Tuesday of Māori Language Week offers you an Australian agitprop mashup, a book about the strange and difficult English language, interaction with bees, and talks about our first Māori radio station, and aviation forecasting.
Te Wiki o te Reo Māori always serves to remind us how Australia makes New Zealand look good in almost every respect, apart from Rugby League. And if your NZIFF schedule didn’t include TERROR NULLIUS, the punk anti-copyright agitprop queering mashup of canonical Australian cinema from the SodaJerk collective, now’s your chance – for free! – to see how a bunch of renegades feel about their home country. This perverse political-revenge and often very funny fable that unwrites Australian national mythology is screening daily through September, hourly on the half-hour starting from (usually) 10:30am (55min; R13 violence, offensive language, sex scenes, and other content that may disturb).
Language nerd Mark Broatch has worked as a senior editor and chief subeditor at three national publications, so it’s no surprise to find him authoring a playful reference book titled Word to the Wise: Untangling the Mix-Ups, Misuse & Myths of Language. Join Exisle Publishing and Unity Books Wellington at 57 Willis Street for a free lunchtime event (12:00pm to 12:45pm), as Broatch discusses his book with fellow author Catherine Robertson. Hope he gives a good kicking to the misuse of “fulsome”.
If you missed the Interactive Beekeeping Demonstration at the start of September, launching Bee Aware Month’s focus on urban apian health, do not dismay. Wellington City Council and Wellington Beekeepers are holding further free demonstrations all this week from 12:00pm to 2:00pm in the Service Centre foyer at the Wellington City Council, 101 Wakefield Street. Pop in for giveaways, the opportunity to learn from the beekeepers, or just to catch the… buzz (sorry).
As part of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori at Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, there’s a free lunchtime talk from 12:10pm to 1:00pm in Te Ahumairangi Ground Floor, National Library, corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon. In Radio Te Upoko O Te Ika: Archived, Digitised and Broadcast, Piripi Walker (broadcaster and writer), Richard McIntosh (National Library Learning Team) and Tāina McGregor (Oral Historian Māori) discuss how and why Te Upoko o te Ika archive came to be part of the Alexander Turnbull Collection, with hundreds of recordings preserved on all manner of formats. In 2007, Te Reo Irirangi O Te Upoko O Te Ika Trust donated over 2000 interviews recorded between 1982-1995, to become one of the Alexander Turnbull Library’s biggest collections, with hundreds of these interviews conducted and broadcast in the interviewees’ first language: Te Reo. The collection continues to be digitised and remastered for full public access.
Flying high in the friendly sky aboard a modified Boeing 747, the NASA Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) gets an unimpeded view of the cosmos. However, to safely reach that altitude and come back down again, mission planners require detailed forecasts of weather conditions along the route. Join Ravi Kandula from MetService for Aviation Weather: Surface to Stratosphere, the Tuesday Talk at Space Place, as he explains aviation weather phenomena, and why accurate forecasts are as important to passenger aircraft as they are for stratospheric flights. The talk starts at 7:00pm, with ticket price included in general admission to Space Place, Carter Observatory, 40 Salamanca Road.