Just Plane Interesting..

Jan 6, 2025
4 min read

Thursday 2 January

After a quiet New Years Day, we were feeling up to an outing or two the next day.

First stop was the Omaka Aviation Heritage Centre where we opted to visit the WW2 story - Dangerous Skies. It was a really interesting perspective on the War - often focusing on the women's contribution which has been so often brushed aside, and giving space to many different nationalities involved - be they friend or foe.

With attitudes like the one below, it is pretty impressive that so many women played such a big part in this conflict.

There were some fascinating propaganda posters from many of the nations involved - the selection below from the UK were quite diverse, and interesting to see the origin of the "carrots help you see in the dark" myth which was propagated to conceal the advancement of radar!

One of the first exhibits featured the exploits of a Airman Spud Hayter who had a wild career including several crashes and on one occasion he was shot down over Kent on his return from a bombing raid and parachuted into a stately home garden where they were hosting a cocktail party - once they established that he was not the enemy, he was invited to join them!

There was so much memorabilia on display from all nations, acknowledgment of New Zealand's involvement in the Battle of Britain (the third largest contingent after UK & Poland) and several beautiful restored and replica aircraft - some of which were still flying at airshows until recently.

Some oddities really caught my attention - this box kite was part of standard emergency kit for pilots, alongside a transmitter radio with a long antenna wire - the kite would fly the antenna high enough to broadcast the signal if they crash landed on sea or land.

The hot car of choice for the heroes of the air was an SS "Jaguar" - the car company took on the model name as SS didn't have a good ring to it in WW2!

This diorama celebrated the life and achievements of the world’s top-scoring female fighter ace Lydia Litvyak and the most famous of all women regiments, the Soviet 588th Night Bombers or ‘Night Witches’ as the Germans called them. Seems like some nations were less misogynous than the Brits!

The final diorama represented the history of the air war in the Pacific - here the downed planes from WW2 onwards were mostly left to rest in situ as a) it was hard to locate and reach them in the jungle landscape and b) many relatives wished for the grave sites of their loved ones to remain untouched. Sadly, this left the planes open to plundering by the locals and/or becoming integrated into the jungle as they were consumed by vines and tree seeds dropped by birds implanted themselves and grew through the wreckage - so there are very few surviving planes from this arena of conflict.

Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop was the creative genius behind the displays which featured lifesize waxworks fascinating background details; they had also created an immersive movie experience of the bombing of Stalingrad. The first part featured the incoming waves of airplanes and bombs exploding in the crumbled cityscape, but the illustrated stats on the numbers who participated and died in Hitler's war on the Eastern Front were even more shocking & emotional - over a million Russian's died defending Stalingrad and in this failed 6 month offensive Germany lost a quarter of a million men. Horrific!

After an emotional morning we headed into town in search of lunch - weirdly hard to find an open cafe on this second New Year’s Day holiday - and for Louis to have a quick swim. We did get a picture of the former residents of 101A Kinross Street, Blockhouse Bay on Kinross Street, Blenheim.

Ended the day at the Roots Gin Shack which is just across the road from our Goldschmidt Vineyards home.

What a fantastic place! This small distillery won the award for the best London Dry Gin in the world in 2023. We got chatting with Ben Legett, the founder, who was fascinating and so good at sharing his enthusiasm and knowledge. The magic all takes place in a reclaimed shipping container distillery at the back of the property, and it's a real family run business as his wife usually runs front of house whilst their collie/lab puppy entertains the customers!

He talked about getting the juniper berries from North Macedonia as this is the gold standard area for them, and about why it is so hard to grow the berries here in NZ. While there is an organisation that has imported and planted both male and female juniper bushes into the country, the growth time is slow and the best berries come from areas with a wide array of juniper bushes. In North Macedonia the berries grow wild across the hillsides and are harvested by hand as each berry on the stalk ripens in its own good time so each berry has to be selected and foraged at the right time. Very labour intensive! The terroir in this area also imparts a high concentrate of essential oils and the mountain air is clear and unpolluted.