Contributors
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A perfect fit
Barbara Brinsley’s fashion sense was forged in the far south. Dunedin is a city of grey stone and wind. Within it, Barbara Brinsley is a flicker of colourful defiance clad in, most days, head-to-toe tartan. She is a style icon in the small city, one who has been featured in Woman’s Weekly, NZ Life &…
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Small comforts
A meditation on ecotourism, loneliness, and a holiday in Whakatāne that accidentally turned into a book review. “Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.” This is the opening line of Becky Chambers’ cosy sci-fi novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built.…
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The walkway at the end of the world
Between Bluff and the Foveaux Strait, a ramble along the Foveaux Walkway feels like skirting the edge of the earth. We’re just pimples on a gnat’s back. It’s a colourful metaphor. But strolling along the Foveaux Walkway, I realise it’s true almost as soon as the wizard says it. My companion on this day is…
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Young guns
A walk around a lake. A big lake. All the way around. It’s late summer. The days are long and the sun still has heat. My car whines with a high-pitched wheeze as it slaloms up the Coronet Peak ski field access road. I’m not on my way to an adventure. I’m on my way…
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Salt of the earth
Pure Salt is helping to restore Tamatea Dusky, one boat trip at a time. The trip’s going to be chilly. There’s a dump of fresh snow to low levels on the Fiordland Mountains. One by one, the volunteers turn up at the Manapouri hangar. It’s a motley lot, myself included. There are back-slaps and hugs…
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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…
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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,…