ChristchurchNZ
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The Wonder Dog of Methven
Celebrating Canterbury’s celebrity canine. We go a bit nuts for clever dogs. There was war rescue Rin Tin Tin who nearly won an Oscar in the 1920s, Dorothy’s Toto (also a rescue) in The Wizard of OZ, and Sinbad the sailor dog, who, as the mascot of the USCGC Campbell, was at sea for 11…
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Music review: The Dreams of Our Mothers’ Mothers!
Mousey (2024) This is the third album from the brilliant Ōtautahi-based and Silver Scroll nominated songwriter Mousey (aka Sarena Close). This time she wants it darker. A less upbeat offering than her first two releases, Lemon Law (2019) and My Friends (2022), The Dreams of Our Mothers’ Mothers! delves into themes of family estrangement, something…
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A plague on both our islands
The 1964 guide to pest control in Aotearoa. The American at the dinner table is telling us about coming across a woman, who from the sounds of it was a West Coaster, in the act of dispatching a possum. I won’t get into it, but a rock was involved. He goes a bit pale as…
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Walk this way
’Twas the day of TWALK. It’s late April, just before dawn and the autumnal cold is really flexing. Its bite is downright devilish. But that hasn’t deterred a throng from amassing in the turbid light. From students to retirees to ultra-running human cannonballs, they form ranks as a free brigade of outdoor frolickers – or…
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A fort story
Fort Jervois on Rīpapa Island is a legacy of New Zealand’s Russian Scare. No not that scare, the other one. On February 17, 1873 some alarming news came out of Auckland. According to the Daily Southern Star, an iron-clad Russian warship, the Kaskowiski, had entered the Waitematā Harbour, discharged a fatal “mephitic water gas apparatus”…
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Book review: Six-legged Ghosts – the insects of Aotearoa
By Lily Duval Canterbury University Press (2024) As Lily Duval explains in her preface, Six-legged Ghosts had its inception in an art project for which she undertook to paint all of Aotearoa’s endangered and extinct species. A huge proportion of them, it turns out, are insects. But because they are little, or gross, or scary,…
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The island
For three years, I watched them scrape it out of the horse paddock it once was. I saw it transformed from a place of memory and life to a leftover triangular bit of land framed by a twisting labyrinth of barricaded motorway lanes. It became a landscape of absence, a one that can now only…
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Nature’s work
How Jobs for Nature helped one community bring its ecological visions to life, for a while. There was this moment back in 2023 when Aimee Hampton locked eyes with a ruru. It swooped into the cool dark canopy, gracefully navigating the forest tangle, and landed on a branch nearby. The discs of its yellow eyes…
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Elie and Ellen
Professional skier and ski mountaineer Sam Smoothy reflects on a ski descent of Elie de Beaumont with his mum, Ellen. My mother skied the day she gave birth to me. She prefers the backcountry, but thanks to me, ten pounds of destabilising ballast on her slim 5’3” frame, Ellen Smoothy was relegated to the easier…