There’s a dark side to herpetoculture—the hobby of keeping reptiles. Attempts to bring exotic reptiles into New Zealand put native species and ecosystems at risk, while demand from international collectors leads to the poaching of endemic geckos from fragile populations. With three-quarters of our reptiles classed as endangered, we can’t afford for any to be stolen.
There are some striking differences in the names that we bestow.
There is a quiet revolution taking place in rural New Zealand. Over the past decade, migrant labour has become essential to the country’s dairy farms, vineyards and kiwifruit orchards, and as a result, the culture of regional communities is changing. A bustling Sikh temple has opened in Te Puke, songs from Vanuatu warm chilly nights in Central Otago, and in Southland, around 1500 Filipinos are employed on the region’s 900 dairy farms. Yet many new-migrant families lead insecure lives, at the whim of immigration law, their future in this country uncertain.
I didn’t grow up tramping, and I started because of a Great Walk. Tramping had seemed like something you couldn’t learn about—you had to be initiated by someone who already knew how to do it—but the Great Walks simplified things. I picked the Routeburn because it had the nicest pictures of mountains. I thought 32 kilometres was a long way, and I didn’t know what to eat or wear or bring. That trip taught me what I should have eaten and worn and brought. It taught me that 32 kilometres isn’t far, that walking all day in the rain isn’t bad, and that the people you meet in huts are some of the best around. What I did grow up with was religion. As my devotion to Christianity waned, the time I spent outside grew, and looking back, I can see that they performed similar functions in my life. I appreciated Christianity for the reminder, every Sunday, of what is essential. For the way it brought me face to face with my failings and my values. For the reminder that human connection is fundamental to life. We don’t have a lot to remind us of what is essential, and tramping is about simplicities—only after 20 kilometres in the rain do I truly understand the worth of a cup of tea and a gingernut. The outdoors strips you to the bones. It puts a dye trace on your failings and your values, and shows you when and how they emerge. It connects you with strangers—you can’t cross a fast creek in a rainstorm by yourself (and sometimes, you just have to wait). In Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness, the British philosopher writes that cultures create buildings, objects and art that capture qualities those cultures lack—light-heartedness, perhaps, or openness. “We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them,” he writes. “We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need—but are at constant risk of forgetting we need—within.” If we’re drawn to places because we seek to inwardly resemble them in some way, then New Zealanders need something about the outdoors. Our individualism needs a reminder of the importance of others. The artificial pace of urban life needs the human pace of walking. And we seek those reminders more often in the outdoors than in religion. Last year, more of us went on a day tramp than regularly attended church. We don’t have Gothic cathedrals in New Zealand—structures that remind us that the scale of time far exceeds a human lifespan—but we have limestone karsts, coal seams, valleys carved by glaciers, and trees that were standing before the King James Version was translated. According to a 2017 Sport New Zealand survey of 33,000 people, seven per cent of New Zealanders had been on an overnight tramp in the past year. That’s more than three times as many people as played rugby. It’s more than played soccer, basketball, netball, bowls or cricket. (Tramping skews male, and vastly more Pākehā take part than any other ethnic group.) There are a lot of people who probably would like tramping, but are prevented by circumstance, or by the fact they haven’t done it before. So I want a Great Walk on every other ridgeline. I want people going door to door asking, “Have you tried tramping?” I want Great Walks to be cheaper, and I want them to be nearer major population centres. Two weeks before this issue went to print, I walked the southern third of what will become our tenth Great Walk. The track on the tops of the Paparoa Range isn’t finished yet—there’s only a poled route that would have daunted me a decade ago. On the tops are tawny alpine meadows covered in tussock, the ridgeline dropping away to the sea on one side, the Southern Alps on the other. That morning, I crossed paths with photographer Neil Silverwood and his partner Lauren Kelley going the other way, returning from taking the final photographs for this issue’s story. (Lauren is on the cover.) At the end of the day, returning to Ces Clark Hut, I realised my friend and I were the only people on the range. And as the sunlight slanted low over the ocean, turning the tussock into spun gold, I felt terrifically wealthy, then greedy, that we were the only people there to see it.
Our towns and cities are lacking something important, and I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Hong Kong. There, senior citizens fill the social niche that teenagers do in Auckland. They loiter in the local square with their mates, laughing raucously. When they exercise in the park, their music precedes them, emanating from tiny boom-boxes clipped to their backpacks. Each morning, I woke to their voices chatting in the street, three stories below, over their first cigarette of the day. This is a city New Zealanders like feeling superior to. “We don’t want to turn into Hong Kong,” we say, worried about intensified housing. But Hong Kong has something we don’t. It has elderly people hanging out in public, everywhere you look. Its residential areas are packed with spaces for people to meet, gather, and linger—squares, plazas, tea-houses, corner stores, tiny parks, giant parks, streetside seats—while ours are not. And we suffer for it. Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, first noticed these places in the 1970s. Or rather, he noticed that European cities had them, and American cities didn’t. He named them ‘third places’, because your first place is your home, and your second is your workplace, but your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances. These places are cheap or free. They’re open to people from all walks of life. New Zealand has a great third place—the outdoors. My favourite third place is a DOC hut, any of them—the one space in the country where anyone is up for a yarn. But I can’t stop in at a DOC hut on my way home from work, and neither can the other 86 per cent of New Zealanders who live in urban centres. Reading Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, I began to wish for an urban equivalent. “A community life can exist when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows,” writes another American sociologist, Philip Slater, author of a book on loneliness. When a city has lovely spaces for people for people to stroll in, or loiter, or meet friends—and importantly for our senior citizens, when these places are close to home—then the requirement for one’s house to be large and nice enough for entertaining is lessened. And when you have places to meet your neighbours by chance, you can get to know them without the pressure of inviting them over. Oldenburg describes third places as neutral ground: no one has to play host and everyone is at ease. “If there is no neutral ground in the neighbourhoods where people live, association outside the home will be impoverished,” he writes. “Many, perhaps most, neighbours will never meet, to say nothing of associate, for there is no place for them to do so.” Why is all of this important? Because a third of us said we were lonely in the 2014 census, and one in five of us will seek treatment this year for depression or anxiety. And because our cities aren’t bolstering one of the most significant aspects of mental health: a sense of community. Yet we blame this lack of community upon ourselves—we haven’t tried hard enough to build it—when the problem is in fact the lack of a venue for this to take place. It’s akin to wondering why no one plays pick-up basketball when there’s no court, hoop or ball. As we rapidly expand our cities, as we solve our housing crises, we have the chance to correct this. We could shift away from the prioritisation of cars as a method of transport, and make our streets places for strolls and encounters. That means living a little closer together, placing useful things within walking distance, perhaps forgoing individual parcels of lawn for large, shared parks. When our third places are a drive away, elderly people are fastened in retirement villages, and teenagers stuck in suburbia. We could treat the city as our living room, kitchen, dining room, back garden and sunny deck. We could value connection over privacy. The tiny-house dwellers featured in this issue are bravely striking out for a new way of life—one where we value the spaces we share with others as much as the spaces we keep to ourselves.
The idea of minimal living, an international fad, has fallen on fertile soil in New Zealand, thanks to our national housing crisis and shifting ideas about the way we want to live. For some people, a tiny house is the only home they will ever afford to own. Others are stepping off the treadmill of modern life to ask: How much space does a person really need?
People who vote for the same party or follow the same group regard each other as intelligent and hard-working, and see those who vote for different parties or belong to different groups as brainwashed and incompetent, according to research published in Political Psychology. Moreover, these attitudes exist no matter which side a person is on. Study participants described people who had the same opinions as them, or ‘ingroup followers’, as lions, wolves, tigers or dolphins—while ‘outgroup followers’ were depicted as sheep, snakes, hyenas or lemmings. Critically, participants thought ingroup followers were best influenced by persuasion, and outgroup followers by coercion. The authors of the study warn against assuming that “the followers of political outgroups are merely sheep who will only respond to coercion—not least because, from their perspective, the opposite is likely to be true”.
Having a good time—not a long time—with grandparents may be the most important factor in a child not being ageist, or discriminatory against older people. The study of 1151 children aged 7–16 was conducted in Belgium and published in Child Development. The quality of time spent with grandparents, where children were happy, was much more influential than the quantity of time. The children who spent quality time at least once a week were the least ageist of all. There were three other factors that made children less likely to discriminate against older people: being aged 10–12 (those aged 7–9 expressed the most prejudice), being a girl, and the grandparents being in good health.
Bill Robertson planned national parks and drew international borders.
Telling stories about the overlooked and the unappreciated.
Most of the stellar yachting careers of New Zealand’s America’s Cup sailors began in humble seven-foot boats—a class now a century old—designed by a Public Works employee who couldn’t swim, and who was too hard up to build anything larger.
Clemency Montelle reads mathematics and astronomy texts in ancient languages.
The politics of a Hawke’s Bay landmark.
Mānuka honey has exploded in value in recent years, and now it’s a high-stakes business, attracting hive thieves, counterfeit products, unscrupulous players—and triggering a race for the blossom every spring, wherever the trees are in flower.
Charlotte Graham used to live on the top floor of a wooden house in Wellington. On November 14, 2016, two minutes after midnight, it began shaking so badly that she struggled to make it to the doorway to shelter. When the earthquake finally subsided, and she heard her flatmates return to bed, she wondered: Do we all need to evacuate? Head up Mt Victoria? She couldn’t find anything online about tsunami risk. Someone on Twitter sent her a map of Wellington council evacuation zones. It didn’t have street names, but she knew the city well enough to place her house in one of the safe zones. It made her wonder: What about people who didn’t use social media? Or the internet? A longterm Radio New Zealand producer, freelance journalist and community volunteer, Graham was well versed in earthquake reporting. She wanted to know what provisions were in place for the vulnerable in disaster planning in New Zealand, and whether the organisations looking after them were getting the same kind of help as quake-stricken businesses. “It became clear that the picture in Wellington was a lot more interesting than I’d first realised,” she says, “but also in the way that Wellington’s most vulnerable were not included.” In early 2017, she won a Scoop Foundation grant that enabled her to do the legwork of finding out more: “I ended up putting in an Official Information Act request to every council in New Zealand to find out what they actually had in documentation to address the safety of vulnerable people.” Councils were, by and large, baffled. No one had asked this before. Some have yet to furnish Graham with answers to questions first posed beginning in April 2016. It’s information she believes is vital. “You can ring a government department and ask for the national picture, but you’re not necessarily going to get the minutiae of the challenges that different areas are facing,” she says. Sometimes the reporting process is time-consuming and boringly administrative—and sometimes the outcome is vitally important. The result of Graham’s research, which has spanned eight months and counting, is a national picture of our disaster readiness, more detailed than ever before.
The unexpected journey of a linguist.
How we perceive the world around us is determined by the language we speak. Language affects how we think of ourselves, how we relate to others, how we organise time and space, even the types of thoughts we’re able to formulate. Not all languages have a past, a present and a future. Not all languages can give the same directions or describe the same relationships. For native English speakers, Māori offers a very different way of looking at and arranging the world. Here’s just one example: English has one word for ‘you’, but Māori has five. It is much more concerned with who ‘you’ are—whether you’re one person, or two, or many, whether I consider myself part of your group or apart from it. The language is a treasure, a lens, a record of culture, a place where stories and poetry and wisdom live. It’s limited in translation by the narrower definitions of English words, and the fact that English takes ten words to explain an aspect of Māori culture which te reo can accomplish in one. To keep a language, though, you can’t just use it ceremonially. You have to be able to say hi, talk about the weather, order McDonald’s. Jeremy Tātere MacLeod of Ngāti Kahungunu is one of a group of people around the country working to create more opportunities to speak Māori in daily life. Despite recent and well publicised complaints about the use of te reo on Radio New Zealand, the vast majority of the New Zealand public want it spoken. Surveys of non-Māori people conducted between 2000 and 2009 showed a rapid upswing in support for the language to be taught in schools and used in public life. In 2009, 65 per cent of non-Māori believed the government should encourage the language’s use. (In 2000, it was 24 per cent.) The change in attitude has been rapid; letting the language soak into public life will take longer. It takes a generation to lose a language, says MacLeod, but three to get it back again. One of the first things you learn in any language class is how to introduce yourself, but in Māori an introduction requires more than your name: it also involves describing where you’re from. Perhaps, one day, we’ll all be able to locate our childhood not just with the name of a primary school but with mountains or rivers or harbours, the immutable geographical features that stood beside us as we learned about the world and our place in it. This different way of thinking came into focus for me during my research for the kauri dieback story. I look at rickers, young kauri, and my mind leaps to objects: lamp posts, masts. Others look at kauri and see members of their family. In Māori cosmology, kauri are our older siblings; we are simply the last-born child, and the living world is formed of our relatives. It is Māori and community groups that are driving action against kauri dieback. What communities can achieve has come to the foreground during New Zealand’s most recent natural disasters, and as a result, there’s been a shake-up in civil defence thinking, as Charlotte Graham has found. We’ve long depended on individuals to prepare for disasters on their own—which means the less able and less capable get left behind. Naomi Arnold also delved into future-planning for her story on robotics. Our population of retirees will overtake our youth at some point in the next 20 years—but how will we care for this contingent of elderly? This issue invites you to try on another view of the world: to see it from the time scale of a kauri, through the nose of a dog, and with the eyes of fellow humans who experience disasters on a daily basis.
For five years Richard Robinson has been heading out into the blue realm far beyond our shores to photograph the pelagic creatures that live there. It wasn’t an assignment as such, but the beginning of a body of work propelled only by curiosity. He began accruing images of events that occur so rarely that few have had the opportunity to photograph them—orca hunting, the birth and first breath of a pilot whale, feeding frenzies that included several hundred animals. Soon, he had the kernel of an idea that began to coalesce around a working title, ‘Where the Buffalo Roam’—a reference to the American West that matched Robinson’s vision of this vast ocean prairie and its cast of leviathans. The project received two big boosts. First, researcher Jochen Zaeschmar allowed Robinson to accompany him on his many trips offshore, where the photographer took up a spotting position high in the crow’s nest. Later, Robinson won the inaugural Canon Personal Project Grant, enabling the completion of the project with the new 5D Mark IV. The coincidence of vision, curiosity and good fortune are captured in the pages of this issue: “Some of the best work of my life,” says Robinson.
Sometimes, the world comes to you.
University of Auckland professor Cather Simpson on solving problems with lasers.
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