Magazine Articles
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Isn’t it beyond words: Essie Summers
Between the covers with Aotearoa’s Queen of Romance. IN THE BEGINNING WAS ESSIE. ESSIE SUMMERS. THE MOST FAMOUS NEW ZEALAND NOVELIST YOU’VE MAYBE NEVER HEARD OF. TO VERIFY THIS CLAIM, IN A HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC SURVEY, FOR A PERIOD OF A WEEK, I ASKED EVERYONE I KNEW OR MET WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF ESSIE SUMMERS AND…
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You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet
A sailor in the hop gardens of Nelson Tasman. THE SCENT LURED ME CLOSER TO THE BRICK WALL IN THE GREENHOUSE. LIME GREEN BINES CREPT UP THROUGH THE GRAVEL AND CLIMBED FIVE METRES TO THE GLASS ROOF. I REACHED OUT TO PRESS A DELICATE, FLUFFY CONE AND YELLOW POWDER COVERED MY FINGERTIPS. I brought the…
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Pants on fire
Revisiting the great exploding trousers epidemic of the 1930s. It was strange behaviour for “a quite respectable garment”. According to the Hutt News, “not long ago, in a country township, a man’s pair of trousers exploded with a loud report.” Fortunately, he wasn’t wearing them at the time and was able to throw the offending…
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Eden Hore: The fashionable farmer
The South Island high country is often associated with beauty, but it is rarely associated with fashion. Yet there, in the heart of the Maniototo, glamour found a home with a farmer named Eden Hore. IN 1975, A NEW ATTRACTION OPENED ON A FARM IN THE TUSSOCKED HILLS NEAR NASEBY, IN THE MANIOTOTO REGION OF…
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Body of work: Ivan Lupi
From Italy to the Southern Lakes, performance artist Ivan Lupi is scratching at the surface of us. TIME BEHAVES STRANGELY IN STRANGE TIMES. WE KNOW THIS NOW; OUR LIVES HAVE BEEN PAUSED, OUR FUTURES ALTERED, OUR HORIZONS MADE UNCERTAIN. IVAN LUPI’S ‘A BIG HAPPY PLANET’ CAPTURES THIS UTTERLY. AN ONLINE VIDEO PIECE, THE WORK DOCUMENTS…
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Failure is inevitable
Or is it? LYN MCNAMEE LOOKS INTO THE REVENANT, A RACE SO HARD THERE ARE NO WINNERS, JUST FINISHERS. It’s dawn in the Nevis Mountains. A piper stands silhouetted on a ridge, his melody drifting towards a host of tiny lights in the tussocks below. Each pinpoint is a contestant — twenty-four audacious adventurers seeking…
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Summer camp
Snapshots from a holiday hotspot. You leave town early to beat the holiday traffic. The car is packed tight with camping gear, the overflow strapped to the roof. The kids were bouncing off the walls, but by the time you pull into Wānaka, everyone is asleep. You’ve left your worries behind. — Every year, around…
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Homeland security
What a small town in the Waitaki Valley has to do with universal health care. Speaking at an event marking its 70th anniversary, then-Prime Minister Helen Clarke talked about what the 1938 Social Security Act meant to New Zealand. More than just a piece of legislation, it stood for an idea. It was born from…
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Sound and vision
What’s a nice Post Rock band like EchoKnot doing in a place like Queenstown? THE LIST OF ECHOKNOT’S THREE MEMBERS TELLS YOU A LOT. JOE BARRON-COWIE IS ON “GUITARS, KEYS AND PROGRAMMING”, SCOTT KENNEDY DOES “GUITARS, KEYS AND VISUALS”, WHILE ANDY PATERSON TAKES CHARGE OF “BASS AND NIHILISM”. CHECK. THERE IS NO LEAD SINGER, THERE…