With international travel currently off limits I know many social media friends who have only just visited Hawke’s Bay for the first time recently and loved it!
We may even let you have your photo taken with the Ranfurly Shield! 😉
Its the sound of waves breaking on Napier’s Marine Parade.
And that?
It’s a magpie calling on a fence in Waipukrau.
Then there is the roar as hundreds of cricket fans cheer when Ross Taylor sends the ball soaring over the boundary for six at McLean Park!
These are all familiar sounds to Hawke’s Bay locals, but may not be so well known to those outside the region.
Recently the chances of Hawke’s Bay locals and others further afield hearing Hawke’s Bay over the airwaves became slimmer and slimmer and one of New Zealand’s biggest media organisations, NZME (“New Zealand Media and Entertainment”), was at the centre of both.
One affected me indirectly, while the other had a more personal impact.
I wish this was a new problem, but it has been going on for as long as I’ve been a curmudgeon! 😉
Hawke’s Bay had been fortunate to retain at least some local content during this time via NZME’s “The Hits” and Mediaworks’ “The Breeze” breakfast shows remaining local, broadcast from Napier and Hastings studios respectively, but this Jono and Ben announcement certainly seemed to threaten that status.
New Zealand media’s talent pool is shallow enough as it is without just swapping the same people around and simulcasting them on yet another network.
NZ Cricket didn’t want to commit to Radiosport’s five year offer, citing advances in technology and a changing media landscape discouraging them from tying themselves into broadcasting on radio for that length of time.
(This opinion apparently failed to take into account that Radiosport has also been broadcasting over NZME’s online streaming service “iHeartRadio” for some time now)
So, from the end of this domestic and international cricket season the dulcet tones of Brian Waddle, Jeremy Coney and their cricket commentating colleagues were out of jobs and will no longer keep summertime gardeners company.
New Zealand Gothic:
Transistor radio playing test cricket,
Freshly mown lawn,
Reel mower quietly pinking in the background.
Ladders, planks & tin of paint set up
For a fresh summer coat on the weatherboards..
Cricket commentary from McLean Park, Bay Oval, Seddon Park, University Oval and all the other grounds around New Zealand will fall silent on the airwaves from April.
Personally, it meant an opportunity I never thought I would have was lost.
Because for three domestic Supersmash T20 cricket matches at my beloved McLean Park, I was one of those Radiosport commentators!
Late last year I got a phone call.
I had mentioned on Twitter earlier in the year about wanting to do cricket commentary, or had been doing my usual social media promotion of McLean Park / Napier / Hawke’s Bay, when I got an email from someone at RadioSport asking if I’d like to send in an “audition tape”, as they were looking to expand their regional roster, and Hawke’s Bay was somewhere they felt they were a bit thin on the ground in.
I was taken aback – Knowing what media in NZ is like (see above), this was not just something that comes along every week.
Unlike The Hits, cutting back regional resources, Radiosport was trying to expand – Having local voices at the likes of Hagley Oval and McLean Park.
So I recorded an ad-libbed over of commentary on my phone one evening after my daughter had gone to bed and emailed it off.
I didn’t hear anything back, so thought I must have sucked and forgot about it.
Until I got a call one afternoon in November.
It was Malcolm Jordan from Radiosport. “Did I get back to you about your audition tape?” he asked.
I replied “No.”
“Oh, sorry, we liked it! We’ve got some Supersmash T20 games coming up at McLean Park in December and January, would you like to commentate them?”
And so began what would unfortunately turn out to be one of the shorter careers I have had.
This was an opportunity to watch the game I love at a place I love and tell the nation (and anyone else listening online around the world) all about it!
And they paid me to do it!
But the money wasn’t the best part.
The best part was that they BELIEVED IN ME!
The day before my first match Malcolm phoned me and went through some pointers for commentating he had sent me.
“We didn’t pick you for no reason. We know you can do this!” he said (or words to that effect).
Because while I believe I am capable of doing the things I want to do, that doesn’t mean a hell of a lot if no one else does, too.
I’d be a multi-media star broadcasting Hawke’s Bay to the world by now if it did!
It’s not even something I’m used to in my day-to-day, non-writing job of a decade and a half!
So to have someone believe in me, pretty much out of the blue was, well, unbelievable!
The games were played and I think I did a reasonable job for my few times in the commentary box.
A personal highlight was I got to step out onto the pitch block in the centre of McLean Park – the closest I would likely get to playing there!
My short stint was completed, pay was deposited, and I looked forward to possibly doing it again next season.
Except as it currently stands I won’t get to.
I know I’m no Richie Benaud, Ian Smith, Jeremy Coney, or Brian Waddle.
I was never going to be able to chuck in my current job and set off on an international cricket commentating career after a couple of T20 games.
But this was an opportunity – something that doesn’t come along very often.
It was a light at the end of the tunnel that said If I stuck at this and worked on it there was a chance, a possibility, AN OPPORTUNITYthat somewhere down the track I MIGHT just be able to make a career of it.
With NZ Cricket and Radiosport parting ways that light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a freight train coming the other way.
As I wrote in a tweet about the Provincial Growth Fund recently:
The new wunderkind websites had the same mentality as the old media dinosaurs they were meant to be superior to.
It felt like they were blowing the biggest opportunity New Zealand media had had in years – Wherever there was internet access they could have had reporters!
This is just the tip of an iceberg New Zealand media SHOULD have started melting years ago!
Heck, in the 80s we had regional news in print and on national TV every weeknight that stopped these bergs from forming in the first place, let alone making it out into the shipping lanes and causing casualties.
We have regional stories that deserve coverage, as many have national implications; A specialized regional local government reporter program in the works, and a Provincial Growth Fund to assist NZ’s growing regions.
Isn’t it time NZ’s commerical media refocused back on the regions, too?
There’s a saying goes:
“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”.
Regional New Zealand has a whole lot of growth going on. Not all of that growth is going to be good.
It’s going to need a lot more solar energy from traditional & digital NZ national media to keep regional growth rot-free!
How many Super Rugby, or even All Blacks games (Napier has hosted only two in 20yrs!) could have been played in sold-out, 15,000-20,000 capacity regional stadiums like McLean Park, rather than the regularly 1/2 – 3/4 empty Eden Parks, or (Wellington’s Westpac Trust Stadium) “Caketins”?
Main centre Super Rugby fixture crowds have been pitiful and/or declining for some time, and the whining about low attendances from rugby bosses has only gotten louder, yet do they change tack and spread the games around?
Hawke’s Bay and their NPC team, The Magpies have been fortunate to have the local support, income and success over recent seasons to weather the storms Tew bemoaned.
For over a decade now, Mrs InFrame has been coming up with a special 12-day menu to celebrate the “Twelve Days of Christmas”.
She alternates each year between the traditional and the New Zealand version, otherwise known as “A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree”.
This year was the Kiwi Christmas Deliciousness Edition!
Most of the dishes have a direct correlation to the songs (Five Big Fat Pigs = Pork/Ham/Bacon), others use a fair chunk of artistic license as, with the original “Twelve Days” song we’d be swimming in poultry with French Hens, Swans a Swimming, Geese a Laying etc. etc. otherwise.
I’ll do my best to explain as we go.
This year’s menu plan is one that was SUPPOSED to be the one in 2016, but went missing just a few days before we were to begin and resurfaced, too late, on Christmas day (It was a Christmas miracle!).
So sit back and enjoy as I reveal what my true love made for me over the Twelve Days of Kiwi Christmas Deliciousness for 2018:
A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree
Blue Cheese, Date and Walnut Parcels:
The blue of the cheese represents the Pukeko, while spinach represents the foliage and the flaky pastry looks like flakes off like Ponga Tree bark.
Two Kumara
Kumara, Spinach, Goats’ Cheese and Walnut Salad:
Pretty straight forward here – Mrs InFrame baked the Kumara into chips to give them a lovely texture.
Three Flax Ketes (“Kits”)
Cherry Pie:
Woven flax Kete are used as baskets and bags to carry things like berries, so we latticed the top of the Cherry Pie to give it a woven look.
Four Huhu Grubs
BRANDY SNAPS!!: Huhu grubs are a creepy crawly delicacy at most “Wild Food” festivals, mainly for their gooey-squishiness when you bite into them, so filling tree-bark like Brandy Snaps with oohy-gooey whipped cream seemed a wonderful take on the idea!
Five Big Fat Pigs!
Pork and Pepper Sloppy Joes:
Five big Fat Pigs make a lot of pork mince and while they might not appreciate the alliteration of “Pork” and “Pepper” I’m sure your average Captain Cooker or Kuni-kuni would be quite happy munching on a fresh, crunchy capsicum.
Six Pois a Twirling
Teriyaki Chicken Rice Balls:
Mrs InFrame had the day off for this one, and our friends Tim and Junko from Tu Meke Don in Napier made us some rice balls to represent the soft balls that are swung on braided threads in Kapa Haka and other Maori songs and dances.
Slippery Sausages in Muddy Mashed Potatoes and Been Reeds:
The Longfin Eel are native to New Zealand. and can be found in lots of waterways – even the creek that runs past our house. They like water that has things they can hide in, like reeds (represented here by the beans) and mud (the Mashed Potatoes and BBQ Sauce)
Eight Plants of Puha
Faux Pho-ha: Puha is a green, leafy green, wild vegetable that usually grows near water, so we made a watery Pho soup with mint, coriander (leafy green herbs) and meatballs.
Nine Sacks of Pipis
Pipi Truck-style Pizza:
The Pipi Pizza Truck is a bit of an institution her in Hawke’s Bay – being on the first new wave of Food Trucks, so tonight’s pizza paid homage to the Pippi truck, rather than the bivalve mollusc.
Ten Juicy Fish Heads
Sri Lankan Fish Curry made with Hawke Bay Snapper:
My boss had been fishing on Hawke Bay a week or so back and kindly gave us some of the snapper (fillets, not heads thankfully..) he had caught. It went perfectly with this Sri Lankan curry!
Piupiu are a Maori grass skirt, as can be seen in the Poi e video above. When the dancer wearing it sways or spins the individual threads spread out a bit like octopus tentacles. When you split Frankfurters into quarters lengthways at one end and cook them, they split and twist upwards and outwards just like tentacles, or the swaying piupiu skirt. It also seemed like a novel way to close out this Twelve Days of Kiwi Christmas Deliciousness!
We hope you’ve been inspired to try some of these, or your own version next Christmas.
From the Napier in Frame family to yours, we wish you a Merry Kiwi Christmas and a safe and happy New Year!
NCC workers keeping one of the city’s biggest stormwater drains clear.
During last week’s rather atrocious weather across Hawke’s Bay Napier’s continuing water woes became even more evident, with Napier City Council issuing a notification for residents to refrain from taking baths, or flushing toilets for 36 hours on Wednesday the 5th of September, as the city’s wastewater system failed to cope with the amount of rain that had fallen almost continuously for 24 hours.
In both cases warning signs were erected around the estuary and immediate areas warning against swimming and the collection of seafood due to the public health risk of possible contamination from sewerage in the water and Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, the region’s environmental watchdogs were alerted.
Pandora Pond – Looking a bit murkier than usual after the heavy rains
“But how does sewerage get in the stormwater?” you might rightly ask.
It’s to do with infrastructure, namely pipes.
Ideally rain falls from the sky, onto your roof, into your spouting and into the stormwater system via gutters and stormwater drains / creeks and eventually into rivers / lakes / out to sea.
Unfortunately some spouting goes into the wrong drains around the house – Wastewater drains from bathrooms, showers, laundries, which gets treated with sewerage from.. um.. “other drains”.
During severe weather events, such as the one we’ve just gone through, having the wrong pipe going into the wrong drain can greatly increase the amount of wastewater in the system.
But Hastings and rural Hawke’s Bay had more rain than Napier did – at one stage I saw a reading of 191mm for HB, 66mm for Hastings and “only” 43mm for Napier in the 24 hours between Wednesday and Thursday.
From the makers of “Highway to Hell” and “Stairway to Heaven” comes “Driveway to Puddle”!
It could be something to do with Napier being coastal – The seas were certainly huge for most of the week and it would be hard for the water to drain out to sea when the sea is doing its best to get onto the land.
Marine Parade’s walkway was a mess on Thursday after high seas accompanying the storm battered the coast
It could be the fact we’re the lowest point above sea level in Hawke’s Bay.
Water naturally runs downhill and it might take a day or so of heavy rain for natural drains to back up the height difference between Napier and Hastings.
Or it could be that the city’s pipe infrastructure just isn’t up to it.
It has been known for some time that Napier’s water infrastructure was aging badly and in need of repair soon, if not overdue.
This has been the problem with Napier’s drinking water – It isn’t Hawke’s Bay’s aquifer quality being sub-par – The water down there is just as clean and pure as usual, it’s been council infrastructure – Bores, pipes and reservoirs letting the side down .
You might remember during the region’s contentious amalgamation debate and vote three years ago that Napier’s infrastructure was a rather large sore point.
I was strongly opposed to amalgamation, seeing the way it was promoted merely as a cynical attempt to sell off and/or privatise council departments (like water) and assets.
But the most odd pronouncement over the issue must go to the regional paper, Hawke’s Bay Today’s, new editor, who wrote on the weekend after the deluge that “A Wee Bit of Wee Never Hurt Anyone, We Hope ”.
Our climate is changing (whether radio host Leighton Smith believes it or not) and the weather is getting more severe, more often.
Sea levels are expected to rise and Napier’s population is expected to grow by at least 2,000 households in the next ten years – Increasing the demands and challenges on infrastructure even more.
Sorry I haven’t been writing on here as much as I used to.
I would LIKE to, but work, earning a living and daily life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of creative pursuits.
I have still been writing, though.
In Hawke’s Bay we have a bi-monthly magazine called “Bay Buzz”. It started out life ten years ago in an online format and slowly progressed over the past decade into this quite marvellous, glossy publication.
It was one of my first forays into writing stuff on and for the interweb.
A year or so later he asked me to write a regular piece, which we called “Man About Town” (not too thematically dissimilar to “Napier in Frame”, really) which I did for about a year, before the need for an income over-shadowed writing and my creative wordsmithing skills returned to their stasis pods, occasionally emerging to point out local wrongs and the bleeding obvious our local mainstream media somehow managed to miss with unnerving regularity via opinion columns and Letters to the Editor.
Five years ago (YES, FIVE!!) I started this site and started writing more regularly again.
A little over a year ago Tom, having seen my site and opinion pieces in the paper, approached me and asked if I’d be interested in writing of Bay Buzz again.
I accepted and the results have been quite good and glossy, with six columns published so far (and a cameo in the upcoming 10th Anniversary edition, too).
I have been stopped in the street a number of times by people telling me they saw me in the magazine and liked my writing, which is pretty cool – I’m not used to praise!
It’s also good to see a Hawke’s Bay publisher footing it with the “big city” type(face)s – A couple of people have said Bay Buzz is like, if not better than, (because of its local focus) the likes of North and South magazine (the Wellington equivalent of Auckland’s Metro – High praise indeed!
I will do my best to post on here more often – I’m due back on Radio New Zealand’s “The Panel” next week and I have two other posts in the works, so material is seldom in short supply – it’s more a matter of available time.
I had promoted the idea of hosting such breakfast television shows in Napier, along with 30 other ideas to attract attention to the city five years ago in my “Month of Fun Days” post. I even used the post in a couple of applications for jobs promoting Napier.
I never got so much as an interview for the jobs, but I have seen a number of the ideas come to fruition in recent years, which while great to see, is also a bit of salt in old wounds (I haven’t received any credit for the ideas, nor assistance in making them happen myself).
Hopefully it’s just the first of many occasions where Napier and Hawke’s Bay take centre stage for all the right reasons!
“It’s evolve or die, really, you have to evolve, you have to move on otherwise it just becomes stagnant.”
Craig Charles
“Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.”
Eckhart Tolle
The annual reshuffling of presenters amongst New Zealand’s broadcasters started again recently.
A few National Party spin doctors got their noses out of joint that Barry’s replacement on TVNZ’s “Breakfast” show will be former Green Party candidate (and co-host of both Crowd Goes Wild and Back Benches on Prime), Hayley Holt, but all that really came down to was sour grapes at losing their biggest primetime soapbox.
But it did raise one question: Where is New Zealand’s new media talent?
This has been an issue for New Zealand’s commercial broadcasting networks for years.
Add to that the popularity of personalised music streaming services and I would almost go so far as to say that by drying up their own talent pool and personal, local touches, commercial radio networks in New Zealand have already gone past the point of no return – Dooming themselves to obscurity and oblivion.
But are their television affiliates heading down the same path?
A recent NZME article opines, in light of the Breakfast / Seven Sharp hosting announcements that TVNZ’s selection of hosts is a bit.. “monochromatic” – That is a mainly Pakeha pool of talent, with a penchant for blonde females. (The article doesn’t mention that at least two of these same blondes featured in the photo for the link to the article also host shows for NZME’s own simulcast radio network “The Hits”).
Hair colour aside there does appear to be a significant stagnation and evaporation effecting New Zealand television’s talent pool.
The “newest” hosting talent that immediately comes to mind is Mediaworks’ Kanoa Lloyd and TVNZ’s Sam Wallace, both of whom started out on TV3’s Sticky TV, before moving to weather hosting/reporting roles and beyond on the rival networks.
Both Lloyd and Wallace have now been in the industry for 9-14 years respectively, making them almost battle-hardened veterans by modern media standards.
But it isn’t just the hosting talent that is getting long in the tooth – The shows they are hosting are becoming less and less “fresh” and original.
When TV3 rebranded themselves as #HashtagLoLSelfie, sorry “+hr=e” early last year it gave a bit of insight of what goes on (or rather what doesn’t) inside the minds of those who pick what we can watch on New Zealand’s commercial television networks.
“..The (TV3 brand) has been around since 2003. And 2003 was the year that Saddam Hussein was found in a hidey hole, everyone was using the Nokia 310 as a mobile phone, and Lorde was seven years old – the world has moved on right?”
“There’s some nights I’ve watched 7 Days and thought, actually, that brand is bigger than Three – seems like it’s been bigger than Three for a period of time.”
MediaWorks’ chief content officer Andrew Szusterman.
Here’s humour and irony in Szusterman using 7 Days as an example, and not just because it’s a comedy show, but because the show is based, amongst other things, on similarly formatted “Mock the Week” (first screened in the UK in 2005, while the TV3 brand was still “fresh” and “new”), but 7 Days’ core cast of comedians had been regularly appearing on the very same channel – TV3 – since 1996 on a show called “Pulp Comedy”.
That’s the same talent, largely unchanged, on the same channel for 21 years!
“..the world has moved on right?”
While the world may have moved on, programmers and content officers’ sights have clearly not.
Let’s look at some of the options “+hr=e” viewers had last year:
The most recent series finale of “The Block NZ” (the sixth since starting in 2012) ended in confusion, derision and claims that it might be signalling the end of the Auckland real estate boom, or it might just have been a signal that New Zealand viewers were tiring of play-acting dressing up as wall-to-wall renovation “Reality TV” shows.
“The Bachelor”, another of TV3’s “reality TV’ stable staples first screened in America in 2002, so it’s roses were likely getting a bit dried up and losing most of their petals and appeal.
Not wanting to be left out, TVNZ last year premiered the NZ incarnation of the Granddaddy of them all, “Survivor”, which started in America in 1997 .
That’s 21 years ago!
TWENTY.
ONE!
The world has indeed moved on, but those at the helm of New Zealand’s TV and radio networks have clearly not!
Which would have been bloody typical, because that was right around the time of my birthday and it would be just my luck for everything to go “KABOOM!” (or ”Whimper”?) just before I was able to open a present, or eat some of the delicious birthday cake my wife had baked for the occasion.
The cake was indeed delicious and I got a model plane I’d been after for some time, so the day was far from catastrophic.
Doomsday predictions are nothing new.
I remember, as an impressionable high school student in the 1990’s, being terrified that Nostradamus had predicted the end of the word would occur somewhere between Phys-Ed and Chemistry on an otherwise typical Tuesday afternoon.
If 380 people dying on our roads in 2017 is “Heart-breaking”, then what is 606 people taking their own lives?
And then, if road crashes and the road toll command so many print and online headlines and television and radio news bulletins, then how do we justify keeping something that takes almost twice as many lives out of the headlines, media attention and public awareness?
The following year, 1996, New Zealand’s annual road toll was 515, the lowest number in 32 years.
Since New Zealand started officially recording its suicide rate in 2008 the figure has never dropped below 500.
Unlike 20 years ago, when drinking and driving had been more of an embedded cultural “norm”, today’s New Zealand public have been aware of severe deficiencies in mental health care and suicide prevention for some time and have been pushing for change.
Too many people have lost love ones who thought no one cared, or no one was listening.
We do.
We are.
But rather than the previous government taking notice or action on such dire figures, like in 1995, the reaction was a bit more… “closed-minded”.
It appeared that only just before the 2017 general election, nine years after taking office, that mental health and suicide prevention looked set to receive more funding.
But even then the two hundred and twenty four million dollars ($224,000,000) set aside for mental health services over four years paled into insignificance when compared to the almost TEN BILLION DOLLARS ($10,000,000,000) the National government were going to spend on highways over the same period.
Mental health services were set to receive 0.022% of what building roads would get.
Even if you took out the necessary $812mill needed to reopen State Highway One between Picton and Christchurch following the 2016 Kaikōura earthquakes, it still only brings that percentage up to 0.024
Such funding would only have been made available upon re-election, of course, and no firm dates were given in the event of that happening.
In their electioneering Labour, the Greens and NZ First all campaigned to put more political influence, funding and focus into the state of New Zealand’s mental health.
It is still relatively early days, politically, since the election and formation of the new government, so I could say we can only hope this iteration of central government will do more than the last.
But I won’t.
Because along with the former Health Minister’s pathetic rebuke of a public call for action, there have been other issues and concerns with how government departments have been approaching and handling the mental health of New Zealanders.
The Ranfurly Shield is the Hawke’s Bay Magpies’ for the summer again! 
