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 I get email updates from the Smithsonian Institution covering all sorts of interesting bits and pieces. Te latest one had a link to an interactive map of Indigenous fishing practices around the Pacific rim which I thought I'd share with you. The photographs alone are fascinating. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-tropical-research-institute/2022/05/10/new-interactive-map-of-indigenous-fishing-practices-around-the-pacific-rim/ Below is: Twin Heart Weir, Shi Hu, in the Penghu Archipelago, Taiwan. Photo by Zeze0729 CC By-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia

Threads of Caring reviewed

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Threads of Caring was reviewed on RNZ today. You can hear it here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018837193/book-review-threads-of-caring  
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  Mrs Schumacher’s Gems A few years ago, I recorded an oral history project with three other oral historians with the aim of uncovering some stories of women’s domestic lives in mid-twentieth century New Zealand. Domestic life as we know it today is very different from the lives led by our mothers and grandmothers whose authority was generally home and community-based. Everyday life in New Zealand during the mid-twentieth century is a significantly under-researched subject. It is a topic which is considered so ordinary that hardly anyone bothers to record the details in their diaries or letters, but it is the daily routine, so insignificant at the time, that was interesting to us for this project.   While the kitchen was the head office of family life, and home baking was perhaps the norm until the early 1980s, this changed as more women continued to work after marriage – and even at the time, many women felt constrained by those norms.   You could call some of them ‘The Reluct
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  Making cream clean and free of odours I’ve been doing some research for MOTAT's vacreator . Here’s a photo of it: I was brought up on a dairy farm so this has intrigued me. It was developed by H. Lamont Murray and Frank S. Board in the 1920s to remove odour from cream that they bought from local dairy farmers for their Te Aroha Dairy Company. The odour came from what the cows ate. They wanted those flavours removed from the cream so that they could get a better price for their butter overseas. In the vacreator the cream is mixed with steam, which both pasteurises (kills micro-organisms) and deodorises (removes unwanted smells and tastes) the cream. With the unwanted flavours removed, the butter could be kept frozen for up to two years. As well as being involved in the dairy industry, Henry Lamont Murray was secretary of the National Rose Society of New Zealand and his obituary in the Christchurch Press in 1959 mentions that his father, W.T. Murray was ‘ a pioneer in the c
Some books I enjoyed in 2021: Susanna Stapleton The adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Stapleton tries to winnow fact from fiction and find out more about Maud West’s personal life – and mainly succeeds. It’s fascinating about what detectives got up to in the early decades of the twentieth century, too. Deborah Levy Hot milk A young woman and her mother are in Spain getting treatment for her mother’s illness. It’s about not knowing who you are or what you want to do with yourself, and the (sometimes) fraught relations between mothers and daughters. Damon Galgut The promise Three (white) siblings grow up in South Africa. It’s bleak but the writing is terrific. It won this year’s Booker Prize. Nicola Upson An expert in murder Upson uses the character of Josephine Tey (whose books I adore) as her ‘detective’ , which is a nice conceit. It’s set around a theatre where one of Tey’s plays is being produced and murders keep happening. There are more in the series – hoorah!