Laura Williamson
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Book review: Sled Dog Racing in New Zealand – A Photographic Odyssey
By Teresa Angell We wrote about dog racing in Issue 2 of 1964 (March 2020) and featured photos by Teresa Angell, so we were pretty excited to see that she has published a full-length book on the subject. Sled dogs are just the best. Woof! Teresa explores our national sled dog scene from the sport’s…
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Music Review: Silhouette – Alba Rose
Silhouette is the debut EP from Alba Rose, AKA Rosie Spearing. Originally from Wānaka and now based in Wellington, Rosie is known as the lead singer of the indie-pop band Corduroy. She also collaborated with composer and producer Bravo Bonez on the trip-hop project ARLS. Alba Rose is her first solo project, and it continues…
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Book review: CUMULUS: an anthology of skies
Edited by Kirstie McKinnon (Caselberg Press, 2023) Hello you beautiful thing. We’ve been looking forward to the release of this book, a hybrid of sky-themed photographs by Dunedin-based photographer Carlos Biggemann and work by some of Otago’s most exciting poets, including Megan Kitching, Claire Lacey, Rushi Vyas and Iona Winter. The project was Carlos’ idea.…
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Book review: Erebus The Ice Dragon – A portrait of an Antarctic volcano
By Colin Monteath (Massey University Press, 2023) Colin Monteath was the Field Operations Officer for the New Zealand Antarctic Research Programme in the seventies and eighties, and was the first person to descend into the inner crater of Erebus (I know – golly!). It’s a place he knows from all angles, and in Erebus The…
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Book review: Takahē – Bird of Dreams
By Alison Balance (Potton & Burton, 2023) I don’t want to stir up any more Bird of the Century controversy, but takahē are the best. For one, they are crazy-pretty. The takahē’s plumage, with its layers of blue, turquoise and shimmering green, is everything you need to know about how nature makes perfect beauty. Also,…
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Poetry review: Remember Me – Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand
Edited by Anne Kennedy (Auckland University Press, 2023) Poetry is written as much for the ear as for the eye, and the more than 200 poems anthologised in Remember Me were chosen with this in mind. As editor Anne Kennedy explains in her introduction, these are works which “employ a kind of music to convey…
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Elsie’s Dream
A winning story. This year, the Queenstown Writers Festival team held a mini festival featuring author talks workshops, as well as, for the first time, a writing contest. The Anna-Marie Chin Writing Competition saw writers from Otago and Southland given a range of prompts and 48 hours to write an original response, either fiction or…
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For the record
What’s an international music writer like Fraser Lewry doing in a place like Ōamaru? Writing about music, mostly. Peer through the window at the Business Hive coworking space on Ōamaru’s Thames Street on any given day, and you’ll likely see a kind-looking, bespectacled guy in a band tee-shirt (Canadian rock’n’roll revivalists The Sheepdogs, say, or…
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Green Mind
A grassroots history of sowing and mowing in Aotearoa. I left Wānaka in my little white Toyota campervan, bound for the North Island. The trip was equal parts long and tedious, novel and exciting. There were windy sections and straight sections, narrow mountain passes and expansive valley floors. As I drove and drove across our…