Category: New Zeland

Canon supports school trip to Gallipoli

A group of Rangitoto College students are about to embark on the trip of a lifetime to Turkey, thanks to the support of Canon New Zealand.

The trip will see 10 students travel to Turkey where they will live with exchange families for two weeks and attend a special commemoration ceremony for those who fell at Gallipoli at Canakkale Savaslari on March 18th.

Canon New Zealand has provided financial support for the students and their accompanying teachers, as well as equipment for a fundraising event and sweatshirts for the students.

Mike Johnston, Canon New Zealand Country Manager, says Canon has had a long association with Rangitoto College and is delighted to be able to provide assistance.

“This will be a life changing adventure for the students. The opportunity to learn about the past and forge relationships for the future is not one to be missed and we are proud that we can help Rangitoto College achieve this,” says Johnston.

David Hodge, Principal of Rangitoto College, is excited about the trip also, explaining, “This trip is a great opportunity for these students to not only learn about a new culture, but to live it. We are grateful to Canon for helping us send these students, as ambassadors of New Zealand, to experience Turkey.”

The student exchange is organised by Istanbul Lisesi, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in Turkey, to build positive relationships between Turkey, New Zealand and Australia.

Rangitoto College was picked from a shortlist of over 100 New Zealand schools to make the trip.

Later in the year students from Istanbul Lisesi will stay with the New Zealand students’ families and attend the ANZAC Day ceremonies on April 25th.

About Canon

Canonis the world’s leading imaging brand that actively inspires with imaginative ideas that enable people to connect, communicate and achieve more than they thought possible through imaging solutions for business and consumers. Canon has ranked among the top-four US patent recipients for the past 18 years, and had global revenues of around $US35 billion in 2009. Canon New Zealand also operates Canon Finance New Zealand which offers one-stop shopping for customers wanting leasing or finance services. For more information, visit www.canon.co.nz, www.twitter.com/canonNZ

Released on behalf of Canon New Zealand by DonovanBoyd PR. For more great ideas on capturing that perfect moment with great digital cameras, visit the Canon website.

For further information contact:

John Boyd

Director

DonovanBoyd PR

09 379 2121 / 021 661 631

via Press Release: Canon supports school trip to Gallipoli.

March 24, 2011
Turkish souvenirs made in New Zealand

By Charlotte Shipman

The painstaking craft of hand knotting Turkish rugs is thousands of years old and based thousands of kilometres from these shores.

But the modern versions of the ancient art have a distinctly kiwi connection.

Throughout the world, Turkish rugs are a highly sought after souvenir. On the streets and in the markets of Istanbul there is a carpet on every corner.

But what most buyers do not know is how much Kiwi’s weave.

“It’s 50 percent New Zealand wool and 50 percent local wool,” says Mustafa Gozne, a wool importer.

Gozne has been getting his wool from New Zealand Wool Services since 1992.

Last year he imported 60 percent of New Zealand wool exports to Turkey – that is nearly two thousand tonnes of wool, worth $7 million.

It is mainly used in machine made carpets, blended with Turkish wool

But 10 percent is used for traditional hand knotted carpets, an art which cheap labour in Pakistan, China and India is threatening to destroy.

“They give the designs, the colours, patterns and they produce Turkish carpet but not in Turkey,” says Gozne.

Hand knotting carpet is extremely labour intensive. Each square metre has 360 knots and takes more than a month to complete.

Our wool is valued for being readily available and having a consistent texture.

“When you use this wool you will not have any headache. I mean the quality during the dying and the knotting,” says Gozne.

There is only one problem – customers do not realise the secret of the rugs and do not give New Zealand credit.

“They wouldn’t really have great understanding that it’s always coming from New Zealand which is something we are looking to change throughout the world,” says Paul Steel from NZ wool services.

But awareness is growing.

Twenty years a go, hand knotted carpet manufacturers did not know anything about New Zealand wool. Now it is synonymous with quality

Of the millions of tourists who visit Turkey every year, some are leaving with a small piece of New Zealand.

3 News

via Turkish souvenirs made in New Zealand – Story – Business – 3 News.

December 28, 2010
One-sided thinking on Gallipoli an injustice

Martin Flanagan

LEGENDS are like earthquakes. They happen. Afterwards, we try to understand the forces that created them. Anzac is an Australian legend that has a roughly analogous place to the Civil War in the American psyche. Both are stories of young nations encountering the horrors of modern warfare for the first time – that is, wars fought with repeating rifles and machineguns and appalling casualty rates. Both conflicts represent massive and unprecedented change.

As popular culture, however, what the Civil War has that Anzac doesn’t is the view of both sides. In 1983, when his yacht, Australia 2, won the America’s Cup, owner Alan Bond acknowledged that at one stage his crew had been losing but added “it was just like Gallipoli, and we won that one”.

It would be interesting to know exactly how that comment was received in lounge rooms across Australia. Did it feel “right” to most who heard it? My guess is that it did.

Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914. In the context of Anzac, we also need to note the extent of the debacle to appreciate the stature of the major Australian characters who emerged from it – like, for example, General Sir John Monash.

The planning at Gallipoli was a farce. Six weeks before the landing, by way of military intelligence, the British officer commanding the operation, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was equipped with two small guidebooks on Turkey and a text book on the Turkish army. Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, an English journalist covering the campaign who correctly foresaw from the outset that it was doomed, said intelligence would be acquired “at the point of a bayonet”. And it was.

Monash was an engineer. Born in West Melbourne to Jewish German immigrants, Monash was of the century just beginning, a man who understood steel and concrete and modern automation. His battles were meticulously planned. The British prime minister Lloyd George described Monash “as the most resourceful general in the whole of the British Army”. Monash is a giant figure in Australian history.

Propaganda was involved in shaping the popular view of Gallipoli from the start. Take the case of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the man with the donkey. Within six weeks of his death, he had been conscripted into the propaganda war, a newspaper report describing him as ”a six-foot Australian” with ”a woman’s hands” who said in a British-Australian accent, ”I’ll take this fellow next.”

Simmo was a five-foot-eight Geordie with a stoker’s hands who spoke in dialect and had fierce Labor politics. His first biographer, a fan of Churchill and acquaintance of Sir Robert Menzies, stripped him of his politics. There was no mention of boozing or fighting. The real Simmo was left in a grave at Gallipoli.

What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn’t die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world – to wit, Turkey – with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.

Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.

I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world – other than Turkey – permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.

My impression is that within Turkey the legend of Anzac got absorbed into the legend of Ataturk, the so-called father of modern Turkey, who, as a young man, championed the Turkish defence at Gallipoli.

It was Ataturk who declared to the mothers of Australia that their sons lay in friendly soil. A group of about 80 Turkish Australians march each year in Melbourne on Anzac Day. Anzac Day would not be the same without them.

Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.

, April 24, 2010

October 26, 2010