VOIP SUPER SERVICE SLAYS PHONE-BILLS

As they say, it pays to shop around. It also pays to check and check on what you are told. For a long time the only access to the Internet available where I am was dialup, until by the grace of God ADSL broadband was made available in late 2012, about three years ahead of schedule. But when I investigated VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol--which means running your landline phone services over the Internet instead of on the traditional hardware, whilst retaining the same telephone number/s) I was told by what seemed a knowledgeable provider that ADSL was not fast enough. VDSL was needed. Which ruled out VOIP for me, because Chorus has not provided VDSL.

But when I refused to accept what that provider had told me and did some deeper research on Google I found a discussion site that seemed to prove it wrong. It also pointed to the cheapest VOIP provider in New Zealand: 2Talk. The discussion did put question-marks over 2Talk's service, but as one very satisfied person said, 'If it works you don't need support.' And in practice I found the support to be excellent.

I called 2Talk, and after waiting on hold for a very long time found out that ADSL is fast enough to drive VOIP, and helped by the helpful salesman I determined the best package for my needs. The prices were amazingly low, so if I swapped from Telecom I would save a lot, yet at the same time I would as a normal part of the deal be getting a huge range of services both basic and luxurious that Telecom cannot provide (or if it can it has never offered them to me).

2Talk referred me to one of its agents BanxSystems, a company that to my delight manifested superlative service, even in passing offering me other services, and far more capacity at far lower prices than other providers--such as ten times the storage capacity: a gigabyte instead of 100MB.

Even better they initiated all the switching-over for me while I was on the phone, and the VOIP hardware, a good British machine, was couriered to me the morning after I clicked on agreement. As the Courier Post lady said, 'You remember people like that.' You do indeed, and you keep dealing with them. When the transfer of the numbers actually happened it was a simple, smooth, error-free, worry-free change. Banx linked into my computer and did all the configuration for me, guided me quickly and professionally through a few queries, and I was away.

In these days when service is often so poor, or even non-existent, to it is a joy to deal with a company that gives excellent service, and even goes far beyond the extra mile. Take a bow Banx :-) You understand the basic of business: Look after your customers and the bottom line will look after itself; look after your bottom line and sooner or later your customers will look somewhere else.

Also take a highly-deserved bow Ben at 2Talk (a very service-oriented leader on their help-desk), because when 2Talk and Banx ran into a roadblock created by that band of knave$ called Choru$ (whose actions constantly show that it cares about money not people), he worked out a way round it--and thus provided what Chorus had refused to provide, despite the promises it had made years ago. Without his sterling efforts my transfer to VOIP could not have happened.

(The only broadband we can get in Rocky Bay is ADSL1, the slowest form of DSL. Chorus said years ago that its bottom line in New Zealand would be ADSL2, so no one should be on less, and by now most New Zealanders should be on VDSL or fibre. The 'roadblock' was that 2Talk provides its VOIP service only on ADSL2, but with a bend and tweak, some lateral thinking via a sister company and willing effort it can get past that and use ADSL1, and it did.)

On top of all that I was delighted to find that the performance of the broadband line was much better with 2Talk. Under Telecom the download speed was about 5.5Mbps on SpeedTest. But with 2Talk the test averages generally hovers round 7Mbps, plus or minus 0.1Mbps, with a best so far of 7.15Mbps, which is about the fastest you can expect from ADSL1. I have not seen it go below 6.5Mbps during the test. Not brilliant by international or even national standards, thanks to Chorus, but the best to be expected in the present technical circumstances.

As if that were not enough you get an amazing level of comprehensive, detailed control over your line/s via 2Talk's software, as well as options on your landline not available on the Waiheke exchange, such as Caller ID--all bundled at no extra charge. In fact, Caller ID is so clever that when a call is coming in it looks up the number in the White Pages and tells you who is calling. You also get as part of the bundle such things as hold music (the music of your choice), blacklisted numbers (so that people you do not want calling you can never get through), sophisticated forwarding options, multiple numbers on your one physical line with different answerphone messages for each, conference calls, all conversations recorded in full if you wish, call-history, a list of missed calls, and so on--the juicy list is long.

One small aspect of having a voip phone that I find a constant boon is having such wide-ranging and precise control over the incoming volume at my fingertips, because it enables me to shut down to a whisper the crass choices for on-hold 'music' made by the musically-challenged or damp down a loud voice or PABX whose output is too high.

My move to VOIP can be summed up by something the Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Auckland said to me many years ago when he was exulting over a new artificial-intelligence computer system that his department had just had donated: 'It's like having a Rolls-Royce when you only had a bicycle before.' I would never want to go back. I would upgrade his comment: 'It's like being beamed up from your bicycle to the Starship Enterprise.'

When you move to VOIP you do not have to chuck out your old analogue phones. You can use them as cheap, dumb extensions on your VOIP system. To do that you get an ATA converter (such as the inexpensive CISCO SPA122) from PB Tech (which is the best place to buy hardware and software in Auckland) and plug your old phones into it.

The $$$ bottom line? There are some one-off costs to set up VOIP--a phone, an ATA converter if you get one, and the cost of transferring your phone number and setting it up ($50)--but the savings every month will compensate for that, and the Rolls-Royce/Enterprise is a joy to use.

...

Footnote: It is amazing, given all the above, that Telecom (now calling itself Shark--whoops, Spark--for some peculiar reason known only to the snottiest little green men on Alpha Centauri's third rock) does not have a VOIP offering. Its staff think it will have one, sometime, but it does not have one now. How very odd! If it did it could be making a lot more money from the same number of lines, because if people now have, say, three physical lines, one for voice, one for the Internet and one for fax, they could put all three on one VOIP line, then Telecom could sell the other two physical lines to two other VOIP customers. Instead it is letting 2Talk and Banx and others walk away with its customers. And it is highly unlikely that it will ever get them back. It keeps blinding itself to the fact that it created and continues to create customers for everyone else. Every single customer with some other supplier is one that it created. It needs to change its mindset, not its name. Changing its name will only make things worse, because there is a lot of brand-loyalty attached to 'Telecom.'

ROCKY BAY NEVER WAS OMIHA

A Waiheke Island Myth

Part 1

On Waiheke Island, New Zealand, a myth has grown up among a handful of people in the Rocky Bay Village that both the village and the bay at its foot have an alternative name: Omiha. Or, worse, that Omiha is the 'real' name and Rocky Bay is only an alternative of little or no significance and not in daily use. And that 'Omiha' is the original Maori name. All that is at best an ignorant error or a mistaken falsehood, at worst a wilful lie.

As that map of the original subdivision proves, clearly labelled as such in the middle, the original Maori name of the land that became the Rocky Bay Village was Kuakarau. The land was a block of Maori land called the Kuakarau Block (plus a tiny bit of the Whakanewha Block in the bottom east corner, just above where it says No. 19 on the picture). The old spelling was Kauakarau, as above, but due to the late Kato Kauwhata, who was then the Maori Elder on Waiheke, that was corrected to Kuakarau and gazetted as that by the New Zealand Geographic Board in 2004.

The 'Omiha' thing was nothing but the invention of a couple of Irish-Belgian Pakeha, who grossly insulted Maoritanga when for marketing reasons they appropriated a whole lot of Maori symbolism in their marketing prospectus so as to sell what in today's money was over six million dollars worth of sections in their subdivision. For that they needed a Maori name, so they changed 'Rocky Bay', the correct name of the bay to 'Omiha Bay', which they had no right in law to do, then used the first word of that unlawful label as their name for the name of the village, which had nothing to do with the original name of the land: Kuakarau. But history and usage prevailed, so the right name, Rocky Bay, again became the name by which the bay was known by all and sundry, and therefore the village too. As the old saying goes: 'Truth will out.'

The bay first appears labelled Rocky Bay on an 1865 Maori Land Court map that accompanied a successful claim in that year by three Maori men to joint-ownership of the Kuakarau Block (there is a copy of that map later on this page). In none of the genealogies that they recounted to the Court, which it recorded in the minutes, and nowhere in the Court record, is there any mention of any 'Omiha' or 'Miha' or or 'O Miha' or 'Mihi' or 'Au Miha' (which covers all of the spurious verbal stories about the 'Omiha' name that have been bandied about at various times--none of them with any official documentary provenance and all false). The Court minutes make no mention of a single one of those variations on 'Omiha', only of Kuakarau. Why should it? They are all arrantly false. That block was acquired by a Pakeha in 1897, then farmed. Twenty-five years later it was subdivided and became the present village. As the photos show, such as the one below which was taken in or about 1922 before the subdivision, it was then only farmland and bush.

The error, the mistaken falsehood, wilful lie, or whatever it may be in whatever quarter... can be traced to the misreading of a Crown map of 1877--i.e., reading the name of a mere whare (a Maori hut) as the name of a bay, and ignoring the label 'Rocky Bay' and moving that label to Whakanewha Bay. To those blunders were was added work behind the scenes--outside due process of law--by parties with a personal interest that they did not declare, sometimes embellished with a nice little story for which there is no documentary provenance. To that has now been added misfeasance--wrongdoing by officials--blatant, egregious wrongdoing by officials who lied to the New Zealand Geographic Board (NZGB) and wilfully misled it into a wrong judgement.

No private, unoffficial sign can change any of the facts, even if it has just been refurbished (in mid June 2017) with a lick or two of paint. An error is an error, not matter how many times it is repeated, or painted.

In New Zealand law there is only one lawful way to put a name on the map, and unless that has been done a name does not have true legal status. You must apply to the New Zealand Geographic Board (NZGB), which must investigate the truth, and when it has established the true name, which should be very easy, it gazettes it. That is the due process of law. But in the case of Rocky Bay a few people worked illegally, behind the scenes, to 'establish' a falsehood--namely that 'Omiha Bay' is the original Maori name for the bay, and 'Omiha' the original Maori name for the village above it. Their unlawful efforts have given rise to the 'Omiha' myth, because they created a particle of 'provenance', which looked like truth, but was and is entirely false. Their unlawful efforts were nothing but artificial insinuation, the seeding of illegal records, which were then innocently copied over and over again by people who did not know better and assumed that the falsities were true. Groundless habit stomped all over the Crown and free-custom facts and circumvented due process of law.

As well as being unlawful the 'Omiha' myth is wrong: it is entirely untrue. The proof of that was established long ago. In 1877 the government, the Crown, did an extremely detailed map of Waiheke Island, a map so detailed that it even recorded the names of whares (Maori huts) as the names of those who owned them or dwelt in them (in those days roads were virtually non-existent and thus postal addresses had yet to be so dwellings were marked with names). That map clearly recorded the name of the bay as Rocky Bay, as had the Maori Land Court map twenty-two years earlier. And in the area above it, which became the Rocky Bay Village, the map also recorded three whares: Kuakarau, after which the block was named, and two subsidiary whares, Ohinearei and Omiha. So Omiha was only the name of a whare, never the name of either the bay or the village.

The notion that 'Omiha' is the alternative name for Rocky  Bay is therefore erroneous, a misreading of a map, a misreading that for some became wilful, a misreading given false provenance by force of personality, by mana, by endless self-reinforcing repetition, by the scornful rejection of every bit of the hard evidence to the contrary, by pulling fictitious strings behind the scenes, etc. Worst of all, none of that activity employed due process of law, it evaded, avoided and ignored the process laid down in the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008 and the equivalent  legislation that preceded it. In short, 'Omiha' was illegally inserted on to the map (by Pakeha who shall not be named here to protect possible sensitivities).

There is not a skerrick of true documentary evidence for the notion that 'Omiha' was ever the Maori name for either the village or the bay at its foot. On the contrary. But the solid, independent evidence in official, Crown documentation done in 1865 and 1877 is for Rocky Bay--and no other name--for the village and therefore also the village--all Waiheke's seaside villages take their names from the bays on which they are situated. But, unfortunately, repetition of any myth takes on the semblance of established fact, and in the case of 'Omiha' that has now reached such a state that anyone who shows the documentary proof that there is only name--Rocky Bay--for both the bay and the village is likely to be treated with contempt, pilloried, mocked and scorned, ignored, even abused. In earlier years what was then called the Waiheke Community Board appointed me as Rocky Bay spokesperson, which was perfectly correct, but then, to my astonishment, refused to have Rocky Bay gazetted.

Misrepresentation and falsification of history remain misrepresentation and falsification no matter how many times they are asserted. Assertion does not create fact. Fact is what fact is. Endless repetition of an unlawful falsehood does not make it true. The undeniable fact here is that Rocky Bay is the name of the bay and the village. Not 'Omiha.' It does not matter how many times you claim that the Earth is flat, it remains round.

To repeat what bears repeating, because it is so often dishonoured, in New Zealand law no geographic placename is official until gazetted by the New Zealand Geographic Board, as laid down in the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008. Unfortunately, 10,000 New Zealand placenames have yet to be gazetted--including Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Waiheke Island, etc., etc., etc. Thus in the twenty-first century the map of New Zealand is a mess, because there are a vast number of names in everyday use, names that are well-established in free custom, even with a great deal of Crown provenance, but have no official standing in law. That includes Rocky Bay; for despite being recorded officially by the Crown in 1865 and 1877 it has still not been gazetted!!! Or even recognised. One hundred and forty years, surely, is enough time for a branch of modern officialdom to notice what the government's judicial and administrative branches laid down in the nineteenth century--for Crown employees to obey the Crown.

Unfortunately the bureaucrats who advise the NZGB, the so-called secretariat, has repeatedly lied to the Board--they committed misfeasance--by claiming that 'Omiha' is the original Maori name, which has misled the Board into making rejecting the truth: Rocky Bay. Original means first, it means that nothing preceded it, and that that is a demonstrable, documented fact. None of the those qualifications apply to 'Omiha'. It is not even an original Maori name for the bay or the village, only for a whare that was there in the nineteenth century, and by 1922 had been long gone. But, of course, bureaucrats cannot bring themselves to say 'We goofed; we'll fix it', so they still fight to maintain the 'Omiha' falsehood. Still, they are in effect rudely telling Rocky Bay people that they do not know where they live.

But the official vacuum of 10,000 has enabled unofficial, de facto 'standards' to multiply, and in the case of Rocky Bay they have added seeming credence to the Omiha myth by repeating it in ways that look official but are neither official nor lawful. Google Earth, for example, has picked up the error, as have other publishers of maps, from the worst of those de facto 'standards', and the source of many repeats of the Omiha error, which is the unofficial system, the Address Finder, created and administered by the New Zealand Post Office under the management of a Mr Geoffrey Pearse, its Addressing Services Manager. That system not only perpetuates the myth it has gone so far as to enforce it rigidly. Its Address Finder refuses to recognise Rocky Bay; it only recognises Omiha; it threatens large organisations with the loss of bulk-mailing discounts if they do not comply with its system; and its online version bluntly declares Rocky Bay invalid and only Omiha valid. That bureaucratic ignorance and instransigence means that the computer systems of entities all over the world which access the Post Office system to check the validity of New Zealand addresses are being wilfully and unlawfully misled; and in consequence when people in Rocky Bay fill in their personal details on paper or online they later find that the 'Rocky Bay' they put down has been altered to 'Omiha'--a place that does not, in truth, exist on Waiheke. And is confused with Omaha on the mainland.

NZ Post/Mr Pearse points the finger of blame, excuse, justification--call it what you will--at other entities, including the Fire Service, Auckland Council, and Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), and LINZ's list of unofficial placenames, from which NZ Post has chosen not to select Rocky Bay-- despite copious evidence against that and many presentations of the truth. Officers in LINZ, which serves the NZGB, point a finger at the Council and, despite the indisputable documentary provenance, falsely claimed that Omiha is 'the original Maori name' for the 'locality'. Then they compounded that falsehood by not putting it square on the village on its ungazetted map, instead off the side!). So a horde of falsehoods circles the main unlawful falsehood, like crippled rats round a cache of rotten food.

One of the countless entities that have been boondoggled by the combination of the Omiha myth and the enforcement of it by the Post Office's unofficial system is of course the Electoral Commission. One effect of that was that not long after I arrived on the island many years ago I found myself disenfranchised--removed from the electoral roll--because my new address would not go into the electoral system. Since then the Electoral Commission has had to add a private area to its system, an area that only its staff can access, in which they can store correct information to counter whatever wrong information the Post Office might insist on. The national call centres of the three emergency services--ambulance, fire and police--also have the wrong name for the Rocky Bay Village in their systems, which creates a dangerous situation, because people in Rocky Bay may only have time to blurt out 'Rocky Bay' before they have to hang up, so the response may be too late. Life and property are constantly at risk due to the bureaucratic botch-up, the unlawful label, the wilful messing about behind the scenes.its system.

That danger must be emphasised by repetitition. If you live in Rocky Bay and have an emergency, and only have time to gasp out your street and village, the service you needed would not be able to find you. Your big heart-attack would kill you, the thugs would invade your home, your home would burn to the ground. Therefore that artificial insinuation of a false name, outside law, is not just a chronic nuisance it is life-threatening.

The Earthquake Commission is another of the countless organisations that have the wrong information, thanks to the unlawful Omiha myth and Post Office's unlawful enforcement of it (which caused an EQC officer to think that she could drive all the way to the island, because she thought the person in Rocky Bay who wanted an evaluation lived in Omaha, which is up north on the mainland, where the Prime Minister has a holiday home). A huge amount of time and energy all over the world is being wasted, because people are obliged by myth and bureaucratic Post Office intransigence to 'fix' computer data that was never wrong. The danger caused by wrong information in the emergency services is increased by the fact that 'Omiha' and 'Omaha' sound exactly the same, and that there is coincidence of like-sounding street-names Omiha Road and Omaha Drive.

The unlawful Omiha myth and the enforcement of it by the Post Office can mean, and does mean, that items destined for a Rocky Bay address may not arrive. They go elsewhere, or you may be told that delivery is impossible so they will never be collected, or they may be returned to the sender marked 'undeliverable'. I was on the verge of being accused of theft because a valuable item from Dell Computers, which was to be paid for on arrival, did not reach me. I finally tracked it down to a courier bin in Christchurch, and the courier company told me that there was an address very close to mine in that city, but it had not been delivered because everything in the address did not match there. In that case I knew something was missing, because of the close call with a serious accusation, but I often wonder how many deliveries never reach people, which they never knew about.

It is long past the time that the Omiha myth was acknowledged as a myth that was perpetuated unlawfully, and dismissed and killed off. Only accurate information should rule. Inaccurate information always causes problems, major and minor, and it always wastes time--in this case the time of people responsible for computer systems all over the planet.

To get things right, Rocky Bay, and that name alone, should be gazetted for the name of the village and the name of the bay. It alone has the indisputable provenance; it alone has the indisputable evidence; it alone is indisputably the true name for both.

The statutes are crystal clear. The Imperial Laws Application Act 1988 says that when due process of law is not followed, when justice and right are denied or even only deferred, then any decision made is 'void and holden for error' and 'shall be redressed and holden for none' (there shall be legal action and the wrong action will be made nothing). That specifically applies, amongst other things, to 'free customs', which that Act gives legal force in Crown low, and in this case 'Rocky Bay' has both government provenance, Crown provenance, and long-established free custom. 'Omiha', the whare long gone, has neither. On top of that, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 says that in official decisions 'everyone has the right to the observance of the principles of natural justice,' and the Privy Council has ruled that 'natural justice' means 'fairness writ large.' Thus any decision that does not support Rocky Bay as the name of the bay and the village, to the exclusion of anything else, is unlawful many times over. It is not just, it is not right, it is not natural justice, it is not fairness writ large, it has nothing to do with due process of law. And thus it is open to legal action--which should and must be taken against wrongdoing--'shall be redressed'. This matter of the right names of this bay and village should have been fixed years ago with a simple please and a thank-you, but the unlawful actions and misfeasance determined to perpetuate a false name and give it legal claim have now escalated this matter to war. That is most regrettable. But take notice, all those officials who attempt to support the wrong names and refuse to support the right ones, you will face legal action. And statute and provenance and free custom will by the grace of God hand you defeat. Crown provenance of 1877 and the usage of free custom establish the truth; the 'Omiha' myth cannot stand against it.

(All those who are in any way related, however distant, to the man or woman called Omiha [both genders have been claimed], and whose hut is labelled on the 1877 map, should declare their interest and stay out of the discussion. The same goes for any who seek, by whatever spurious excuse, to support the unsupportable, false assertion that 'Omiha' is the original Maori name of the bay and the village. It was the Kuakarau Block; it was Kuakarau land; 'Omiha' was at most a subsidiary whare)

Behind the Scenes
A part of this constant push behind the scenes to get Omiha as the name of the village arises from a nice little story that it goes back to a captured slave woman called Omiha who lived where Omiha Road now is (but NZGB bureaucrats have suggested that it was actually a man called Moses and that it was O Miha, meaning 'Of Moses'; and have also suggested that it is Au Miha meaning rough seas and whale calves). But although strong feelings about an ancestor are very understandable, that does not give those who may have them any right to trample on history, the truth, common practice, established practice and due process of law to get their way, and thereby endanger life and property because 111 calls will  bring a speedy response or no response at all. Perhaps the notion that 'Omiha' was the name of the whole village was originally a misapprehension coloured by romantic desire, which then became an article of fond family faith, but the best way of keeping faith with ancestors--indeed the only way--is to stick to the truth. It is certainly not keeping faith with any forebear who got things wrong by blocking attempts to set things right.

One of the more recent attempts to set things right was again blocked by behind-the-scenes efforts.They are obliged to be behind the scenes because there are no facts to support them. That has been going on for years: unlawful manipulation behind the scenes to make semingly official the will of a few, perhaps of only one or two families. Every attempt to install the truth has been invisibly killed off.

It is disappointing that prime movers for one family deploy great mana to triumph over the historical facts. Those persons are most wonderful and admirable, truly most wonderful and admirable,  but even great mana cannot make endlessly repetition of false facts into true ones. And in this case, if they were to be true to what they usually are--blindingly honest and manifesting great integrity--they would change, would side with historical fact, would side with long-established common usage by the rest of the world, would side with due process of law, would cease getting at decision-makers behind the scenes, would put public safety at the top of the list, and would admit the truth--namely, that the two places where 'Omiha' might look official (village and bay) are only false provenance arising from groundless repetition. Then the only support for be for the only name that has true provenance as the name of the village and the bay: Rocky Bay.

The Facts, the Evidence, the Indisputable Historical Provenance
Again, one of the earliest pieces of documentary provenance for the name of the bay being Rocky Bay is on the official government map dated 1877, registration number 1667, held by the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which shows 'land adjudicated by the Native Land Court, land sold under Sir George Grey's Regulations 1853, old land claims, penny-an-acre grants, grants under Auckland Waste Lands Act 1858, and land alienated to general government.' The entire map covers Waiheke Island. This is the bit that covers Rocky Bay:

As all can see, the name of the bay is Rocky Bay--and nothing else. In those far-off days there was no village, just a collection of Maori establishments on which there were four Maori names recorded, two for areas, two for whares. The two names for areas were Kauakarau (a misspelling of Kuakarau that was later corrected by the late Kato Kauwhata who was then Waiheke's Maori Elder, and the correction was confirmed and gazetted by the NZGB), and Ko Hikapua. (Kaukarau is on the map twice, and circled between the repeats is what the librarian at Auckland Museum has identified as 342, a survey number associated with Kauakarau). The names of the two subsidiary whares recorded were Onhinearei and Omiha. Omiha  is said by some to be a woman, by others to be a man, who lived in that whare; others have other explanations. That spot is now the western end of  Omiha Road, so the name of the road, and only that, has excellent provenance. Unfortunately, the name of the Ohinearei whare has been lost to history, because nothing is named after it.

The big bay east of Rocky Bay, labelled Whakanewha Bay on the 1877 map, which is now the seaward edge of the Whakenewha Regional Park, and was in those days the seaward edge of the Maori block called the Whakanewha Block, is also misrepresented by the New Zealand Geographic Board's secretariat, as well by many uniformed printers of maps, which label it as 'Rocky Bay (Whakanewha Bay)', which is quite wrong, a fact underlined by the placement of the modern label 'Whakanewha' on the land above that bay, land that does not spill over to the land above Rocky Bay. So Rocky Bay is Rocky Bay; Whakanewha Bay is Whakanewha Bay. Two separate names for two bays. That is also what modern usage has long established. Whakanewha Bay is also clearly labelled as that and nothing else on an 1857 Crown map prepared by the Admiralty (detailed further down in this blog article), indeed far more clearly than on the 1877 map.

The documentation with the government's 1877 map, which was supplied by Auckland War Memorial Museum, states that the then government recorded the names of Maori whares. They were clearly marked with a small squarish dot beside them to differentiate them from other details. In the Rocky Bay area there are two names beside square dots: Ohinearei and Omiha. Omiha was a whare. A whare. A whare is not a bay or a village. It is a whare. A Maori hut. That makes nonsense of the chronic false insertion of 'Omiha' as the name of the bay and the village. As does the photo taken before the subdivision was done in 1922, which shows no whare; whatever had been there was long gone.

Underlining that the definition of 'whare' in the on-line Maori dictionary: whare

Play

1. (noun) house, building, residence, dwelling, shed, hut, habitation, suit (cards).

Not village, not a bay, not a beach. But even if it did include any of those words the government map of 1877 does not plonk 'Omiha' in the bay or splat it across the village area. It places it on a spot that is now one end of Omiha Road.

Added to all that ineluctable provenance is Wise's Auckland Provincial Directory of 1950-51, 'containing the official list of over 1200 townships' extending from Gisborne to Whangarei. It had an entry for Rocky Bay on page 132 between its entries for Riverhead and Roranui, but between its entries for Omapere and Oneroa there is nothing--there is no Omiha. Indeed, there is no Omiha anywhere in Wise's, not just not on Waiheke Island. The listing for Rocky Bay did not show the names of every resident, only forty-nine of them, including the New Zealand Insurance Agent, J.F. McAuslin, and Mrs Annie M. O'Brien, after whose family Bush Road was changed to O'Brien Road, which is Rocky Bay's central main road and became the road into the village when it was extended up to the quarry later in the 1950's. Thus it is clear that the Omiha myth has been wrongly pushed upon us behind the scenes in far more recent years.

Added to those provenances is the note on this genealogical site (click on the link and search in the text on 'Rocky Bay'), which shows that the famous painter C.F. Goldie, who was born in 1870, holidayed in Rocky Bay in the early part of the twentieth century. There is also the undeniable fact that the Rocky Bay Regatta has been running since 1948, and is never called the Omiha Regatta.

In Islands of the Gulf by Shirley Maddock & Don Whyte published by Collins in 1968, she refers on page 280 paragraph 3 to 'the Hodsons at Rocky Bay'. ('Omiha' is of course not mentioned anywhere in the book--it is a non-fiction work).

Added to that is the fact that a local Rocky Bay society set up in 1933, which was persuaded to call itself after the woman/man called Omiha whose whare had been close to a parcel of  land it purchased, and so was persuaded to call itself the Omiha Recreational and Welface Society Incorporated (OWRS). But, despite that baseless oddity, it states clearly in Clause 3 of its articles of incorporation, dated the 19th of October 1933, that it is there for the Rocky Bay community; it makes no mention of any joint name; it is all Rocky Bay, Rocky Bay, Rocky Bay, and nothing else.

False Pillory
There may be some who see exposing the unlawful Omiha myth as an affront to the OWRS, even as an attack on it. It most certainly is not. The OWRS is not affected by establishing the geographic facts from solid historical evidence. Its name remains the same. A society in a village or town or city is not obliged to use the name of its locality, even if logically it should. It can call itself whatever it pleases, as did the OWRS--but as shown it clearly stated that the reason for its existence is Rocky Bay.

There may be some who think that exposing the Omiha myth is an attack on Maori and Maoridom. It most certainly is not. It is only on an error that happens to be a Maori word. If things were the other way about and the provenance were for Omiha and the myth was for Rocky Bay it would be the latter that would be attacked as wrong. I have successfully applied for the gazetting of three names on Waiheke Island: Te Akau O Hine, Tanerore Cove, and the correction of a misspelling--Kauakarau Bay to Kuakarau Bay. All are Maori names, and I was proud and happy to establish them in law.

No, the attack is on an error and nothing else. Certainty of nomenclature for our whereabouts is important and untoward consequences are always caused by uncertainty and error, particularly in this electronic, Internet age. This is all about setting the record straight.

Mr Jones has the right to be called Mr Jones and nothing else, because that is what his documentary record shows and proves. So does Rocky Bay, for the same reason. To persist in calling him Mr Smith because someone decided to prefer that is not just perpetuating a pointless myth, it is not just perpetuating a left-field 'mistake', it is wilfully perpetuating a lie. He is Jones, Jones, Jones.

In the real world the road-signs and bus-signs etc., have it right. It is long past time for everything else to do the same:

The graphic below is what the official map should show, and what the New Zealand Geographic Board should gazette--these names in these places, and nothing else. That is established local usage, long-established, and it alone should be respected above all else--not a name only used erroneously because of a blunder, a misreading of a map years ago.

Part 2: More Crown Provenance

Until recently what is in Part 1 was all that was known. But now even more forceful Crown provenance has been discovered, with the admirable help of librarians at the Auckland War Museum Library and three divisions of the Auckland Public Library. That multiple provenance adds further proof (not that any more was needed) first that Omiha has no claim to be on the Rocky Bay map as the name of the village or bay, second that to call it the original Maori name is arrogantly false; and third that the true name of Whakanewha Bay is exactly that.

The land that is now the Rocky Bay Village was in 1877 known to the Crown as the Kauakarau Block. It had of course been Maori land, and most Maori land became Crown land and private land, sometimes via the Crown and sometimes by direct negotiation with chiefs. (again, 'Kauakarau' was found to be a misspelling of Kuarakau, and was corrected and gazetted by the NZGB, so the fully legal name of the bay to the left of Rocky Bay in the above map of Rocky Bay is Kuakarau Bay.)

A clearer copy of the 1877 Crown map of Waiheke Island, showing only the Rocky Bay area and its immediate surrounds, is below. As can be seen, Kuakarau (to give it its corrected spelling) is on the map twice, once with dot beside it, which denotes a whare, and once without a dot beneath the claim number 352, which denotes an area. So it is obvious that the owner of the Kuakarau whare was also a major landowner.

When the land that is now the Rocky Bay Village was subdivided and sold to the public in 1922 by its then owner Judge O'Brien, it covered the Kuakarau Block and a tiny part of the Whakanewha Block (the bottom south-east corner of the village). So the only Maori words that have a Crown claim on the Rocky Bay locality are, primarily, Kuakarau, and to a very small extent, Whakanewha. The whares called Ohinearei and Omiha, which were on the Kuakarau Block, have no claim of any sort to be the name of the village or the bay. They were subsidiary whares on Kuakarau land, and are long gone, and were long gone in 1922.

The subdivision map shows clearly that the land was the Kuakarau Block. An excerpt is below, preceded by the clearer scan of the 1877 map referred to in Part 1. The first, to emphasise again, is a Crown document; it is Crown provenance, irrefutable. The second, the 1922 subdivision map, employs Crown nomenclature for the blocks of land involved, the Kuakarau and Whakanewha Blocks.

Before those 1877 and 1922 mappings, another map was done, in a survey from 1849 to 1855 by the Royal Navy, the Admiralty, a Crown entity, which mapped the approaches to Auckland Harbour, and that of course included a map of Waiheke Island. Its date of publication is 1857. It shows Whakanewha Bay labelled as that, which was perfectly fitting, because it was the seaward edge of the Whakanewha Block, which is now the Whakanewha Regional Park, and therefore the name has Crown provenance twice over, for land and sea, and has the name has also been in free custom since. This is that Crown map:

And close-ups of the relevant parts (Kuakarau is here misspelt as Kowhakarau):

In short, Whakanewha Bay is that, and nothing else. It is not 'Rocky Bay,' it is not 'Rocky Bay (Whakanewha Bay)', it is not 'Half Moon Bay', or anything else it might have been called in word or on maps that have ungazetted terms.

And Rocky Bay is Rocky Bay, both the bay and village. It is not 'Omiha Bay' and the village is not 'Omiha'. 'Omiha' has no factual or lawful claim to be a name for Rocky Bay, or any locality on Waiheke Island. Any map that says so is ignorant of Crown fact, it is unofficial and illegal.

Part 3: Fatal Consequence

The Post Office Address Finder, run by Mr Geoffey Pearse, is assumed to be both official and accurate because it is on the Post Office website under the Post Office logo. It is neither. It would be better called Mr Pearse's Address Mangler; it is not official, and is only as accurate as his thoughts. Its consequences can be fatal, and have been, because computer systems all over the world, public, private and corporate, are linked to it.

When people who live in a place called ABC, and call it ABC in free custom, particularly when their free custom is backed by long-established provenance on nineteenth-century Crown maps, but the correct ABC is replaced by an incorrect XYZ in Mr Pearse's Address Mangler, the first consequence is that they have been insulted. It is very bad manners. Because when the people in ABC fill out their address, a data-entry person somewhere in the world will find that that will not go in. No matter how hard they try ABC will be blocked by the Address Mangler, which will force them to enter XYZ. That means the people at that ABC are being treated as so stupid that they do not know where they live, and must have their ignorance and stupidity corrected by people with superior knowledge. That is an insult. And the time of countless data-entry people all over the world is being wasted.

Further up the scale of consequences is the inconvenience, wasted time and disruption caused by problems with mail and courier deliveries, because they are delayed, or misdirected, or lost, or people are told they cannot be delivered and must spend time making corrective arrangements. The envelope or parcel has ABC on it, but the delivery people are told by the Address Mangler that there is no such place, and they may, as has happened, send it off to some place that has a similar address.

Next up the scale is problems with the Electoral Commission, with the worst being that someone may be disenfranchised until the Commission can sort things out. That is on top of the Commission having to spend time and money adding a private part to its database in which it could record the ABCs despite having to print the XYZs on the rolls.

By far the most important computer systems linked to the Address Mangler are the ones at New Zealand's national call-centres for the Police, the Fire Service, and the Ambulance Service. When those services are called, people are not talking to local services, they are talking to the national centres. So when someone living in an ABC is faced with a criminal threat such as a home-invasion, or has a house-fire, or is having a heart-attack or some other medical emergency, and calls 111, they are talking to people far away in national centres. And those people know only what is on screen in front of them--which is fed from the Address Mangler, which does not have the ABCs. It has XYZs. So if callers only have time to scream down the phone. 'I live in HIJ Street in ABC' then hang up, the emergency services will not find them, or will take so long to realise the truth that they may arrive too late. 

That has happened. The worst consequence was fatal. For example, a young woman died on the west coast of Auckland because the emergency services were directed to the wrong place. The national call centre was not at fault. It was the Address Mangler.

In the case of Rocky Bay, even adding 'Waiheke' to the scream may not help, because there's a Waiheke [River] in the South Island, so time may be lost on that aspect of the confusion.

If Geoffrey Pearse gets it into his head that a place is called XYZ, because someone failed to look up an authoratative source, or lied out of a vested interest or a family interest, or exerted false political interference, or a LINZ official was ignorant, careless, stupid or misfeasant, etc., etc., then Mr Pearse will record XYZ in the Address Mangler--then will stubbornly resist all attempts by anyone in ABC to correct it, particularly if the same unlawful false information has also been artificially insinuated into some Council paper.

So all those responsible for illegally perpetuating the 'Omiha' lie and using it to replace the right name, Rocky Bay, the name long-established in Crown provenance and free custom, are all guilty of perpetuating a situation which at best is a daily insult; at middle is inconvenient, disruptive, time-wasting and anti-democratic; at worst is damnably dangerous, and could easily prove fatal. They have put a demonstrable falsehood above fact, above law, above human life. The lie is easily fixed; but they cannot be bothered. Gazette Rocky Bay, then Mr Pearse will be forced to correct his Address Mangler.

Those responsible for perpetuating the 'Omiha' lie in some way include Waiheke councillors, members of Waiheke Community/Local Boards, council bureaucrats, Geoffrey Pearse and other Post Office bureaucrats, and misfeasant staff serving the New Zealand Geographic Board.

The lie is on their heads; the chronic law-breaking is on their heads; the blood is on their heads.

Here, for the final word, is one of the most authoritative words on Rocky Bay, which is the 1865 Maori Land Court map, a map that accompanied the successful claim to joint ownership of the Kuakarau Block by three Maori men, Haora Tipa, Te Kapihaua Tuhi, and Hauauru Taipari. This map clearly labels as Rocky Bay the bay still called Rocky Bay by locals, as it was also labelled on the 1877 Crown map; and it labels the land as Kuakarau (to use its corrected, gazetted spelling); and shows the positions of the same three whares shown more clearly on that 1877 Crown map.  This map is as supplied by the New Zealand Geographic Board under an Official Information Act request; it was sourced by Board staff from New Zealand's historical archives.

It has three minor errors: Waiheke is misspelt as Waiheki in one place, 'Wakanewha Bay' is misspelt and oddly misplaced from the correct position shown on the 1857 Admiralty map, and Kuakarau Bay (the bay to the left of the promontory) is not labelled at all, but Rocky Bay, the label on the bay to the right of the promontory, is where it should be and still should be and still would be, but for a clerical boo-boo and some actions outside due process of law.

Finally, here are the concluding minutes of the 1865 Maori Land Court hearing that that map accompanied, in which three-way joint ownership of the 212-acre Kuakarau Block was certified by the Court.

Part 4: Regardless of truth and law, the lies, lies, lies and more lies prevail

Despite all the above, the farragoes of lies continue.

The most reprehensible lie bandied about, which has misled hundreds of people, is a damnable farrago. It says that Omiha is derived from O Mihi, and that Mihi was a woman from the Te Arawa canoe, and that when it called in at Waiheke in the thirteenth century on its way from Hawaiiki to its final landing place on East Cape she chose to stay on the island because she wanted to be with Ngati Paoa rather than continue on with her waka. A part of that story is that Mihi was a princess.

The facts prove that all that rubbish is lies, lies, lies, lies.

Firstly, the Te Arawa canoe did not call in at Waiheke, as this official record proves: (https://teara.govt.nz/en/map/2340/landing-places-of-the-tainui-and-te-arawa-canoes)

Secondly, Ngati Paoa did not come to Waiheke till the nineteenth century, so anyone stepping off a canoe in the thirteenth century to join them would have been rather elderly by the time they turned up. (https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/4022/waiheke-island)

Thirdly, the only Mihi on record in the Te Arawa tribe was indeed high-born, but she did not arrive on the Earth until 1870, and is not recorded as coming to Waiheke. (https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3s36/stirling-mihi-kotukutuku)

Fourthly, it is very obvious that Ngati Paoa did not exist till long after the original canoes came from Hawaiiki. That iwi is descended from a man called Paoa, who arose much later, about the 1600s, the seventeenth century. So it was impossible for anyone to be joining that tribe in the thirteenth century.

https://teara.govt.nz/en/marutuahu-tribes/page-3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C4%81ti_P%C4%81oa

http://ngatipaoa.co.nz/history/

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GrePoly-c1-24.html

http://ngatipaoa.co.nz/

The truth is that the original Maori name of the land that became the Rocky Bay village was Kuakarau. As already shown that is the name shown on the nineteenth century maps produced by the Maori Land Court in 1865 and the government in 1877, and the name shown on the 1922 subdivison map. It was a block of Maori land called the Kuakarau Block. And on both the 1865 and 1877 maps the name of the bay at the foot of what is now the intersection of Glenbrook and O'Brien Roads is clearly marked 'Rocky Bay.' Not 'Omiha Bay'.

'Omiha' was never anything more than the name of a minor whare on the Kuakarau Block, a subsidiary whare to the Kuakarau whare, as was the Ohinearei whare. It was never the name of a locality, only of a whare. It was illegally adopted as a marketing name by the pakeha subdividers in 1922. They had not a drop of Maori blood in them or their families, but outrageously chose to steal Maori symbolism because they obviously thought that 'Omiha' would sell their 488 sections more readily than 'Rocky Bay.' They also lied in their marketing prospectus, claiming things about the village that were palpably false, which was a criminal offence.

Those are the facts, over which the lies have been preferred by knavish bureaucrats, and by which the foolish Minister has allowed herself to be misled. The bureaucrats were lied to, they put the false name on maps as the unofficial name, and pretended it was the original name, and when an application was made to make the customary name official, they chose to make the lie official, and, worse, to confuse the issue by changing the false name by adding a macron over the O, to be oh-so politically-correct. Macrons are a pain to have to add to text on a computer, and many typefaces do not have them, and replace them with something else, so what they won will not be used, which makes the farce even more farcical.

The misled 'Omiha' contingent wanted that name; they wanted that unaltered. But what they got from the Minister on the advice of her bureaucrats was an alteration--its spelling changed to a macron-O. Which only PC-diehards will ever use.

The gross immoral of this story is that in New Zealand in the twenty-first century if you repeat silly lies long enough and loud enough and trick enough people into believing them and giving them loud support, including from dishonest 'journalism', the lies will beat the truth and the law any day. That's progress!!!  That 'Omiha' thing is an edifice of lies: marketing lies, fanciful lies, historical lies, 'politically-correct' lies, childish lies, racist lies, 'journalistic' lies, click-bait lies, photographic lies, lies of all sorts. An edifice of lies, an orchestrated litany of lies...

The phrase 'the naked truth' comes from a fable in which Truth and Falsehood went bathing. Falsehood emerged first from the water, and stole Truth's clothes. Truth, unwilling to wear the clothes of Falsehood, went naked. The truth stays ever true, it stays ever true to itself, it stays ever true to reality, no matter how many lies try to destroy it, and no matter what rank the liars might have.

NEW NEW ZEALAND FLAG

A national flag should be simple, it should have a bold design that is instantly recognised, even at at a distance, and it should say 'this is what we are.'

New Zealand is a long narrow country between two seas; its Maori name is Aotearoa, which means Land of the Long White Cloud; it is the home of a people who are known the world over as Kiwis, after their unique native bird; our head of state is the Queen, who uses royal blue.

This design for a flag combines all those elements.

Tasman Sea    Aotearoa/Land of the Long White Cloud   Pacific Ocean

It keeps a connection with the present flag by using the same deep blue, but here it represents the Tasman Sea on one side of the country and the Pacific on the other. In the centre the white panel represents Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, and the green kiwi combines our national symbol--long known the world over--with the green that New Zealand is also famous for.

The kiwi could be less stylised than the one shown here, such as the one that has long been used in the roundels on RNZAF aircraft.

ROUNDUP OF THE ANEMONES

Once upon a time there was a wonderful man called Marty. His full name was Marty Awe Tia, and he was well-named, because all the good folk were in awe of how wonderful he was and how much he liked people and how much good he did for them all day and every day.

But, sadly, Marty had anemones. Whoops! Hang on--enemies, which is not a nice flower at all. It is a sad fact of life that even the nicest people get them horrid enemy thingies, plus all the lies and nonsense and nasty attacks filled with loathing that go with that getting.

The anemones that loathed Marty Awe Tia had some very weird pinions. For example, they opined that anyone who loves something because it is beautiful is just an emotional prat. Which means that wot they really think is that we have to chuck love out of the windbag to make a good decision. Obviously, there's no weirder pinion than that known to science or anybody. No one can stand up straight on pinions like that.

But even that weirdness was not enough for Marty Awe Tia's anemones. They loathed him so much that they made up a cunning plan to stretch him something terrible, fill him with concete, and turn him into an oogly place for parking rich guys' boats, thereby making lots luvvly moolah and the anemones filthy rich.

Fortunately, all Marty Awe Tia's friends got together to buy a humungous amount of Roundup to spray on the anemones and thus save him from being transmogrified into a monstrosity of the moolah-and-concrete kind.

Yay!

We hope.

UNFORTUNATE RHYMES AND BREEDING

Len Brown
Pants Down
Tup Town

It sounds like horse-breeding: TupTown out of SuperCity by PantsDown.

NO TO MARINATED MUTILATION

When I was a Member of the Waiheke Community Board there were from time to time meetings of the Community Forum, in which the views of leading Waihekeans were canvassed as part of the Board's statutory duty to consult with its community.

At one of those meetings a woman perfectly expressed what Matiatia is to the island. She said, 'My home doesn't start at my front door or my front gate. It starts at the wharf.'

Matiatia is the front door to our island, the front door to our island home, the front door to every home on the island.

But now a select few want to take a third of it for themselves, they want to possess it, they want to exlude everyone else from it. They want to change for ever the look and special quality of our front door. They want to turn a public place into a private space. They want to mutilate our frontage for personal gain.

If they came and demanded a third of my front porch for their own purposes and to enlarge their income I would tell them to get lost. Scram: this is mine, this is my front door, this is my home. The island and the Council should tell these greedy narrow-minded people to get lost, we should tell them and the specious
arguments by which they vindicate their cupidity to get lost, we should tell them to get lost so completely that they will never again chuck this foolish, selfish, ugly proposal at us.

(If they are to get a marina, let them have a little bit of our back yard at Kennedy Point. Not spread over a large part of our front porch.)

SUPER PAYDAYS ARE UNFAIR NOT SUPER

Many superannuitants are living payday to payday, and finding it difficult to manage. But if they were paid weekly instead of fortnightly they would find it much easier. And they would be getting paid more for nine months of the year.

Household bills arrive monthly and must be paid by certain dates, especially when there are discount-dates, and supermarket specials are issued weekly. But because New Zealand Superannuation is paid fortnightly there is a constant mismatch between income and expenditure.

If superannuitants work out what your monthly average is by dividing your annual total by twelve, you find that with fortnightly payments you are being paid below that monthly average for nine months of the year, and above it for only three--and those three good months are always a long way apart. This year, for example, the above-average months, the good months, are January, July and December. So there's five-month stretch to endure where you are below your monthly average. That situation is unfair and unjust because it makes it more difficult to manage--all because because the government and its bureaucracy cannot be bothered taking real human-beings and real life into account.

If superannuitants were paid weekly instead of fortnightly they would have a better, more even income, and there would be twice as many months in which their income was higher than their monthly average. For example, someone being paid $700 a fortnight would be getting a monthly average of $1517, if you divide the total for the year by twelve, but the actual monthly payments are $1400 for nine months of the year and $2100 for three of them. In 2013 those high months are only January, July and December. Therefore in
February, March, April, May, June, August, September, October and November the payments are $117 below the average, so there are long below-average stretches. But if that same person was paid weekly, the monthly income for January, April, July, October and December would be $1750, and the other months would be $1400, so there would be more above-average months and they would be closer together.

It would be much easier for elderly people to manage. But the Minister for Old Guys, Ancient Monuments, Greyheads and Other Advanced Specimens of Humanity (Hon. Jo Goodhew) and the CEO for the Ministry of Social Development claim that it would cost a fortune to change from paying superannuation fortnightly to weekly. But a brain-damaged earthworm with flat batteries and a spade through its gizzard could work out that it wouldn't cost anything to tell the super computer program to run twice as often. It runs weekly for the dole, so there's no reason it cannot do it for super. Or are unemployed bods worthy of the best treatment but wrinkly bods aren't?

If you agree, and want to put pressure on the government to do the right thing by superannuitants, please sign the petition

( http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/new-zealand-government-pay-superannuitants
-weekly-not-fortnightly-to-make-budgeting-easier ... is the address to cut and paste if the link doesn't work for some reason)

WAIHEKE'S ANTIPODES

Click here to find the exact antipodes of where you live.

Waiheke's exact antipodes is in Spain. The illustration shows the exact antipodes of the Oneroa Post Office, so if you dug straight down from there you would come out in the Spanish countryside.

To get to the antipodes of your place, zoom out on the Original Map, move it your country, then zoom it  and move it about till you have the red pointer right where you want it.

OPENING WALLETS WITH ZIPPY LINES

The really, really, really exciting headline in the New Zealand Herald announced with really, really, really breathless excitement that 'Ziplining is coming to Waiheke Island.' 

Wow!

What we have always called a flying fox is now being called a zipline. That makes it really, really, really new and really, really, really exciting. Double wow!

(For Wikipedia on ziplines, click here.)

What it means is that three flying-fox cableswill be defacing the Waiheke sky on Trig Hill, all so that three pairs of people can ride, side by side, 'over vineyards and down into native bush' (says the Herald).

EcoZip Adventures is the outfit that wants to make a buck out of this. 'EcoZip', which sounds like something that closes the fly in your natural pants, is yet another silly notion from the buckaroo brigade. Just put Eco in front of a dumb idea and expect everyone to bow down and flock to you with their wallets wide open, showering you with their bucks.

After the suckers have trundled along the flying fox EcoZipper says there will be guides to lead people on boardwalks and tracks through the bush to its flash new visitor centre. They will teach them about Waiheke. All that will take about an hour and a half, says EcoFly/Zip/Quickbuck.

The Zip blokes say that what they are creating is a chance for anyone to get up close and personal with our native bush, to reconnect with nature.

On a wire? On boardwalks?

Have they never heard of feet? Nothing can beat walking through the New Zealand bush on the leaf-mould. Certainly not three flying foxes for two, or boardwalks. Or Zippy off-islanders telling us all about Waiheke.

Those zippies are shooting us a line. Zip it, guys.

BOOK OF WAIHEKE STORIES PUBLISHED ON AMAZON

The full twenty-six episodes of the The Lower Deck, the over-the-top stories about Waiheke Island history, both real and unreal, can now be downloaded in a single click to your Kindle or PC from Amazon, for a mere $US2.99 (or its equivalent in the Euro, the UK pound, etc.)

Click here to go the right place in Amazon.

Episode 1 remains on the The Lower Deck blog as a free sample.

Enjoy...

AIRPORT! A DUBIOUS DISASTER MOVIE

Please! A Brit with a Dubai mentality buying up for 'development' our airstrip, the so-called Waiheke Airport. We need that elitist greed landing on Waiheke, right next to a beautiful regional park, and a quiet bush-clad village, like we need a dagger in the heart.

A Big Thanks to the careless Overseas Investment Office with its right-wing anti-community mentality for giving its blessing to the purchase.

And an even Bigger Thanks to Denis Musson who dreamed up the whole filthy-lucre scheme in the first place and hocked it off for millions.

'The love of money is the root of all evil.'

MY BOOKS AND STORIES PUBLISHED!

Over the years, both living on Waiheke Island and before I came here (and wish I had come much earlier in life), I have written a huge amount--millions of words of one sort or another--ranging from professional writing in information technology, business and science, to children's and adult fiction, to legal opinions, to local-body reports, to design descriptions, to blogs, etc., etc. The fiction has covered a very wide range, from fantasy to horror, from romance to humour, from metaphor and environmental activism to classic tales reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Tolkien.

Some of my stories are very short, some are full-length books; they vary in length from a mere 360 words on one page to over 33,000 on 84 pages. But 360 words can be just as compelling as a much longer work. The length should be whatever it comes out to; it should fit the story. The 360-word work is a horror-story, whose brevity heightens the horror (and the black humour).

Creative Waiheke is of course an ideal environment for a writer, so they flourish here, but an unpublished writer is a perpetually frustrated being. And till now none of my stories have been published (on paper, I mean), either because I made no attempt, or as was the case with my first book, a fantasy written long ago called The Wing-Friends, because although the publishers liked it they declined it. They liked it because their reader, the famous Dorothy Butler, recommended it, but they did not think there was a big enough market in my native New Zealand to make it worth their while. The opinions of publishers are the bane of author's lives...

How many times in history have books been declined by publishers, or only published in very limited numbers, because publishers did not think they would be successful, but then were runaway best-sellers, never out of print? The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Lord of the Rings are two of myriads of examples. There must be many books that die in drawers and never see the light of day, but would be very successful if they were published.

To get round all that, the ideal is be your own publisher, but traditionally that has meant a large initial outlay because of the cost of a print-run and marketing. Print-on-demand publishing, in which copies are printed only when ordered, opened large cracks in that obstacle, but although the outlay was not anything like as large it was still not an easy road, especially if you had a number of works to publish.

In the past few days I have discovered, rather belatedly, to my chagrin, that Amazon has swept away all obstacles with free services, both ebook and print-on-demand. The ebooks are published via Kindle Direct Publishing; the print-on-demand are published via a part of the Amazon empire called CreateSpace. The Internet has radically changed the author's world. Yay! No longer do publishers have the whip hand, or any hand at all. Now the author is in charge, and has a direct line to readers. Which is how things should be. Chronic frustration can now be removed with a some uploading and a few clicks of a mouse.

So I have started publishing a number of my stories myself. The shorter ones are or will be in ebook format, for reading on an electronic reader or a computer. The longer ones will be in print-on-demand paperback format.

To find my stories go to Amazon and enter my name in the search box: Nobilangelo Ceramalus, or just Nobilangelo, or click on this link. As the days go more and more will be there. so far I have published seven ebooks. Soon I shall publish my first print-on-demand book, The Wing-Friends. I also plan to publish an environmental book, The Earth-Guard, via print-on-demand, as well as other things in both formats, about a dozen all together perhaps.

The exclamation mark at the end of the title of this posting is therefore an indication of my relief at being able at long last to get my stories out into the world where they belong.

I hope there will be people who will enjoy them.

PLAN TO ADVOCATE IS NOT TO PLAN TO DO

(A milestone: this is post number 200 in this blog)

The Waiheke Local Board has issued its Local Board Plan 2011 in the form of a beautiful glossy 44-page A4 booklet. The front cover is headed 'Local Board Plan 2011 - Your Voice for Your Community'. The back cover has the fine print: 'Auckland Council disclaims any liability whatsoever in connection with any action taken in reliance of [sic] this document or for any error, deficiency, flaw or omission contained in it. Adopted in October 2011.' The first error is 'reliance of', which should of course be 'reliance on'.

The aims presented in the booklet are laudable, so is the high quality of the presentation, but the fine print gives the game away, as does the constant interation in item after item of what the Board gives as its role: 'advocacy.'

That is of course its role in law--to be an advocate for the community (not, as it claims, to lead; in a democracy it is the people who lead)--but the strong impression one gets is that that the Council is in charge, not the people of Waiheke, that the best the Board can hope for is to shout through the door, and the best we can hope for is that our community will what is best for it. Or, more accurately, that we will not get the worst.

I hope they succeed, I hope we succeed, I hope Waiheke will remain Waiheke, despite the constant efforts of the greedy, the soul-less, the haters of all that is beautiful and true and good. The Board's booklet has its heart in the right place, but it is not being permitted to do much more than speak.

Should we be surprised? Of course not. When he turned our local-government world upside down and created a mammoth bureaucracy topped by a centralised council and a very powerful mayor Rodney Hide had the hide to say that he was 'putting local back into local government.'

As a Waihekean wisely observed, 'We vote for the people we hope will do the least harm.' In Rodney Hide we got the most.

Sorry, Mr Hide, you cannot get better local government from a powerful central body, remote from localities. Especially when the locality is way across the ocean.I an island is a place apart in body and mind. It should not be ruled by those it is separated from. That is against nature, against reason, against humanity.

Advocacy means a lot of shouting across the water. Shouting in hope. We should be doing.

Would that we had our own council again, or at very least one whose heart beats in tune with ours. A behemoth centred in a city has the heart of a city behemoth, not the heart of a small village-rural island. It can never have that. An island is separate physically; it should be governed separately.

The only good thing that came out of Hide's machinations is that we got rid of some evil bureaucrats in Auckland City Council. But we are still at the mercy of a glossy super-council. The best we can hope for is that it will be less merciless than the old lot. We got a fine booklet. Will we get the community to match?

I wish bureaucrats, and politicians (who are just bureaucrats who make speeches), would get it into their skulls that they are messing about with people's lives, not with little black marks on white stuff, even if it is glossy white stuff.

In summary. Much the same, but less evil than before. So far. 'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.' We shall be vigilant, we shall always shout when we are being stomped on. We are Waihekeans. To live on an island is to protest against the big mainland, so shouting and being feisty is what we are. Would that we could be left to our own devices!

And that we had full control over our rates, instead of having only little bits of it parcelled out by others.

So 'advocate' is is. Loudly!

But that is not how it should be. The purpose of local government in New Zealand is defined and laid down in law, in section 10 of the Local Government Act 2002 :

10 Purpose of local government
The purpose of local government is--
(a) to enable democratic local decision-making and action by, and on behalf of, communities; and
(b) to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities, in the present and for the future.

Decision-making, not advocacy-making. Action, not talk. Democratic and local, not remote. First and foremost by--and by the local community. Not first and foremost on behalf of. And even when it is on behalf of it is to be democratic and local. That is the law. Good, democratic law.

MULTIPLE MPs

Waiheke could hardly have done better in the election. For us MMP means multiple MPs. Three! Nikki got the seat and Jacinda and Denise got in on their party lists. So we get the whole political gamut: centre-right, centre-left and left. All we missed out was a man, or two, or three...

If competition really is all that its accolytes believe it to be, Waiheke can expect a good haul of the baubles of office.

But this article in Gulf News would not inspire anyone to put a bauble-box on lay-by.

EVIL BOATSHEDS

This 'poetic' infernal memo, a tizz about the fact that the historic boatsheds in Rocky Bay pre-dated the Resource Management Act 1991 and therefore never got resource-consents, must have got its wires crossed in some Supersilly teacup and fallen into my inbox by mistake. At the risk of being reported to the police and sent to Guantanamo Bay I am making it public (verbatim):

I wuz sitting in me dessk,
In me VERY IMPAWTINT Cownsilly jobb,
Werking for thuh Supersilly Megga,
An thinkking reel hard
How to mayk thuh wirld
Purrfict--
Spesshilly Whythuhheckee,
Whitch is fulla loonies
An kats wot woant herd--
Suddinnly I spotted that them
Ole bote shedds in Rockhead Bay
Aint got no Rise-sauce Consints.
Aaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhh quoth I,
That's it.
I'll mayk them gett Saucy Consints
Then thuh wirld 'll be awlright
An I'll be thuh hero of thuh wirld
And thuh SuperSaver of Whythuhheckhee.

So I isshooed commahnds:
Get SAUCE CONSINts for them
Ole bote Sheddds
Aw thay'll bbee dimolished.
I leened back in me chair.
Fulla pride
At me clvverniss.

Then I hadda wunnerful thawt:
I betcha lotsa places on
Thatt isle of rebels nevver
Got SAUCE CONSINTS
(Coz they wuz bilt befaw 1991
When thuh Sauce COnsints ACT
CAyME IN,
But that don't madder)
SO NOW I'VE GOTTA CUNNING PLAN:
I'll ishoo SAucy commahns
To awl them Badd Ole Bildings
An I'LL DIMMOLISHh AWL thuh badd stuff.
YAY!!!
Dubble YAY!!!
I betcha thadd'll get riddovv
All thuh loonies
An all thuh madd kats
An all thuh feistee iddeeits,
Thenn the only peepills on Whythuhheckee
Will be thuh gwid wunns,
The besst wunns,
The Edyukated Clevver Wunns,
The only wunns wot can get
Evreethink rite,
The only wunns wot can spell--
LIKE MEE!!!

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

When we are free to choose
We are not free
From the consequences of our choice.

10,000 PAGEVIEWS!

To my astonishment Waiheke Notes is the most popular of my blogs (although because statistics were not counted by Blogger till May 2009 blogs that have been going far longer, such as EStar, may actually have had more).


But Waiheke Notes has just passed 10,000 pageviews--from the time that Blogger began counting in 2009, which was about two years from when this blog began in August 2007. To be precise, 10,008 as of this morning.

 
An even bigger surprise is where the readership is. As you can see from the map, America and Norway particularly stand out. So do France, The Netherlands, Lithuania and Russia. Even New Zealand ;-)  Along with the Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and the UK.

Thank you, readers.

If you like my odd sense of humour you may also like my other Waiheke-related blog, The Lower Deck.

THE GOOD LEADER

The great Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, said of leaders:

A leader is best
When people barely know he exists.
Not so good
When people obey and acclaim him.
Worse when they despise him.
Fail to honour people,
They fail to honour you.
But of a good leader,
Who talks little,
When his work is done,
His aim fulfilled,
The people will all say,
'We did it ourselves.'

FERRIES AT THE BOTTOM OF QUEEN STREET

All Waihekeans believe in ferries. We have to, we cannot do without them. They wand us from the Supersilly to our island paradise.

Which raises the subject of suitable names. Given what That Man said about dealing with us--that it was like trying to herd cats--it was very appropriate to call the first one Quickcat. There are no quicker cats than us, particularly when Orcland is trying to herd us somewhere we don't want to go. (And MEOW does mean the Moral Equivalent Of War.)

That underclaws the fact that we have a reputation for being feisty, which we are extremely proud of, so Feistycat would be a fitting addition to Fullers' Waiheke fleet.

But Fullers have yet to acknowledge our airy belief in ferries. They came close when they acquired a boat called Wand-erer. But for their next vessel they should admit the whole truth, and call it Tinkerbell.

Then as some unfortunate too-later sprints despairingly for a rapidly retreating gangplank, we could all call out in gleeful unison, 'Ask not for whom the Tinkerbell tolls. It tolls for thee!' (apologies to John Donne)

Or, if they want to be a tad more serious, and very Shakespearean, they could call it Titania.

THE SITTING MYSTERY

When a bird sits on a nest (a process they call nest-sitting) it produces chicks, which grow into birds.

There is also the simple modern system that has replaced all that old-fashioned nonsense called building, the process called house-sitting, which produces cabins, which grow into dwellings.

There is also of course truck-sitting, the system which results in the pitter-patter of little Fiats, which grow into all sorts of things, from Roll-Royces to Hummers, Toyotas and tanks.

However, no one has ever been able to discover what you have to sit on to produce politicians...