Contributors
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Elie and Ellen
Professional skier and ski mountaineer Sam Smoothy reflects on a ski descent of Elie de Beaumont with his mum, Ellen. My mother skied the day she gave birth to me. She prefers the backcountry, but thanks to me, ten pounds of destabilising ballast on her slim 5’3” frame, Ellen Smoothy was relegated to the easier…
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Music review: Good Miles To Go
Jackie Bristow & Barry Saunders (2024) When Jackie’s not busy creating awesomeness with the music stars of tomorrow, she creates a fair bit of her own awesomeness too. She has released five albums and splits her time between Aotearoa and Nashville, USA, where she has been embraced by the Americana scene, sharing bills with the…
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Music review: SongCatcher/Youthtown EP Volume 1
Jackie B Productions, 2023. Produced by Mark Punch & Jackie Bristow. SongCatcher started as a one-day songwriting workshop run by the Queenstown- and Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jackie Bristow, then grew into a full songwriting programme that helps young people build their creative identities through music. These identities have now been showcased on a compilation EP, that…
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Book review: Everest Mountain Guide – The remarkable story of a Kiwi mountaineer
By Guy Cotter (Potton & Burton, 2023) Since first climbing the mountain in 1992 as part of the Adventure Consultants team, Guy Cotter has become one of the industry’s most respected Everest guides. In the three decades since, he has accumulated a proper shopping list of accomplishments, including summiting Everest five times and scaling seven…
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Book review: Rapture – An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand
Edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor (Auckland University Press, 2023) “I fell in love at the poetry night / with the meter of the verse / steady rhythms and free-flowing rhyme / visionary prophets gliding on intuitive time / the hopeful expression of these beautiful minds” – Andy Coyle Some poetry is written for…
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Book review: Marilynn Webb – Folded in the hills
To hold this book is to realise a dream that can’t only be mine about Marilynn Webb’s work, to stroke the very lines she made. The hardcover soft with its raised cloud lines, an invitation to fold ourselves in. Marilynn Webb: Folded in the hills is a bilingual companion book to the phenomenal exhibition of…
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Natural Born Campervanners
May 2020. First week out of lockdown. We were trucking along nicely when my wife made an announcement: “I’ve done something. I’ve booked us a campervan for ten days!” I had many thoughts, largely circling around the theme of whether or not she had paid any attention AT ALL in the 24 and three-quarter years…
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Moonlight Mondays
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Maybe not. It started on a warm summer Monday just over a year ago. I was probably trying to work off some holiday ham, mourn the whisky from the night before or just get out of…
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a squid boat
Laura Williamson revisits a close encounter in the skies above Kaikōura. It was sometime after 2am on December 21, 1978. An Argosy turboprop freight plane was en-route from Wellington to Christchurch with a hold full of newspapers when the crew saw something strange off the Kaikōura coast. A set of lights seemed to be following…