Issue 120 Mar - Apr 2013 Archives - New Zealand Geographic

Geography

Trick or treaty

A clash of cultures in Spirits Bay...

Geography

Where can the city dweller look for the inexhaustible wild? Perhaps it lies closer than we think, on the flipside of the ordinary, along the unkempt edges of the familiar. An urban green space can become a site of pilgrimage, a place to discover a waterfall by moonlight....

Geography

Squeezed, not shaken

A claustrophobe goes caving...

Science & Environment

Lessons from little creatures

Robotic in form and startlingly efficient en masse, ants have outlived the dinosaurs and now scuttle over every major landmass but Antarctica. Humans can learn a lot from these diminutive critters, which communicate using cocktails of exotic pheromones, expeditiously divide labour among thousands, and silently conduct their small and significant lives for the greater good—of the colony and their immediate […]...

History

Falcon of the dawn

Maoridom gains a queen....

Travel & Adventure

What Lies Beneath

A small group of New Zealand’s elite cavers are pushing further than ever before into the marble heart of the Arthur Range, west of Nelson. To date, they’ve discovered 14 kilometres of previously unknown passages, and now, battling extreme cold, exhaustion and unrelenting rock, they are a hair’s breadth from connecting two of the country’s […]...

History

Secrets & Treasures

Archives New Zealand is an odd institution. Created to preserve the official records of the nation after a ‘wake-up’ fire in 1952 destroyed a swathe of government papers, it gives the impression of being run by an eccentric collector with the instincts of a magpie. Its holdings range from the priceless to the bizarre—from the […]...

Geography

Shelter from the Storm: The Story of New Zealand’s Backcountry Huts

Trampers, mountaineers and explorers alike have sought shelter within the wooden and iron frames of the nationwide network of backcountry huts for nearly 200 years. Shelter from the Storm details the stories behind these remote abodes. Huts were often built from corrugated iron and whatever materials could be scavenged from the site. In Bealey Spur […]...

Science & Environment

Free radical

Christine Winterbourn and the search for elusive molecules...

Science & Environment

Acting on impulse

Electricity made you do it...

History

A filthy war

It was common mud that proved the greatest adversary at Passchendaele...

History

Crime & punishment

A nail-thin nick on the ridge of a silver police whistle marks the downfall of a dastardly gun-toting highwayman, and a life spared...

Geography

Pirongia Traverse

The Pirongia Traverse crosses the old volcanic cone of Mt Pirongia (959 metres) and is part of the Te Araroa route connecting Hamilton and Waitomo. South-west of Pahautea Hut it includes almost a kilometre Pirongia of mountain-top boardwalk. Te Araroa’s construction manager, Noel Sandford, organised the boardwalk construction in 2006 to take trampers across deep mud, and […]...

Science & Environment

Wind in the willows

Stressed trees yield more fuel...

Geography

Butts for birds

Birds are crafty nest-builders, making their homes from moss, mud, feathers, sticks and…cigarette butts...

Science & Environment

If I had a nickel

A brainless urchin is the model for an ingenious carbon capture and storage system...

Geography

Gullibility

Gulls take advantage of big-city living...

Geography

Subterranea

I slithered along the gravel through a streamway barely 25 centimetres high, 10 centimetres of water lapping gently along the centre line of my face. With my head turned sideways, I could breathe only through the top of my mouth by pursing my lips, awkwardly, into a snorkel shape, as freezing water sloshed about my […]...

Geography

The Phantom Menace

In a land where invaders are cinematically popularised as battle-clad Orcs thundering down a mountainside wielding spiked clubs, it’s ironic that Public Enemy No. 1 is a butterfly—an ephemeral being borne on alabaster wings, not dissimilar to an already well-established cousin. And yet, this phantom menace threatens to wipe out a large number of native […]...

Magazine

Issue 200

Jul - Aug 2026

Solar power
Horses of Huntly
Forget me not
Whaling
Red admirals

On December 10, 2024, a juvenile bottlenose dolphin was reported tangled in fishing line near Riverhead, in the upper reaches of the Waitematā Harbour. The dolphin couldn’t flex its tail properly, or dive, or chase fish. Its pod headed elsewhere. One larger dolphin stayed behind, and for the next month it stuck close, spending almost […]...

Editorial

Judging a book by its cover

This issue’s cover posed a challenge: to present cannabis in a way that was recognisable, but that didn’t immediately call to mind a number of associations. An image of a cannabis leaf has layers of meaning attached to it. We wanted to make it possible for readers to take a fresh look. We are, as […]...

Editorial

Editorial

I grew up with a mainsheet between my teeth, and every summer as the mercury rises, the salinity of my blood seems to increase in anticipation of another dousing. There is nothing, in all the world, more satisfying than hoisting a rag, casting off from the tangle of civilisation and sailing towards a beckoning horizon. You […]...

In the field

Two years on Mana Island

Flora Feltham wrote an early version of our cover story when she was living on Wellington’s predator-free reserve Mana Island with her husband, then a DOC ranger. The couple spent two years on the island, often alone, spanning Feltham’s first pregnancy and 10 months of their baby’s life. An incredible honour, she says, but it […]...

Editorial

Photo stories

Some of the most powerful moments in this job are when I open up a new gallery a photographer has sent in. It’s a story on screen, right in your face—gorgeous, gutting, often both at once. See: everything shot by Lottie Hedley, especially her warm, disciplined set on marching teams, published in Issue 193, and […]...

Features

A clean sweep?

Every year, New Zealand vessels drag trawl gear across nearly 100,000 square kilometres of our seafloor. We are the only nation still trawling on the high seas of the South Pacific. Can we make bottom trawling better? Or should we ban it altogether?...

Features

Afterburn

Wildfires were rare in Aotearoa prior to humans. That changed, but it is climate change that will fuel the inferno of the future....

Features

The wreck of the penguins

Why did hundreds of dead kororā—little blue penguins—wash up on beaches around the country two summers ago? Has their fate got anything to do with the weather? Or has it got something to do with us?...

Editorial

Civil unrest

I have lived in Auckland, on and off, most of my life. Like most, I recognise its turbulent volcanic history only in passing. The cones and craters of Auckland’s 53 volcanic centres are landmarks, dramatic in scale but quiet in bearing—there are no plumes of steam or cauldrons of boiling mud as in Rotorua, no […]...