The Rifleman set out from Hobart on April 14, 1833, and was never seen again. The fate of the ship, her 12 crew and six passengers, remained a total mystery for 179 years. Only now, after re-examining artefacts collected in 1996 from the foot of Auckland Island’s uncompromising westerly cliffs, have experts finally solved the riddle. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack—the definitive piece of evidence measured just 14 millimetres across.
Some of Te Araroa’s routes are less thanideal. The footpath between Paekakariki andPukerua Bay just north of Wellington, for example, runs alongside the busy Centennial Highway, and few but the dedicated through tramper would walk it. Te Araroa Trust is gradually eliminating such sections, and work is underway here on a new 7-km route with some of the most amazing coastal views in the country—the Paekakariki Escarpment Track. The track is unfinished, but Wellington Te Araroa Trust recently decided that the first two kilometres should be opened as a daywalk to allow walkers a sample of its considerable charms. It’s not properly signposted yet, but here’s how to do it. Get to Paekakariki by train or car. Walk past the local cafes and turn down Ames Street. Halfway along, the present Te Araroa through route leaves Ames Street for the Domain, but ignore that, and continue along Ames Street to its junction with State Highway One. Turn left and follow the footpath north across the highway over-bridge, then descend stairs to go under the highway. The track that begins here is high standard. Water crossings are bridged, and sports shoes are sufficient footwear, but take a jacket for it can get windy. It ascends with seats at various viewpoints to a height of 80 metres, with sweeping views along the western coast, and out to Kapiti Island. About two kilometers along the escarpment you’ll strike a barrier across the track. Turn there and make your way back. The contractor is working beyond the barrier, taking the track up to a 200-metre lookout point. From there it’ll taper down to finish at the old Muri Railway Station. When the blue line is complete, the whole track will become part of Te Araroa’s through route.
The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has never been so low
As early as 1793, the Frenchman Nicephore Niepce and his brother Claude imagined a photographic process, and experimented with various light-sensitive substances and cameras. In 1826, Niépce exposed a pewter plate coated in bitumen for eight hours to produce what he called a “heliograph”, or sun drawing, of a view from his window. Unlike his predecessors, who had also toyed with photographic optics, Niepce had succeeded in recording an image for posterity, and that act would become a cornerstone of photography. Unless an image was recorded, it was as fleeting as the moment itself. These fuzzy images may appear unremarkable today, but this ability to store the past indefinitely must have seemed nothing short of magical at that time. Over the subsequent century, photography became a pastime as well as a profession and lightweight cameras with flexible film formats spurred the propagation of the hobby, as would digital photography decades later. Photographs for documentary or archival purposes have enormous historical value, even if not anticipated at the time. Further analysis of photographs taken of artefacts recovered from the Auckland Islands in 1996 led to the final identification of a wreck this year, a story which appears in this issue. Mike Wilkinson’s routine photograph of a button revealed the fate of the Rifleman and all those who went down with her nearly two centuries ago. But photographs can be more than memory—they can change the future just as they alter our understanding of the past. They can inspire and motivate a viewer by presenting a new perspective. And that ability to move the viewer, and perhaps even influence their future actions, is the hallmark of the most potent photography. This is the fourth year of New Zealand Geographic’s annual Photographer of the Year competition. We received a record number of entries and the best work exuded the values that have always made great photography popular. An estimated 145,000 people visited the exhibition at Auckland Museum (which continues until February 2013), and many took the opportunity to pick their favourite from among the finalists—democratising the judging process as social media has democratised the internet. In this issue are the results, a new vision of New Zealand just as Niépce recorded his perspective of rural France, for posterity, for insight, and for the sheer magic of freezing time.
Unless something goes horribly wrong, Stewart Islanders aren’t actually born on Stewart Island.
Warriors of the Kiribati archipelago fashioned amour from fish
The Amazon rainforest creates its own rainfall by releasing tiny potassium-salt particles, shedding light on the role that biodiversity plays in weather patterns. For the water vapour in cloud to become water dropletsfalling as rain, it must first ‘seed’ on to a small particle such as dust, soot from fires or factories, sulphates from volcanoes, or sea salt from the ocean spray. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany X-rayed particles from the mist over the pristine jungle northwest of Manaus, Brazil, and discovered that, in the Amazon, potassium salts ejected by plants and fungi are responsible for bringing organic gases together to seed clouds. Scientists have detected potassium in the Amazon air since 1985, but little was known of its concentration or role. “What’s really new is actually being able to identify the particles that carry the potassium and organics, and identifying their role in the water and chemical cycle over the forest,” said researcher Meinrat Andreae. The study’s co-author, Christopher Pohlker, cited the Amazon as one of the last places on Earth where the atmosphere,for some time of the year at least, is not polluted by anthropogenic emissions. “The Amazon is our proxy for a pre-industrial ‘baseline’ atmosphere in order to understand what, nowadays, the impact of human pollution on atmospheric cycling is,” he says.
Researchers redefine the origin of languages using virus-tracking technology
Instead of submitting a conventional art portfolio in sixth form, the culmination of Elliot O’Donnell’s entire year’s work was spray-painted across the school walls as graffiti. The school voted to allow the submission, perhaps endorsing his future, more subversive, activities. O’Donnell, also known by his pseudonym Askew One, grew up in Morningside, Auckland. During the 1980s, he was immersed in hip-hop culture filtering in from New York. Adidas stirrup track-pants were popular, breakdancing was “phenomenally huge”, and Smooth Crew—a group pioneering the graffiti scene at the time—were making their mark on neighbourhood walls, arches, pillars and train stations. “In ’93, I started going out at night, sneaking out of the house and tagging with one or two of my close friends—the local park, the local train station, the stretch of train tracks, all over the school,” he says. At Auckland Metropolitan College—the city’s ‘alternative’ secondary school in Mt Eden, now closed—O’Donnell met other graffiti artists, such as Tanja Jade Thompson, a.k.a. Misery, and decided that graffiti was something he wanted to pursue as a career, if that was possible. As it turned out, his work since school has been diverse—he published a magazine, organised events, ran an art gallery and set up a music label. O’Donnell makes a distinction between what he describes as graffiti and a more publicly acceptable form called ‘street art’, produced by “wishy-washy” art school graduates “who haven’t faced the kind of adversities in doing what we do”. The difference, he says, is in the illegal act of graffiti. The crime, the anti-establishment protest, the troubled journey of the artist, lend legitimacy to the art. “The majority of graffiti artists have fairly significant rap sheets and run-ins with the law.” Graffiti, he says, is not just a form of self-expression, but an existential statement. “It’s a very simple message. It’s a message that says, ‘I’m here, I exist’, and it’s a message of wanted gratification and recognition from your peers. “It’s a very, very raw and genuine human thing to feel, and want to do.” However, in May 2011, O’Donnell received a wake-up call. It arrived as a “thunderclap headache” which rendered him temporarily deaf and periodically unable to feel half of his face, or arms. He had developed Call-Fleming Syndrome, a rare condition that results in spasms of arteries in the brain, causing temporary stroke-like symptoms—possibly as a result of the fumes from the enamel paint he was using daily. Recovery has been slow, and O’Donnell remains highly sensitive to paints. When spray-painting, he must use non-toxic paint, work in ventilated spaces, cover every patch of skin and wear a respirator. The health shock prompted O’Donnell to turn to more conventional surfaces, but this had anunexpected benefit; it gave his work permanence, and led to Smoke Signals, his biggest solo exhibition to date, in March this year. Large-scale canvases with bold graphics, stark colours and strong graffiti influences debuted on exposed brick walls in Britomart, downtown Auckland. Many of the works used stylised slogans as social commentary, but retained the anti-establishment undercurrent of his illegal work; ‘A fool’s paradise’, ‘Island of promises’, read one. “A lot of our key artists have always centered around graphic use of type and words. It’s part of the New Zealand painting tradition,” O’Donnell says, quoting Colin McCahon among his influences. “I have a sketch book and I play around with phrases, and they’re kind of like mini-poems in a way, because I try to find the perfect symmetry between letters, the right play on words, and trying to make them as concise as possible.” The messages might have been the same as his illegal activity, but this exhibition was commercial. The Mayor of Auckland, Len Brown, even called his work “patriotic”. Does that undermine the legitimacy of his art? O’Donnell believes it still challenges the public. “I got to define myself, I got to show where my work is going, I got to put a value on my work and say to people, ‘This is where I’m at right now.’ “I feel I’ve found a harmony between my background, and I’ve found a place where I can take it, where it comfortably fits within the scope of the New Zealand painting tradition,” he says. O’Donnell now splits his time between graffiti, fine art, graphic design and directing music videos. Olivia Laita, his girlfriend and business manager, lives with him in their rented warehouse art-studio in Onehunga, reminding him to do “regular” activities, such as walk the dog or call his parents. Together they manage an online shop of his artwork, packaged into accessible formats for his fanbase: T-shirts, prints, silk-screen editions and smaller canvases. He travels regularly to the United States—Miami, New York, Los Angeles and Detroit—to make murals, and also to Australia, Tahiti, Germany, France, Switzerland and Denmark for his work. He recently contracted to graffiti silos in Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter. “At the end of the day I’m an artist,” he says. “I’m no different to anyone else, with the exception that a good majority of what I’ve done, I’ve done outside the law.”
For animals, home is where you have a better-than-even chance of surviving
Keith Woodley Penguin, $50
Silent Spring became an anthem that empowered the environmental movement.
IN THE 1960s, while Barry Crump’s hard-case yarns of deer-hunting in the Ureweras were taking New Zealand by storm, another eccentric take on the culling business lay languishing among family papers. Those Wild Men From the Bush, the visual diary of a government deer culler written 20 years before Crump’s novel, had to wait another half century to taste printers’ ink. The diary’s author was 20-year-old Neville Spooner—“Stag” to his mates—a lively, bright-eyed lad with a wiry beard and an unruly mop of hair. Born into a hunting family (one photo shows 15 or more of the Spooners’ guns leaning against a wall), he developed an early interest in both art and hunting. As a boy, he neatly combined the two by producing illustrated stories about his shooting and fishing exploits. Spooner’s impulse to record reached a peak with Those Wild Men. Across 80 pages and 320 captioned drawings it faithfully recorded the daily doings of cullers contracted to bring the country’s burgeoning wild deer population under control. The 80-page diary begins in the severe winter of 1939, with the men cutting tracks in the Tararua Ranges near Spooner’s Carterton home. Action then shifts to the Whitcombe Valley in Westland where, armed with his old ex-army Lee-Enfield rifle, Spooner proved to be a skilled marksman. He shot a record 525 deer in the season downing 41 on one memorable day alone. The diary has now been reproduced in facsimile as part of a generously illustrated biography by Chris Maclean, Stag Spooner: Wild Man from the Bush. Spooner’s vignettes are to treasure: “While Pete went up to bag a lone hind (losing his knife in the process) Stag boils the billy but set light to the tussock slope—silly fellow,” declares the caption to one drawing. After much tramping and shooting, camp making, letter reading and billy boiling, punctuated by several forays back to civilisation, Those Wild Men trails off into uncaptioned pictures and pencil sketches then, finally, a blank ruled page. Spooner’s thoughts had turned to war. On July 1, 1940, he volunteered for active service, surprisingly fetching up as a non combatant with the Fourth Field Ambulance. Military minds apparently rated his early job driving a grocery vehicle around the Wairarapa more highly when it came to waging a world war than his prowess as a sharpshooter in the mountains. Army life stretched Spooner. He was stationed in North Africa and described his experiences (which included, briefly, being taken prisoner) in a steady flow of letters to family, enclosed in outrageously decorated envelopesWild Man from the Bush reproduces more than 30 of them, along with several drawn by brothers Tory and Bryan. Soon he was selling specially printed envelopes to fellow soldiers, reporting that one edition of 1500 copies sold “like hot cakes—DOENUTS—at 3d each”. In June 1944, Spooner’s ambulance unit entered newly liberated Rome. “We stared in wonder. There was the great marble pillars of the Old Roman Forum, and the world’s largest amphitheater the ‘Colosseo’ which will hold 87 thousand people, and all round those old historic ruin sare the 18, 19 and 20 century buildings, including the greatest monument I have ever seen, the King Emmanuel Memorial,” he wrote in a letter home. “Ten years ago I would have never dreamed that I could come here, and although it is a great thing in a bloke’s life, I would enjoy myself much better on the mountain or at the coast but then one can always do that, can’t one.” In 1945, the brothers arrived back in New Zealand, their army days at an end. Spooner took up cabinet making and dreamed of living off art. The next year, aged just 28, he was dead. The cause is unclear, but it seems that he caught pneumonia while on a solo hunting trip in a remote spot at the northern tip of Lake Te Anau. In a letter to Mrs Spooner, the boatman who had dropped her son at the isolated camp site wrote: “I have seen practically every bit of New Zealand and Australia and also a fair bit of the world during the recent war but I still have to see a more beautiful spot than this final bay of the North Fiord.” The fact that he died in such a place, while engaged in an activity he loved, could have been little consolation to Spooner’s mother. Or to readers who see the talent and promise at the heart of Stag Spooner.
Showdown in a mining town
Discovery is at the heart of learning, for adults and children
Snow avalanches—such as this one seen from Tasman Glacier in Mt Cook National Park—are among nature’s most striking spectacles. Most occur naturally, unseen and harmless, but those that occur around ski fields or roads have claimed the lives of 140 New Zealanders since records were kept.
Life thrives against the odds in the frozen sands of Te Onetapu, one of just a handful of volcanic dune systems in the world. Formed by the sand, rock and ash ejected from volcanic activity, this windy and hostile environment is transformed every time a giant awakes.
Early promotion of mountain tourism.
Sea turtles survived a meteor that killed the dinosaurs, millions of years of predator attacks, even the slow warming of the seas, only to be threatened by nylon fishing lines and plastic bags. Those that wash up in New Zealand almost always need the help of humans.
Like a planet in space, a rainbow trout egg sparks and crackles as biological processes begin a miraculous transformation, the same that progresses silently in the inscrutable waters of New Zealand’s wild rivers every day. But even in clean rivers, the odds are stacked against this small vessel of life—only one in a thousand eggs will hatch and survive until adulthood.
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