DunedinNZ
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology
Edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2024) Coined in the 1990s, ecopoetry is work that delves into the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds, often presented with an awareness of the damage and losses the former has imposed upon the latter. It is, Janet Newman notes in the introduction to…
-
Big birds: The 1964 guide to the giant extinct penguins of Aotearoa
Most of us think well of penguins. There’s something joyous about their awkward waddling, something heart-warming about their tiny flipper wings, a reminder that these earthbound creatures once knew how to fly. They’ve featured in everything from an Oscar-winning documentary (March of the Penguins, in which Morgan Freeman chronicles the harrowing breeding-and-feeding cycle of Antarctica’s…
-
Book review: Marilynn Webb – Folded in the hills
To hold this book is to realise a dream that can’t only be mine about Marilynn Webb’s work, to stroke the very lines she made. The hardcover soft with its raised cloud lines, an invitation to fold ourselves in. Marilynn Webb: Folded in the hills is a bilingual companion book to the phenomenal exhibition of…
-
Above par: The 1964 guide to Aotearoa’s best rural golf courses
Our resident golf writer Phil Hamilton tours the nation’s village greens. Golf is big in Aotearoa. By some metrics, we have the second-most courses per capita after Scotland, the birthplace of the sport. Flash resort courses continue to be built at pace and to suck up overseas attention, but the heart of golf in this…
-
Book review: CUMULUS: an anthology of skies
Edited by Kirstie McKinnon (Caselberg Press, 2023) Hello you beautiful thing. We’ve been looking forward to the release of this book, a hybrid of sky-themed photographs by Dunedin-based photographer Carlos Biggemann and work by some of Otago’s most exciting poets, including Megan Kitching, Claire Lacey, Rushi Vyas and Iona Winter. The project was Carlos’ idea.…
-
Poetry review: When I Reach for Your Pulse
By Rushi Vyas (Otago University Press, 2023) When I Reach for Your Pulse is an uncomfortable read, but this is not about our discomfort. This is about Rushi’s sustained generosity in sharing his grief, his anger, his complex responses to living with the life and death of “the man who earned the money mom used…