scholarly journals The Lost, Erased, Unseen and Forgotten: Translating into Architecture the New Zealand Wars

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Geordie Shaw

<p>There is a perception amongst New Zealanders that our country was forged at Waitangi in 1840 with a shaking of hands and pressing together of noses. However, in actuality it emerged from a drawn out war of fear and unrest; four million acres of land was confiscated and thousands died fighting on it. Hills, valleys, fields and plains were soaked with blood from Wairau to Kororāreka . Today these sites still hold the memory of those fallen, but the New Zealand Wars and their implications now seem a distant haze on our nations consciousness. The wars have become lost, erased, unseen and forgotten. The New Zealand Army Museum in Waiouru is the building on which I focus a critique of our past and present approaches to architecture. Creating an extension to this museum forms the design component of my thesis – the new building housing the museum's overshadowed New Zealand Wars collection. The methodology involved researching and choosing specific stories from the full spectrum of the New Zealand Wars. Concepts, architectural languages and elements are then translated and collaged into a new building. The hope for this synthesis is that it will reveal our untold and unseen history through architecture, that it might represent and communicate something of our past to us; helping to [re?] construct our national identity.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Geordie Shaw

<p>There is a perception amongst New Zealanders that our country was forged at Waitangi in 1840 with a shaking of hands and pressing together of noses. However, in actuality it emerged from a drawn out war of fear and unrest; four million acres of land was confiscated and thousands died fighting on it. Hills, valleys, fields and plains were soaked with blood from Wairau to Kororāreka . Today these sites still hold the memory of those fallen, but the New Zealand Wars and their implications now seem a distant haze on our nations consciousness. The wars have become lost, erased, unseen and forgotten. The New Zealand Army Museum in Waiouru is the building on which I focus a critique of our past and present approaches to architecture. Creating an extension to this museum forms the design component of my thesis – the new building housing the museum's overshadowed New Zealand Wars collection. The methodology involved researching and choosing specific stories from the full spectrum of the New Zealand Wars. Concepts, architectural languages and elements are then translated and collaged into a new building. The hope for this synthesis is that it will reveal our untold and unseen history through architecture, that it might represent and communicate something of our past to us; helping to [re?] construct our national identity.</p>


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 336-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandala White ◽  
Annie Potts

AbstractThis qualitative study, conducted between August and December 2006, explored the opinions and experiences of New Zealanders who challenge orthodox attitudes to the use and consumption of nonhuman animals. To date, New Zealand (NZ) has under-investigated the perspectives of those who oppose animal farming, the eating of nonhuman animals, and the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Agriculture substantially influences the economy and cultural heritage of the nation. Given that national identity in New Zealand strongly associates with farming and meat production, this paper investigates how vegetarians living in this country experience and challenge prevalent imagery and ideas about New Zealand. In particular, the paper examines the ways in which “kiwi” vegetarians are disputing the dominant image of New Zealand as “clean and green” and a land of "animal lovers" and how they are experiencing mainstream (meat-loving) kiwi culture in their everyday lives. The paper also examines some of the more positive aspects for vegetarians of living in New Zealand.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Micheal Warren

<p>Sports matter. Today sport is one of the most enduring social events that humans from across the world participate in, no matter their race, religion or gender. Moreover, the biggest of all those sporting events is the Olympic Games, which is held every four years. The modern version of the Games was founded by Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin and first took place in Athens in 1896. New Zealand first competed alongside Australia as Australasia in London 1908 and Stockholm 1912. Following the games of 1916 which were cancelled due to World War I, New Zealand has competed as a sovereign nation since Antwerp 1920. Since 1908, over 1200 New Zealanders have competed at the Olympic Games, winning more than 100 medals. That performance in itself makes New Zealand one of the most successful nations in Olympic history on a per capita basis. That statistic alone underscores the relationship between the Olympics and national identity, as an embodiment of New Zealanders believing they ‘punch above their weight’ on the world stage.  Benedict Anderson wrote about the imagined community, where the nation is imagined because it is impossible for every citizen to know each other.¹ This research has found that sporting teams like the All Blacks and the New Zealand Olympic Team are perfect avenues to help create this imagined community. New Zealand’s national identity is not fixed, it has evolved, but the one mainstay of that identity is the sense of being an underdog on the world stage.  The research has found that over the past three decades New Zealand governments have increasingly woken up to the importance of high-performance sport and following the disappointment of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, funding was increased, which has led to better results and more medals. Today New Zealand athletes are funded on a per-capita basis just as well as many other nations we would compare ourselves with. New Zealand politicians have been quick to associate themselves alongside sportsmen and women and often speak about the close link that exists between sport and identity in New Zealand. However, unlike Australia, New Zealand does not have a national sports museum, and also unlike Australia, and the United Kingdom, New Zealand legislation does not allow for free-to-air television coverage of games of national significance. New Zealand does not adequately showcase its sporting history, and this has the potential to negatively affect the importance New Zealanders place on sport and the Olympic Movement as an important part of its national identity.  Ultimately this research has found that the New Zealand Olympic Team epitomises what it means to be a New Zealander and has found that across multiple levels of analysis, the Olympic Movement has significantly contributed to the development of New Zealand’s national identity. More broadly, the Olympic Games have become a key avenue in which that national identity can be projected to the world.  ¹ Benedict Anderson, ‘Imagined Communities,’ (London: Verso, 2006), pp.6-7.</p>


Urban History ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 61-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. A. Hamer ◽  
Max Kelly

New Zealand's national myths have emphasized the rural frontier. The archetypal and most commonly celebrated colonist has been the backblocks settler, the cow cockie, and to some extent the gold miner. New Zealanders have never seen much glamour in their towns. Yet from the very beginning New Zealand has been a mainly urban society. Many towns were founded in the early stages of European settlement, and New Zealand has exhibited in modified form the tendency to ‘metropolitanism’ characteristic of other countries that were settled in the mid-nineteenth century. The urban historian could have a very important role to play in helping New Zealanders to come to terms with, and absorb into their sense of national identity, this major aspect of their national existence.


Author(s):  
Philippa Mein Smith

Ron Palenski is a noted journalist as well as historian.  As someone who has written on the history of sport and who runs the New Zealand Hall of Fame, he has a keen interest in national identity, so much so that we wrote a PhD on the subject at the University of Otago. The Making of New Zealanders is based on this thesis, though readers would not have known without being told as Palenski's skill as a writer ensures that the style is vigorous, engaging and accessible. 


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

The conclusion reaffirms the essential role played by cinema generally, and the coming-of-age genre in particular, in the process of national identity formation, because of its effectiveness in facilitating self-recognition and self-experience through a process of triangulation made possible, for the most part, by a dialogue with some of the nation’s most iconic works of literature. This section concludes by point out the danger posed, however, by an observable trend toward generic standardization in New Zealand films motivated by a desire to appeal to an international audience out of consideration for the financial returns expected by funding bodies under current regimes.


Author(s):  
Peter Hoar

Kia ora and welcome to the second issue of BackStory. The members of the Backstory Editorial Team were gratified by the encouraging response to the first issue of the journal. We hope that our currentreaders enjoy our new issue and that it will bring others to share our interest in and enjoyment of the surprisingly varied backstories of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. This issue takes in a wide variety of topics. Imogen Van Pierce explores the controversy around the Hundertwasser Art Centre and Wairau Māori Art Gallery to be developed in Whangarei. This project has generated debate about the role of the arts and civic architecture at both the local and national levels. This is about how much New Zealanders are prepared to invest in the arts. The value of the artist in New Zealand is also examined by Mark Stocker in his article about the sculptor Margaret Butler and the local reception of her work during the late 1930s. The cultural cringe has a long genealogy. New Zealand has been photographed since the 1840s. Alan Cocker analyses the many roles that photography played in the development of local tourism during the nineteenth century. These images challenged notions of the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ and how new technologies mediated the world of lived experience. Recorded sound was another such technology that changed how humans experienced the world. The rise of recorded sound from the 1890s affected lives in many ways and Lewis Tennant’s contribution captures a significant tipping point in this medium’s history in New Zealand as the transition from analogue to digital sound transformed social, commercial and acoustic worlds. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly celebrates its 85th anniversary this year but when it was launched in 1932 it seemed tohave very little chance of success. Its rival, the Mirror, had dominated the local market since its launch in 1922. Gavin Ellis investigates the Depression-era context of the Woman’s Weekly and how its founders identified a gap in the market that the Mirror was failing to fill. The work of the photographer Marti Friedlander (1908-2016) is familiar to most New Zealanders. Friedlander’s 50 year career and huge range of subjects defy easy summary. She captured New Zealanders, their lives, and their surroundings across all social and cultural borders. In the journal’s profile commentary Linda Yang celebrates Freidlander’s remarkable life and work. Linda also discusses some recent images by Friedlander and connects these with themes present in the photographer’s work from the 1960s and 1970s. The Backstory editors hope that our readers enjoy this stimulating and varied collection of work that illuminate some not so well known aspects of New Zealand’s art, media, and design history. There are many such stories yet to be told and we look forward to bringing them to you.


Author(s):  
James Meffan

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).


Author(s):  
Liana MacDonald ◽  
Adreanne Ormond

Racism in the Aotearoa New Zealand media is the subject of scholarly debate that examines how Māori (Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand) are broadcast in a negative and demeaning light. Literature demonstrates evolving understandings of how the industry places Pākehā (New Zealanders primarily of European descent) interests at the heart of broadcasting. We offer new insights by arguing that the media industry propagates a racial discourse of silencing that sustains widespread ignorance of the ways that Pākehā sensibilities mediate society. We draw attention to a silencing discourse through one televised story in 2018. On-screen interactions reproduce and safeguard a harmonious narrative of settler–Indigenous relations that support ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation, and the Television Code of Broadcasting Practice upholds colour-blind perceptions of discrimination and injustice through liberal rhetoric. These processes ensure that the media industry is complicit in racism and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples.


1998 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gordon

New Zealand English has evolved in the past 150 years, at a time when it is possible to find both written and spoken evidence of its development. This paper takes evidence gained from an analysis of written comments on early New Zealand English and compares this with data taken from an analysis of spoken New Zealand English obtained from recordings collected in the 1940s of old New Zealanders born in the 1850s-1890s — the period when the New Zealand accent was developing. By putting the written data beside the spoken data it is now possible to assess the accuracy of written records as a basis for the reconstruction of the earliest form of New Zealand English.


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