<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>0:20 ramari stewart is her own kind of modern day woman she leads an adventurous but at times solitude life as ramari looks into the wonders of the natural environment our kaupapa takes off when ramari explains her hapu background i originally came from near whakatane at er ohiwa ohiwa harbour um it's the area that i was raised in is now known as potohopi and i guess my early beginnings there fostered a lot of interest in natural history <.>m my mother's <&>1:00 english so er on my <.>m my father's side er there was ngati awa and ngati kahungunu <&>tape cuts out in your drafted c v at the moment and looking at it it's really really impressive er it seems like i'm talking to a professional woman voc where <.>did mm where did this er need to it seems a voyage of discovery of a of a high calibre where did this come from well voc i left school and went into nursing as a profession and i saw that through at middlemore where i did my training and then postgrad i went into accident and emergency department and later intensive care so my interest there lay with clinical work er and finally when i left i went to polynesia and what made you leave the hospital area voc well i think i'd decided that er continued after registering and i really wanted to explore a lot of other interests in life and <&>2:00 i've always been interested especially in the marine environment er i think my mother said that i could swim before i could walk so because that interest was <.>al always there tut when i went to polynesia i had also prior to that er at the age of eighteen um had taken up scuba diving so that i guess er led to my going to polynesia i was especially interested in the traditional fishing and i was lucky enough to to experience time in the outer islands where in those days that was in the midseventies um tongan fishermen were still luring different species and there were specialist families and the first er family that i went with um <&>tape cuts out good at luring sharks <&>3:00 these are the big sharks big sharks yes it's it was quite an experience because women normally can't go out over the reef <,> on <.>fish <{><[>and i <[>is that a tradition or is that <{><[>new <[>on fishing expeditions so there was a lot to be considered their concern was that hina who was the leading shark would be jealous and so they had to er there was quite a lot of ceremony involved women out in out in the canoes is hina a female shark yes word and is she the judas of the of the group does she lure them to the men maybe laughs <{><[>laughs anyway they overcome this this problem and off we went and it was a very successful voyage and from then on the word went round round the islands <.>that i guess i became a bit of a talisman <[>laughs laughs <&>4:00 and i lived with one or two other <.>eg examples um <&>tape cuts out the octopus people who lured the octopus i was fascinated by tongan carvings of the of the feke it always seemed to have a rat on its head and i was intrigued to know why and they said that's because the <.>o the octopus disliked the rat <,> and the story goes that in the early days er a rat was swimming from one atoll to another and ran into difficulties and nearly drowned and it was the octopus who saved it by allowing it to sit on his head however the stress of near drowning the the rat er crapped on the octopus's head so apparently this is the reason why to this day that the octopus <.>disli has an immense dislike for the for the rat and when living with these people who lure octopus <&>5:00 they use a lure fashioned to look like a rat and they shake it over the octopus's hole and you see an octopus come out er and then he spots the lure or spots the rat and turns bright red with anger and just grabs hold of it and there's no hook no nothing to fasten him he just hangs on really tight and they pull him out of the water and then of particular interest to me was the carving family um tut they had voc during the er days when the european whalers visited tonga um they took on tongan crews just as what happened here in new zealand and in tonga they're short of timber tut historically there were a lot of raids with fiji over timber <.>to especially to build their large er multihulled vessels called kalias and the tongan <&>6:00 carvers learned to use whalebone and so they had <,> picked up a skill from the europeans and i was very fortunate at that time to get out on a whaling expedition which was all hand harpoon stuff they were humpback whales out off tekumereke and <.>j i was out there for seven days in the middle of nowhere laughs it's quite exciting watching someone pouring water on the bowsprit so it doesn't catch alight when the lines are running out and to see them tut their adaptations these whales don't <.>fly er float <,> tut <,> so they someone hopped in the water and sewed the lips up um yeah so that <.>w that they could tow it home and they towed it all the way home they have these er <,> they maintain these whaleboats they are a <.>l a form of er type of longboat and they've they have them rigged with polynesian <&>7:00 design sail and voc you see them <.>s er sailing around in the tongan group today and they are left over from that whaling period the european whaling period how many voc men would it take to tow the whale back to shore tut <,> it's not so much men it's it's um vessel power so er we <.>had there were a couple of boats <{><[>with the whale under tow and when they get back to the island of origin um everybody's down there ready to help butcher the animal not a <.>b not <.>an nothing was wasted but of course this is not happening today <[>and then mm do they when you <.>the <.>the <.>boat whaleboat you went out on do they attract the sharks yes they do that's what intrigued me was er there're a lot of pelagic white tip um sharks in the water because they're attracted by all the blood and the and the frenzied activity <,> and yet they seemed to just go about their business the tongans without um <&>8:00 paying much attention i also saw this in other island groups um there seems to be an understanding there um they seem to understand er just how to behave in the water so as not to attract er an attack i later on worked actually worked with sharks in polynesia with an american research project and tut the work consisted largely of acoustic studies on sharks in polynesia that meant that they were using sound to attract sharks um they have some very specialised cells called ampullae of lorenzi and these pick up vibrations in the water and we discovered that if we played certain frequencies in the water that you could actually <.>at attract a shark without um without bait or anything else and if <.>th if the frequency was intense enough they would <&>9:00 actually break into a frenzy which was not motivated by feeding it was motivated by a sound alone can the human ear hear it tut no no the other thing was that <,> we worked with grey reef sharks which are in shallow water around the reefs they're very <.>c very common if the reef is healthy <,,> and i noticed that um if you pursued them they'd go into a sort of startled posture um it was just like a cat being startled and there was er lifting of the snout er arching of the back and very exaggerated lateral bending of the tail and the pectoral fins were er <,> almost brought <&>pronounced as bought to right angles to the body rather than the normal um swimming position and they would weave around in a kind of circle or figure of eight pattern tut and if they went through this complete ritual <&>10:00 you could guarantee that they would turn and attack you <,> and we understood that this was a territorial type of response um because we noticed that in the case of when we looked at shark attack um statistics particularly in australia whose where they've had a lot er and south africa people were able to go in and rescue the person and they had a single bite um so we felt that there was a lot of this was territorial response rather than motivated by <{><[>feeding <,> but it was interesting to see the polynesians who spend so much time in the water gathering <,> kaimoana um they seem to have a wonderful relationship with their environment and if they are ever bitten by sharks <,> they treat that as just being unlucky um it's usually an accident swallows it's often a <&>11:00 fisherman who's got one wrapped up in some gear and he's trying to free it <,> tut or it's a maybe um a shark inside the lagoon <.>a and the exit is blocked so the animal is responding to sort of clear its path so there's a single bite and you don't see it again <[>mhm mm how different when you take um both because you've come through both avenues there's how the natives the indigenous people er take their role and their scientific approach to the shark and all that goes with the sea and there's the americanised way mhm which is high frequencies high tech mm er <.>w voc do they meet <.>i in at some basis point or are they so <.>pa far apart they need to talk to each other er there was interest there but a scientist is a scientist and the term is called anthropomorphising you do not anthropomorphise <&>12:00 and <,> the tut well perhaps to give you an example of the differences i was working on the in shallow water about thirty thirty feet and we were setting up a cage for our own protection <{><[><.>bec <[>now this is when you were with the americans or the <{><[>er the islanders <[>tut this is during this er project yes and we were setting up a cage on the bottom for our own protection because what we were going to do <.>was had a certain element of danger <,> and a tahitian appeared from nowhere he just bare feet er little wee japanese goggles and waved and he only had one arm swallows which had been bitten by a shark six months beforehand and i actually attended that er that victim and we took him to papeete for treatment <,> he was bitten in the forearm however <.>j through <&>13:00 infection and things like that he had to <.>high have a high quarter amputation now this man appeared from nowhere to say hello he heard that i was down there so he came to say hello and a grey reef shark swam quite close and he just stuck his foot out and pushed himself off it and big smile on his face <,> as far as he was concerned um the reason for for his accident was it was WAS an accident he'd done something wrong <,> <{><[>whereas we were looking at the behaviour of these animals trying to understand why they react this way and that way tut um maybe we should've been looking at the <.>th the behaviour of people and seeing um how they react to to um animals er in particular sharks and you know turn things around a bit tut we might've learnt more laughs <&>14:00 <[><.>and did anything while you were with the tahitians and the tongans and all the people of the pacific mm the secrets some of them showed you did they come in handy at one dangerous point in your life when you were dealing with trying to understand the sea tut yes they did um i lost my fear of sharks in polynesia um you got so familiar <,> we got you got so used to them being around tut and you learned to respect them you also learned to understand what their role was in the environment clears throat tut and you got to like them er you started even recognising individuals when you spent a long enough time we also tagged a lot of them by swimming up to them and sticking barbs in them which had um spaghetti trailer colour coded tags on them so that helped us get to know um individuals <&>15:00 however um <,> it was some time after when i came back to new zealand and i was <,> diving off the poor knight's and i jumped into the middle of a school of travelly and i was trying to take photographs and the next thing there was a whoosh right past my right buttock and it was a mako and i was over blue water and to this day i still have a fear of hanging over the blue abyss um because of that encounter with <{><[>this <[>now can you take us back to the blue abyss what does this all mean <.>t in terms of shark attack is that where if <.>w you're gonna get eaten anywhere that's where it's gonna be or well i was doing something that did have <.>a voc you know there is a risk when you're in the middle of a <.>s a frenzied school of fish who are feeding and then predators turn up um there is THAT's when you're in in a risk <&>16:00 situation because when they rush into the school they've got their jaws wide open and and they could hit you <&>16:07