RE: Wellington topo map - Hataitai

Brent Efford
Friday, October 4, 2002 11:15 AM

Hey, Don, you are the great map man! I treasure the collection of Ohio maps
that you sent me during our C&LE discussions - quite similar in style to the
NZMS topo maps. It is interesting that the cartographers of the early 1950s
identified trolleybus lines (even if a bit incorrectly) and not the Waitoa
Rd stub terminus!

Hataitai is normally pronounced as you did - even if not spelt strictly that
way. Originally it was Whataitai - a Maori name whose origins I haven't yet
discovered.

Cheers,

Brent Efford

-----Original Message-----
From: Donald Galt [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, 4 October 2002 11:37 a.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: [TramsDownUnder] Wellington topo map - Hataitai


Further to Peter Bruce's query about Wellington maps:

The attached is extracted from a long-vanished Lands $ Surveys series
(NZMS2)
at the scale of 1:25,000. I prepared this a week ago at the height of the
Hataitai fury, but opted to post another map instead.

The standard scale for topo maps in those days was 1:63,360 (one inch to the
mile) but a few urban areas were covered at this larger scale - one never
since
offered in NZ even though common in many countries.

The gridlines, remember, are of the old military grid and are spaced 1000
yards
apart, not metres. I can't predict what the scale of the map will be on your
screen, but a little calculation says that at 1:25,000 the lines would be
36.6
millimetres apart.

This fragment is pieced together from two sheets, N164/2 (Wellington,
published
August 1952) and N164/5 (Sinclair, published August 1944). Sorry about the
bad
match: it isn't easy to position a large map on a small scanner, and after
many
tries with software I gave up on the micro-rotation necessary to match the
two
portions.

The later northern sheet shows the 15-Roseneath trolleybus line as a
tramway,
technically an inaccuracy but not without its logic.

I have maps of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch at this scale, and
Dunedin
at 1:63,360. All show tramlines. Any interest? Anything readable would
require
a number of large files, and at least theoretically there is the crown
copyright to consider.

Parenthetically, how is "Hataitai" commonly pronounced? When I first saw the
name 45 years ago or so, I mouthed "high-tie-tie" and ever after spelled it
that way until a week ago. Now, I did hear it pronounced occasionally when
living in NZ (memorably, it figured in a shaggy-dog story involving a
cavalryman shooting a horse, which story I have also heard set in locations
such as the Khyber Pass.) But if ever I heard a pronunciation disabusing me
of
my misspelling, I either ignored it or forgot it immediately.

Of course, it isn't really my fault :-} If Pakehas did a
better job pronouncing Maori names it would be "hata-ita-i."

Don




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