Contributors
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Book review: End Times
By Rebecca Priestley Te Herenga Waka University Press (2023) For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, watching young people grapple with the existential threat of climate change is a dose of déjà vu. Like global heating, back then the threat of nuclear war begged the question: how do you go about…
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Book review: Dark Sky – Murder among the stars
By Marie Connolly Quentin Wilson Publishing (2024) An astronomy professor is murdered at Tekapo’s Mt John Observatory during an academic conference, and there are suspects aplenty. When criminal psychologist Nellie Prayle gets involved, she finds out the academics have been up to all kinds of mischief, from adultery to professional rivalry to intellectual property theft…
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Night at the asylum
A stay at the West Coast’s spookiest backpackers. If you’ve ever been to Hokitika, you’ve probably stopped at the glowworm dell: a little crevasse alongside State Highway 6, usually packed with tourists marvelling at what daylight reveals to be the slimy larvae of the fungal gnat. But if you take a wrong turn on the…
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Under your own green steam
“There is no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. A bowl of oatmeal, 30 miles, you can’t come close to that. Put a bowl of oatmeal in your car, you’re not going anywhere, let alone 30 miles. The efficiency is terrible compared to a human.” These are the words…
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Five skaters and a goalie
It was bedlam, plain and simple. North Korean military police had stormed the ice and were trying to wrangle a team of South Africans. They were slipping and sliding as they chased the hockey players around the rink in front of a crowd of thousands. In the stands was 17-year-old Simon Glass. His home in…
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Big birds: The 1964 guide to the giant extinct penguins of Aotearoa
Most of us think well of penguins. There’s something joyous about their awkward waddling, something heart-warming about their tiny flipper wings, a reminder that these earthbound creatures once knew how to fly. They’ve featured in everything from an Oscar-winning documentary (March of the Penguins, in which Morgan Freeman chronicles the harrowing breeding-and-feeding cycle of Antarctica’s…
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The island
For three years, I watched them scrape it out of the horse paddock it once was. I saw it transformed from a place of memory and life to a leftover triangular bit of land framed by a twisting labyrinth of barricaded motorway lanes. It became a landscape of absence, a one that can now only…
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Absolutely fabulous
Liz Breslin revisits a hypercoloured Central Otago cinematic classic. There might be 50 ways of saying fabulous, but at letterboxd.com someone called Robino gave the film of the same name two and a half stars and said, “they only said it 17 times.” It’s streaming on TVNZ+ at the moment so I tried to keep…
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Nature’s work
How Jobs for Nature helped one community bring its ecological visions to life, for a while. There was this moment back in 2023 when Aimee Hampton locked eyes with a ruru. It swooped into the cool dark canopy, gracefully navigating the forest tangle, and landed on a branch nearby. The discs of its yellow eyes…