Laura Williamson
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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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Beyond the graves
The 1964 guide to storied cemeteries of the rural South. When I was a kid, someone told me to hold my breath whenever I passed a graveyard, or else the souls of the dead would slip in. Boo! I still do it out of habit, which happens a lot when I’m travelling the roads of…
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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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It’s only natural: The 1964 guide to nude tramping in New Zealand
If you’re wearing boots, are you really naked? It started with an Instagram post. A tramper on Mount Taranaki posted a photo of a fellow hiker. Taken, thankfully, from afar, and, also thankfully, from behind, it showed a man descending the mountain wearing nothing but a backpack, socks and boots. You could almost hear the…
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A skier’s a skier
The meaning of adaptive. Bailley Unahi knows all about the journey from beginner to competitive athlete. Originally from the Southland town of Winton, Bailley was 19 when her spine was broken in a balcony collapse at a Six60 concert in Dunedin. She had been athletic before the accident, playing “every team sport possible”, including netball…
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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…