The Next Hundred Years

As it was...

Last Friday saw the opening of Abbeville Estate.
A year ago, I had blogged about the fate of the old Westney Rd Methodist Church, which used to sit in Mangere, by the Auckland airport access road. At that time, I'd been provided information by Peter Alexander, Auckland International Airport's General Manager Property, and he kindly invited me to attend the opening...

Abbeville Homestead

Abbeville Estate is Auckland's newest venue for weddings and events. It contains four heritage buildings in tranquil surroundings, yet is only minutes from the city and the international airport (not that you'd know it - plane noise is almost non-existent).

The barn

The Nixon Road site is the original location of Abbeville Homestead and barn (the only intact pre-1860 historic farm complex remaining in the Auckland region). Moved onto the site are the equally well-restored 1855 Westney Homestead and Westney Church (c.1856).
Many of those attending the opening had family ties to to the church: their ancestors had been buried beside it. But no burial records existed, so the Mangere Hist.Society had the awesome challenge of finding descendants, from just

Westney Homestead

headstone details. Then permission was needed to resite the graves, so the land could be developed for the airport's second runway. The restoration of the church, with Andrew Rennie's well-known stained glass windows in pride-of-place, must have been fitting closure. Having seen the church in its latter tired days, I was

The Rennie windows

most impressed... 
The Estate plan required sustainable activities. The Great Catering Company will manage/operate the Estate as a function venue: several weddings are booked already. With the church and reception venue on-site, Abbeville Estate makes a one-stop wedding location!
Big bouquets to all those involved...and esp.Auckland Intl.Airport for going well beyond its core responsibilities and helping to preserve local history.

Ready for the next century...

Wolf In Sheep's Clothing?

If you're a casual internet user, then the storm rollin' in over Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei may mean little to
you. But...it should!
Y'see, Huawei's involved in a $1.35 billion Ultrafast Broadband Project (UBP) in NZ. As reported by NBR last week, defence analyst Rod Vaughan claims Huawei is almost certainly a front for Chinese intelligence! That's also the collective view of the US, UK and Oz security folk.
Yet naive Noo Zuld is not at all concerned about security, or about Huawei's involvement in our telco sector! Huawei is strong here, having been in NZ since 2005, supplying equipment to Chorus, 2Degrees, Christchurch's Enable Services and the central North Island's Wel Networks as part of the govt's UBP (remember how it talked this up, back in 2010?).
But overseas, Huawei's been blocked from bidding for Oz's $38 billion national broadband network for security reasons, and US stopped it from buying various telcos. NY Times reports US computer security software firm Symantec dissolved a Huawei joint venture, over fears it would prevent it from obtaining US govt classified information about cyberthreats.
NZ-based defence analyst Paul Buchanan once worked for the US Dept of Defence, and believes Huawei is intent on tapping into the top-secret Echelon intelligence network (SO secret, it's on Wiki!) in which NZ exchanges highly classified info with US, UK, Canada and OZ: "China's been lagging behind with signals intel and technical intel...they've got to get a significant capability, and the suspicion is that Huawei is one way of doing this." Buchanan believes US has classified information implicating Huawei in covert activities.
NZ is particularly vulnerable to cyber-espionage, as evident by the hacking of Muddling McCully's private email. This showed how loose our internet security is, when a govt minister can have his private emails hacked into by amateurs. We would be an easy back-door for a malevolent hi-level hack.
NZ does like its sheep...but is Huawei a wolf in sheep's clothing? Is it too late to extricate ourselves from this? Do we need to?
Well, I think so, and here's final proof. Huawei boss Ren Zhengfei (a former People's Liberation Army officer)...looks just like Cheng Zhi, the nasty Chinese spy chief in the tv series "24"...just sayin'!

NZ Hit Space Earlier Than Thought

Remember the hurrah in late 2009, over the successful launch of a small rocket into space from Great Mercury Island off the Coromandel Coast?
At the time, the launch of Atea-1 was heralded as New Zealand's first step into space,but new information has put that claim very much on the back burner. And yet the evidence has
been in full view for years...
After WWII, USA was very keen to advance its knowledge of rocket propulsion, well aware that its Soviet rival was also intent on gaining a foothold on the launch pad. It smuggled a number of top German rocket scientists to USA, to continue their work in secret. One of them was Wernher von Braun, described as the greatest rocket scientist in history. He developed the Saturn V booster rocket that helped land men on the Moon in 1969.
Between 1950-1956, von Braun developed the Redstone rocket for the US's first nuclear ballistic missiles. Following the launch of the 50th Redstone rocket from Johnston Atoll in the South Pacific in July 1958, von Braun disappeared for two years...reappearing in July 1960 to become NASA's first Director.
Recently declassified documents show that between 1958-1960, von Braun was actually working here in NZ. Part of his brief was to survey NZ to find the best site for an observatory (for future space flight observations). This led to the establishment of Mt.John Observatory in Tekapo, which officially opened in 1965.
But his main focus was the development of thruster rockets for steering future lunar landing craft...and this was done in the northern Tararua Ranges behind Palmerston North! That 2-year period saw the launch of no less than 13 rockets - all under top secrecy. The team lived in temporary barracks at a site deep in the bush, and was shuttled out to Linton Army Camp once a week at night under armed guard. The team's success was a major factor in the moon landings.
Later in the 1960s, residents of Tiakitahuna on the Manawatu Plains were looking for a symbol to mark the area's centennial. One of von Braun's unused rockets had been discovered by a local hunter in the bush compound. His story (quickly suppressed) linked in with tales of unexplained bright lights and, as this was the age of the Space Race, a rocket symbol was chosen.
To quell the rumours and stop searches for the real rocket, army engineers made the Tiakitahuna Rocket out of 44-gallon oil drums welded together: it was erected in the late 1960s. The centenary years were painted at the top while the district name was painted down the body.
The rocket became a familiar landmark on the southern approach to Palmerston North City. Yet few outside the military and the govt ever knew it also marked NZ's first steps into space in the late 1950s!