Its face is changing from brick to glass, but the heart of Auckland’s main street still pumps to the same old beat. Whether it’s billions for a bank deal or a buck for a busker, Queen Street is the home of the wheelers and dealers; day and night, a theatre of human exchanges....
In every whitebaiter’s life there is a moment they dream of; a tantalisingly elusive moment which will make all the misery, the discomfort, the sheer boredom of ‘baiting astoundingly and deliciously worthwhile. Writer and whitebaiter Kerilulme recalls her special day: “It was the seventh of November, getting toward the end of the season, and there […]...
Fog is only cloud resting on the Earth’s surface, yet it can kill. Aircraft and ships get lost in it, and so do people. It is responsible for some appalling accidents on motorways. Cars travelling at high speed on a fine sunny morning can turn a corner and suddenly be in thick fog. If they […]...
From last september through to May of this year, the dramatic proximity of Castor and Pollux with Mars forms a literally moving memorial to two of the major advances in astronomy—namely, the heliocentric solar system and the Universal Law of Gravitation. These in turn were to be the observational and theoretical foundations upon which the […]...
The summer of 1992/93 has been unusually cold. Everybody has been saying so. Apple growers have been a fortnight late starting to harvest their crops, and few persimmons will attain high enough sugar levels to be exportable. People who for years have swum every day from Labour Day through to Easter Weekend have been selective […]...
Many birds migrate to escape the rigours of winter. Not so emperor penguins. Each autumn they march towards breeding sites on the edge of Antarctica, where they will raise their young in the freezing darkness of the harshest winters on earth....
New Zealand’s most active volcano is a magnet to scientists and sightseers, but behind its primeval beauty lies a violent history—both human and geological....
Between 1941 and 1945, far from the battle fronts of Europe, Africa or even the Pacific, a handful of hardy volunteers kept a look-out for the enemy on two uninhabited island groups in the subantarctic....
On the West Coast, catching whitebait isn’t a hobby, or a sport, or even a business: it’s a religion. There’s something about these tiny, translucent slivers of life that transforms fishers into fanatics, and draws them each spring to where the rivers meet the sea....
