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Editorial

1000 words

For four years, I edited a photography magazine that featured interviews with professional photographers from around the world. For four years, I was every day amazed and convicted by their work, and the culture of photography that they talked about in their home countries: exhibitions, grants, support… respect. That culture seems to be lacking in New Zealand today. Look at the pictures that New Zealand photojournalist Melanie Burford made of communities affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Or the pictures that New Zealander Robin Hammond has made of daily life in Lagos. They are among our best photographers, and neither has worked in this country in decades. We have little work like this in New Zealand because we have few publications that can afford to pay a photographer to spend months on a story. New Zealand Geographic photographer Richard Robinson began collecting images for his feature on seabirds in this issue nine years ago. Neil Silverwood has been working up his West Coast feature since 2018. But there is not enough income from New Zealand Geographic to support an entire industry. Photojournalist Adrian Malloch once made the bulk of his income taking pictures for magazines published by Bauer Media, which ceased publishing in April this year. He has turned his attention to commercial photography, but it’s a poor substitute. “There’s so much photography of people now, but it’s all curated by advertising agencies, publicists, marketing people,” he says. “Whatever it is they want to tell us is everywhere for us to see. But who are we and what we care about, what matters to us, that’s what documentary photography is able to do if it’s done properly.” Today, one of New Zealand Geographic’s best and longest-standing photographers is working in a kiwifruit packing house to make ends meet. Another has a full-time job in healthcare. Eleven years ago, New Zealand Geographic inaugurated Photographer of the Year to stimulate pros, encourage emerging photographers, and involve the public in a more critical visual examination of our environment and society. The finalists of this year’s competition are online now, and will be exhibited at the Maritime Museum later in September. It’s a reminder of what we look for in photography, and what is usually available in the media. News photography covers dramatic events and famous people. Disasters and dignitaries. But it’s the slower pace of documentary photography that records everyday life—beautiful, with dignity and grace. Internationally, there are structures in place to support documentary photography. Aspiring photographers can win places in workshops to discuss art and ethics. Documentary photography is exhibited in art galleries and professional photographers can apply to non-profit funding bodies such as the Pulitzer Centre or ProPublica which allow them to pursue stories over the long term. Photojournalism is in crisis in New Zealand, and yet our major media and arts funding agencies don’t support it. If NZonAir supported photojournalism like it supports screen production we would have a compelling and important new view of our nation. If Creative New Zealand recognised documentary photography as a valuable visual art, our galleries would be as full of challenging and relevant photography as those overseas. Recognising the importance of documentary photography, before it is gone, would bolster an entire industry of creative professionals. But perhaps more importantly, it would give us a better view of who we really are as a nation, because pictures give us something that words do not.
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Geo News

The roots of poverty

People’s attitudes towards poverty depend on the stories they’re told about it, according to two surveys of more than 32,000 people in 34 countries, including New Zealand. Those who believed poverty was caused by situational factors, or things out of people’s control, supported social-levelling policies. People who believed poverty was due to individual factors, such as merit, were less egalitarian. The study also found that participating in a virtual simulation of poverty increased the weight people gave to situational factors, and prompted more egalitarian behaviour.
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Geo News

The rise of depression

Increasing numbers of New Zealand high school students are suffering from poor mental health. Last year, researchers from the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago and Auckland University of Technology surveyed nearly 8000 young people about their wellbeing, as part of the Youth19 Rangatahi Smart Survey. The findings were compared to similar surveys carried out regularly since 1999. Some trends are positive; high-schoolers are smoking and binge-drinking much less than they were two decades ago. But while more than two-thirds of the students reported good mental health, nearly a quarter—23 per cent—said they’d experienced significant depression. Female students and those from minority groups were most likely to be affected—and for many groups, the proportion reporting depression symptoms has doubled since 2012. Suicide attempts have also increased, especially for boys. The researchers said there’s now strong evidence that the general mental and emotional wellbeing of New Zealand’s teenagers has worsened over the past seven years. There was no single cause. Social media, loneliness, discrimination, and concern about climate change and the future were all cited by young people as being factors in their distress.
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Editorial

Horrible history

New Zealand has 123 statues of named people on outdoor public land. Over 2018 and 2019, a team from the University of Otago, Wellington studied whether these statues had ever been attacked. Almost a quarter of them had. The weapons of choice? Hammers, axes, concrete cutters, and paint: gold, red, blue. Seven per cent of statues had had their noses damaged or knocked off. (Robbie Burns, in Hokitika, is still missing his.) Six had been decapitated, some repeatedly. (A statue of King George V in Matakana has lost his head five times.) Three statues were destroyed entirely. The study found that 93 per cent of statues were of European people, and 87 per cent of them were men. Only one statue on public land featured a person of Pacific ethnicity: that of rugby player Sir Michael Jones. This research is thought to be the world’s first study surveying a country’s attitude towards its public statues. It wasn’t funded; the four authors carried it out in their spare time, out of personal interest. Its publication comes at a time when we’re asking ourselves: Who do we venerate? Who are our cities and streets and maunga named after? The answers to these questions can be rather dismaying. Recently Wairarapa resident Raihānia Tipoki looked into the namesakes of five of the region’s towns: Joseph Masters, Charles Carter, George Grey, Isaac Featherston and John Martin. All were active in displacing the area’s original inhabitants. “So as the many kāinga throughout Wairarapa slowly shrank behind the billowing smoke of the growing colonial towns, new streets were created, monuments erected,” writes Tipoki, “and now as I drive north to visit my friends in Masterton, my eyes are subjected time and time and time again to the names of the people riddled throughout our region who sought and succeeded to suppress the indigenous peoples of this land.” A former mayor of Hamilton is calling for a referendum on restoring the city’s original name, Kirikiriroa, which means “long stretch of gravel” in reference to the Waikato River. A statue of Captain John Hamilton was removed by the city council in June after a request by the confederated iwi of Waikato-Tainui. A statue of George Eden, Lord Auckland, only ended up in its namesake city after being kicked out of West Bengal. (Eden had been Governor-General of India; he never set foot in New Zealand.) When one state government in India decided in 1969 to retire all colonial statues, a New Zealand insurance company offered to ship Lord Auckland over here. His statue, which usually stands near Aotea Square, is presently in storage due to construction work. Some of our public figures are not connected to this country at all. Some of them were responsible for terrible things. What do we do with these monsters of history, looming at us all of a sudden out of the dark? As more than one nation is learning, it isn’t possible to move on from a racist past by pretending it didn’t happen. We can’t just switch the lights off and hope the darkness makes our monsters disappear. Ocean Mercier, profiled here, suggests we tell the full story of people that our statues commemorate, crucial as they were to New Zealand history. The George Edens and the George Greys alike. But my favourite solution to the problem comes from Tūhoe activist Tame Iti, who wrote on Twitter: “Don’t destroy the statues! Put them in a place all together where people can talk about them... like a racist museum... having them altogether in one space as racists and no longer as upstanding citizens is way more useful than having them at the bottom of a river.” Let’s turn the lights on. Let’s remember the racism of our past, so that we can recognise it when it looms up again, and turn with confidence to a different future.
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Features

The 147th year at Castlepoint

Freelance jockeys, keen spectators, farming families with station hacks and horse trainers with thoroughbreds descend on the Wairarapa every autumn to take part in one of New Zealand’s longest-running events.
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Geo News

No more blame

As social researchers seek ways to defuse hostility towards “outgroups”, one United States study has found a simple means to get people to rethink their attitudes towards, in this case, Muslims. First, the researchers asked their Spanish study subjects whether they considered themselves responsible for the actions of white supremacists such as Anders Breivik. Overwhelmingly, they felt that they were not. Then the researchers asked whether individual Muslims should be held responsible for the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which were committed by Islamic extremists. The subjects again said no. People’s natural desire to be consistent, say the authors, moderates prejudice and delivers more considered views on conflict.
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Features

Gun country

Last century, firearms flooded into New Zealand with returning servicemen, and during peacetime guns became synonymous with an honest, healthy way of life in the hills. Now, there are thought to be 1.5 million firearms in New Zealand—one for every three people—used as conservation or farming tools, or simply for sport. To some, firearms symbolise self-sufficiency and responsibility. To others, they’ll never be more than instruments of death. But is this issue as clear-cut as it seems?

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Geo News

Global shapers

When did the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch, actually begin? In research published in Science in August 2019, Australian social scientists say humans have been the main influence on the Earth’s climate and environment since 2000 BCE. “The activities of farmers, pastoralists and hunter-gatherers had significantly changed the planet four millennia ago,” writes co-author Andrea Kay from the University of Queensland. “The long-term cumulative changes that early food producers wrought on Earth are greater than many people realise.”
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Geo News

Walk like a shark

When spider monkeys, honey bees, or sharks are foraging for food, they’ll use a pattern of movement called a Lévy walk—random but correlated steps with no destination in sight, involving many short movements mixed with a few longer ones. The theory goes that this pattern is statistically best for finding randomly distributed objects, such as food. Now, Japanese scientists have shown humans also do the Lévy walk when moving through crowds—the free spaces substituted as the resources being sought. Though people move haphazardly, they naturally choose efficient routes. The study has implications for crowd-behaviour research and urban design.
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Editorial

A park a day...

We’re increasingly stressed, and so are our kids. Their rates of anxiety have surged by 875 per cent over the past decade, and that’s just for children under 14. But there’s something that can help, and it’s free. Nature is good for us primarily because it acts on stress. Earlier this year, United States science journalist Aaron Reuben tallied more than 450 studies showing a positive connection between nature and human health. You don’t need a lot of it, either: a recent British study of 20,000 adults found that spending two hours per week in a park provided the same benefits as five. But for those able to devote a weekend to the wilderness, nature appears to act like a deep-clean for the brain: people emerge better able to concentrate, problem-solve, and think creatively. In other words, a research-approved remedy for our increasing rates of depression, anxiety and health problems costs us nothing extra. We simply need to use a resource that we’re already paying to maintain for other purposes. The Department of Conservation is a health provider, and its land—a third of New Zealand—a massive therapeutic facility. So how do we get people there? How do we teach them about it? How do we help them use it? These connections are starting to be made. DOC’s Healthy Nature, Healthy People initiative, a partnership with the Mental Health Foundation, is a step in the right direction—it’s based on the pioneering Parks Australia programme that saw the concept of ‘nature prescriptions’ spread around the world. But it needs to be scaled up a thousand times. It needs funding, support and other partnerships. Then there’s Federated Mountain Clubs, its members overflowing with knowledge and goodwill, but facing an ageing membership and lacking connection with young people. We need better connections between healthcare providers and the people who manage and advocate for our outdoor places. We need better infrastructure to help our diverse population, with its various needs, to access these places. And we need better information about how much our conservation land can help us. Imagine if we designated areas ‘therapy forests’ or ‘therapy beaches’ or ‘therapy valleys’, and there was a subsidised bus that took you there on Saturdays, and once you got there, a track that was good enough for strollers and wheelchairs, too. We can learn from the many successful initiatives overseas. In the United States, the non-profit Park Rx connects healthcare providers with park areas or non-profits that help improve access among groups of people who typically don’t go bushwalking or tramping. Community group Unlikely Hikers provides support for people living with disability to access parks, as well as people who feel they don’t fit in with traditional tramping clubs. Hike It Baby does the same thing for parents with young children. We underestimate what can be learned and gained from time outdoors. On my way to meet the Rapsey family (see page 32), I hitchhiked to Nelson Lakes National Park with an high-school outdoor education instructor (the lack of transport between Nelson and its proximate national park is another story). She told me outdoor education was falling out of favour among students—the subject was perceived as a dead-end, as fun rather than useful, not the kind of thing that smart kids might do. Nature shouldn’t really be an option, but a default, like maths, like English, like eating five fruits or vegetables a day. Nature is the environment that our bodies evolved to fit, not the cities we’ve made for ourselves. Nature activates our parasympathetic nervous system, the ‘rest-and-digest’ process that’s the opposite of the ‘fight-or-flight’ one. Our bodies know it’s home, even if we don’t.

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