Honouring the gift of Puhiwai Rangi
Te Rawhitiroa Bosch documents the traditional harvest of a sperm whale stranded in the Coromandel.
Te Rawhitiroa Bosch documents the traditional harvest of a sperm whale stranded in the Coromandel.
Becki Moss photographs the drama and intimacy of two vogue balls.
When Tom Doig started reading about doomsday preppers and survivalist subcultures, his first question was: “What if they’re crazy?” His second question was: “What if they’re right?”
One thing about having a 33-year online archive of every New Zealand Geographic magazine—from issue 001 in January 1989 to this one, issue 177 in September 2022—is that it’s possible to see all the ways the magazine has evolved. If you haven’t yet explored the archive, it’s an interesting, occasionally infuriating place. There are original stories by Michael King and Keri Hulme; there are articles that would be better suited to an encyclopaedia than a magazine; there’s some excellent photojournalism, especially of the way we live; there wasn’t always the diversity of voices and viewpoints we strive for today. Some of these changes are simply because you, the reader, have needed different things from us over time. Now that you carry an information portal around in your pocket, our features are less completist: more like stories, less like Wikipedia pages. We face issues today that we didn’t think about much in 1989 (“Who does outer space belong to?” “How do we rehabilitate our rivers?”) but we’re also looking at the same things all over again from a new vantage point (“How do we protect the vulnerable?” “How do we honour the Treaty?”) Some of these changes are because journalism has evolved, and our ideas about how to tell stories responsibly have developed. These days, we want you to know a little bit more about the people who are writing and photographing the stories in the magazine. We want to acknowledge the perspectives they hold. That’s why there are now credit lines in stories describing our contributors a little more, and that’s why we’ve started listing the iwi of any Māori contributors or sources—so that others can pinpoint them in the web of networks and relationships that is te ao Māori. The unchanging part of the magazine—our magnetic north—is that we’re committed to learning. We don’t consider anything to be finished. Like the scientists we write about, we keep open minds, sift new evidence, listen to those who have a long history and connection with the whenua. And we start stories in the same way, a candle in a dark room, reaching towards something we feel is there. Most of the stories in this issue began as musings—a sixth-sense notion that there may be something worth bringing into the light, worth sharing with others. “I see a lot of rosellas these days,” I said to Auckland journalist Ellen Rykers. “Are they bad?” Our oceans journalist Kate Evans heard talk about an terrible seaweed on Great Barrier Island. “Is this even a story?” she wondered, and went there to find out. I asked Tulia Thompson to attend a siren battle and tell us what it was like and Kerry Sunderland suggested travelling up the remote Baton Valley to find out what life there is like. We start, always, in ignorance, and then we learn. After five years and one pandemic editing New Zealand Geographic—a job that is a bit like being an air traffic controller, where journalism and photography are the planes—I’m taking a sabbatical to learn more about journalism in the United States, with some help from Columbia University and Fulbright New Zealand. I’m planning to listen, to reconsider, and to return not with more certainty but more curiosity. The magazine’s next editor, Catherine Woulfe, is sitting right next to me as I type, and I’m excited to see what the magazine—this country, our lives—look like from her vantage point. You’re in good hands.
Six years ago, Edith Amituanai visited a west Auckland park to find a group of siren cars blasting out the kind of music played in island nightclubs. Now, she’s practically a member of the Switch Hittaz. Sports stadiums would wish for the same atmosphere as a siren battle, she says: “There’s a lot of joy in it.”
Siren crews offer belonging and creativity as much as resounding treble or volume—all of which were on display at New Zealand’s first-ever national siren battle.
Te Rōpū o te Matakite: the seers, the ones with foresight. That’s the name of the group that revered leader Dame Whina Cooper led on a 1000-kilometre march from the Far North to Wellington in 1975, protesting against more than a century of colonial laws designed to alienate Māori from their land.
Protecting the environment isn’t just about how much you buy, it’s also about what you buy and how sustainable those choices are.
For Mike Murphy, the managing director of Kōkako Coffee, using certified Fairtrade beans is a total no-brainer. “It helps growers, it helps us and it’s good for consumers,” he says.
The Kalahari Desert in Namibia is home to the San people. Surviving in this harsh and desolate world, their tracking skills are unsurpassed. They are teaching Hayden Turner how to find prey in an environment where the rivalry for food is intense and where water is a scarce luxury.
In the impenetrable jungles of Cameroon, Hayden Turner hunts with the Baka tribe. The Baka are all under five feet tall, but their bravery is legendary. Using their voice as a weapon, poisonous darts and incredible courage, Hayden Turner sees with his own eyes how they kill to survive.
Surrounded by danger, deep in Malaysian rain forest, live the Jahai tribe, the world’s first blow-pipe hunters. They survive just as their ancestors have for thousand’s of years before them and Hayden Turner is going to find out how.
Former Zoo-keeper Hayden Turner heads to Vanuatu’s Tanna Island to learn about the Namal people’s hunting strategies. They hunt every creature on the island, whether it swims, crawls, runs or flies … and over the centuries the Namal have developed innovative ways to catch them all.
For one week in May, 21 photographers documented a small town at the confluence of history. What they found was beautiful.
One town, five days, 21 photographers.
The fight to decriminalise homosexuality.
Melanie Burford, a New Zealand photojournalist in Norway, turns her lens on intangible subjects: her son’s autism, her family’s search for belonging.
Final presentation for the Photo Aotearoa photojournalism workshop, hosted at Turangawaewae Marae in Ngāruawāhia, May 2022. Edited by Melanie Burford. Photographed by Edith Amituanai, Te Rawhitiroa Bosch, Tatsiana Chypsanava, Mattheus Elwood, Tash Hopkins, Jodie James, Rachel Mataira, Joshua McCormack, Adrian Malloch, Andrew MacDonald, Cameron James McLaren, Becki Moss, Vanessa Parker, Ralph Piezas, Mike Scott, Erica Sinclair, Scott Sinton, Aaron Smale, Maine Tito, Dominico Zapata and Julie Zhu.
The fifth issue of New Zealand Geographic, published on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, began with an observation that “differences were not understood, respect not offered, deals not honoured, wrongs not righted and, for many, a corroding ignorance widens the gulf”. Thirty-two years later, those words are still accurate, so we asked ourselves how we could do better as a media outlet to address the widening gulf and bravely confront some of the questions still vexing New Zealand society. We turned to writer and author Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu), funded by NZ On Air’s Public Interest Journalism initiative, as a sort of navigator to help steer the waka through these difficult seas. We set out priorities. Developing Māori journalism talent is critical, but so is the careful, considerate, respectful explanation of what is meant by rangatiratanga, how co-governance might be relevant, how iwi can balance commercial priorities with kaitiakitanga and how to close the yawning faultlines created by the trauma of colonisation. “Luckily these aren’t uncharted seas,” says Low. “Māori writers, thinkers and leaders have had to grapple with these questions since before the time of Te Tiriti, so there’s generations of matauranga to draw on. My small part is to try to bring Māori voices and perspectives into New Zealand Geographic in substantial ways, give people the space to tell their stories, and provide some of the history and context needed so these issues make sense.” A picture is worth a thousand data points In 2008, Edith Woischin and Timo Franz went on their big OE, exploring surf beaches around the Pacific before arriving in New Zealand. Here, they co-founded Dumpark, an agency specialising in data visualisation and infographics. From mapping oil spills and plastic pollution to reporting on social development and human rights, their work involves making complex information intelligible. This issue, they took up the challenge of transforming sea-level rise data into visualisations for the story A map of the future. The long reach of war Tatsiana Chypsanava’s multi-stop journey to her present-day home of Nelson has encompassed being a dance student in Belarus and a cocoa farmer in Brazil. Now, she’s a photojournalist. With family in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, Tatsiana has first-hand experience of how much the conflict in Ukraine is affecting Kiwis with roots in the region. It grew into this issue’s story about how authorities overseas can intimidate or crack down from afar on dissent. Hold still As a 12-year-old, Becki Moss won a camera at the Fieldays biosecurity tent, then taught herself photography from the online community Flickr. From the age of 14 onwards she was spending summers shooting weddings, and eventually, she quit her science degree to freelance full-time. In Wellington for a contract, she began documenting the local drag scene, and continued to photograph the LGBTIQA+ community over the course of several years—a project that was part of the portfolio that won her Young Photographer of the Year in 2020. Much of her work touches on invisible chronic illnesses—such as her story Stay Home Club.
The actor, writer and director’s play Dawn Raids is being restaged, 25 years after he wrote it.
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