Contributors
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Book Review: Strong Words 3: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition
Selected by Emma Neale and Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2023) Essays are on the up in Aotearoa. This has in part been fuelled by successes like when Wellington’s Ashleigh Young winning the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize (worth $230,000!) for her essay collection Can You Tolerate This?. The annual Landfall Essay Competition, which has been running…
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Of M*A*S*H and mushrooms
The curious case of a puffball named for a famous pair of TV lips. There are many things I don’t know about fungi, but one thing I know for sure: it’s crucial to get a positive identification. Taxonomy is of the ultimate importance. Especially when the guidebook (Geoff Ridley’s A Photographic Guide to Mushrooms and Other…
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Roll Cage Mary
Sometimes landscape symbols feel like an ingrained part of ourselves. A cathedral, or a memorial, is solid, concrete and dependable, even when it has fallen. There is an order to the markings of our landscapes that helps us navigate our world. That is until you arrive in Antarctica, when all that solidity goes out the…
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A gig in a hut
On stage and off the grid in the Pisa Range. A single bulb hangs from the roof, casting direct light on the musician below, his eyes closed, his face contorted. The crowd, if you can call it that, sits on wooden benches in near darkness just a few metres away. They are completely silent. At…
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That’s the spirit
Liz Breslin goes ghostbusting in two of the South Island’s haunted hotels. We are not Kesha in popular reality TV series Conjuring Kesha, who says, in the trailer, “a lot of things have happened that are weird, but I’m like, give us more.” We are not the beloved Ghostbusters men or the flopped Ghostbusters women.…
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The past is a photograph
Travelling times gone by through an amateur photographer’s album. The photos have a quality that tells you they are not from now. The grain is fine, the light natural and the colours vigorous. The compositions disclose something about the photographer; you can hear him thinking, see him learning, his light-caught journey exposed, frame by frame.…
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Highway to the danger zone
What the small problem of the Franz Josef petrol station says about our inaction in the face of big problems. 1— A million tourists pass through the town of Franz Josef, population 500, every year. They book helicopter rides to the receding glacier and take strolls through the primordial forest. Thrill seekers are everywhere, to…
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Like bucks to water
The 1964 guide to the flora and fauna on the banknotes of Aotearoa. Since the passing of Queen Elizabeth II we have, like Snoop Dogg, had our minds on our money and our money on our minds. Specifically, we’ve got our minds on the prospect of being confronted by King Charles III’s sad bewildered gaze…
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The slacker generation
Crossing the line with the funambulists. Elsa Leperlier, a young French woman living in Wānaka, didn’t have a choice when the small tabby cat adopted her. It was love at first sight. Owning a cat isn’t easy when you’re a freewheeling spirit, travelling the world without any ties. Elsa was once offered a lucrative job…