Archaeologists dive into exploring old shipwreck
After more than 180 years resting in Whitianga Harbour, the HMS Buffalo shipwreck will be explored by archaeologists.
This weekend a team of divers and archaeologists will descend on the remains of the ship, which was built in India in 1813.
The teak vessel was used as a British naval storeship and to transport convicts to Australia, before it sank in a gale at Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula in 1840.
Maritime archaeologist Kurt Bennet, who is leading the project, said the shipwreck was covered in sand when examined in 1986.
In recent years, the sand has been scoured away, exposing most of the hull.
Bennet said this offered a golden opportunity to learn more about the construction of the ship.
‘‘We don’t have many archeological examples of this type of ship that are easily accessible for research.’’
The team is planning two dives lasting 1.5 hours in total.
‘‘We will be taking thousands of photos very slowly across the ship.
‘‘We want to make sure we’ve got overlap on each photo, and then we put all those into specialist software and that creates a 3D model.’’
The ship is about 50m offshore in fairly shallow water. The divers could face challenges from waves that create ‘‘a washing machine at low tide,’’ Bennet said.
The researchers are working with Mercury Bay Museum and Nga¯ti Hei iwi, which has connections with the long-lost ship.
‘‘Their people helped survivors off the ship and buried one of the sailors who lost their lives.’’
Local businesses have boosted the researchers’ funds and they were awarded a scholarship from the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology.
He may have been Born to Run but Bruce Springsteen got to walk this week. The Boss pleaded guilty in a virtual New Jersey hearing to one count of drinking alcohol in a prohibited area late last year.
Charges that he’d been operating a vehicle while intoxicated were dismissed, however, after prosecutors acknowledged they couldn’t prove them.
Springsteen was fined US$500 and allowed to go free. In showing the 71-year-old rocker leniency, the judge noted that he had a squeakyclean driving record over nearly half a century in the state.
It was exoneration but of a strange sort for the one-time E Street Band frontman. Here was a rock’n’roll rebel who’d made a name for himself singing about lawless adventures along Thunder Road , at the helm of ‘‘suicide machines’’, ‘‘chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected and steppin’ out over the line’’.
And it turns out all his life he’s been driving like a Sunday school teacher with a carload of geriatric patients on day release.
It wasn’t the only evidence of how The Boss’s carefully woven narratives of working-class ennui in a brutally unequal and oppressive America might be at odds with his modern reality.
This week he launched a podcast with Barack Obama in which the two great men express shared empathy, muse about the fallen state of the nation and offer their fervent hopes for its resurrection.
A video shows the two of them relaxing in a recording studio at Springsteen’s sprawling mansion, the former president presumably having just dropped in from one of his own residences on Martha’s Vineyard or Manhattan, in between supervising shows under the auspices of his multimillion-dollar Netflix contract.
The podcast is, without irony, titled Renegades but these two are about as renegade as the top two finishers in a bowls tournament at a retirement community. When did art get so establishment? How did we reach an age when the genres of creative enterprise, music, novelwriting, film and TV production, feature mostly themes so completely in line with the consensus nostrums of the ruling classes?
It’s not just septuagenarian singers. Their gentle mellowing as the fruits of the capitalism they once denounced pile up is a long-familiar spectacle. It’s just about every writer, comedian, musician, playwright, movie director, young and old, motivated to share their artistic urges with the world.
The arc of Springsteen’s art is a useful metaphor for the condition.
These people used to be the voices of the voiceless, exploring edgy topics, expressing truths that dare not be spoken. Their declarations of artistic independence are now almost indistinguishable from the outpourings of the corporate communications department of any Fortune 500 company.
The songs, films and novels they produce move in perfect alignment with the received nostrums of the age: the perils of climate change; the evils of white privilege; the right to free movement across a borderless world; the championing of a genderfree age; celebrating the beauty of an integrated global economy.
They used to channel and articulate the frustrations and resentments of those left behind by society – the despised and derided. Now it’s our creative types who do most of the despising and deriding.
The butt of any comedian’s jokes are the Neanderthal Trump voters who live in trailers in godforsaken towns in the Midwest. The villains of new British novels and TV dramas are foul-mouthed Brexit supporters muttering angry imprecations against immigrants and experts.
The hero of our modern culture was once the kind who wanted to smash things and die before he got old. Now it’s home by nine to record a podcast with a chief executive about LGBTQ+ quotas.
When art melds so completely with the prevailing mandates of the age, can it even continue to be considered art? –