Wellington journalist Michelle Duff tackles the big stuff: racism, sexual abuse, the deep, dangerous inequities ambient in our education and health systems. What this means is that she has spent 15 years asking people about the worst traumas of their lives. Or, as she described it in a recent piece for 1News, “sitting at their kitchen tables with a cup of tea cooling beside your notebook as they describe the unfathomable—the death of a child, the rape of their daughter… gripping the dark nebulous cloud of their grief and sieving it into readable black and white”. It gets to you after a while, the anxiety, the sadness.

Connecting with nature, Duff realised, is just about the only thing that helps. Surfing especially.

Her board came with her to Tairāwhiti, of course (page 90). She got in the water at Wainui and Makorori. It helped soothe the ache of what she and photographer Brennan Thomas had been documenting: “Climate change in real time, threatening whole communities… Seeing some of the damage visually actually scared the shit out of me.

“I also got my first ‘Kia ora!’ in the waves,” Duff says, “from a wāhine Māori surfer in Makorori who was absolutely owning a break I was terrified by.”