Garry's Blog

The Story of an Immigrant Ship, Garry Law Published in Heritage Matters. Issue 25 Summer 2010/11 About RMS Remuera.

Strangeness on Maungawhau The Pou The Maori inscription The other inscription ?????? What on earth is this about? The sign

The Last Spike - Feilding and District Historical Society, 2008. 138p ISBN 978-0-473-13715-1 Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the completion of the North Island main trunk railway. A superb collection of photographs enliven the text. As a primer on the civil engineering methods and practices of the time this is hard to beat.

Heritage Matters have published a short article of mine - a much shortened version of the on-line paper. Garry Law 2008 “The Great White Fleet in Auckland” Heritage Matters Issue 17:38-9.

More scientific illiteracy at TVNZ. Last night they had the Hubble telescope seeing planets around a star in another galaxy . Oh dear - we will be waiting a while for that one to be true. It was of course another solar system. It's 25 light years away. The closest galaxy is a dwarf companion to our own and it is 42,000 light years away. The BBC got it right. BBC story

The Awa Book of New Zealand Science. Edited Rebecca Priestley, 2008, The Awa Press. What a great book – extracts from papers and writing about science from through our history, embellished by some relevant pieces of our poetry. Of course much of the material is largely of local interest – the pieces by the likes Cockayne, Cotton, Guthrie-Smith will resonate with New Zealanders but less for people away from here. They are well chosen – Priestley has a good eye for what is readable as well as significant. For archaeologists the pieces by Rafter and Adds connect us to the bigger picture. It is the bringing together here of the international contributions that is not often done. If one puts together the pieces by Rutherford and Marsden on the discovery of the atom’s nucleus, Tinsley on the nature of the universe, Wilkins on DNA, and Alan Wilson (with Rebecca Cann) on our recent African Genesis this is an astonishing contribution to knowledge of the fundamentals of our world and ourselves. ...

Bookhabit - Abundance and Constraint: A Short History of Water Use in New Zealand New Zealand has an abundance of water but still there has been conflict over its use. Maori managed water and asserted their right to its use particularly for fishing. Colonists soon came into conflict with Maori over water, disrupting traditional fishing through rafting logs, introducing new species and using waterways for wastes. Water was an important early source of power in colonial New Zealand used for milling a variety of products and in hydraulic mining. Gold mining was intimately connected to early hydroelectric development, a use which came to have the most profound effects on New Zealand's waterways. The Law followed the different forms of use of water as they developed. Through mining contamination many rivers were declared sludge canals and their banks taken into Crown ownership - the Queens Chain - to prevent court actions by the adjoining owners. Wetlands have been much affected by deve...