Though we don’t think about it much, the element carbon is all around (and within) us. Diamonds, pencil leads and soot are all forms of pure carbon, and living tissue is made of carbon combined with other elements. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide makes up three hundredths of one per cent of the air we breathe. […]...
Since mid-1991 New Zealand has been in the grip of a significant epidemic of meningococcal meningitis. Though not dramatic enough to make the headlines every day, the epidemic has warranted steady media coverage. In early September, for instance, Middlemore Hospital in Auckland claimed that it was admitting a case each day, and in the previous […]...
Mantled by the ”Cloaks of the sky” (the literal meaning of kahurangi), the mountain of the Arthur Range guard the eastern flank of the Kahurangi National Park, due to be officially opened in late 1995. This, our 13th national park, preserves one of the country’s largest tracts of true wilderness....
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He that abides in me and I in him, the same brings forth much fruit.” Quoting the words of Jesus in John 15, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga bestows the name Vaine Mo’onia (The True Vine) on a fine new Tongan Methodist Church in Auckland....
The first glimmerings of dawn brush a soft rose across the clouds. Rushes stand like knotted horsewhips against the misty ghost of morning. On hidden ponds waterfowl raise a raucous reveille in anticipation of the new day. Dew-drenched grassheads soak my clothes as I sidle through the half-light. A hawk, disturbed from his ground roost, […]...
“A not altogether idiotic sheep-farmer” was how Herbert Guthrie-Smith of Tutira deprecatingly spoke of himself. Yet from the unlikely base of his remote Hawke’s Bay station, this retiring Scotsman became an influential naturalist with an abiding passion for the land and the native wildlife that was being eliminated from it. He wrote a series of […]...
“World famous in New Zealand”—who doesn’t immediately think of an outsize soft drink bottle and the droll TV ads that have fixed Paeroa in the national consciousness? More than a few small towns, struggling for viability, are experimenting with ways of staking a claim on the passing visitor’s attention and custom. Large roadside objects—such as Te Kuiti’s giant shearer—are becoming […]...
Each June—in that brief hiatus after the cows have dried off and before the next batch of calves hits the mud—a stretch of river flat beside the Waikato River blossoms white with tents by the hundred. Every sort of agricultural ware, and much more besides, is on display and for sale in this giant four-day […]...
Will Cooper’s fascination with photography began with taking pictures underwater, particularly around the Poor Knights Islands, a hop, skip and boat trip away from his home near Ruatangata. When an accident seven years ago prevented him from further diving, he turned his attention to subjects on land—and found the “forgotten acres.” Over a period of two-and-a-half […]...
Bryan Jackson, raconteur and cultural magpie, stops in front of a display case and points to a wooden box brimming with clay Daker marbles. “That’s the guts of the museum,” he says. “Half of those marbles date from my childhood.” “They are the seeds of all this, then,” I suggest, gesturing at the riotous press […]...
