GLAM/Newsletter/November 2023/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue XI, November 2023

New Zealand report

Summer students at Auckland Museum

Earlier in 2023, Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira successfully applied for a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to improve articles on local suburbs and local history. As a part of this project, the Wikimedia Foundation and the museum co-funded four Wikipedia interns to join our summer student cohort, learning how to edit Wikipedia over the 2023/24 summer period.

The brief for our students is simple: create or improve articles related to the Auckland Region/Tāmaki Makaurau, based on what you feel passionate about, and what you feel will be beneficial for students learning about history. Currently, the students have discussed focusing on a few different aspects, including:

More content on Te Ao Māori and Māori history
Queer history
Elevating Pasifika voices, and showcasing South Auckland culture
Natural history
Wikipedia pages on immigrant communities, including South Asian communities

Students spent the first two weeks learning about Wikimedia, including the limitations and benefits of the platform, issues such as conflicts of interest, and learnt how to edit. We'd planned for students to start posting articles by week three, but one student wrote and published her first article only four days into the programme! By the end of week two, the students had published seven articles. The second week also included a guest speaker, history education specialist Mark Sheehan.

Check out our weekly progress updates and the project dashboard, and read some extracts from their articles below.

Natural history

Almorah Rock Forest and Takapuna Fossil Forest are two newly created articles that showcase Tāmaki Makaurau's natural history

The Almorah Rock Forest is a micro-ecoregion, restricted to 0.032 km² on the Auckland isthmus. The forest formed 28,000 years ago, growing atop the vocalic scoria left by the Maungawhau / Mount Eden eruption. The rock forest is a unique environment, favouring plants that grow well in poor-soil environments. Most of the forest area was destroyed as the suburbs of Epsom and Newmarket developed. A large block of the rock forest, called Withiel Thomas Reserve, was gifted to the city of Auckland in 1948 by the family of naturalist Algernon Thomas.

Takapuna Fossil Forest is a petrified forest that formed approximately 190,000 years ago after lava flows from the Lake Pupuke volcano encased broadleaf forests in lava. The forest was likely exposed to the surface within the last 7,000 years, and much of the forest was destroyed in the 1970s. Currently, the forest is protected under the Auckland Unitary Plan as an Outstanding Natural Feature.

People

Tara Te Irirangi was the paramount chief of Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki in the 19th century, during the early colonial period of Auckland. A figure in the Musket Wars and early land sales, Tara Te Irirangi is memorialised in many place names including the suburb of Ōtara and Te Irirangi Drive, a major arterial road in Auckland.

Ron Brownson was a prominent New Zealand curator at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and a figure in Aotearoa New Zealand's Gay Liberation Movement. Brownson was a major supporter of Pasifika art and artists, and was awarded an Montana New Zealand Book Award in 2008 for contributions to the book Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning.

Churches

Our Lady of the Assumption is a heritage-listed Catholic church located in Onehunga. Built in the Gothic Revival style by E. Mahoney and Son in 1889, the church has been a major feature of the Onehunga community for over 100 years.

St Barnabas Anglican Church in Mount Eden and St Peter's Anglican Church in Onehunga are two of the Selwyn churches: historic Anglican churches in Auckland built in the 1840s. The first woman mayor in the British Empire, Elizabeth Yates, is buried at St Peter's cemetery.