Covid-19 Alert

NZ moves to the Traffic light system at 11:59pm on Thursday 2 December 2021 with Auckland at RED. The rest of New Zealand level is still to be decided.
Scan QR Codes & get your Vaccination Pass | Save Lives | Be Kind

Monday, July 31, 2017

Wellington Library Card Holders can now access Jazz and other music libraries 24/7


Wellington City Libraries


Log in with your library Card to: http://www.wcl.govt.nz/mygateway/music.htmlInformation about music is right at your fingertips through the following links:

Lynda.com

Lynda.com is an online tutorial service providing access to over 3,500 instructional videos on computer software, business and creative skills - including music composition and recording techniques. The courses are delivered by tutors who are both experts in their field and know how to teach. Added features, allow for searching across courses, curated playlists and individual access enabling course progress to be saved. Lynda.com can be accessed both within the library, or from outside. Find out more.



Naxos Video Library

Naxos Video Library is an extensive streaming video library of classical music performances, opera, ballet, live concerts and documentaries. Watch the world's greatest opera houses, ballet companies, orchestras and artists perform on demand! All you need to do is logon with your WCL library card.


Naxos Video Library can not currently be accessed from the public computers in the library - logon from home or ask a staff member for help. As there are a limited number of sessions available at any one time, please log out when you have finished listening.

Logon now

Get streaming access to around one million recordings of classical, jazz, world and American music. This online resource includes:
  • American Song: Music from America's past right up to recent additions including Motown, Jimi Hendrix, Mamas and the Papas and other artists from the rock era.
  • Smithsonian Global Sound: Music and spoken word from Smithsonian Folkways and other legendary music labels, including Fast Folk, Paredon, Cook, Dyer-Bennet and Monitor Records.
  • Classical Music Library: Over 120,000 classical music recordings from EMI, Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Hyperion, Artemis- Vanguard, Sanctuary Classics, Vox and many more.
  • Jazz: 130,000 tracks make this the most comprehensive collection of jazz available online. Includes the most renowned jazz artists, performances and record labels: Verve, GR , Impulse! and more.

Alexander Music Online

Alexander Music Online can be accessed both from home and in the library, however as there are a limited number of sessions available at any one time, please close your browser or the relevant browser tab when you have finished listening. 
Start search

Logon to listen to streaming audio of more than 276,000 tracks from over 19,000 CDs, with 500 CDs added monthly. Includes almost all the standard classical repertoire, as well as other genres such as jazz, blues, nostalgia, new age, world music, some pop and rock, and music and information aimed at children.

Naxos Music Library

It includes the complete catalogues of Naxos, BIS, Chandos and others, plus selected titles from other independent labels such as V2 (At The Drive-In, Datsuns, Stereophonics), and New Zealand labels Atoll, Rattle, and White Cloud. Contains liner notes plus opera synopses and libretti, composer and artist biographies, and other useful information.
Naxos Music Library can not currently be accessed from the public computers in the library - logon from home or ask a staff member for help. As there are a limited number of sessions available at any one time, please log out when you have finished listening.

Logon now

Naxos Jazz Library

Logon to listen to streaming audio of classic jazz sourced from the OJC series, including iconic works by Chet Baker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane in full album content. Also includes classic Soul & Blues from the Stax/Fantasy vaults, from Isaac Hayes to Albert King. Thousands of albums to choose from.
Naxos Music Library can not currently be accessed from the public computers in the library - logon from home or ask a staff member for help. As there are a limited number of sessions available at any one time, please log out when you have finished listening.

Logon now

Oxford Music Online

This database is the leading online resource for music research and features more than 50,000 articles on musicians, composers, musicologists, instruments, genres, terms and much more. Information is supplemented by links to related websites, illustrations and sound enhanced music examples (music examples can not currently be accessed from the public computers in the Library).
Oxford Music Online is a combination of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., (2001, 29 vols), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, (1992), and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., (2002) along with The Oxford Companion to Music (2002) and The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed., Revised (2006). Other Grove titles and resources will be added over time.

Start search

All Music Guide

This excellent resource provides searching ability for artists, albums, songs, styles and labels. Extensive biographical details for artists are included, as are reviews of albums. A handy feature is the ability to find similar or related albums.
Start search



Gale Biography In Context

This comprehensive database contains biographical information on more than 185,000 people including artists and musicians from throughout history, around the world, and across all subject areas. It combines award-winning biographies from respected Gale Group sources and also includes full-text articles from hundreds of periodicals. You can search for people based on one or more personal facts such as birth and death year, nationality, ethnicity, occupation or gender, or combine criteria to create a highly-targeted custom search.
Start search

Music on MasterFILE Complete

There are a number of full text music magazines available through this Ebsco database, including those listed below. Clicking on the links above will take you directly to the holdings of each magazine. If you have not accessed the Ebsco site in the last 30 days you will need to validate your library card access first, and then the links above will work for you. Login now

Breaking News! WOMAD earlybirds are nearly sold out!



Earlybird Youth three day tickets have officially SOLD OUT! And we have less than 200 earlybird adult three day tickets left... once they're gone, they're gone and tickets will rise to the standard price.

ADULT 3 DAY EARLYBIRD TICKET $220

Click here to but tickets

Enter Competition Here


Groove Book Report - Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World – Billy Bragg (Faber)



"Skiffle is a music genre with jazz, blues, folk and American folk influences, usually using homemade or improvised instruments. Originating as a term in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, it became popular again in the UK in the 1950s, where it was associated with artists such as Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Ken Colyer and Chas McDevitt. Skiffle played a major part in beginning the careers of later eminent jazz, pop, blues, folk and rock musicians and has been seen as a critical stepping stone to the second British folk revival, blues boom and British Invasion of the US popular music scene."  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiffle

Told with joyous vigor, this book tells the story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthy witch-hunts. Billy Bragg traces how the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s.

This is quite possibly the first book to ‘properly’ explore the short-lived Skiffle phenomenon in any really depth.  On the surface, it’s a musical style that could easily be brushed aside as a post war hillbilly revival – A last gasp for Britain’s vaudeville performers whose careers have been swept aside by the tidal wave of Swing, Big Band Music and Jazz brought to UK by American troops stationed there during the war.  On the other hand, author and musician Stephen William “Billy” Bragg argues skiffle was the first and possibly the best example of British youth’s DIY ‘punk’ attitude which sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it.
Billy Bragg

It’s no surprise that Bragg chose this topic because for nearly his entire 30-year recording career he’s been involved at the grassroots of political and social movements.  As he’s told the UK press on multiple occasions: “I don’t mind being labelled a political songwriter. The thing that troubles me is being dismissed as a political songwriter.”  And even more than before, he’s still searching for a New England.

Skiffle, as a style, if that’s the right word, emerged from the trad-jazz clubs of the early ’50s.  Initially it was another vehicle for novelty songs, skits and old time music hall – a tradition that British performers longed to revive but it’s simple style, often played on guitar, washboard, harmonica and piano meant that nearly anyone could pick up an instrument and play.  So skiffle was adopted by kids who growing up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. These were Britain’s first teenagers, looking for a music of their own in a pop culture dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC.  With a reinvented version of a Leadbelly tune Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of Rock Island Line.  And soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year.  It was that simplicity, Bragg argues, that likens the style to the punk rock that would flourish two decades later because, at the end of the day, skiffle was a do-it-yourself music.

Way back, before BREXIT, the country had another identity crisis.  As Orwellian Britain was recovering it desperately needed some kind of release from the blandness and drudgeries of a post war concrete-grey world.  Victory was not sweet.  It was harsh.  There were ration cards and shortages, laws and restrictions.  America had exported its glamour to Britain but it was all still black in white in Old Blighty.  And for the youth of the country, who’d grown up with the scars of the previous decades they were wanting to escape with nowhere to go.  As Johnny Marr wrote in his own biography, his play ground was the rubble of a bombed-out Manchester.  Not the glam of the Hollywood Hills.

Lonnie Donegan
The hit parade dominated by ‘Old Men’ – crooners and novelty songs.  Music was for grown -ups.  So it was refreshing when that was all disrupted not just by Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line (1954) but by the equally homespun Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O by the Vipers and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group’s Freight Train (feat. Nancy Whiskey).  Skiffle was the natural replacement to the exotic Calypso styles.  Although it drew its roots from Blues it was ideally suited to British working class accents and certainly struck the right chords with the audiences.

As far as Bragg is concerned Donegan is the hero of British skiffle but it all starts earlier with trumpet play Ken Colyer who boarded a ship in 1952 as a galley cook and landed in New Orleans.  There he gigged with local musicians.  Eventually he was kicked out of the USA, when his visa expired and for ‘consorting’ with black musicians, he set up shop in London with his own new sextet playing New Orleans-style jazz, with Chris Barber on trombone and Donegan on banjo.  Colyer also played guitar with a subset of the band – including his brother, Bill, on washboard – performed interval sets featuring folk, blues and country songs.  Ironically Colyer and his brother were eventually sacked from their own ensemble.  Re-labelled the Chris Barber Jazz Band the group recorded their first album in the summer of 1954, including the add-on Rock Island Line by the great blues singer Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly).  The record company pretty much ignored this tune for over a year until finally released, almost by accident.  And the rest is history.

Ken Coyler
For players, the appeal of skiffle was immediate.  All it took to create an approximation of the sound heard on a song like, say Rock Island Line was a bass made from a tea chest and a broom handle; a zinc washboard and a set of metal thimbles; and a guitar, uke or piano.  Someone also had to sing, of course, roughly in the southern blues and country styles.  Because there was no amplification rehearsals could go ahead in front rooms of terrace houses without annoying the neighbors.  Because it was a cheap and easy music to learn and play, guitar sales soared.  On a different level this was the parlor music that was once a vital part of British social graces, but perhaps more lively.

Overall, Bragg acknowledges, the significance of skiffle is subject of heated debate.  For our hero, Lonnie Donegan, it probably became an albatross as much as an eagle’s wings.  It took him from obscurity to fame.  He didn’t do himself any favors, though.  Recording tunes like My Old Man’s a Dustman and Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight? relegated skiffle back down to the ranks of novelty music.  Although many bands and performers chose to return to the style later on.  Paul McCartney and John Lennon returned to their roots and borrowed heavily – You can hear it on When I’m 64 and Rocky Racoon, for instance.

Bragg rounds off his book with a kind of Post-skiffle chapter, bringing the connections of Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, The Who, The Bee Gees, all who owe their careers to their early interest in skiffle and it’s motivations to get them playing.  He then leaps ahead to remind us that the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned and many others of the 70’s all played London’s 100 Club in 1976 with the same brazen attitude to “set out to democratize popular culture”.

Skiffle was a working-class music at best and even could be egalitarian at times, especially when the BBC got hold of it.  Many of Britain’s best rock musicians came from the streets.  You can see how Bragg makes the connection.  Not bad for a working-class kid who failed his 11-plus and missed out on a place in University.  His work, life and now this book speak volumes more than any professor, and with more colour and relevance than some tedious talk in a dusty lecture.





Monday, July 24, 2017

The Groove Book Report: Teenagers: The Rise Of Youth Culture in New Zealand, Chris Brickell, AUP, $49.99

From mashers to milk bars, flappers to factory girls, larrikins to louts – this intimate and evocative look at youth culture offers insights into the true lives of teenagers and the history of New Zealand.

Teenagers is a ground-breaking history of young people in New Zealand from the nineteenth century to the 1960s. Through the diaries and letters, photographs and drawings that teenagers left behind, we meet New Zealanders as they transition from children to adults: sealers and bushfellers, factory girls and newspaper boys, the male ‘mashers’ of the 1880s and the female  ‘flappers’ of the 1910s and ’20s, schoolgirls and rock’n’rollers, larrikins and louts.

By taking us inside the lives of young New Zealanders, the book illuminates from a new angle large-scale changes in our society: the rise and fall of domestic service, the impact of compulsory education, the movement of Pākehā and then Māori from country to city, the rise of consumer culture and popular psychology. Teenagers shows us how young people made sense of their personal and social transformations: in language and song and dress, at dances and picnics and social clubs, in talking and playing and reading.

Teenagers provides an intimate and evocative insight into the lives of young people and the history of New Zealand.


According to popular myth "In the 19th century, the American world consisted of children and adults. ... adolescents were displaying traits unknown among children and adults. Although the word teenager did not come into use until decades later, the teenage mindset dawned in the 1920s."  And we tend to think of teenagers as an invention of America, of the rising automobile culture and the post war era, especially after the dawn of rock'n'roll. Not so, says Chris Brickell, author of a new book on the subject: Teenagers: The Rise Of Youth Culture in New Zealand.  His narrative chooses to follows the development of distinctive tribal subcultures of the youth in this country, proving that 'teenhood' started much earlier, as far back as the mid 1800s, in fact, when that period of adolescence didn't even have a name, lest an identity.  Yet it existed.

Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Otago, Chris Brickell knows his stuff but unlike  many other academics he's resisted the temptation to cloak his findings and research in complicated extrapolations and dull, structured prose.  Instead he's peppers his snappy words with plenty of photographic evidence and informative and effective asides.  In fact half the book is photos, so it makes for a helpful browsing book but is also really informative and educational when you choose to dig deeper.

Of course, it's not an an exclusive club.  we've all been card carriers at some stage.  Brickell was once a teenager himself.  He writes a little about his teen years, but doesn't focus too heavily.  That'd be an autobiography.  He does acknowledge that every teenager's experience will be different.  "When you're a teenager, you can only see one little part of the elephant," he says,  Essentially he reckons that every experience is very much down to social class, family context, friends, sexuality, personality.  And I would add historical setting.  The world of pre-war teens, war and post war adolescences and then the 70's, etc, and now are all different.  Teens today have social media and digital devices.  Teens then had telephones and letters, telegrams home.  Technology was important and essential to keeping social relationships alive - more so than adults.  More intense, perhaps.  That is different in every era but really, similar.  And yet still, no two experiences were exactly the same.  Confused?

Brickell looks at it this way: There are some major shifts in our society from the 1800s and he follows through fashion, music, slang, courting rituals and social gatherings like dances and the all present 'coming out balls' and of course, weddings.  He also looks at the opportunities for jobs and the freedom our youth had, within the social confines and rules of the day.
Brickell's images show the very same people decades before hanging out together, as distinct groups - cliche's even (pre-1950's Heathers).  One example is of three likely lads photographed in the 1930's with their bikes, in a the 1940's.  Mostly these photos were of sports events, youth clubs, Scouts, Boy's and Girls Brigade''s and dances but they definitely show what the cool kids were up to back then.  One classic is some teenagers at a dance at Upper Hutt Youth Club during the 1960s.  Don't they look hip?  Observe below:

Revelle Jackson
The teen terms are even more important.  You've got "Straights" and "Rebels", "Bushfellers" and "City Slickers", "Factory Boys" and servant girls. "Mashers", "Larrikins", "Flappers", "Bodgies", "Widgies", and "Cissies", "Jazz Boys" and, my favourite, "Milk-bar Cowboys".  Brickell gives us insights into all these gangs.  But, somehow he misses the really big one.  The army.  Half of our teens were duped into joining the biggest gang of all.  the biggest bullshit gang.  Their still telling the same lie to teens in the USA. Hell, half the the country are 'serving' it seems.  But here we choose Peace and self obsession over oblivion.  Thank God for that.  Rant aside, it seems that it's the one thing Brickell has missed.  Yet Military service really did have a big part in the shaping of the Kiwi teen.  Male, and even females, to.

Apparently Brickell spent more than eight years collecting photographs and recording plenty of key local youth styles.  He snuck away their diaries (slightly creepy) and snatched choice lines from outraged editorials in newspapers like The Truth and our or upstanding Evening Post.  He couldn't resist.

But, he argues, this is a book about changes in New Zealand society - with a youth lens.  True even Michael king's journalist eye ignores the youth history of our country and focuses on the big events.  there's an exhibition at Te Papa, in Wellington called Golden Days.  it may well be the only time you actually see youth of any age in NZ history and their regular pastimes.

Naturally, Brickell focused on the look, poses, attitude, the rebellion. He says that even in the earliest photos you get a 'dandy' emerging.  A style, particularly with the young men who are trying to establish their own uniqueness, a separation from the old fogeys.  Take a look at rugby players or even warriors - they a youthful rebelliousness and masculinity.  An attempt within the confines to show their own burgeoning power in spite of their parents and their peers.  "Gesture, pose and attitude - the larrikin's slouch, the masher's smirk, the flapper's swearing, the bodgie's sneer - all reflected a desire to dissemble and transgress".  Check these two out:
Auckland University Press
However, it wasn't just men.  In the late 1800s, a large number of girls spent their teenage years working as domestic servants, under the thumb of their wealthy employers, both morally and financially, and, of course, that influenced how they behaved and expressed themselves.  By contrast, many young men had financial power, working in factories.  there was a very specific working class youth style called the "Larrikin", and a more middle class style called the "Masher".  They were still miniature adults but they grew up fast.  Women, teen women didn't get that independence until they became factory workers and 'Land Girls" in the years of WWII.  Or did they.  Brickell shows a few incidents where they have some freedoms.  In church groups, in social settings and universality life.

He also notes the development of youth interests, the slow but steady development of teenagers' own tastes like in 1920s, a lot of young Kiwis were interested in of jazz, way before their parents.  And, of course there was finally the Brando entrance.  "But by the 1950s, there was a much more visible and distinct youth culture. You had rock'n'roll music, teen-focused films like Rebel Without A Cause and Blackboard Jungle, and certain clothes young people were adopting that their parents would never wear."  Of course.  Somehow, that was when teen hood got boring - predictable McDonald s and Walmart  cloned styles and culture.  The strength in this book is the undercurrent.  Before the introduction of the Teddy Boys, and the Motops.  There is a brilliant blurry pic of some punters from Lower Hutt's Stokes Valley doing their best to outraged the 'Olds' with their shaggy Beatles' mop-tops.

Naomi Highfield, Glenys Taylor and Beverley Nicholson near the skating rink in Paraparaumu, early 1965.
Auckland University Press

The Beatles made it here in 1964, and you had local young-un's with mop-top hairstyles and the whole she-bang showing up New Zealand as a really backward and boring place.  I had noted that just about every photo prior to that was an old grey haired bloke in tweed or a woman with a turban hat and cats eye glasses (always over 50 and nearly always some Mayor's wife).  Squaresville, man!

Although his book finishes abruptly in the 1970's, before my own teen hood really got going, he notes that there is no more a "typical teenager" today than there was in the 1880s.  Obviously he chose to ignore 'Punk' and "Goth' and New Romantic'.  I could have argued these were far more influential than the Teddy Boys and the Widgies.  He'd just say it was history repeating itself.

Teenagers: The Rise Of Youth Culture in New Zealand, Chris Brickell, AUP, $49.99, is on sale on July 24.

Wednesday, July 05, 2017

NEW MUSIC FROM THE BOMBAY ROYALE!


Cult band The Bombay Royale are set for a triumphant return with their third studio masterpiece ‘Run Kitty Run’. A Retro Bollywood fuelled rampage through Psyche-Surf, 80’s Electro-Pop and Desert Rock, ‘Run Kitty Run’ is, like its predecessors, conceived as the soundtrack to a lost film. The music conjures into life a devastated futuristic landscape peopled by robotic horsemen, killer satellites and grinning sadhus. Overlaid with vocals in Hindi, Bengali and English, the resulting soundtrack is one of love and betrayal, hopeless escapes and unlikely salvation.



The first single ‘Ballygunge’ has an angular 80’s vibe, infused with gated snares and the spirits of Talking Heads and David Bowie and it’s a love song set in a dark sci-fi vision of Kolkata. Familiar landmarks like Gol Park are dwarfed by aerial highways and transmitter towers framed by the plumes of departing spacecraft. Despite the odds love blazes defiantly – whether it can survive is another question

Recorded between Hope Street Studios in Brunswick and Soundpark Studios in Northcote, ‘Run Kitty Run’ was co-produced by Tristan Ludowyk (The Putbacks, The Cactus Channel) and The Skipper aka Andy Williamson.


With the announcement of the highly anticipated new album, The Bombay Royale also launch a national Australian tour as well as a run of European festival spots including Sziget in Hungary and Brittany in France.







The Groove Book Report - Moo and Moo and Little Calf too - Written by Jane Milton, Illustrated by Deborah Hinde


During the massive 7.8M earthquake that hit New Zealand in November 2016 two cows and a calf were stranded on a two-metre high 'island' when their paddock slid and buckled 80 metres from its original position.  Sensibly they stayed put and were rescued by farmers a day or so later. This story attracted huge media attention locally and around the world.

It's an iconic story of bravery in the face of great adversity, and of helping others and protecting those around us. It's also emblematic of the laconic Kiwi sense of humor and the strength of the New Zealand spirit when faced with chaos and extreme challenge.

That was an earthquake is very clearly etched in my memory.  As a Wellingtonian I well remember being shaken from my bed, grabbing the emergency kit, bundling the kids in the car and heading to the hills whilst all around the tsunami warnings screamed out across the Hutt Valley.  For me and other adults it was a nervous night but for our youngest it was an adventure.  That's how she'll remember it.  Getting up in the middle of the night, camping out in the car and devouring service station chippies and soft drinks.   She had a wonderful time and is still quite gleeful about it when I ask her, even now.  So it was no surprise when the courier package arrived.  She tore open the cover and exclaimed loudly "The Earthquake Book! Yes!"

I should explain.  Emily is my youngest, just six and learning to read.  Not only did she learn about the November, 2016, earthquake at school but also about some of the bizarre things that occurred on that night including the raising of the land around the Kaikoura coastline and how it left stranded three sheep on a tiny island of land over 2 metres high created by the the extreme buckling of land around their coastal paddock.

From Moo and Moo and Little Calf Too
by Jane Milton / illustrated by Deborah Hinde
(Pub. Allen & Unwin)
The story captured the public and international media's attention so much that they, these three wonderful creatures became world famous in New Zealand. The unusual situation coupled by their daring rescue by local farmers is a story in itself and like the legend of Shrek the wild sheep was just begging to be made into a book or film.
Quick to capitalize on the even Jane Milton, who actually lives on the very same Clarence River farm in Kaikoura has chosen to make the most of this crazy situation.  Like Jane Bowron (Old Bucky and Me) who wrote about her experiences and learning to live with the the Christchurch earthquakes Jane Milton has also chosen to embrace her situation, even as the land outside her window twist and turns like a distorted body.  Jane and her husband Derrick live at her childhood home of Waipapa. They raised three children on the farm, two of whom are also farmers: Ben runs Waipapa and Willie runs Glentoi at Ward.  Although Waipapa’s idyllic house and garden were tossed around on November 14, the house survived relatively unscathed.  However, the family’s 1400ha hilly, coastal farmland took a massive hit.  When the day after the quake dawned, a news crew shot images from a helicopter of two cows and a calf stranded precariously on a newly formed, grass-topped island with no obvious means of escape. A hill had collapsed, the land had moved 80m, and steep cliffs and deep ravines now criss-crossed the landscape.  that became her story.

It could have been a story of devastation and loss.  But instead Jane has made this a really fun story in 20 punchy, quick witted stanzas.  Comprised mostly of short rhyming couplets the story flows easily and naturally like a song and has a very familiar feel to it.  As a first time reader, Emily found the vocabulary easy to read and rhyming also helped her to anticipate not only words but the story, too.  Like all her favorites (Jane Dodd, Dr Seuss, etc) it was an effortless read for her.  Yet Jane does not avoid using 'adult' words when needed.  Try this one on for size:

"On and on, past the trough and the tank,
Past the Totara and the tussock
And their favourite grassy bank.
Then down,
             down,
                  down,
                        down
                            with a rumble and a roar,
  Until their ride ended at the valley floor.


It's a very Kiwi story with plenty of references to the local landscape.  Jane makes sure she includes the limestone cliffs and Totara trees (spelling it with the macron).  There's even mention of a famous helicopter pilot - Richie - Yes, the former All Black! And she name checks the real farmers that rescued the cows, too She also uses a few geological terms such as 'rupture' and 'rubble', but down plays the noise and horror of the quake, thankfully.

Deborah Hinde was the one responsible for the brilliant book A Kiwi Night Before Christmas.  As an illustrator she works in a simple pen, ink and watercolor style.  Her style is gentle and calming.  She shies away from gruesome details or awkward accuracy but still manages to capture the scenes as if she has really been on this farm.  Perhaps she has.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-3933582/Nowhere-mooove-3-cows-stranded-New-Zealand-earthquake.html

In this image made from video, three cows are stranded on an island of grass in a paddock that had been ripped apart following
an earthquake near Kaikoura, New Zealand Monday, Nov. 14, 2016.  (Daily News/ Newshub AP)
 
Deborah's challenge, as was Jane's, was to turn all that was chaos and crisis into a bit of fun.  After all, you gotta laugh sometimes when things like this happen and I think they've managed to do that.  Emily laughs at the silliness of three cows stuck on a platform in the middle of a beach to mountain.  "How will they go to the toilet or watch TV? " She asks.  She's imagining them escaping one by one by diving off a board into the sea and swimming across to Wellington.  "Why not? They could stay in my room."

While there will be no bovine borders in this house, there is plenty of room on our book case and I really hop that when the dust settles and the cows are once again lowing in the fields that Jane Milton will find time for another adventure installment.  I can't wait.

Children's Book - Suitable age group - 3 - 7yrs
Moo and Moo and Little Calf too - Written by Jane Milton, Illustrated by Deborah Hinde
Published by Allen & Unwin - RRP $19.99