Destination Queenstown
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Music review: Good Miles To Go
Jackie Bristow & Barry Saunders (2024) When Jackie’s not busy creating awesomeness with the music stars of tomorrow, she creates a fair bit of her own awesomeness too. She has released five albums and splits her time between Aotearoa and Nashville, USA, where she has been embraced by the Americana scene, sharing bills with the…
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Music review: SongCatcher/Youthtown EP Volume 1
Jackie B Productions, 2023. Produced by Mark Punch & Jackie Bristow. SongCatcher started as a one-day songwriting workshop run by the Queenstown- and Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jackie Bristow, then grew into a full songwriting programme that helps young people build their creative identities through music. These identities have now been showcased on a compilation EP, that…
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Natural Born Campervanners
May 2020. First week out of lockdown. We were trucking along nicely when my wife made an announcement: “I’ve done something. I’ve booked us a campervan for ten days!” I had many thoughts, largely circling around the theme of whether or not she had paid any attention AT ALL in the 24 and three-quarter years…
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Moonlight Mondays
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Maybe not. It started on a warm summer Monday just over a year ago. I was probably trying to work off some holiday ham, mourn the whisky from the night before or just get out of…
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Chasing the New Zealand Mountain Dolphin
It started as a light-hearted investigation. It became a fervour of curiosity and madness in the South Island bush. I first heard of the beasts in 2021. In a DOC hut near Murchison, I caught a passing comment about a creature known as the Ruahine Mountain Dolphin. “The what?” I asked. My question was met…
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Elsie’s Dream
A winning story. This year, the Queenstown Writers Festival team held a mini festival featuring author talks workshops, as well as, for the first time, a writing contest. The Anna-Marie Chin Writing Competition saw writers from Otago and Southland given a range of prompts and 48 hours to write an original response, either fiction or…
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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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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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Home sweet home
A Queenstown-based film-maker wants us to think globally, shred locally. Sage Kotsenburg once said, “there’s no blueprint to snowboarding, you know? You can really just make your own mark.” In 2014, Sage won the first-ever Olympic gold medal in men’s snowboard slopestyle, and his words still ring true for Ryan Quirke. With the mountains up…