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?