Issue 21: Autumn 2025
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A Wild Life: Photographs from the backcountry of Aotearoa
By Shaun Barnett (Potton & Burton, 2024) The epilogue of Dave Hansford’s Kahurangi closes with some words from one of Shaun Barnett’s last interviews, before he died from cancer in 2024. “The more I learn about the connectivity of diversity, the connectivity of things,” he said, “it gives me a profound sense of joy.” A…
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Book review: Kahurangi – The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson
By Dave Hansford (Potton & Burton, 2024) Aotearoa’s second largest national park, Kahurangi National Park is known for its epic tramping, diverse landscapes, wealth of fossils, and extraordinary range of flora and fauna, including great spotted kiwi, cave spiders and a giant carnivorous Iand snail (the Powelliphanta, which can grow as big as a gym…
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Poetry review: /slanted
By Alison Glenny (Compound Press, 2024) /slanted is Alison Glenny’s third poem collection, full of the sort of poems that I find hard to explain and easy to deeply, deeply love. The word ‘ECHO’ echoing multiple-y across the page, for example, fading out then gone, as echoes do and are in the mountains. /slanted is…
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Poetry review: HOOT!
Words from the Ōtepoti Writers Lab community 2019–2024 Edited by Eliana Gray and liz breslin(Rivulet Press, 2024) Ōtepoti Writers Lab, or ŌWL, was a writerly thing of collective beauty, collective beauty which has now been anthologised in HOOT!. Launched in 2019 by Prospect Park Productions (run by H-J Kilkelly and Emily Duncan), ŌWL was, H-J…
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The Shadow
A classic gets a second life. That slow sway, rocked like a baby in a cradle. Sloshing from side to side in the wind, you’d bump shoulders with a stranger, a friend, or the one you hoped to sway into the night with. You’d huddle for warmth; you’d share a nip, a drag, a puff…
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The Iceman calleth
If exploding beer is your problem, yo, he’ll solve it. Here is a sentence I never thought I’d write. I answer my phone and there is a man on the line; that man is Vanilla Ice. This is especially striking as I am receiving the call in my house, which is located in a small…
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Simple rules
On coming back to a small town. The path curves around the contours of the lake, following the ebbing water for as long as you want to walk it. A concrete trail, upgraded from gravel and dirt a long time ago, now the groundwork for a sense of stability. I sit and stare at the…
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If it works, change it
For nearly a decade, LUMA lit up Queenstown for the love of it. It’s always about the weather, rain and wind being unwanted, no matter what the event. And in the week leading up to LUMA 2024, it’s uncannily warm. Nor’west, the forecast is mixed. But the transformation of the Queenstown Gardens continues regardless. From…
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Getting across the river
How Anthea Fisher learned to stay composed in a crisis. When the helicopter smashed into Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, the force was enough to eject Anthea Fisher out of the four-point harness strapping her to the seat. It was so violent it ripped her boots off. In a few seconds, the sleek machine had become…