It’s almost 30 years since I retired from commercial piano playing, and thinking about that today made me feel positively creaky. Strangely, even after all that time, I still see myself as a muso.

Cutting my teeth in the music business: with the Massey Jazz band, playing at a university woolshed hop in 1964. This was one of the more decorous gigs we played. There were some grubby occasions. (Click to enlarge)

Pre-Aardvark – my first residency in Wellington. The John MacGibbon Quartet at the Skyline Cabaret ca 1970.

I first retired from playing back in 1975, when I broke up my last band, Aardvark. We’d enjoyed a fair bit of success on the Wellington scene, being the first resident group at the swanky brand-new ‘international’ James Cook hotel. That lasted for about three years, then we moved to residencies in the Abel Tasman and Waterloo hotels. Those were days when people went out for what was known as ‘dine and dance’. We also did outside gigs and recording work.

Aardvark installed as resident band in Wellington's flash new James Cook Hotel. Me on the left. Mike Loader singing. A very baby-faced Bruce McKinnon on drums (he had toured the world as a 15-year old boy wonder with the National Band and was a 16 year old underage music degree student at Victoria Uni when he joined us). On bass guitar is John Trethewey, one of the best natural musicians I ever had the pleasure of playing with. We wore suits and ties for a while, but soon went casual.

It was getting harder and harder to keep a good band together. We had  great musicians – people like bassists Clint Brown, John Trethewey and Paul du Fresne, and drummer and future NZSO principal percussionist Bruce McKinnon. Mike Loader was our lead singer and though he lacked the soul and ‘feel’ I really wanted, he’d cut his teeth on the Asian circuit and was a good front man. And he was totally reliable, which counts for a lot in the music world.

Moi, when we were playing at the Abel Tasman Hotel. Dig the trousers!

I never wanted to be fully professional. I had another career and was content to play every Friday and Saturday with extra nights from time to time, especially towards Xmas each year. But I shared the bandstand with some players who wanted to work more often, and tended to move on to better opportunities. That was a hassle, and so was a growing inability to handle the late hours. That was partly caused by advancing age but mostly by the advent of babies who prevented me sleeping in.

One memorable outside gig: a Chistmas concert at Mt Crawford Prison, with Aardvark augmented by some of the top local musos. Top: Kevin Clark, myself, Rodger Fox, Clint Brown. Centre: Kathy Saunders, a TV personality. Bottom: Dave Parsons, Mike Loader, Bruce McKinnon. The photo appeared on the front page of the Evening Post. (Click to enlarge)

It had been good fun. Lucrative as well – Aardvark was reputedly the best-paid band in Wellington, and the extra cash certainly helped Liz and I, as young marrieds. But I gave it all up and concentrated on my day job. Then, two years later we moved to Cromwell, where I succumbed to pressure and started playing again. I was the best piano player  in Central Otago – by default. The standard of music in those parts – back then anyway – was abysmal. While I’d been a better than average nightclub pianist in Wellington, several others were better than me –  certainly in their specialities. My speciality was being versatile. Now I was the king, and though adulation was nice for a while, it became embarrassing. The locals knew no better and I felt a fraud.

Some of my musical friends in Central Otago. Playing a duet with another pianist, Les Richardson, with Geoff Stevens on bass. This was at the Stevens's home in Alexandra where many fun times were enjoyed.

But I enjoyed playing again in Central Otago. I formed a little trio with Geoff Stevens from Alexandra on double bass and Dick Fraser, from Cromwell on drums. They weren’t good players, but they were enthusiastic and fun to be with. We played in Alexandra, Cromwell, Tarras, Lowburn, Luggate, and Wanaka. We kicked off live music at Olivers, the soon-to-become famous restaurant in Clyde started by Fleur Sullivan and John Brain, who had been as assistant chef at the James Cook when I played there. Fleur installed an antique grand piano that looked fantastic but was unplayable – like so many pianos in Central Otago. (I ended up buying a Yamaha CP30 electric piano in self-defence.)

We did the odd gig in Queenstown – an oasis where there were some good musicians. I also played solo piano in Queenstown, mostly filling in at the Coachman restaurant, then the flash eatery in town. I resisted invitations to make it a regular thing. I was amused one night in the Coachman when some Americans were astounded to hear me playing the blues. How could a non-American do that?

My musical stamping ground in Central Otago, with an extension to Okuru on the West Coast (marked 'A'), where I played at the notorious Whitebaiters’ Ball.

One night after a gig at the Coachman, I went to a musos’ jam session. There I was invited to play keyboards with a country and western band at the annual Whitebaiters’ Ball at remote Okuru, south of Haast on the West Coast. Definitely one of the highlights of my musical career.

No, it was the lowlight. I’d done some swanky stuff in Wellington, but this was the opposite side of the coin and a gig to treasure.

The revelers were a rum bunch who’d crawled from under rocks in the dank West Coast bush. They could have been cast in the movie Deliverance, except it hadn’t been made. About 11pm, word passed around: “It’s all on.” Scores were to be settled. But not yet. They still needed several more hours of heavy drinking and the occasional twirl around the dancefloor. Then at three in the morning, the perfect brawl started: floor awash with beer, macho snarling,  lurching fisticuffs, broken glass, blood and weeping women. Astonishingly, no one was seriously hurt and, most important, the band was unscathed. We should have been behind chicken-wire like the band at a country bar in the Blues Brothers. (I once played behind a barrier like that, at a NZ Universities Winter Tournament ball held at the showgrounds in Palmerston North. We needed protection against flying cans of beer.)

My final gig in Central Otago was on the last day of 1979, celebrating New Years Eve at the Lowburn Hotel, then under sentence of death by dambuilding. A few days later I left Cromwell and moved to Sydney. That was the end of commercial playing, other than one paid background music gig a few years ago in Greytown – an unpleasant struggle against a horrible piano at the local workingmens’ club.

Scene of my final band gig on New Years Eve 1979 – the Lowburn Hotel, on a site now 20 metres beneath Lake Dunstan.

Interior of the Lowburn Hotel, New Year's Day 1980. We had played there the night before and I went back to collect my piano and amplifier, taking my camera with me. This was a Sunday and the usual 'Sunday School' was operating. Back then bars were not allowed to open on Sundays, but the local cop wasn't concerned. He probably drank there as well. One feature of the pub was its collection of stuffed animals and birds, some of which can be seen in the picture. (Click to enlarge)

I still do a few unpaid appearances, in presentations about my book Piano in the Parlour and occasional sessions at Martinborough’s Wharekaka retirement home. No blues, rock ’n roll or jazz, and sometimes I have a yearning to get back to that again. Very difficult though, without an an electronic keyboard and amplifier, and a band.

I still play every day to amuse myself and thank my parents for starting me on piano in the first place. Imagine if I had been given a trombone…

My new book comes off the printing press this week. Compared to my other books it’s minimal, at 11,000 words and 40 pages. But a lot of work went into it, and not just the recent writing and layout. It’s a of decades of learning and doing.

This is a handbook about researching, writing, producing and publishing family history books, and it developed out of talks I’ve done at the National Library this year. Well, to be precise, one of the talks hasn’t happened yet – it’s next month.

For the first talk I was asked to supply supporting notes, which became quite long and detailed. People were saying it would be good if the notes were more widely available. So I’ve obliged, by expanding them further and adding pictures and diagrams.

In some ways it’s all faintly ridiculous, in that I haven’t been a practicing genealogist for more than ten years. But to some extent I’ve kept abreast of the discipline through friends who are still active in the area, and through publishing books for other people through my Ngaio Press business. I seem to keep getting dragged back into the area because my own family history book, Going Abroad, was well received by the family history community and still gets touted as a ‘good example’. It’s into a third printing and sells quietly all over the world.

While the writing and publishing sections of my new book are based on what I do professionally every day, quite a bit of research and talking to experts was needed to get up to date on research itself. The biggest change since I was in the game is the vast amount of information now available on the World Wide Web.

Writing and producing this book has been a bit nerve-wracking. Given that I was advising other people how to do it, my own writing and pronouncements had to pass muster and the book shouldn’t be full of typos. Serious checking has been done!

Other than the research section, which is mostly genealogy-specific, the book could be useful for others. There’s generic advice on writing, editing, working with graphics, layout, printing and promotion.

Incidentally, the family on the book cover are the MacKays – probably living in Southland when the photo was taken. Eric MacKay had been the live-in tutor at the MacGibbon Accommodation House in Mataura in the 1860s. John MacGibbon Snr and his family had gone to Mataura at the end of 1858, armed with a contract from the Otago Provincial Council to run an accommodation house and river ferry. At this time, the Mataura River was a serious barrier to inland travel between Invercargill and Dunedin. The MacGibbons, who were the first settlers in Mataura, remained there until March 1966, when they took up farming at Kelvingrove Run in the nearby Hokonuis. Eric MacKay is holding Leslie, Mary MacKay is holding Helen and the standing children are Ann, Eric and Gordon.

Your Family’s History is described on the Ngaio Press website here.

Why  change Wanganui’s spelling to Whanganui? Surely not because whanganui means ‘large harbour’? Where’s the large harbour?

Looks like a wide upside-down river to me.

Let’s steer clear of both warring factions and, in the interests of accuracy, go for a new name altogether: Waipara North.

Wai= water.

Para=sediment, mud.

Click to enlarge

During spring our property in Martinborough is an exciting place to return to each weekend. Everything, including daffodils, is busting out all over. It’s quite a contrast to our place in Ngaio, Wellington, where most of the vegetation is New Zealand native and is mostly green all year round.

Over the last two weekends, our new Burmese kitten, Java, has been introduced to the great outdoors. He’s coped very well and had a wonderful time. New sights, new scents, grass under his feet, meeting the neighbour’s cat, climbing trees, birds – close, though fortunately not yet personal.

Java takes cover under an artichoke plant. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Here are some little videos of the action.

Climbing a tree for the very first time:

Meeting the neighbour’s cat:

Meeting the neighbour’s cat  again:

Startled by birds – a flock of sparrows flew suddenly over his head. This video got the following comment on YouTube: “It very nice. Cat is good eating in my country but I dont do this.”

Chasing a bit of apple tree pruning:

Java reclining at the end of his big day out

Earlier this year, during the NZ National Library’s family history month, I was asked to give a talk on Writing and publishing your family history. I felt a bit of a fraud really. I had written and published a family history book – Going Abroad – but it was way back in 1997. Since then, I have helped other people research and produce their books, but I haven’t been a practitioner in my own right for more than ten years. But Going Abroad was well reviewed when it first came out and sold well, not just to my own family. There seems to be some residual glory, because I’ve been asked to repeat my presentation in November, as part of a Friends of the National Library lecture series on the changing face of modern publishing.

During my first presentation, I mentioned the tremendous help now available on the Internet to family history researchers. There’s much more information and resources on the Net now than there was in the 1990s when I did my research.

One of my suggestions was that people starting a family history project should establish a blog. Not a general blog, but one devoted specifically to their family history project. It could be made public but it could also be a private blog restricted to people who have been given a password.

The blog is where you could tell people what you’re working on. You could request comment and input. People could respond in the comments section of the blog and even get a discussion going. They could also download files from the blog – for instance a draft family tree in PDF format, photos or scanned documents. Unfortunately only you, the blog owner, can send files to the blog, so other people would need to send their files to you via email, postal mail or personal contact.

You would need to be careful when putting an email address on a blogsite. The actual address must be disguised, or it will be harvested by ’spambots’ and you’ll get a load of spam emails. There are various ways to make your address unharvestable and some are described here.

The blog would be used in conjunction with email. You’d email contacts to tell them something new had been posted.

If you run your blog on public blogging sites like this one (WordPress) or Google’s Blogger, it costs nothing – no setup costs, no ongoing costs. Well…you can pay a small amount if you want more sophisticated options and a large amount of storage space, but the free deal should be more than enough for family historians. I use the free service for this blog.

You don’t need special software. All your editing is done on the web page. It would help to have a broadband connection, though. Dial-up performance could be glacial.

I’ve not previously tried to make a file downloadable from my blog, so here’s a trial. It’s a PDF version of  a family tree I produced some  years ago. Download it here (250K). It’s not a bad demonstration of how a family tree can work as a PDF. Printed out, this occupies over 20 A4 sheets of paper. As a PDF it saves paper and it’s searchable.

Instructions for how to upload a file to a blog and create a download link for it are here.

Family historians could give themselves a web presence without setting up a blogsite. They could set up a website instead. But it would much more trouble and would probably look quite amateurish unless you’re already a web designer. Blog services like WordPress have done the hard work for you. They provide most of what you’d ever want and they make your blogsite look pretty professional even if you’re not. The ‘comments’ facility they offer would be difficult to set up on a standard website. They offer many different basic design layouts, you can personalise the masthead with your own photo and you can select from a variety of sidebar add-ons such as links to other blogs or websites, a search box, ‘This day in History’ and so on.

As well as helping your family history research, the blogsite would be a good place to promote a book or other printed material you might produce. And later, when people come through with inevitable corrections and bits of fascinating new information, onto the blog they go.

Maori people are currently debating which flag, from a number of  options, should be adopted as a Maori flag to fly alongside the New Zealand flag on Waitangi Day. Apart from one design, they are  awful.

But the best of them is actually damn good and should be adopted as the flag for everyone in New Zealand.

Flags from which a 'Maori' flag is being chosen in the current debates. Top left: Flag of the Independent Tribes; top right: the Tino Rangatiratanga flag; bottom left: the current NZ national flag; bottom right: the Red Ensign.

The Flag of the Independent Tribes was first used in 1834 and even served as a kind of national flag until the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. It’s a ghastly bit of cobbling-together. Also offered as sacrificial victims in the Maori flag-choosing process are the current NZ national flag and the Red Ensign. They’re as likely to be chosen as Hone Harawira is to join the ACT Party.

Which leaves just one: the Maori Flag, aka the Tino Rangatiratanga flag. It’s a great flag – simple, stylish, flies well and, with its koru motif, recognisably ours. I’ve yet to find anyone who doesn’t like the design, even if some people wouldn’t want it because of separatist connotations fanned by Maori and Pakeha racists.

Let’s neutralise the separatist connotation by making it the flag for everyone.

If we make it everyone’s flag, it can still be a little bit separatist. By moving on from the Union Jack, it can symbolise our final separation from Britain. (To be followed, asap, by turfing the British monarch as our head of state, and ditching other remnants of colonial cringe.)

The Tino Rangatiratanga flag is much better than the fern motif flag being pushed by Lloyd Morrison and others at NZFlag.com. I’m sick and tired of NZ being represented internationally by black imagery. It must come across to people outside New Zealand as monochromatic, boring and negative. We need some colour. The Tino Rangatiratanga flag gives us colour, but retains enough black to keep the Darth Vader brigade happy.

Personally I’ve long wanted the Hundertwasser flag as our national flag. Indeed, I own a Hundertwasser flag and fly it in my office. But I’m realistic enough to concede it won’t get the nod now. The Tino Rangatiratanga flag is next best in my opinion, and I’d be more than happy to be represented by it at a future Olympic Games.

Though the NZFlag website mainly pushes its favoured design, it does present alternatives, including the other flags I’ve mentioned. Morrison also explains very well why we need a distinctive New Zealand flag. His heart’s in the right place, even if his flag is wrong.

Tom Scott in the Dominion-Post, 31 January 2005.

(Click to enlarge.)

This image, from today’s Dominion-Post, shows the coming realignment of the worst of the Rimutaka hill road – all on the Wellington side of the summit. Work starts later this month and completion can’t come soon enough for those of us who travel back and forth regularly, hoping we won’t meet big trucks on the corners.

It’s a follow-on from the realignment work completed in 2006 on the Te Marua to Kaitoke section of the road between Wellington and Wairarapa. There are bends on the Wairarapa side of the summit that would also benefit from a bulldozer, and I hope  they’re next on the list.

The terrain is such that it will never be an easy road. A road tunnel would transform the trip, but the cost would be so high that it would never get off the ground…well, in this case, under the ground. Legend has it that the Americans volunteered to dig a road tunnel during the Second World War, presumably to improve access to the Featherston Army Camp. Google was unable to confirm.

I just hope that if the road becomes substantially better, it doesn’t attract more logging trucks – in which case we’ll be back to square one again.

The Dominion-Post article is here.

We picked up our new kitten, Java, on Friday night and have spent an interesting weekend with him. There was the expected nervousness and hiding away from the world. But he’s largely come out of his shell and is revealing himself as a friendly, playful animal with a frequent, loud yowl. We’re hoping to hear much less from him when he settles down further. He likes having his tum rubbed – a required attribute. Other required attributes he gets a pass marks on are being inside the bed and playing fighty-bites. (Our immediate family knows what the latter means.) Leapies and head-butts are absent so far but hopefully they’ll emerge. He purrs OK by most cat standards, though not (yet anyway) at the drop of a hat like his predecessor, Bob. Like Bob, he has a taste for power cords and computer wires, so bitter apple lotion will be applied liberally when we get back to Wellington tonight.

It’s nice having a cat in the house again.

Update, 29 July: Java is well settled in and really feeling his oats. I’ve considered renaming him Frenetica, but that could backfire if he turns into an adult slob. But right now he’s quite mad – tears all over the place, playing most furiously. None of our previous Burmese cats have been this lively, but then previously we’ve had kids at home – and earlier Liz was a stay at home mum – to spend more time with them and tire them out. Now there’s no one there during the day and by the time we get home, Java is desperate for attention, fun and games. Yesterday he discovered a big Kirkaldies paper bag:

I’ve discovered a fascinating new website. Well, fascinating for news junkies like myself… It’s the Washington-based Newseum, which collects front pages every day from many newspapers in many countries. Below is today’s link page, saying there are 574 front pages from 53 countries. It it were a weekday there would be more – 800 of the world’s newspapers submit their pages. They include several New Zealand newspapers.

Jumping-off point for today’s North American newspapers. Clicking on a yellow marker brings up a small version of the front page for that locality's newspaper, and it can be made bigger for easy readingy. ( Click to enlarge this image.)

There are similar maps for different regions of the world and newspapers can also be selected from lists and pages of thumbnails. They open up very fast and are moderately readable on the computer screen. However, clicking a button can load a newspaper in much higher resolution PDF form.

The website also has general information about the world of newspapers, and descriptions of the physical Newseum museum and display centre, which opened in April 2009.

Sunday Mail (Brisbane), Sunday Sun (Calgary), El Espectador (Bogota). Click to enlarge.

Gulf News (UAE), Tribune (Mesa, Arizona), Leon Milenio (Mexico). Click to enlarge.