Contributors
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Chicken Run
Chicken stress is real. If you know, you know. Chickens are a great idea, in theory. Also, in theory, theory and reality are the same thing. The idea is simple. You provide some hens with a safe place to sleep, food, water and some table scraps, and they provide you with plentiful, healthy and (crucially)…
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Love stories
Romance writing is having a moment. We found this out after Wānaka-based writer Catherine Hart got in touch with us about sending us a romance-style story set in the town. Why not, we thought. A quick Google delivered promising headlines like ‘Gen Z loves smut. NZ authors are cashing in’. Thank you RNZ. And we…
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Young man in The Clutha
The heart can never grasp these unbearable early departures. —Jim Harrison, Complete Poems. The Clutha River ran misty blue in the hot summer of early 1969. Within a couple of decades the great river would be stilled by the dam at Clyde, but in early ’69 it charged through the gorge like a wild animal—seething,…
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Argonaut of the ice
Adventures at the ends of the earth are just another day at the office for Ben Comeskey. It was -25℃ outside, possibly even colder. And that was before factoring in wind chill, which Ben Comeskey says was considerable: sustained and roughly 60 knots, or more than 110 kilometres per hour. It was a never-ending roar.…
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On a wing and a plank
Happy snow landings. High above New Zealand’s knife-edge Southern Alps, a single engine Pilatus Porter is aiming to achieve the outlandish. Aiding in its aerial quest are 600 horses of raw power, nearly 800 kilometres of range and velocity enough to make a bullet train sweat; this turboprop aircraft is a workhorse. But where it…
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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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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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Fight or flight
Nathan quacks around and finds out. Martha is my oldest friend in Wānaka. While I fish, we talk about the weather, the annoying tourists, the falcons who think “they’re all that”, the river levels, entomology. We share inside jokes, we fight, we make up. We have had hundreds of lunch dates at the Albert Town…
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The Wonder Dog of Methven
Celebrating Canterbury’s celebrity canine. We go a bit nuts for clever dogs. There was war rescue Rin Tin Tin who nearly won an Oscar in the 1920s, Dorothy’s Toto (also a rescue) in The Wizard of OZ, and Sinbad the sailor dog, who, as the mascot of the USCGC Campbell, was at sea for 11…