When Louis Macalister first met the Huntly crew in our story on page 52, they were riding dirt bikes—hooning through parks and public spaces, and hacking people off with the noise and disruption.
Good fodder for a documentary. Macalister and his friends run a YouTube channel, Department of Information. It’s a bit like a New Zealand version of Vice. In their weekends and holidays, for a grand total of about $300, they made a short video about #bikelife—published in June 2024, it’s now one of their most popular posts, with almost 950,000 views.
Early this year, Macalister got a text. The boys were riding horses now. Would he like to come back? This time he took stills, shooting on film. His first set of images was incredible: the crew on horseback, in cowboy hats and hoodies, hanging out at a Huntly skate park. Macalister’s been back many times since, following his nose. “Sometimes you drive through town, you see someone on a horse and start chatting to them, and they’re like, ‘Oh, come with me today.’ There’s never much organisation. It’s just: you turn up.”
There was so much to photograph: not just the horses but the built environment, the river, the houses. “Everyone’s outfit’s always interesting,” Macalister says. “The haircuts, the tattoos—there’s lots of visual symbolism to work with.”
He had fun with it. And it seems like the people of Huntly did, too.
“Some places you go,” Macalister says, “people are just like, ‘No, no, don’t do that.’ Everyone here is, like, ‘Oh! Take mine! Take mine!’”
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