appears throughout the Illiad as a messenger, variously answering Achilles’ prayers and Zeus’s commands. Rainbows often connected gods and humans. In Norse mythology, Bifrost, a flaming rainbow bridge, links the land of Asgard, home of the gods, to Midgard, the world of the humans. Bifrost was guarded by Heimdall, a god who could hear wool growing on a sheep’s back and see the least movement a hundred leagues away, day or night. But he could not save the bridge when the apocalyptic final battle between gods, giants and demons came and Bifrost shattered under the weight of the combatants. In many cultures, the rainbow is linked with snakes. In Estonian folklore, a rainbow serpent sucks up water from rivers, lakes and seas and then rains it back to Earth. In Aboriginal Dreamtime, the ancestor Rainbow Python also brings life-giving rain. In the Argentine Chaco, however, the Toba Indian rainbow serpent Wosa’k stops the rain, appearing only when he is angry at humans. As well as life-giving rains, rainbows were sometimes thought to bring pestilence. When smallpox reached Australia, the Aboriginal people near Melbourne called the disease the “scale of Mindi”, their Rainbow Serpent. Zulus in South Africa also believed that if the rainbow touched someone, it infected them with disease. The Igbo people of Nigeria thought that where the double-headed rainbow python touches the ground, an important person will soon die. Pointing at rainbows was considered to be dangerous. In Hungary, it was thought that the pointing finger would wither, while in China, the entire offending hand was expected to ulcerate. In Central America, the Sumu Indians kept their children indoors to avoid the risk that they would inadvertently point at a brightly coloured rainbow. Pointing at people has often caused offence and could be mistaken for delivering a curse (we still tell children that it’s rude to point), so who would want to offend a powerful god? Hungarians believed that walking under a rainbow could provoke a sex change. Nearby, in Bohemia, this applied only to girls under seven. When two bows appeared together, the Chinese believed that the brighter, primary bow was male and the fainter, secondary bow was female. In New Zealand, a similar belief was held by the Tuhoe, although with the sexes reversed. They also regarded whirlwinds as children of the rainbows. For Christians, the primary bow was and is God’s covenant that he will not destroy the world by flood a second time, and in medieval Europe the secondary bow was seen as the Devil’s work a failed attempt to copy God’s glory that wasn’t just fainter but had the colours in the wrong order as wel. Sir Isaac Newton described the physics of rainbows in the 17th century when he showed that white light broke up into its constituent colours when it fell obliquely onto the surface of a glass prism. Sunlight striking the curved side of a raindrop changes direction as it enters the drop. The extent to which it does so depends on the wavelength and therefore the colour of the light. Shorter wavelength light, such as blue, bends more than longer wavelength light, such as red. Travelling in slightly different directions, the light waves spread further apart as they cross the raindrop. They then reflect off the back surface of the drop, cross the drop again, and exit the water back into the air. As the light crosses the water surface, it changes direction again, separating the colours even further. Because of this separation, the coloured light that reaches the eye of an observer comes from different raindrops. The red light comes from raindrops a little higher in the sky, while blue light comes from drops that are lower down. The raindrops, of course, are falling, so that each is quickly replaced by a raindrop from above, creating the illusion of a stationary rainbow caught in a falling curtain of rain. The secondary bow, which is not always seen, is formed by light that reflects twice off the inside wall of the raindrop. Consequently, it is fainter, as each time the light reflects off the inside surface of the drop, a fraction of the light escapes out into the air. The colours are reversed because of the second reflection, and the secondary bow is also higher, making an angle of about 51 degrees with the incoming sunlight, compared to 42 degrees for the primary bow. The interesting consequence of this precise angle of sunlight is that two people side by side do not actually see the same rainbow they see their own personal rainbow, shifted slightly to one side.
New Zealand extends through a wide range of latitudes—from semi-tropical waters off the Kermadec Islands in the north, to frigid, tempestuous seas that lash subantarctic islands in the south. Here, unique marine organisms inhabit an equally strange underwater terrain, a product of the volcanism that accompanies seafloor subduction to form ridges, reefs, pinnacles and a network of large underwater canyons and trenches.
We live in a world of bewildering complexity, and there is generally far too much going on around us for us to be aware of everything the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches that constantly harass our senses. Our brains have therefore evolved to select some aspects of the world for mental processing, and ignore the rest. That selection process is what we call attention. Its selective nature is easily demonstrated. In one famous example, people are shown a moving clip of a basketball game, and are generally so intent on watching the players that they fail to notice a gorilla that has wandered onto the court. If you play messages via earphones simultaneously into each ear and ask people to listen to one of them, they generally fail to pick up any information from the other, even though it’s equally loud. This proves that attention can be operated internally, by the mind, and not simply by orienting the ears. Visual attention, however, generally depends on where the eyes are looking. Even so, it is possible to look straight ahead and yet pay attention to events out of the corner of the eye a device that can be used by rugby or netball players to trick the opposition. Or by school teachers, anxious to detect mischief makers. Nature has equipped us with automatic mechanisms to capture events that might be important to survival. Loud noises, sudden movements, brilliant flashes of light these all divert us from what we are doing, in case they signal danger. So does extreme pain. Alarm systems are typically loud and jarring, although we may also be tuned to more subtle events. A mother may be especially alert to the sound of her baby crying even from a distance, and all of us are sensitised to the sound of our own names being spoken, even if whispered. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, John of Gaunt observes “...they say the tongues of dying men enforce attention, like deep harmony”. However, we are not slaves to the environment; attention can be controlled voluntarily, as when we choose to read a book, listen to a lecture or a piece of music, or solve a crossword puzzle. To a degree, then, we can filter out most environmental distractions, although not all. In his poem The Canonization, the poet John Donne famously exclaimed, “For God’s sake hold thy tongue, and let me love.” Attention is not always directed to the external world. We can beam it inwards, as when we are lost in thought or reverie. Attention requires a fine balance between concentration on the task at hand and awareness of the environment. We cannot be so intent on solving a Sudoku puzzle that we fail to observe the conflagration around us, nor can we be so easily distracted that we fail to complete any task requiring sustained concentration. Sometimes the balance is disturbed, as in some cases of brain injury, or in what is called attention deficit disorder. In general, boys seem more prone to this than girls. In a hunter-gatherer society, it was probably the males who did the hunting, and this required constant attention to danger and opportunity. The human brain is curiously asymmetrical in the way it controls attention. The left brain attends to the right side of space, the right to both sides, albeit with some bias towards the left. Damage to the right side may therefore cause the patient to lose awareness of events on the left, a phenomenon known as hemineglect. The patient may eat from only the right side of the plate, dress only the right side of the body, ignore those who address them from the left, and are easily beaten at chess by an attack from the left flank. A famous example is the German artist Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), who suffered a right-brain stroke in 1911 but continued to draw and paint for the next 14 years—much of his work shows a neglect of the left side. Just why the brain should function in this asymmetrical way is not clear. Perhaps it’s because in most of us the left side of the brain is largely taken up with language, and so loses some of its capacity to direct attention to space. Left-brain damage seldom results in neglect of the right side, or does so only transiently, and there is no evidence that nonhuman animals show a similar asymmetry. We are the lopsided ape.
The community comedies made in the late 1920s by the pioneer New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward always involved a standard plot: there was the pretty school teacher who, according to the narrative, arrives in a peaceful town and “sets the hearts of all the boys aglow”. She is then pursued by two locals, a villain called Freddy Fishface and the hero, Billy Cowcocky. The vaudevillian tone would be set in the opening titles TWAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN THE GREAT THROBBING METROPOLIS which would be accompanied by an opening shot of an empty main street in some New Zealand town, and a solitary dog. The movie always ended in a chase, involving cars, several horses and the local fire brigade. Rudall Hayward recognised early on in cinematic history just how much New Zealanders loved to see themselves in situ, but back in the 1920s, as in the 21st century, getting money to make movies required tenacity and ingenuity. Hayward’s solution was to tour a stock script around the provincial towns, make a film featuring locals and screen the result within a week or two, while everyone was still caught up in the excitement of it all. This would earn him enough to take the template to the next town. The first of the community comedies was called Hamilton’s Hectic Husbands, but New Zealand’s second Chief Censor, Walter Tanner, ruled against the title. He believed the story had its origin “in some local scandal”, and the title would cast “suspicion upon all husbands in the town”. Hectic Husbands was also turned down as a title, but the film was eventually released as Military Defaulters and Others. “New Zealand morals have always been looked after,” notes Diana Pivac, the director of public programmes at the New Zealand Film Archive. Later movies included A Daughter of Invercargill (and also a Daughter of Dunedin, Gisborne, New Plymouth and so on), Winifred of Wanganui, Suzie of Stratford, Natalie of Napier and Patsy of Palmerston. A few years ago, when the Film Archive visited provincial towns around New Zealand as part of the “Last Film Show” project, an elderly woman stood up at the end of the screening in Wanganui and introduced herself as Mary of Marton. She received a standing ovation. Between 1928 and 1930, Hayward made more than 20 community comedies. Getting the whole town involved always ensured sell-out audiences. This enabled him to work as a full-time filmmaker, probably the only filmmaker in New Zealand at that time who managed to do so. Says Pivac: “It was a triumph of local enterprise.”
Founding editor Kennedy Warne has contributed more to the past 100 issues of New Zealand Geographic than most.
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