A night at the Globe
When a 400-year-old play was brought to life in Auckland with Pasifika costume, dance, language and actors, audience numbers broke records.
Troubled waters
Swimmable rivers or more hooves on pastures—is there a way of improving water quality without paralysing the primary sector? Or has agriculture reached an environmental tipping point?
Into the weeds
We can’t decide what to call it—marijuana, dope, pot, grass, bud, green, hash, weed, devil’s lettuce, jazz cigarettes—or how to manage it. One thing is certain: cannabis is undergoing a radical image makeover. As arguments over its safety and medical efficacy.
The hunting of the snipe
An unlikely crew is given the assignment of catching birds in butterfly nets on a weather-beaten subantarctic island.
No swimming
Five millimetres of rain in a day is not uncommon in Auckland, but it is enough to cause parts of the city’s wastewater network to overflow, spilling raw sewage into the sea and making beaches unsafe for swimming. This summer, permanent warning signs were posted at 10 locations where water quality is so bad that Auckland Council no longer monitors it. Why are Auckland’s beaches so frequently unswimmable? Is the solution better plumbing—or more enlightened thinking?
The mechanical sympathy
Bruce McLaren founded the most successful Formula One team in history and set records that lasted decades. His name is still emblazoned on some of the world’s fastest cars. But the fairytale quality of McLaren’s life—growing up above his parents’ petrol station, racing the Austin 7 he built as a teenager, later winning Monaco and Le Mans—conceals the hardships he overcame and the innovations he made. McLaren didn’t just race cars, he designed and built them, and in doing so, transformed the sport of Formula One.
Rock stars
In the heart of the Waikato there’s a multimillion-dollar industry based on a gnat. Glowworms are big business, attracting well over half a million people a year to Waitomo and prompting some to shift from working the land above ground to commercialising the creatures below it. But keeping the caves and their thousands of tiny performance artists in good health requires round-the-clock care.
A leap in the dark
Of all the world’s amphibians, the most evolutionarily unusual and critically endangered is the Archey’s frog. The smallest of New Zealand’s four native frogs, this ‘living fossil’ hasn’t changed much in 150 million years. It didn’t evolve ears or a voice, prefers the forest floor to water, and can’t leap without landing in a bellyflop. Why are Archey’s frogs so strange, and what makes them so important?
Silent Sisters
Carmelite nuns live in seclusion, rarely venturing from their cloister. Instead, they devote themselves to prayer and contemplation. Eighty years after it was established, a glimpse inside an Auckland monastery reveals simplicity and contentment born of another time.
Monsters of Yore
Across the world, ecosystems have been transformed by the mass extinctions that followed the arrival of humans. In New Zealand, the moa, the world’s largest eagle, sea lions, elephant seals and whales were wiped from the register at lightning speed. How did our megafauna become reduced to lawn ornaments?
New Zealand’s Next Top Model
A small group of Kiwi scientists is attempting to construct the ultimate crystal ball—a mathematical model of the Earth’s natural systems so intricate that it can predict the behaviour of our atmosphere, land and seas, human industry and biological production, far into the future. Behold, the New Zealand Earth System Model—the most nuanced and complex description of our region’s functions ever devised.
Snow birds
No one knew that Kaikōura was home to the world’s only alpine-dwelling seabird until an amateur ornithologist following a rumour discovered its burrows high in the mountains. As the bizarre attributes and tenuous existence of the Hutton’s shearwater slowly came to light, Kaikōura took up the mantle of protecting its local bird—just in time to witness the destruction of its breeding grounds in the November 2016 earthquake.
The Kiwi Bushman
Josh James reinvents adventure and manhood on the West Coast, with the world watching.
Rare and unusual
A voyage to the Kermadec Islands has resulted in the discovery of many species either new to science or not previously found in the area.
Crafted
From Captain Cook’s first fetid brew in 1773 to the hop-rocking IPAs that dominate today’s craft scene, small breweries at the Top of the South have shaped beer culture and industry in New Zealand. Matt Philp primes his fermenter to figure out why.
A tale of two currents
Morgan Gorge, a spectacular chasm on the South Island’s West Coast, is a showpiece of whitewater power. Although it has been paddled by fewer than a dozen people, it is the aspiration of kayakers here and around the world to tackle its supreme challenge. If the Minister of Conservation grants a concession to electricity company Westpower to build a hydro-generation scheme on the Waitaha River—as she says she intends to do—Morgan Gorge will become an emaciated trickle for much of the year. Opponents say this would be an environmental tragedy and a cultural loss, tantamount to building a windfarm on the summit of Aoraki/Mt Cook.
In the wake of the quake
The Kaikōura Earthquake was better documented and measured than any natural event in our history. As the data streams in, scientists are scrambling to decode its hidden meanings and answer some burning questions of Antipodean geology: How does seismic energy jump from one fault to another? Why were so many involved in this earthquake? And what can it teach us so we are better prepared for the next one?
Life on the edge
Like New Zealanders, penguins occupy the margin of land and sea, being dependent on both habitats, and vulnerable to changes in either as well. Their fate is wedded to our coasts, and as scientists have begun to understand, they are a perfect indicator of the health of this fragile boundary too. What can penguins tell us about our seas and shores?
The puzzle of pilot whales
They strand on our shores in greater numbers than any other species of whale. Scientists believe they know why, but there is much about these animals that remains an enigma, and the strandings continue to happen.
Why wasn’t I told?
This year, for the first time in the 150-year saga of Parihaka, the government is preparing to apologise for one of New Zealand history’s most deplorable acts: the invasion and sacking of a Māori pacifist community and the imprisonment without trial of its leaders, Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi. Yet for many New Zealanders, the word “Parihaka” still draws a blank. On hearing the story for the first time, they ask: why wasn't I told?
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