moa footprints

What’s in a title? Your ideas please!

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moa-footprints-1912
The moa footprints discovered in 1912 on the banks of the Manawatu River. This photograph was included in the report of the discovery, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

It’s been a bit quiet on the blogging front lately, as I have been busy getting as much writing done on my book as I can before the Claude McCarthy Fellowship I was so fortunate to receive finishes. The book examines the environmental history of the Manawatu Region, in the lower North Island of New Zealand, from pre-history through to today (see: Manawatu’s environmental past to be documented), and I have been working on it (between work, family and life) for a couple of years now. (See: A racy title is one thing, but what’s the book actually about? for a synopsis of the book.)

Making progress on writing has been further challenged by the arrival earlier this year of our baby girl, Caitlyn. Caitlyn is known to make her feelings very clear when I spend too much time staring at the screen of my laptop, rather than gazing at/playing with/talking to her. Continue reading →

Prehistoric revelations of a Manawatu flood

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When surveyors laid out the Manawatu town of Palmerston North, they were a little optimistic.

An 1878 [see left] and later 1895 survey map shows sections in the suburbs of Terrace End and low-lying Hokowhitu running right up to – and in some cases beyond – the banks of the meandering Manawatu River. However, the multitude of lagoons in the district showed that the Manawatu River must have flooded, and changed its course, many times throughout the centuries, leaving these “cut-off meander” lagoons as evidence. Continue reading →