Ashburton, Canterbury, New Zealand - The Band Stand

Band Rotunda, Ashburton, New Zealand, early 1900s.

Communities around the world built band stands in the second half of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century as objects of civic pride and to support the brass band concerts that were important elements of social life.

Ashburton's bulbous-topped band rotunda serves as a platform for speech making on some civic occasion in the early 1900s. The band appears to have been banished from the stand for this occasion but troops or cadets in both Scottish uniforms and naval garb are lined up to left and right of the rotunda. A good number of Ashburton's population appears to have turned out for the event. The railway station located on the southern line can been seen in the distance.

Travel in the Amuri District, North Canterbury, early 1900s

The Hanmer coach leaving Culverden, early 1900s. The sender writes that motorcars have replaced the coach, postmarked 1913.

Before the railway line was extended all the way to Waiau in 1918 - and to Parnassus in 1917 - the Amuri and Hurunui districts relied on stagecoaches to deliver the mails and passengers to points north of Culverden. The various accommodation houses, later improved to hotel status, provided more than a watering hole for the weary traveler.

Waiau Hotel, Hanmer early 1900s

By the early 1910s, service cars were beginning to replace the coaches but bridging remained a problem in such sparsely populated rural districts.

Departure of Service Cars from Hanmer Springs, circa 1910.

Drowning was a leading cause of accidental death in nineteenth century New Zealand for humans, frequently along with the loss of bullock and horse teams as coaches and wagons got washed away.

Till the arrival of the railway and better roading, bulk commodities such as the wool of the "Amuri Wool Kings" had to be moved by bullock wagons down to the shore to be lightered out to coastal steamers.

Wool wagon - 1880s view - Ready Money Robinson's Cheviot Estate.

Kaikoura, New Zealand - Early Views #2

Stagecoach outside the Hapuku general store, just north of Kaikoura on the Seddon to Kaikoura Coach Road, circa 1905.

Land travel in North Canterbury has been difficult since the early days of European settlement. In the mid nineteenth century to the early 1900s, road travel by coach was long and arduous.

The steep, hilly terrain - most vividly impressed upon the mind of even today's road traveler by a drive through the Hundalees - and the rocky, narrow coastline made putting both road and rail links in place difficult.

Wagon passing through one of the many road tunnels on the coastal road south of Kaikoura, circa 1905.

To this day, the geography & climate combine in severe weather to challenge mere humans to keep the transport links free of slips and open. The railway line running through Kaikoura was not completed until 1945.

Air New Zealand Plane on Lease to German Airline Crashes Into Mediterranean

The first Air New Zealand A320 to join the fleet lands at Auckland airport in 2003

An Air New Zealand Airbus A320 leased to German XL Airways for the past two years crashed into the Mediterranean Sea while on a test flight.

The seven people on board - four Air New Zealand pilots and engineers, a New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority official, and two XL Airways pilots - are presumed dead.

The aircraft was being tested in Perpignan, south-east France, prior to being returned to Air New Zealand and flown back to New Zealand later this week.

The aircraft was 4 years old and had accumulated approximately 7000 flight hours in some 2800 flight cycles. Air New Zealand began to introduce the A320 150 seater aircraft into its fleet in 2003. The airline operates the A320 on its Trans-Tasman and Pacific Island routes. There were 12 A320s in the airline's fleet at the end of August.

The crash occurred 29 years to the day that an Air New Zealand DC10 on a tourist flight crashed into Mt Erebus, in Antarctica, killing all 257 passengers and crew. That crash was the worst in the company's and New Zealand's history.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Happy Thanksgiving to All Our Readers

Kaikoura New Zealand - Early Views 1908 #1

Amuri Rutherford sent these two cards to her postcard penpal in Austin, Texas in 1908. Amuri was the daughter of Andrew Rutherford, one of the "Amuri Wool Kings" of the nineteenth century, owner of the large pastoral run Mendip Hills, and Liberal member of parliament.

Some sense of the health difficulties faced in daily life in the early twentieth century are given in Amuri's messages to her Texan penpal. On the reverse of the first card, she writes:

“This seaside resort is 34 miles from “Mendip Hills”.

“Was indeed sorry to hear you had been so ill & hope you will soon be quite strong again. I think sickness detestable. Did I tell you that seven of us had scarlet fever last winter; since then I have not been very strong, but I suppose one cannot get well too suddenly" - Amuri Rutherford, 16 March 1908.

And on the second, Amuri reveals something of the class-structure of the times to be found not only on the large sheep runs, but more generally in New Zealand society:

“We have rather a “difficult” time with our maid servants in N.Z.. At present we have two girls who call themselves “lady (?) helps.” I am teaching my youngest brother (11 years) until Sept. when he goes to Christ’s College [an elite private boarding school], Christchurch. I am just twenty one, & not being the proud possessor of “brains” find it rather difficult to teach him! With kindest regards.”

Amuri Rutherford married Eric Russell, a wealthy grazier from Victoria, Australia, in a society wedding at St Andrews Presbyterian Church, Christchurch in 1912. The couple returned to Victoria to farm Russell's property. Amuri died in Geelong in 1988 at the age of 101.

Janet Holm, Nothing But Wind and Grass, 1992.

Today Kaikoura is a coastal town of 2,172 with eco-tourism constituting the major industry in the form of whale watching, dolphins, and marine birds, supported by farm services.

OECD Forecasts for New Zealand Economy - November 2008

The OECD released its latest Economic Outlook, no 84 on 25 November 2008 which included the following summary of its economic forecasts for New Zealand:

"New Zealand has entered recession ahead of other OECD countries, a victim of simultaneous domestic and foreign shocks. The outlook remains subdued because the large macroeconomic imbalances built up over the past decade -- inflation, housing overvaluation, high household debt and a huge current account deficit -- will take some time to unwind.

Macroeconomic policies are in a good position to cushion the downturn. Tight monetary policy, in place for some time, is now being eased at a rapid pace, and a fiscal expansion is starting from a point of significant surplus and low debt. It will be important to maintain the strong inflation targeting and fiscal sustainability frameworks and to facilitate the shift of resources to the tradeables sector."

The OECD's GDP forecasts for New Zealand were cut by a third to 0.5 percent for the calendar year 2008 and from 2.1 percent to 0.8 percent in 2009 from the previous round of forecasts. Only a small improvement to 1.9 percent growth is expected in 2010.

Inflation that hit 5.1 percent in the September quarter is projected to fall away to 2.3 percent by the end of 2009.

But the deflation beginning to grip the world economy will see a widening of the current account deficit to 9.5 percent of GDP by the end of 2008 with only a small improvement to a deficit of 7.6 percent of GDP in 2009. Unemployment is forecast to reach 5.4 percent by the end of 2009 and 6.0 percent in 2010.

On the plus side, New Zealand's macroeconomic policy settings have positioned the country to absorb the economic shock better than when it entered previous cyclical downturns. The low public debt as a percent of GDP, currently around 17% of GDP, provides a fiscal cushion and permits more room for a larger fiscal expansion than the new National government is likely to contemplate, but circumstances could change that stance.

Where policy settings could be criticised is in the area of monetary policy where the ill-conceived single-minded focus on inflation targeting has blinded the Reserve Bank somewhat to the need for a faster and more expansionary monetary stance. That said, it is to the country's benefit that a more enlightened Governor, Alan Bollard, is at the helm rather than his more ideologically-blinkered predecessor, Don Brash.

Like the official New Zealand economic forecasts released in the last month or two, the OECD forecasts likely underestimate the gravity of the economic situation facing both New Zealand and the world economy. The unwinding of the debt crisis in the US and its ripple impact on the rest of the world will likely take longer and involve a steeper plunge in economic activity than these sets of forecasts indicate.

The track record of economic forecasting is that forecasters are notoriously bad at picking the timing of economic downturns but even worse at estimating how deep the economic decline is in severe downturns.

US economic commentators are picking the current recession to be as bad as the W-shaped recession of the early 1980s - essentially 2 recessions, 2 VVs make a W! - but the structural change being wrought through the financial sector in many economies is more likely to result in an recession more like the magnitude of 1973-1975.

[Personal note - this is not a kuaka (godwit) twittering away, but the analysis of a macroeconomist who studies the business cycle. And, if I may be immodest, who warned in an economics article in the mid 1990s of the grave danger of the derivatives market causing a systemic collapse of the financial and real sectors resulting in international financial instability. Small good that did the world!]