Dave Gunson’s childhood was spent on the side of the Mersey River. He and his friends would play happily on its oil-clogged sands as Liverpool’s sewage oozed sluggishly past on its way to the sea. It was the sort of river, he recalls, where “if you fell into it you’d have to go to hospital […]...
Heavy rain fell over large areas of New Zealand during the weekend of June 12 and 13. The heaviest falls occurred over the hill country of Buller, Nelson and Western Marlborough, where between 100 and 200 mm of rain fell in 24 hours, causing rivers to flood. A man was killed on Saturday evening at the […]...
Remember those museum visits of childhood: school buses lumbering into the carpark while swaying teachers cautioned “no running please, and keep your voices down”? And, once inside, the galleries of labelled objects frustratingly quarantined behind glass? Looking at the old coastal cutter Rewa, bedded in oozing harbour mud alongside a wormy wharf, the air alive […]...
For NASA, these are indeed the nauseating nineties: four years and four partial or total mission failures. Following the six Apollo visits to the moon and the faultless performance of the Voyager vehicles, it seemed that NASA was master of its trade, that nothing was beyond reach. Building on these successes, its missions became more […]...
Once it was thought New Zealand had escaped the worldwide dominance of dinosaurs. Not any more. The discoveries of a group of amateur palaeontologists in Hawkes Bay have changed everything....
Raoul Island is a bewitched Pacific paradise which has lured to its shores a long line of would-be settlers over the past 1000 years....
Hacking his way up the brittle flanks of Linda Glacier, alpine guide Charlie Hobbs leads his climbing partner towards the summit of Mt Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak. Vast snowfields that lie within the shadow of Cook and its neighbour, Mt Tasman (left, background), are the source of some of this country’s mightiest river of […]...
There were no clean hands when Jill and David Moorhouse’s neighbours joined them to restore a 19th century earth building on their farm in the Awatere Valley, near Blenheim, Today, many of those early “cob” dwellings are still standing, and earth building is enjoying a renaissance as a new generation discovers the magic of mud....
Students compete in Auckland’s biggest Polynesian festival...
