In 1986, after years of social upheaval, martial law, and with four agonising years to go before the communist regime’s final collapse, 22 year-old Derek Grzelewski—a keen mountaineer—went climbing in the Carpathians. He did not return to his native Poland. Descending instead into Slovakia then crossing into Austria, Derek slipped quietly into Western Europe through […]...
On May 25, 1978, the New Zealand government sent in hundreds of police and army officers to evict protestors at Bastion Point, in what was the largest internal mobilisation in New Zealand’s history....
In upper Moutere, inland from Nelson, Anna Barnett lives in love with the earth. Earth at large and in close-up. Particularly in close-up....
Cack-handed, cow-pawed, dolly-pawed, ker-handed, left-plug, southpaw, squiffy, these are just some of the names that have been applied to left-handers. They have an air of insult, implying that lefties are somehow inferior, or at least odd. On the other hand, as it were, we right-handers are, well, just right. Our language betrays the distinction in […]...
I awoke on Sunday morning to find my van surrounded by vehicles. Since the sun wasn’t yet up, I was more than a little surprised. When I’d pulled in on nightfall the previous evening, there had only been a couple of those imported Japanese buses converted into motorhomes in the small field at the end […]...
Memories are odd. What events we remember, why, and how we remember them all offer fascinating insights into the complexity of the human mind. Some people, such as criminal prosecutors, have a very serious interest in them, as ascertaining the real truth from a witness can be extremely difficult....
Kakapo are New Zealand icon—early explorers such as Charlie Douglas went to sleep to the sounds of dozens screeching around campsites in the Landsborough. His accounts include the now unthinkable thoughts of using kakapo oil to make the finest cakes and shortbread....
News that 59 of a rare bird species, hihi (or stitchbirds), were being released into the wild last year raised a few eyebrows. These birds were once common in the North Island, but the last official sighting in the wild was in 1883, and these days the only existing self-sustaining population is on Little Barrier […]...
Deep in the earth’s mantle, powerful convection currents are slowly driving the Australian Plate into collision with the Pacific Plate, lifting the Southern Alps four kilometres up into the mid-latitude westerly winds, creating one of the world’s great rain factories....
As New Zealanders plunge into autumn and the Northern hemisphere welcomes spring, auroras—those spectral colour displays that occur around the poles and light the night sky at extreme southern and northern latitudes—increase in frequency....
