Edited by Lynley Edmeades, Otago University Press, $35, October 16
This anniversary issue of our longest-running literary journal will chime with New Zealand Geographic readers: many of the essays, stories and poems trace a connection to land. Kids swim in a river flickering with elvers. A couple slide down hills on cardboard. Hamilton journalist Connie Buchanan, who writes often for this magazine, switches to fiction with the story of a suburb built on a dump—and the strata on which we set our lives.
One of the most affecting pieces is Lucinda Birch’s essay about her father, who killed pests (rabbits, magpies, possums) all his life and finally killed himself. There are other losses—Owen Marshall contributes a poem for Vincent O’Sullivan, who died in 2024; Fiona Pardington photographs taxidermied birds; poet Robert Sullivan learns to play an albatross-bone flute, thinking of the dead, downy chick. But overwhelmingly, the project is life. Each page of this issue is noisy and shining; filled with children, birdsong and sunlight, pīwakawaka. There is heaps of weather. Proper, cracking storms.
Many writers are tackling change: top surgery; a family home that floods with every king tide. Tōrea Scott-Fyfe writes of the damming of a river, where the eels lament to their taniwha of “a wall… a wall between us and the sea”.
And activism, amidst the turmoil, is celebrated. In ‘Pipes’, a gentle story by Shariff Burke, a woman hangs a Palestinian flag on her wall. A visiting plumber takes one look, raises a fist and says, “From the river to the sea”. The sun hits his face just so. The lady of the house is thrilled. “Can’t say it loud enough eh.”
