Blog
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Book review – Not Alone: Walking Te Araroa Trail through New Zealand
By Tim Voors (Bateman Books, 2023) Not Alone is Dutch long-distance hiker Tim Voors’ second book about, well, walking a very long way. It serves as a follow up of sorts to The Great Alone: Walking the Pacific Crest Trail, for which he tackled the 4265 kilometres from Mexico to Canada on foot. This time,…
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Book Review: Strong Words 3: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition
Selected by Emma Neale and Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2023) Essays are on the up in Aotearoa. This has in part been fuelled by successes like when Wellington’s Ashleigh Young winning the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize (worth $230,000!) for her essay collection Can You Tolerate This?. The annual Landfall Essay Competition, which has been running…
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All our favorite New Zealand Lord of the Rings filming locations listed
The Lord of the Rings trilogy really put Aotearoa New Zealand on the film-making map. It spawned both a thriving locally-based special effects industry in the form of the Oscar-winning Weta Workshop (in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington), as a whole new tourism draw: New Zealand Lord of the Rings filming locations. According to…
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Music Review: Change, For a Fiver
Barry G Barry G is an Irish singer, songwriter and impressive strummer of strings who is a familiar figure on the Southern Lakes music scene. His first album, Change, For a Fiver, showcases everything his audiences love in his live performances to great effect. There’s his voice, which has an endlessly listenable Passenger vibe, except…
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Book Review: Dirge Bucolic
By Jasmine Gallagher (Compound Press, 2022) Jasmine Gallagher’s debut collection is like a series of fractal prisms. She takes moments, spaces and stories, then breaks and turns them so we see them from all sides. As implied by the oxymoronic title, there’s a lot here. Dirge Bucolic delves into and through Jasmine’s personal experience of…
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Review: AllTrails Hiking App
I was introduced to the AllTrails app while travelling for work. I was in unfamiliar settings, and wanted to escape my hotel room and go for a short hike. AllTrails had the answer. The app features more than 400,000 curated trails and a global community of over 45 million users. The largest collection of digital…
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The tree tops! Our five favourite New Zealand trees
Aotearoa New Zealand has some exceptional trees. It’s a lush, green place, with more than 10 million hectares of its land mass covered in native and exotic forests. Prior to humans arriving, more than 80% of the country was forested, and what cool forests they were. Today it’s less that 40%. And while some native…
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Book review: Fossil Treasures of Foulden Maar – A window into Miocene Zealandia
By Daphne Lee, Uwe Kaulfuss and John Conran (Otago University Press, 2022) This generously illustrated book takes the reader through the story of, and significance of, the Foulden Maar site in Otago. Formed by a volcanic eruption 23 million years ago, the Maar’s undisturbed sedimentary layers are chocka with rare, well-preserved fossils. It’s an extraordinary…
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Book review: The Wandering Nature of Us Girls
by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2022) “Those girls are making a scene,” writes Frankie McMillan in ‘The movie of your life’ and oh she sure is. Fifty seven scenes in five sections. Are these scenes poetry, are they prose, are they prose poetry, flash fiction? The lines between these categories are blurry at best anyway…