Our part of town

Several people gave me sketching materials for Christmas, so I've been indulging my hobby this week.

This is the view just past the Boys High School in Coronation Avenue. The house on the left is on the corner of Wakefield Street (yes, named after Edward Gibbon). Then comes BK's Motel, run by two of our friends, Ross and Sheryl Domney, with their three flags flying at the gate.

I spent yesterday afternoon turning it into a watercolour version:

There are some interesting older houses, and some newer ones, around the corner in Rogan Street, where they have a view of the mountain across the racecourse to the south, and the sea beyond the CBD to the north.

Here are the first few:

The house on the right is seen from the other side in this next view:

Sketching in Christmas Week

A photo was posted recently on Facebook of Mt Taranaki by moonlight. Here is my version of the photo, using white gel pen, white pencil and silver pencil on black paper.

Today we decorated my mobility scooter for Christmas; here is a photo to show you what it looks like, with granddaughter Carys trying it out:.

Although I am walking as much as possible along the street and back, I need to ride the scooter to reach some slightly more distant sites for sketching.

One is the Polytech just around the corner:

And in the other direction the corner of Tokomaru and Turi Streets.

And here is Margie's 2016 version of our Christmas tree:

The Bell Tolls

It was a handbell, just like the ones the schools used to use to ring lunchtime or at the end of the schoolday. This one was smaller, lighter, but just as well made and rang with a good tone.

It sat on my windowsill by my big armchair, where I was recovering from surgery on the third floor of the new hospital building. I could see a view of Mt Taranaki from the chair, but I couldn't reach the electric bell, so the nurses had found the handbell somewhere and brought it instead. I had insisted I wanted to see the view, rather than be closer to the bell button.

On the bell itself was a label which read: Property of TDHB Ward 4. The handle was well worn. I soon recognised it as one that had stood on the desk of the Charge Nurse of the old Ward 4 (Orthopaedic) in the eighties, when Patricia Woods was in charge. If my memory is correct it had been donated by a grateful patient.

So I told the nurses all this, and they looked at me slightly bemused; "why would a ward need a ward bell?"

My mind wandered back to those days. In 1988 the then Minister of Health, Helen Clark, had asked everyone to think about replacing Hospital Boards and some Health Department services by what were to be called "Area Health Boards". The aim was to make the health service more aware of preventive and community measures, rather than focussing solely on hospitals.

So the Hospital Boards set up Community Advisory Committees to consider the possible future shape of the new structures. I was asked, as a community worker at Social Welfare, to be a member of the Taranaki Hospital Board's committee, along with about 20 others, including several members of the Hospital Board, one of whom was Patricia Woods.

The committee was chaired by Dan Holmes, the THB chair, and advised by the Board's three top staff members, John Eady, Peter Matthews and Janice Wenn. Other community members included Simon Shera from Hawera. We duly thought about the questions the ministry had set us. A year or so later the Area Health Boards were set up.

A week after I left my picture window and the old handbell behind, the penny dropped. Every ward on those days needed a bell to ring the end of visiting time. Visiting was from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, say, and at 4 pm one of the nurses would ring the handbell to tell the visitors politely it was time to say Good bye.

No wonder the handle looked worn; it had been used every day for years.

More Sketching

I haven't stopped sketching

Even though it may look like I've stopped blogging. But I've just sent a contribution to Carers New Zealand, the national centre for carers. (carers.net.nz)

My best sketch of the last few weeks:

This is the Coastal Walkway, looking towards the Wind Wand from the area below Octavius Place.

Another day I walked in Pukekura Park to a hilltop overlooking the main lake and the Tea House. I wanted to concentrate on three of the trees, especially a kauri:

Another morning, near the walkway I could see a big bank of cloud to the west, brilliantly lit by the rising sun:

I stopped at a bench in Liardet Street one morning, opposite the Hour Glass night club, and sketched the building.

Have I given up on trying to sketch?

It might seem like it from my recent posts

But since our house-shift I have been back into it.

One evening I sketched an ornament and table in the corner of he room:

On our way to Wellington we called at Greytown for lunch. We enjoyed revisiting the Wairarapa, if only for an hour or two. We particularly like Greytown:

And stopped briefly in Palmerston North. This is a view looking across John F Kennedy Drive:

In the capital we travelled into the city by train; I only had time for a quick impression before the train moved off:

And one day in Pukekura Park there was this tree trunk: 
 
 





On our way through Stratford I managed an impression of the clock tower:

 

 

A Leafy Suburb

A day or two ago, between showers

I wandered around our new neighbourhood to look at Spring colours.

Even from our lounge window the maple tree has suddenly dressed itself in these deep red leaves, contrasting with the pink, cream and blue from Ian and Barbara's garden over the street:

Two more shades of red from the roadside trees round the bend....

And promise of more shades of pinks, reds and white further along.

Round another corner in Bell Street a historic Puriri on the lead up to the Polytech reminds us of our own puriri giant in Lemon Street, which is known and loved by thew whole of that neighbourhood.

On a street corner a more formal arrangement with its Spring greens,...

And the trees from our other lounge window looking into Geoff and Carolyn's wilder garden. These trees were planted many years ago when the house was owned by our Lemon Street neighbour Jan and her late husband Paul:

Coming back home past Ian and Barbara's plants arranged to cascade beside their house:

Our own rhododendron beside the drive is now in full bloom. We can see it from our kitchen window and enjoy its rich colour all day long.

Old neighbour Joyce, a well-known and well-loved potter, used to live in this house until her death some years ago. You can see she had some skills in garden design as well!

Our street has lots of beautiful old trees, full of tui and other birds. We are well sheltered from the cooler southern winds by all this foliage.

The birds of paradise flowers are doing well this season, certainly in our part of town.....

What a delight all these Spring colours are!

Building Community

Do humans need a religious basis on which to build a community?

We were in Wellington to attend the annual conference of the Sea of Faith, an organisation we have belonged to, at a distance, for nearly 25 years. It explores all sorts of ideas that are or have been associated with religion. Many of its members are "progressive" or "liberal" christians, some are more inclined to other world religions or atheism.

The organisation itself holds an annual conference (this year at Silverstream) and publishes a newsletter.

Each conference has four keynote sessions followed by discussion in smaller groups and winds up with a panel which enables everyone to ask questions of any of the speakers.

This year was kicked off with an address by Lloyd Geering, who put forward the idea that the evolution of the world has produced more and more complex organisation, both in the physical world and in the world of ideas. He drew on the writings of Jan Smuts and Teilhard de Chardin to elucidate ideas like "complexification" and "noosphere". 

Lloyd suggested that the ultimate result of these processes would be a world community which has been developing out of the Christian West over recent centuries.

The second address was a recorded one from Michael Benedikt, who is an American architecture professor who has written a book called "God is the good we do". Michael's parents were both holocaust survivors who became very opposed to religion as a result of those experiences.

His idea is that God only exists through the good we do. When we do ethical things we create God. He calls this idea "theopraxy".

The next speaker was Gretta Vosper, a minister of the United Church of Canada, who leads a church in Toronto. She has declared herself to be atheist; her church does not use any of the traditional christian language, but what they do and what they talk about amounts to christian values and christian practices translated into secular terms.

This has put Gretta and her church at odds with the United Church authorities. Discussions are continuing; watch this space!

The last session was addressed by Geoff Troughton from the Religious Studies Department at Victoria University. He summarised the present state of the religious life of New Zealand, as measured by census returns and and the Study of Attitudes and Values. 

The main point he made was that the numbers of people with any connection with christian churches is dropping, while the numbers who report "no religion" is rising, which we all know anyway from anecdotal evidence.

We had missed the conference for several years; it was good to reconnect with several old friends from other parts of the country.

Wellington Highlights

Those World War 1 Exhibitions

Saturday and Sunday afternoons, being in Wellington and having heard wonderful positive reports from friends who had visited the historic exhibitions currently on in the city, we went and saw and were conquered!

So what I write here is against the background of respect, admiration, even amazement at the research, scholarship, design skills and sensitivity displayed by both institutions and their staffs.

We visited Te Papa on Saturday afternoon and the Dominion Museum on Sunday. Not enough time to have seen everything, let alone to have read every word on display. 

But we have read a few of the hundreds of books published recently on the same subjects and done our best to get our heads around the masses of information about the war: 1914, New Zealanders in the Great War, the Gallipoli campaign, the battles for Fromelles, and Passchendaele, and the First Day of the Somme.

Podium winners

We had heard lots about the Weta Workshop models, the huge replicas of men in action, and the reconstructions of weaponry at Te Papa. But the reality of these exhibits was enough to blow us away, down to the sweat on the brows, the hair on the legs and the barbed wire.

The atmosphere of a French town 100 years ago in the first few metres of the Dominion Museum exhibition made one feel that it was indeed an old part of France we were walking through.

We took one or two shots of the more spectacular photos of the Gallipoli campaign; even on the small screen of our mobile phone one in particular is so sharp it is almost unbelievable. We are full of admiration for the curatorial staff who restored that photograph and all the others.

But most impressive to my mind was the model of the Battle of Chunuk Bair. I had read about the models made of the Waterloo battlefield and displayed in Europe at a shilling a time. We had been to Waterloo itself and seen the displays there. But the huge, detailed, incredibly carefully reproduced model of Chunuk Bair showing Malone and his Wellington men is just overwhelming. 200 men from Taranaki took part in that battle and only three survived.

Battlefields galore

I have visited battlefields for many years, quite apart from Waterloo which I have mentioned already.

Around 1970 I took my two children on a trip around the Waikato. We started off at Pukekohe East to look at the bullet holes in the church where our great-great-grandfather was involved defending his farm and that of his neighbours from a Maori skirmishing party in 1863.

Then we explored the Rangiriri site, and took in as much of that as we could. After that we drove on up the Waipa Valley and eventually to Orakau, trying to imagine the mayhem that occurred there.

Later, living in the Bay of Islands, our favourite outing for visitors was to Ruapekapeka, where you can still see the underground shelters which gave protection even from the cannon that Governor Grey's forces had dragged up the Pakaru Road from Derrick's Landing.

And here in New Plymouth we are surrounded by battle sites from the 1860s, from Te Kohia near Waitara to St George's Redoubt down the coast. When we lived at Oakura we passed ten historic sites from the wars between there and New Plymouth each day.

I later had many discussions with an acquaintance who had served in the parachute regiments that took part in the Battle of Arnhem in the second war. 1000 men in his battalion dropped there and less than 100 came out.

Finally, when we were in Europe in 2008 we visited Passchendaele.

Gallipoli

Both versions of Gallipoli are overwhelming. The Dominion Museum's lists of the dead are incredible; one wonders when they will ever stop coming. Every few days through those terrible months there is another page full of names from all parts of the country.

And the summaries of the years through the whole war, each with its memorial archway and the rows of graves stretching away on both sides, take the story to every theatre of that murderous struggle.

However I was left with a question: why have we got two versions of Gallipoli in two different exhibitions? Did the Te Papa team phone the Dominion team one day and say, "We've got a heap of material collected about Gallipoli that we have no room for in our displays. Could you use it in yours?" To my mind the whole experience could have been enhanced by having all the Gallipoli material in one place and the rest of the war covered somewhere else.

Ideally

If you want to absorb as much as you can from the current exhibitions, my suggestion would be to take it slowly. Try starting with the World War I exhibition at the Dominion Museum, over three or four visits.

Once that has sunk in, I would take another two or three visits to get my head around the Gallipoli story at Te Papa, which would enable me to have enough general background to tackle the more detailed version back at the Dominion.

But the last section would take several more visits, probably nearer eight than four, to absorb the mass of details in the photo captions, introductions, lists of casualties, and detailed maps, models and documents.

There could not be a more absorbing way to learn all one could about this most disastrous episode in our history.

Voting in Elections

Low Turnout

There has been a lot of comment in the media this week about the low turnout of voters in the Local Body Elections. It seems votes are running at an even lower rate than three years ago, around 20% for this stage of the cycle.

Former New Plymouth mayor Peter Tennent has been encouraging everyone to get out and vote, both in the press and on Facebook.

I have several suggestions for improving voter turnout.

My first concern is he voting age. 18 is an age when teenagers are thinking of everything else besides local politics. They have many decisions to make and decision fatigue means they put the politics in the too hard basket.

If we were to lower the qualification age to, say, 12, young people would be able to concentrate more on that issue, and they would still be in school, and at a stage when all intermediate teachers could be expected to spend some time teaching their classes about how the system works.

Once in the habit of voting at the younger age, the teenagers would be less likely to give up through decision fatigue.

My second concern is the number of candidates one has to choose from. Even though I have lived in this town for forty years, and been involved in the community most of that time, I still don't know more than a couple of the candidates.

To make the process easier, the area should be broken down into wards. But not the usual geographical ones. My suggestion is that if the wards were defined by age bands, we would be more likely to know the candidates in our ward.

So, in a city with ten councillors, one would have ten wards according to date of birth. Candidates would not have to be from the age-band; if teenagers wanted to elect someone of their parents' generation, or vice versa, that should be possible.

But it should mean we get a council more spread over the age range and so more representative of the community. And the decisions about who to choose would be a whole lot simpler.

It would be possible to think of other ways of splitting the area, but they would be more complicated and more controversial. Keep it simple!

What do you think?

Seventy years ago

Another holiday

In what we called the "August" school holidays of 1947, when I was 13 and in Year 10, the family had a holiday in Wellington.  We travelled by the Limited Express (7 15 pm departure from Auckland Railway Station) which took all night to reach Wellington (9 am).

You will be interested in the three-page account I wrote at the time detailing the trip from one end of the island to the other.

A Classic Holiday

Summer 1950-51

Here are some box Brownie photos from our family holiday at Christmas 1950. Noel and Stuart trying out the Bumper Boats at Caroline Bay in Timaru.

In those days the car was hoisted on to the deck of the ferry for the trip between the islands: Wellington to Littelton. Our boot was loaded with luggage and spare petrol cans to cope with the family of five in a 10 horsepower Ford.

One of the fascinating places we stopped for a look was the Hanging Rock near Fairlie, with its cave paintings.

And the extreme southern adventure on New Year's Day was to Half-Moon Bay at Oban, Stewart Island, for a swim.

Stuart was nine, I was seventeen, and Olwyn fourteen at the time.

Romantics Galore

Thank goodness the world is full of dreamers!

What a glorious day for a walk! We drove halfway to town and walked from there to the Farmers Market. 

There were half a dozen tents set up in the Huatoki Plaza. Before you get there you can hear a young man singing, accompanying himself on a guitar and helped by a friend with a drum from some Asian country. The songs are strident, full of passion and not all that tuneful.

Next to them is a mature lady selling baked goods of various kinds. We later buy one of her cinnamon buns for morning tea. Next to her two young guys grind and sell coffee from Papua-New Guinea. We order a coffee to go with the bun.

We bump into a friend who is standing for the position of mayor in the local elections in six weeks' time. Her attitude is "Che sera, sera". She cannot do more than she is already doing for the community; she has a long history of  service in a variety of ways. We wish her well.

Over the way a stall selling processed meats of various kinds, And another selling sauces and chutneys.

Most elaborate is Margaret's cousin's tent. He has a small farm where he grows lavendar and garlic; his stall sells various lavendar products: shampoos, perfumes, hand creams and so on. He also grows tea and a variety of herbs which he processes into a range of herb teas.

We wonder how many customers he gets each time he sets up his stall, a process which takes 30 minutes (and a similar time to dismantle). He is also standing in the elections, after a life-time of adventurous enterprises and community service.

All the time we are wandering around there are only a handful of customers; these days the crowds are in the chain stores in the new shopping centre on the fringe of town -- which looks just like similar centres in every provincial town in the country.

So cheers for originality, enterprise, and dreams! Some of them may change the world occasionally, and the rest will fade out of sight. But what a drab place it would be without them!

Memories on Paper

Old documents

A few posts ago I showed a photo of the Chevrolet my grandfather bought in 1939.

A year or so later he wrote a letter to me, which you can read here. He was 73 at the time and I was approaching 7.








A dozen years later I was called up for Compulsory Military Training. This was at the time of the Korean War and it was the popular system in all developed countries to require a period of military service.

I opted for the Air Force and was accepted as a trainee pilot.

Before we had barely completed our initial training (at Taieri Airport, with instructors on leave from their normal jobs as agricultural topdressing pilots), the Tiger Moth planes were scrapped, and we were discharged, being just as obsolete as the planes!

Here are my discharge papers.

When I worked in India I didn't need to fly, but I did need to drive, and here is my Driver's License.

The mission owned at various times a Dodge station wagon and a Landrover. The four-wheel drive capability was very necessary, as the roads in those days were very primitive, although the Indian Government built kilometres of good roads very quickly.

In about 1960 I walked for a day and a half from the end of the road to attend a district conference in one area; five years later we were able to travel the whole way by the Landrover.

Newspaper Appearances

In the Press

Several times over the years press reporters have shown an interest in my activities, and here are four examples:

In 1953 I attended a conference of Baptist young people at Mooloolabah on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, and was met in Brisbane by a reporter from the Courier-Mail.

Much later, around 1979, I was interviewed by a Taranaki reporter on my experience of India, particularly of the State of Tripura, where I lived for around seven years.

From 1995 to 2000 I was a member of the Taranaki Regional Ethics Committee, which advised on all health research in Taranaki which involved human subjects. Here is one reporter's account of an interview I gave the local paper.

And a year or two later I took up playing the clarinet and joined a community concert band of adult learners. Here is what the same paper made of their research about our music!