Every Saturday in cities and suburbs, small towns and remote country districts, greens are mowed and rolled, mats put out, coins tossed, bowls delivered, scores kept, tea made. Enjoyed in New Zealand by 91,000 players, bowls ranks in popularity ahead of rugby or cricket and is capturing a new generation.
New Zealander's case to co-host the multi-billion dollar international astronomical project, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), has moved another step closer with the October launch of AUT University’s High Definition Radio Telescope in Warkworth. The 12 m radio telescope is a prototype designed to link with powerful supercomputers processing simultaneous observations over large distances, a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry. Combining with Australia’s antennas, the overall footprint of this array will exceed 3000 km, making it the world’s largest—an astounding 100 times leap in sensitivity over any existing radio telescope. Radio telescopes can see through cosmic dust and gas which are opaque to optical telescopes, making them extremely versatile. And with this level of sensitivity, it is believed that SKA has the wherewithal to unravel many of the deepest questions in astronomy and particle physics. This is big science, on the scale of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, giving our scientists an opportunity to be at the cutting edge of discovery.
Nimrod, Borchgrevink’s, Terra Nova, Discovery—these are the names of a collection of dilapidated huts on a continent unfit for human habitation. These are also the huts that represent the ‘heroic age’ of exploration, the first buildings to be constructed on the world’s most southern continent. And, as those who argue for their preservation like to point out, Antarctica is the only place in the world where its first buildings still exist. Preserving these four bases has been driven by the Ross Sea Heritage Restoration Project, an international New Zealand-led conservation programme that started three years ago. It has involved dozens of conservators from around the world, often working in situ, restoring the belongings of the world’s most famous explorers—packets of soap, soup cans, jars of salt—to their former ordinary glory. The first of these sites, Nimrod Hut, has now been completed and it’s hoped that around the time of publishing, the last of the 5000 or so artefacts will be returned to Ernest Shackleton’s base, now weather-tight and structurally secure. The trust has turned its attention to the Terra Nova Hut, forever linked with Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his unsuccessful 1911 race for the South Pole. This is the largest of the four huts and will involve 8000 artefacts. Meanwhile, closer to home, work has begun on the conservation of the 800 or so items—sleeping bags, Scott’s pipe holder, a tent—which were removed from the huts during the 1980s and 1990s and have been stored ever since at the Canterbury Museum. The project can be followed online at www.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica-blog, a site run through the Natural History Museum in London. The site is attracting around 40,000 visitors a month, dispelling any doubts that artefact conservation could make a compelling blog topic. “It’s been one of the most successful museum blogs in the world,” says Nigel Watson, executive director of the Antarctic Heritage Trust, when asked to explain the blog’s appeal. “This is part of the world’s heritage. It’s part of humanity’s story.”
You may have noticed, lamented, and been infuriated by our free-to-air broadcasters, who seem to regard natural history as something of a bygone genre, leaving it to Prime to screen superb series such as BBC’s Life in Cold Blood and the equally gobsmacking Wild China. Except perhaps for Meet the Locals, the series of four-minute documentaries currently screening between programmes on TVNZ’s digital channel 6, in which DOC’s Nic Vallance travels the country and talks to New Zealanders doing their bit for native flora and fauna. This is where, for instance, you learn of the Moehoinui giant weta, thought to be extinct on the mainland until a Waikato farmer found one in a patch of gorse—currently the only protected patch of gorse in the entire country. It’s not exactly Life on Earth, but it’s a start, and it’s free. Those who don’t have a digital decoder can watch the series via the websites of TVNZ or DOC.
Whining in second gear, my car shudders over the Crown Range and into the heartland of Central Otago. With dozens of dizzying switchbacks behind me, I enter a spare and dramatic landscape pilled with tussock and dusted with spring snow. Above the snowline, low-lying vegetation clings to the hillside and the structure of the Alpine Fault is laid bare, millennia of geological processes on grand display, the ranges buckled like twisted metal. The alps dominate every view of the Mackenzie country, and define both its weather and its borders. In this issue we focus on this basin in the heartland of Otago and the skies above it. So clear is the atmosphere here that it is set to become the world’s very first UNESCO Starlight Reserve, a radical new designation for an endangered feature in our increasingly altered environment: darkness. The announcement has additional significance as 2009 will be the International Year of Astronomy, exactly 400 years since Galileo Galilei pointed his “Dutch Looking Glass” at the sky. With a modest magnification of only three times he could make out mountains and craters on the moon, many more stars than were visible with the naked eye, and moons orbiting Jupiter. Now our most powerful radio telescopes can see so far they can look back in time at objects formed not long after the big bang. In the next decade, New Zealand looks likely to host part of the largest radio telescope ever designed, 50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster in processing speed than any telescope working today. It will be located in the Southern hemisphere because there’s less radio interference and it affords a better view of the Milky Way. Four centuries after the first telescope, our remote archipelago on the far side of the planet could be the eyes of the world. You’re invited to enjoy our grandstand view with the star chart included in this issue. On any given night a portion of the chart will be visible between your horizons. We’ve included some 10,000 stars, as many as can be seen with the naked eye or even a small telescope—possibly the most comprehensive southern sky star chart available. Otago also features prominently in another story in this issue. The endearing white tails of rabbits belie their voracious capacity for consumption and, since their introduction in the 1860s, they have systematically demolished great swathes of pasture in the South Island. There are anecdotes from the early 1990s of farmers clapping their hands and whole hillsides seeming to move as thousands of rabbits ran for cover. Then, a decade ago, in an almost cinematic plot of skulduggery, Mainland farmers defied the biosecurity laws created to protect their industry and imported rabbit calicivirus disease, injected it into hapless bunnies and distributed the carcasses far and wide. Claudia Babirat describes every twist of the conspiracy in her story. The result was far from total extermination, but farmland that was once a dustbowl is being grazed again. It seems that Mackenzie’s magical interior will now be renowned for research rather than rabbits.
Kelly, the last dolphin held in captivity in New Zealand, was the embodiment of our changing attitudes to marine life.
Apis mellifera
You may have seen the ad featuring the pukeko stealing a peg, a shoelace from a shoe, paper from a waste basket, all of which it packs off to furnish its beachside nest. There’s also the one with the pair of pukeko chicks, so young they haven’t yet grown into their own feet, teetering after their mother into a house where the residents have left a light on.
As I look out on the contours of Makara peak from my home in Karori, at the western edge of Wellington, the springtime bloom is gathering weight and colour. The blustery winds of the equinox create a fast-moving cloud life that casts across the hills an alternate deepening and a heightening of the predominant cadmium yellows and siennas and burnt oranges of gorse and barberry and broom. It’s easy at this time of year to forgive these exotics their noxious estate for the colour they bring to the hills. Ulex Europaeus, common gorse, is the dominant vessel of most of this spring cheer—so radiant and wide‑spread a bloomer that even the bellies of passing clouds seem tinted a light ochre. This humble member of the Leguminosae, or pea family, has captivated poets, and writers as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sea‑mus Heaney, Michael Longley and Ian Wedde, who have seen in it images of oxidised gold or spilt yolk or the condensed wisdom of nature itself. Gorse has been an ubiquitous (and ambig‑uous) presence in the background of my own life in Karori. When we moved here in 1959, the hills were somewhat grassy and bare, with dark fringes and pockets of bush and low regeneration, but still giving plenty of evidence of the farmland that had fallen into dilapidation after WWII. We could climb to the gun emplacements on Wright’s Hill and pretty much toboggan down to the road below. Then, from the mid-60s it seemed to be the Age of Gorse. Much of the untended pasture land, where it was spared subdivision development, reverted back to the hardy colonials. Ulex in particular appeared to thrive, seemingly at the expense of the native flora, although this wasn’t quite so. In the folds of the hills, in creek-carved gullies, ponga, whitey-wood, mahoe, and rangiora still flourished. But gorse was king, a pioneer in the full bloom of secondary succession, colonising the grassland, the raw clay slopes, and stony, fast-draining alluvial soils of the place. The canopy grew thick and impenetrable—a living emblem of intransigence and obstinacy; thickets overtook the foot tracks across the hillside, and under certain lights, cobbled and tufted, the gorse seemed to match the colour of the winter sea. And indeed there is something oceanic about a gorse canopy when it is buffeted by high winds, swaying slowly and out of time with the gusts. Occasionally a fire took hold and shimmered and burned, leaving a black nude patch of hillside. And after the fire, a great strike of gorse seeds, bursting like shotgun pellets over the burnt ground. And in the background, the gangs of scrub-cutters and gorse-sprayers, sent out by councils and boroughs in our own small-scale land wars. By the 90s there was evidence of a change in thinking, not perhaps a quantum change, but gorse, once cursed and maligned, was rehabilitated. The spraying and hacking tailed off. The new emphasis—on gorse as a nursery plant of young native flora—was built on facts that had been long known: that it is an excellent soil former, stabilising wind and moisture and temperature at ground level. That its extensive root system tunnels into the ground, breaking it up and piping in nitrogen. That large amounts of litter (humus) further this process, and the denseness of the stands of gorse inhibit erosion and litter wash, so that a moist microclimate is maintained below. What we saw on the hills around Karori, from the 70s to the 90s, was the dense cover typical of the consolidation stage of gorse. Few other plant species seemed to be able to compete, but, with the stands approaching 20 years or older (the beginning of the senile stage of gorse) they opened up to let in light, and seedlings of native flora took root and flourished. The soil was now fertile, weather protection at ground level was excellent, and conditions were right for regrowth. It is now well-established that if gorse is left alone on wasteland, much of this land will be reclad in native forest. And now in the new millennium, as I look out at Makara peak, this process seems well in train. Fresh green natives are clustering on the lower slopes, rising above the gorse; they will consolidate in time, growing taller and broader, outgrowing the old nurseries. The gorse is there too, of course, but I look on it as a living symbol of older and wider processes of colonisation and assimilation. Perhaps this hardy colonial, along with the kowhai, could become our national flower.
If you noticed something pretty big hurtling towards you at 120 kilometres per second, you’d be worried, right? And if that “something pretty big” turned out to be a trillion stars—a whole, very large galaxy—that would be bad, wouldn’t it? This is not an academic question. Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way Galaxy are on a collision course. Astronomers cannot be confident about the details of this collision as they don’t have a reliable measurement of Andromeda’s rotational velocity. This parameter would reveal whether a head-on smash involving stars, planets and dust is likely, or if the dark matter halos—which extend much further out and account for the joint bulk of galactic mass—are what will collide. Astronomers have long been aware that we are on this course and they are decidedly sanguine about it. With more than two billion years to plan for our fate, a fallout shelter is less of a priority than working out how our species might still be around to witness the fireworks. Both these galaxies, the largest in the local cluster, have immense mass: Andromeda has many more stars than the Milky Way but the Milky Way may be more massive on account of its dark matter density. Computer modelling suggests they’ll skim past each other in two billion years, gravitationally embracing at arms-length in an elephantine waltz, get close again on their second pass and then collide on the third, finally merging in five billion years into a super-massive galaxy. This dance has been choreographed by T.J. Cox and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their simulation suggests that gravitational forces would mess up both the galaxies’ neat spiral structures on the first pass, wrenching out long tails of stars and gas as they circle, through to the formation of a single oval-shaped galaxy. What then of our neighbourhood? If their simulation is accurate our Solar System has a high likelihood of being exiled to an even more distant outer suburb of the new galaxy—tentatively named “Milkomeda”—than it presently occupies in the Milky Way, and there is a possibility (around 3 per cent) that it will migrate to Andromeda on the second pass, before rejoining the Milky Way at the final merger. The idea that we could one day look out and see our Milky Way from the vantage of a new home galaxy is a bizarre prospect. While such collisions look impressive from afar, individual objects such as stars within the galaxies are unlikely to collide because they are so widely spaced—the nearest star to the sun, for example, is thirty million solar diameters away. As a foretaste, a Hubble Atlas of 59 observed galactic collisions showing a remarkable variety of dramatic consequences can be viewed at NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope website: www.spacetelescope.org/images/
Touching the void
In the late 19th and early 20th century, when our native fauna was either taken for granted or considered a pest, it was perfectly acceptable to mount bits of birds in silver and gold, to be worn as jewellery. The huia was always a coveted species, with its tail feathers worn by Maori to signify chiefdom. It’s thought that the death knell for the bird came when the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall (later King George V and Queen Mary) visited Rotorua in 1901. At the welcome, a huia feather was placed in the Duke’s hat and the huia—dead or alive, whole or in parts—became more desirable than ever. Little wonder the occasional beak would turn up in a brooch. If kea beaks didn’t have the same cachet, they were more readily available. In the 1880s, the kea had gained an exaggerated reputation as a sheep killer and, under pressure from ranchers, the government introduced a bounty for the bird of three shillings a head (which would have a buying value today of around $23.60). In March 1884, the sheep inspector from Queenstown reported that kea had killed 200 sheep in a single night near Lake Wanaka; the beaks of 1574 kea were later delivered to his office for reward. In economically depressed times, kea-hunting was a lucrative source of income. As the bird began to wise up to the human threat, farmers turned to professional bounty hunters who used a variety of tactics to attract them, such as displaying pieces of bright-coloured cloth, chaining kea to rocks to “call” in other birds, or hanging out sheepskin laced with strychnine. The New Zealand Journal of Agriculture records that 29,249 kea beak bounties were paid out between 1920 and 1929, and the practice continued until the 1940s. The kea is our most intelligent bird but was the last to be given, in 1986, unqualified protection on both private and public land.
The Southern Crossing of the Tararua Range is a track with a long history, dating back to the early part of the twentieth century. A group called the Mt Hector Track Committee proposed developing a track to connect Otaki with the Wairarapa. Through their efforts, three huts were erected, amongst the earliest built in the Tararua Range. Beginning from Otaki Forks, the track ascends through forest to Field Hut, then onto the tops to reach Kime Hut. From Kime, the track climbs Mt Hector, the highest point in the southern Tararua Range, and one that affords 360˚ views over Wellington and the Wairarapa. South of Mt Hector the route crosses a series of other sub-alpine peaks, reaching the bushline near Alpha Hut. From Alpha Hut the original Southern Crossing route used to descend to the Tauwharenikau Valley, then climb over Mt Reeves to end at Walls Whare, near Grey-town. These days, however, most parties opt to walk out to Kaitoke, near Upper Hutt. Although this is undoubtedly easier for organising transport, it’s somewhat ironic that this latter route remains in the west without actually crossing the range. Otaki Forks to Field Hut (20 bunks, wood burner, $5/night) 2–3 hours Otaki Forks is a popular place for swimming, camping and picnics. From the overnight parking area, a short track leads down to a picnic area and a swingbridge over the Waiotauru River. Across the bridge, past the turnoff to Parawai Lodge, a brief climb leads to a grassy terrace. At a track junction follow the signposted track leading to Field Hut. A long but not particularly strenuous ascent through forest ensues to reach the historic hut—built in 1924 and now the oldest purpose-built tramping club hut remaining in the country. Field to Kime Hut (22 bunks, $5/night) 2–3 hours Above Field Hut a short section in forest and sub-alpine shrubs leads to Table Top. Beyond here the track ascends the open tops of Judd Ridge, which can be very exposed to the elements. While there are few marker poles, the track is worn enough for it to remain clear except when it’s obscured by snow. Near the top some waratahs appear, and shortly after comes the signpost indicating the turnoff to Bridge Peak and Maungahuka Hut. Not far from here, just over the rise of Hut Mound, Kime Hut lies nestled in a shallow dip by a prominent tarn. Kime to Alpha Hut (20 bunks, wood burner, $5/night) 4–5 hours From Kime Hut you embark on the exposed tops to Alpha Hut. Initially the track climbs to Field Peak, then drops sharply to a saddle, from where the final ascent to Mt Hector begins. At 1529 metres, Mt Hector is the highest point on the crossing, and one of the finest viewpoints in the Tararua Range. A large wooden cross marks its unmistakable summit. On a good day the Kaikoura Ranges can be seen, rising beyond Wellington Harbour, while Kapiti Island and the Marlborough Sounds lie to the west. From Mt Hector the route heads almost directly south, dropping to a shallow saddle before climbing over the Beehives. Beyond is a narrow section of ridge that can be unnerving in high winds. Undulating tops travel leads to Atkinson, marked by a short waratah. Past Pt 1372m the terrain remains flat as far as Aston, where the track curls south-east, around the Dress Circle. After a climb onto Alpha, the track swings directly east. Alpha Hut lies down the other side, nestled amongst stunted silver beech trees. Alpha Hut to Kaitoke via Tauwharenikau and Smith Creek 7–9 hours From Alpha Hut, a forested track leads to Hells Gate, where there is a brief dip in the ridge. Shortly beyond you reach a track junction. The left branch leads to Bull Mound and out to Walls Whare via Cone Hut. The traditional Southern Crossing route was via Bull Mound to the Tauwharenikau Valley, downstream to just north of Tutuwai Hut and over Mt Reeves. Instead, head right, over Omega, and continue along the undulating forested terrain of March-ant Ridge. While passing through attractive silver beech forest, the Marchant Ridge track is deceptively long, and a longer but preferable alternative lies on the route out the Tauwharenikau Valley via the Block XVI track (which is clearly signposted on Marchant Ridge). The bridge at the bottom of Block XVI has been removed and a new bridge built about 100 metres north of the confluence of the Marchant Stream with the Tauwharenikau River. Although it involves a 300-metre descent, once down in the Tauwharenikau Valley travel is generally flat on forested river terraces. At Smith Creek Shelter a well-benched track ascends gently to the head of Smith Creek, interrupted by one scramble around an area of slips. An alternative track, well signposted, has been formed around the slips. Near the head of the creek, the track climbs over a saddle of regenerating forest to begin a sidle towards Kaitoke, passing the Marchant Ridge track en route.
Both Darren Hughes and Nathan Guy were destined for a political career from a young age, one by family tradition, one by precocious ambition. They go head to head for a second time in Otaki, the closest-fought electorate in the last election and a revealing snapshot of the national outcome.
From midday friday 25 July, to midday Saturday, a low deepened by 28 hPa as it moved towards the top of the North Island from the area east of Queensland. On Saturday afternoon, as the low moved over land near Kaitaia in Northland, its central pressure was around 960 hPa—lower than the storm that caused the Wahine disaster or the cyclone of 1936. There were so many concentric isobars—lines representing barometric pressure—so close together on the resulting weather map that it resembled a dart-board, evidence of the damaging winds the storm was bringing. The closer the isobars are to each other, the greater the speed of the wind. But wind speed also depends on the curvature of those isobars. When isobars are curved anticyclonically—around an area of high pressure—the wind speed is greater than what the spacing of the isobars suggests. On the other hand, when isobars are curved cyclonically—around an area of low pressure—the wind speed is less. The sharper the curvature, the greater this effect. Close to the centre of a deep low, such as this one, the wind speed is less than half what the spacing suggests. This is why, on Saturday 26 July, the strongest winds occurred ahead of the front associated with the low, where the isobars were less curved. Winds reached 130 km/h with gusts over 150 km/h in exposed places along the east coast from Northland to Bay of Plenty. Trees were blown down, blocking roads and cutting power to thousands of homes, while some houses lost parts of their roofs. Two men drowned when the fishing vessel San Cuvier struck rocks near Opotiki, and another man drowned when trying to paddle an outrigger canoe from Maketu to Tauranga. Heavy rain caused flooding and triggered numerous slips, endangering houses and cutting roads. The Kauaeranga River near Thames burst its banks, covering the road, and in Panguru on the Hokianga Harbour people were evacuated from their houses. On Mt Ruapehu a blizzard set in during Saturday morning when some 10,000 people were on the ski-fields. Not all were able to get off the mountain and some had to spend the night in their cars. On Sunday, the weather eased as the deep low moved rapidly away to the east of Gisborne. However, the respite was brief as another low developed over the north Tasman Sea and crossed New Zealand a few days later. Although not as deep, its track took it farther south, bringing damaging winds and fl oods to areas relatively unscathed in the first storm. On Wednesday 30 July, the wind damage was particularly bad in parts of Manawatu, Horowhenua and the top of the South Island. Greymouth was struck by wind gusts estimated at 160 km/h, which uprooted trees and tore roofs off many houses. In Nelson, one motorist drove under a large tree as it was falling but escaped with the loss of just the car aerial. Filmed from a nearby cafe, he was on YouTube and internationally renowned within hours. In Horowhenua, a truck and trailer were blown over by the easterly gales and hundreds of trees snapped off or uprooted, cutting power to thousands of homes. In New Zealand, the most damaging winds often occur downwind of mountain ranges. Dense air forced to rise over a mountain barrier accelerates downwards once past the ridgeline, causing the wind to be stronger than it was upwind of the mountains. Cyclone Bola was an example of this. Then, the worst of the flooding was on the Gisborne and Hawkes Bay side of the ranges but the worst wind damage was in Taranaki and in the forests around Taupo. On Wednesday and the next day, heavy rain caused widespread flooding in eastern areas from Marlborough to Otago. More than 200 mm of rain fell along the Kaikoura Coast causing numerous large slips, which cut the main road and rail links. In north Canterbury, surface flooding was widespread and the settlement at Amberley Beach had to be evacuated when floodwaters began entering houses. Heavy snow fell over parts of inland Canterbury, closing roads around Tekapo for a time. Northern areas hit by the first storm suffered further flooding and wind damage. Two people drowned in Northland while trying to cross a flooded creek, and several towns in the Coromandel were cut off after 300 mm of rain fell in the ranges. In Hawke’s Bay, storm surge eroded the coast, destroying two baches and damaging other properties. Insurance losses from the two storms have been estimated at over $10 million. To have two destructive storms so close together, although not common, is not without precedent. The large-scale atmospheric wind patterns that create a favourable environment for storm development will sometimes persist through one event and trigger another. As to the possible role of climate change, while meteorologists are reluctant to attribute individual storms to global warming, an increase in storminess is consistent with predictions of atmospheric behaviour in a warmer world. As the air becomes warmer it is able to hold more water vapour. When the air inside a developing storm rises, some of the water vapour condenses, releasing latent heat, which intensifies the storm’s development. This mechanism plays a key role in the explosive deepening of lows like the one that occurred on the 25 July. And feeding these storms with warmer, wetter air only increases the amount of rainfall further. This winter may have been a window onto our future.
It looks endearing but the rabbit’s voracious appetite means that, in some parts of the country, it is more destructive than any other introduced pest. Its resistance to environmental stress and its remarkable reproductive capacity makes it almost impossible to control.
Our ability to recall past events in our lives is part of what has come to be called mental time travel. Our memories, however imperfect, probably evolved not to provide a faithful record of the past, but rather to supply information for building future scenarios. This allows us to plan events in detail, or to weigh up different possibilities before the future is upon us. It also enables us to create what have been called “future selves”, models of what we hope to become once we have completed an education, found a mate, bought a house, chosen a career or cleaned out the basement. Like Browning’s grammarian, a number of cognitive scientists, myself among them, have controversially claimed that only humans can travel mentally in time. Animal researchers have risen to the challenge, but it has proven peculiarly difficult to show that non-human animals can indeed mentally relive the past or imagine the future. In humans, of course, we can simply ask, but in animals lacking language we need other techniques. The problem isn’t simple. Consider for example a dog that buries a bone, and later returns to dig it up. This need not mean that it actually remembers burying the bone. It may simply have knowledge of where the bone is buried, without mentally reliving the act itself. One suggestion is that we could be surer of true remembering if we could show that an animal that buries food can recollect not only what is buried and where it is buried, but also when it was buried. Scrub jays, pesky little birds that cache food for later consumption, may well pass this what-where-when test (also called the www test). If they cache both worms and nuts in different places, they will recover the worms if a relatively short time has elapsed, since they prefer fresh worms to nuts. But if a longer time has elapsed, they will go for the nuts, evidently because they know the worms will no longer be fresh. This suggests that they remember not only what they cached and where they cached it, but also when they cached it. Moreover, if jays are watched by another while caching food, they later re-cache it, presumably to thwart the watching bird from stealing the food. But they will only re-cache if they themselves have stolen food; even in scrub jays, it takes a thief to know a thief. Re-caching might be taken as evidence that the birds can imagine a future event of theft. These are among the increasingly clever experiments designed to show that nonhuman species can travel mentally in time. But I’m not yet convinced. My knowledge of such events as my own birth passes the www test—I know where I was born, when I was born and, heaven help me, what was born, but of course I have no actual memory of the event. The critical distinction is between what we know and what we actually remember, and it remains a real challenge to demonstrate that distinction in birds, or in any non-human species. I invite suggestions. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that we humans are obsessed with time. Of course other animals plan for the future by migrating or by hoarding food, but these activities are instinctive, driven by changes of season, and have limited provenance. In our own activities we are driven by time itself, with appointments, deadlines, wedding anniversaries and taxes. Although generally adaptive, reliving the past can be an emotional hazard, as when we recall previous embarrassment, and anticipation of the future can be a source of anxiety, as in a visit to the dentist or an appointment with the boss—or the inevitability of death, leading perhaps to religions that promise an after-life. Sometimes, though, the knowledge that time will pass is a comfort, as when Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, masquerading as a man, finds herself in an impossible situation and exclaims: O Time, thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me t’untie! Language itself may have evolved precisely to allow us to share our experiences, and its lack in other species may reflect the absence of mental time travel. Sharing allows us to benefit from the memories and plans of others. And to be adaptive, the tales we tell need not be true. This explains not only our predilection for gossip and shared confidences,but also the human obsession with fiction, whether through stories around the campfire, novels, plays or TV soaps. Or, you may think,columns like this.
A century ago, in December 1908, Ernest Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his “investigations into the disintegration of the elements” or, put more simply, for helping establish the principles of radioactivity. Rutherford was born in Nelson in 1871, the fourth child of 12, and like most students of his generation, he needed help if he wanted to stay at school beyond the age of 15. He managed to secure various scholarships; first to Nelson College, then later to Canterbury College in Christchurch, graduating from the latter in 1893 with a first-class master of arts degree in mathematics and physics. The following year, thanks to an Exhibition Scholarship, he began studying at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, led by J.J. Thomson, Europe’s leading expert in electromagnetic radiation. It was the right time and place to be a physicist: radioactivity (the spontaneous disintegration of atomic nuclei) had recently been discovered, Thomson had identified the electron and—a few months after Rutherford’s arrival at Cavendish—a German scientist discovered X-rays. What makes Rutherford unusual is that he did most of his important work after he’d received his Nobel, and in physics rather than chemistry. In 1909, continuing his long-standing interest in alpha particles, Rutherford had suggested that one of his students, Ernest Marsden, run experiments to investigate the scattering that occurred when a beam of particles was shot through gold foil. Marsden found that most of the alpha particles travelled straight through unaffected, and a small number were deflected, some more than 90 degrees from their original path. Rutherford apparently exclaimed (embellished over the years), “It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” At the time the prevailing picture of the atom was of a thick web of positively charged material in which electrons were embedded like raisins in a bun. Rutherford concluded that, for some particles to travel straight through unimpeded while others ricocheted off at such great angles, the gold atom’s mass must instead be concentrated in a tiny, dense nucleus and the rest of it must be empty space. It was in 1911 that Rutherford eventually developed his model of the atom as a tightly packed positively charged nucleus, orbited by electrons, which became known as the Rutherford atomic model, and emblematic of 20th century scientific discovery. The atomic structure has since been established more precisely by other scientists, particularly Niels Bohr, but it began with Rutherford, a small piece of radioactive material and thin gold foil.
Shooting the Mackenzie Country assignment for New Zealand Geographic took multiple trips over a full year, and in that time Paul Daly experienced the full spectrum of southern weather, from blizzards to blistering nor-westers. “The Mackenzie has its own microclimate and it can be really difficult to predict the weather. Sometimes it comes over the Alps from the West Coast and at other times it blows in from the east, so I was never entirely sure what I was going to get.” His photographs fill this issue’s feature on the Mackenzie Country and will also be exhibited in Christchurch in mid-2009. Daly’s first camera was a stolen one. Well, borrowed, from his mother, and it was 15 years before she got her beloved Yashica FX-3 back. But she had encouraged him in his photography, so perhaps the appropriation was to be expected. It had some good Tamron lenses, but was otherwise an unexceptional manual SLR—the perfect tool for a developing photographic mind. Daly exercised it in the mountains that surround the rugged Southern Lakes district, but it wasn’t until leaving school that photography turned from a hobby to an all-consuming passion. It was the large format landscape work of Southland photographer Andris Apse that impressed him most. “He was capturing pure wilderness and showing New Zealanders where they lived,” says Daly. He bought a couple of second-hand large format cameras and started to come to terms with the new tools. “Shooting on film can be a real pain in the arse sometimes, but it’s also really rewarding. When you put those big trannies on the light-box it blows people away. The colour, saturation, sharpness and depth are all there in their purest chemical form, without digital trickery.” The necessary encumbrances of tripod set ups, film changes and even manual focus force him to take his time, to compose, to breathe, to contemplate a shot before releasing the shutter. “Everybody walks around their subject to find the right angle, all on a plane of 1.8 metres, but sometimes it’s important to climb above it.” Daly drags a stepladder around, so that he can get another view of the world. “It’s never as easy as just getting out of the car and setting up,” he says. “There will always be a better shot up the hill or across a river, but once it’s found, then it comes down to equipment and timing.”
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