Issue 22: Winter 2025
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Clay Eaters
By Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, 2025) Clay Eaters is Wellington-based poet Gregory Kan’s third collection. In it, he takes us far from here in space and time to a jungle island, one that is both figuratively and literally hard to navigate due to the tangled nature of memory, and the unreliability of maps. It…
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How to Darn a Salmon
By Barry G Barry Grehan, performing as Barry G, is an Irish folk singer who was, for a time, a regular on the Wānaka and Queenstown music scenes. How to Darn a Salmon came out of Barry’s practice of writing short poems for 15 minutes at the start of each day, which he kept up…
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Book review: Southern Faces – An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin
Edited by Riley Smith (Wildlab, 2025) Although it’s subtitled ‘An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin’, Southern Faces is more than a climbing guidebook. As you would expect, it is packed with helpful technical information covering the cliffs, boulders and pinnacles of greater Ōtepoti – grading, number of bolts, approximate route and rappel lengths,…
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Our duty of cairn
Rocks and hard places. “This can’t be the way.” I emerge, scratched and panting, onto a blessed patch of open tussock. I’m in the middle of Fiordland, painstakingly extracting myself from the alpine scrub that’s had me hemmed in on all sides. The toothy, snow-draped peaks of the Darran Mountains tower over the lush valley…
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An alpine odyssey
Huw Kingston and Laurence Mote are putting the mountains in mountain bikes for a cause. Coming to a ski field near you this winter, two guys on bikes. They will probably look tired. If you see them, say hello, offer them a cuppa, and maybe a bed. They’re calling it Alpine Odyssey Aotearoa. Odyssey is…
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Harder than ice
The rise, fall and resurrection of the Bush Creek Rink. Cold fingers pull laces on stiff leather – breath hanging in the air, the waft of woodsmoke, the cackle of childish laughter. I flip my collar and sink into the wool of my jersey. This isn’t the time or place for modern fabrics. Grabbing my…
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Here be tigers
A ski traverse of the Hooker Range. This is the tale of a bucket that went on a long journey to the wild places west of the village. It’s a yarn about three mountain guides (sometimes four), spanning three decades in age (sometimes four) on a much-needed week off. And it’s the story of a…
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Stuffed animals
The 1964 guide to the everywhere-taxidermy of the South Island. Rural Aotearoa and taxidermy go together like an all-you-can eat sausage sizzle and tomato sauce. There’s a lot of it, and both involve getting stuffed. However you feel about taxidermy, it’s an impressive craft, one which involves fitting the clean and treated skin of an…
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Fishing in the Styx
In memory of Brian Turner. Around four in the afternoon, one day in early December, I rest on a bank of the Taieri River, a kilometre or two upstream of the bridge on Loganburn Ford Road. I feel a light breeze on my face and hear it rustle the tall grasses on this otherwise calm…