South Wairarapa Rebus Club

REBUS SW guest speakers at our 25 January 2019 meeting were Jan & Stuart Abernethy, a couple of Carterton-based entrepreneurs working and trading as “Lavender Abbey”  – growers of Lavender and handmade Lavender products since 2008.

From the several hundred Lavender varieties available, the Abernethys chose the French “Grosso” Lavender – flowering in November and harvested in February.  One or two other varieties were used to blend for handmade products. Processing the crop requires steam distillation to extract the aromatic Lavender oil. 

A magnificent tabletop display at the meeting showed many Lavender Abbey products including Magnesium Sleep Lotion, Lip Balm, Face & Body Cream – and, unexpected by your scribe, culinary lavender buds used for shortbread biscuits (recipe provided); plus Lavender and Hops pillows.

Lavender Abbey is a member of the NZ Lavender Growers Association, and is the winner of the 2018 Memorial Trophy: two Gold/one Silver Supreme Oil Awards. … Continue Reading

20 Year Service Medal for Maureen Thurlow

Maureen Thurlow was presented with the Red Cross Twenty Years Service Medal by Branch President Brian Love at the branch’s volunteer Christmas morning tea. Geoff Cave of Carterton received an Award for ten  years service.  

Brian thanked members for volunteering for Red Cross and welcomed a very special guest speaker Jenny Percival.  Jenny is a Wairarapa District Health Nurse Educator, has always had a passion for humanitarian aid work and on three occasions in the past five years has spent time overseas working with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),
        Jenny spoke of her decision to become an aid worker,  she had been in the nursing profession for some time when one evening while she was watching a TV programme about the Red Cross made the decision to volunteer her services.
          The first of her three deployments came in 2014 a month spent in Sierra Leone at the time of the Ebola epidemic there.  This was a stressful time, Jenny said.’We had a tent hospital, and there was little escape from the heat’. The hospital was in the diamond mining area; so it was noisy from explosions and very dusty.  ‘We could not see the sky.’  … Continue Reading

Wairarapa Dark Sky part of major world-wide research project 

The South Wairarapa’s night sky is being monitored round the clock in Spain and contributing to a world-wide dark sky database,  thanks to a European research team.

The move follows Chairman of the Martinborough Dark Sky Society, Lee Mauger, making a  connection via Twitter with fellow Dark Sky enthusiast Carlos Eugenio Tapia Ayuga from Spain.

Carlos is part of the “Stars4All” team at the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain which has developed a new online dark sky monitoring meter called TESS.

The Stars4All project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme,  the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever with nearly 80 billion Euros of funding available over seven years (2014 to 2020). Think of Horizon 2020 as New Zealand’s Provincial Growth Fund on steroids!

Carlos proposed the team in Spain fund a night sky meter so Martinborough could join the worldwide research network on light pollution. The TESS sensor now installed in Martinborough records cloud cover 24/7 and sky brightness every night. 

The Wellington Astronomical Society were also given a TESS meter for the Gifford Observatory in Wellington City, so now we can compare our light pollution to Wellington City and also many other locations around the world. … Continue Reading

Plundering beauty

With a title such as “Plundering Beauty”, one might be forgiven for thinking this slim grey volume is of the same ilk as “Shades of Grey”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hidden between its covers is a fascinating story of mankind’s wars down the centuries, paralleled by an equally extensive catalogue of the theft, destruction, plundering, displacement and concealing of some of the world’s greatest works of art. 

In the second of the Longwood Life Lessons series presented by Friends of Kokomai, comes Arthur Tompkins, Wellington District Court Judge and the author of the above book, subtitled “A History of Art Crime during War”.

A regular guest of Kim Hill on Saturday mornings on RNZ, Arthur Tompkins will present a talk on ‘Gentlemen Art Thieves: persistent myths and great art‘. In that, he will explore and trace the stubborn and recurring myth of the gentleman art thief, who steals masterpieces for solitary enjoyment in exotic hideaways: from Adam Worth, the original ‘Napoleon of Crime’, to James Bond’s first arch-villain Dr No, and finally Thomas Crown’s theft (and return) of Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk.  … Continue Reading