Blog
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Gear review: Rab Torque Mountain Pants
The best fishing pants. Ever. You might refer to them as mountain pants, hiking pants, travel pants, quick-dries, but in my world, they’re known as fishing pants. Quality mountain/fishing pants were one of the first victims of fast fashion. Mass produced, low quality are now the norm. Zippers have been replaced by cheap velcro, they’re…
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Book review: The Emotion Dealer and Other Stories
By Jack Remiel Cottrell (Canterbury University Press, 2025) For me, one of the joys of a tramping trip is having the time to read at the end of each day, and using that time to actually read instead of scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and letting the world’s digital noise work its way into my…
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Music review: Let it Rain
Jackie Bristow, feat. Katrina Bristow “Everywhere you go,” the Finn brother sang, “always take the weather with you”. On ‘Let It Rain’, Jackie Bristow agrees. The song is the first single from GOLDMINE, the sixth studio album for the New Zealand-born singer-songwriter, currently based between her home country and Nashville. The song is an Americana-style…
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Game review: Birdle NZ
It’s like Wordle, but with birds. Even better, Birdle NZ is about Aotearoa’s birds, who are exceptionally cool thanks to plate tectonics and the Darwinian quirk of having evolved in isolation. In fact, if you were going to invent birds for a video game, our manu would be just the sort of thing you might…
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Show You’re Working Out
By liz breslin (Dead Bird Books, 2025) If this book is afraid, it doesn’t give a fuck and goes ahead anyway. Which is to say this poetry is a resourceful, DIY, lesbian builder that will deconstruct the ambient violence it encounters and create a shelter of banter, a huddle of tenderness, a tent for marchers…
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Book review: Aotearoa Light
Moments of Wonder and Realisation in New Zealand Wilderness By Peter Laurenson (Bateman Books, 2025) In Aotearoa Light, Peter Laurenson combines his stunning landscape photography with a message of positive action. The hope is that, rather than pleading, shaming or cajoling, sharing images like the ones in the book can be galvanising when it comes…
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Clay Eaters
By Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, 2025) Clay Eaters is Wellington-based poet Gregory Kan’s third collection. In it, he takes us far from here in space and time to a jungle island, one that is both figuratively and literally hard to navigate due to the tangled nature of memory, and the unreliability of maps. It…
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How to Darn a Salmon
By Barry G Barry Grehan, performing as Barry G, is an Irish folk singer who was, for a time, a regular on the Wānaka and Queenstown music scenes. How to Darn a Salmon came out of Barry’s practice of writing short poems for 15 minutes at the start of each day, which he kept up…
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Book review: Southern Faces – An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin
Edited by Riley Smith (Wildlab, 2025) Although it’s subtitled ‘An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin’, Southern Faces is more than a climbing guidebook. As you would expect, it is packed with helpful technical information covering the cliffs, boulders and pinnacles of greater Ōtepoti – grading, number of bolts, approximate route and rappel lengths,…