South Island
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The wonderful wizard of Bluff
Noel Peterson uses his powers for community good. Perhaps there is a magical explanation for why it’s such a lovely warm winter’s day in Bluff. But if he has cast a spell, Noel Peterson won’t say. It’s a valid question. After all, Noel is a wizard. “When I cast spells from my lair, it sometimes…
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Down to some fine arts
Riversdale’s Mixed Media Exhibition has a lot of heart(s). I drive through Gore, out into the rolling countryside, past the Hokonui Hills. An evening fog hovers at sheep level over the paddocks. Twenty minutes later I arrive in Riversdale, population 500. The main street is mostly deserted. It’s dusk on a winter Friday. There are…
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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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We’ll all only be images
Marti Friedlander turned an outsider’s eye on the countrysides of Aotearoa. “When you’re born in a land you become blind to it. You no longer see the beauties within.” – Daniel K. Brown, School of Design, Victoria University The sheep seem to know something. Some are minding their own business, but most, ears perked, eyes…
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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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Book review: End Times
By Rebecca Priestley Te Herenga Waka University Press (2023) For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, watching young people grapple with the existential threat of climate change is a dose of déjà vu. Like global heating, back then the threat of nuclear war begged the question: how do you go about…
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Book review: Dark Sky – Murder among the stars
By Marie Connolly Quentin Wilson Publishing (2024) An astronomy professor is murdered at Tekapo’s Mt John Observatory during an academic conference, and there are suspects aplenty. When criminal psychologist Nellie Prayle gets involved, she finds out the academics have been up to all kinds of mischief, from adultery to professional rivalry to intellectual property theft…
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Night at the asylum
A stay at the West Coast’s spookiest backpackers. If you’ve ever been to Hokitika, you’ve probably stopped at the glowworm dell: a little crevasse alongside State Highway 6, usually packed with tourists marvelling at what daylight reveals to be the slimy larvae of the fungal gnat. But if you take a wrong turn on the…
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Under your own green steam
“There is no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. A bowl of oatmeal, 30 miles, you can’t come close to that. Put a bowl of oatmeal in your car, you’re not going anywhere, let alone 30 miles. The efficiency is terrible compared to a human.” These are the words…