Magazine Articles
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Taking shape
Counting the real cost of a surfboard with Aotearoa’s most inland board builder. It’s as far from the coast as you can get. Yet, thirty minutes’ drive west from the country’s most inland town, Cromwell, there’s a persistent noise that is often mistaken by neighbours for an out-of-tune weed-whacka. It’s the sound of Paul Roach’s
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Push, push, roll
Nat Halliday revisits the time he skateboarded (yes, skateboarded) from Cape Reinga to Bluff. It’s 2008, and I am 31 years old. I’m in the Auckland Airport with a huge bag, some cash savings and a plan to travel the 2000 kilometres to the southern tip of New Zealand by skateboard. I should probably have
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For the record
What’s an international music writer like Fraser Lewry doing in a place like Ōamaru? Writing about music, mostly. Peer through the window at the Business Hive coworking space on Ōamaru’s Thames Street on any given day, and you’ll likely see a kind-looking, bespectacled guy in a band tee-shirt (Canadian rock’n’roll revivalists The Sheepdogs, say, or
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Green Mind
A grassroots history of sowing and mowing in Aotearoa. I left Wānaka in my little white Toyota campervan, bound for the North Island. The trip was equal parts long and tedious, novel and exciting. There were windy sections and straight sections, narrow mountain passes and expansive valley floors. As I drove and drove across our
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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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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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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.