Contributors
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Simply breathtaking
Taking the plunge with freediver Kathryn Nevatt. “It’s all about the breathing – even though it kind of seems like it’s about not breathing,” Kathryn Nevatt explains. A Queenstown-based architect, Kathryn is also a record-holder in freediving. She can hold her breath for more than seven-and-a-half minutes, and she has dived to a depth of…
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Book Review: A River Runs
By Benny Sip Fishing and poetry – it’s a 1964 dream combo! Benny Sip’s spare collection A River Runs is named, presumably, for American author Norman Maclean’s classic novella A River Runs Through It, which tapped into a youth spent in Montana surrounded by family for whom there was “no clear line between religion and…
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From the annals of big bird-dom: Superman the moa
“It trampled over tropical wilds for millions of years—until man made it extinct! Now, centuries later—has it come back for revenge?” SO THIS HAPPENED. IN JULY OF 1973, THE FIRST STORY IN DC’S ACTION COMICS NO. 425 WAS ‘THE LAST MOA ON EARTH!’. IT’S COMPLICATED, BUT BASICALLY IT’S ABOUT A HUNTER WHO STUMBLES ACROSS A…
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The festival season is upon us
The 1964 guide to the best music festies of the South Island. Down here in the roaring forties, summer comes with the kind of long days and warm nights that lend themselves to the wearing of small amounts of clothing and to dancing in fields until the sun goes down, and then comes up all…
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Book review: The South Island of New Zealand: From the Road
By Robin Morrison (Massey University Press, 2023) First published in 1981, The South Island of New Zealand: From the Road was the result of a road trip taken by the late photographer Robin Morrison and his family in 1979. While travelling through the South Island, Robin chose to take pictures of places and people, instead…
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Book review: BITER
by Claudia Jardine (Auckland University Press, 2022) Claudia Jardine is a bit of a polymath. She has an MA in classics from Victoria University of Wellington, is the reigning Christchurch Poetry Slam Champion, and is an independent musician. She is also very funny. BITER, her debut poetry collection, reflects all of the above. The book…
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Book review: Not Set in Stone
By Dave Vass (Potton & Burton, 2023) In Not Set in Stone, Dave Vass tells the story of a life spent in the mountains, and now spent without them. One of Aotearoa’s leading mountaineers, Dave broke his neck in 2015 while walking out from a climbing trip in Fiordland, resulting in incomplete tetraplegia. Much of…
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At the mercy of the winds
Up, up and away with NASA’s beautiful balloon. It’s ANZAC Day, 2017. I’m parked on the side of Kane Road, peering across a paddock strewn with pivot irrigators and over the Clutha River to the Wānaka Airport. There, a balloon shaped like an inverted teardrop is slowly filling with helium, cubic inch by cubic inch.…
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Contagion magic
Travels with Rocinante. It was the end of autumn. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, staring at the bones of a bike. Metal debris littered the carpet. My phone stood propped against the cardboard bike box as YouTube explained how to screw pedals on. I had no idea what the hell I was doing. …