Hundreds of people gathered in Tolaga Bay to observe the transit of Venus in June 2012. Photo: Supplied
Venus is seen moving across the face of the sun, on June 6, 2012. Photo: Andy Reisinger
The 2012 Transit of Venus inspired the Uawa community to invite scientists and poets to Tolaga Bay to explore how the region could transform itself and restore the Uawa River catchment and coastline.
On the day of the transit, Alison Ballance and I were among the hundreds of visitors to Tolaga Bay and we documented the event in this special feature.
Last week, the launch of a book of poetry, inspired by the transit, brought some of the community together again. The book is the result of an exchange between three German and three New Zealand poets who met in Tolaga Bay in 2012 and have since created new work in response to their experiences.
Among the poems are Taranga's Song, by Hinemoana Baker.
Here Chris Price reads Parallax.
And Glenn Colquhoun performs one of his poems about the German naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach.
Uawanui project chair Victor Walker says the event has helped to forge many new relationships and has resulted in several ecological restoration projects, including the re-planting of some of the plants collected by Joseph Banks during the visit of James Cook's Endeavour in October 1769.
"In 1769, these plants go off, they end up in the British Museum of Natural History Kew Gardens, and we get the descendants' seeds back hundreds of years later and regrow them. The irony is that they were lost to us ... so we're very fortunate to be able to do that."
The region's restoration has also led to the discovery of a population of banded dotterel, which he says the community now "spies on with webcams".
The Transit of Venus / Venustransit poetry collection is published by Victoria University Press.
