The glowering duck on the cover only just made it. As we put this issue together, we were leaning toward a foreboding shot of the Bounties: black cliffs, albatrosses wheeling in a sepia sky. The cover story in that case would have been about the new variant of avian flu, which is worse than you […]...
It is impossible to write an editorial before the rest of the magazine is finished. That last week is like being stuck in a small room with 17 radios all nattering away on different stations. But now, it’s ten to seven on the night we go to press. Everything else is done; the designer is […]...
The pōhutukawa boomed last summer. Thousands of trees blooming their hearts out, ridiculous masses of flowers, a red wave cloaking the battered coastlines, playgrounds, suburbs. It was the first pōhutukawa mast in 20 years. But something uglier was flourishing in those old-man branches, too: myrtle rust, a fungal disease that blew in seven years ago […]...
There’s a dead end we run into again and again while documenting natural science in New Zealand—a wall of “We don’t know.” “Nobody’s working on that, sorry.” It floors me, the scale of what we simply do not know. I have always hoped that politicians are driven to base their decisions on evidence, and where […]...
Mum and Dad’s first date was in a dinghy. As soon as my brothers and I could hold a handline they had us dangling for spotties off the Picton wharf. We adored it. The jostle for the best spot. The smell of sunscreen and squid bait. Tug. “A monster!” Mum and Dad would exclaim, as […]...
Acquiesce. It’s the name of an anaesthetic used to knock out tank-reared kingfish so that the people farming these apex predators for food can handle them. A disquieting word. Margaret Atwood would love it. But it’s not science fiction: it’s happening now. We’re farming kingies—and we’re farming pāua, hāpuku and whitebait, too. It’s uncanny to […]...
Of all the penguins and forests and fire and ice, the horses and high wires and aerial shots in our Photographer of the Year finalists, my favourite frames are both portraits. First, Joe Harrison’s shot of a boy on a campground seesaw. Just look at the light. Look at that boy, looking straight through you. […]...
The other day I watched a man walk onto the bus, put down his laptop and blazer, and sneeze a streak of snot on his arm. He looked at it. Made a decision. And wiped his arm on the seat. Of all the bad things happening in the world, my immediate worry is COVID-19. Partly […]...
Down in southern Te Waipounamu where I’m from, before European contact the fishing grounds had names. Tau-o-te-kāeaea, a reef where rays congregated. Hāpuka, off Ōraka where, well, hāpuka were caught. We fished from waka and earned mana serving abundant catches. Access was managed via whānau and hapū rights; in some areas these wakawaka, or allocations, […]...
What would lockdown have been like when you were a teen? In trying to fathom the gap between today’s adolescents and all who have gone before, it’s a useful thought experiment. For me, a Hawke’s Bay teen in the late 90s, I suspect a lockdown would have been extremely chill. Lots of books and baking […]...
