The Valley
Asher Emanuel, Bridget Williams Books
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The reawakening of waka ama
The joy and community that comes from picking up a paddle—and putting your back into it.
Woman alone
The hard, heavy work of not feeling scared in the bush—and why we persist.
Feeling fairly okay about the fuel crisis?
“It won’t sort itself out,” warns energy expert Nathan Surendran.
For shame
While editing Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley’s feature story about the surge of methamphetamine and HIV in Fiji (page 50), I read a Rapid Assessment report from a team commissioned by the United Nations. They spent weeks in Suva in 2025, interviewing dozens of men and women who inject meth. In their own words, these people tell of the sharing of equipment, including needles; the makeshift ways in which they mix up their fix; the illness and poverty and violence that coalesce around addiction and so often drive it; the shame. “The judgmental looks,” says 35-year-old Aliyah. “The eyes. The Fijian eyes that judge you…” The researchers also convened talanoa, group conversations, with leaders in health, law enforcement, churches and the civil service. In these transcripts, one religious leader calls addiction “demonic”. He says his own daughter has been affected, and that most families stay silent on the matter because of shame. The report notes that such stigma, together with the country’s fragmented officialdom and law enforcement, is a barrier to the fixes that seem so obvious from here: clean needles, prophylactic medication, education in safer drug use. New Zealand has our own national shames. Equally fixable. Equally stymied by the desire to cleave to the cultural status quo. Very often our leaders don’t come right out and say that’s what’s going on. But let us here, as Kiwis love to do, call a spade a spade. Agriculture accounts for about half of New Zealand’s planet-heating emissions, yet after the 2023 election, the incoming government reversed plans to include it in our emissions trading scheme. Read: they did not want to annoy anyone in Red Bands. Likewise, in the face of explicit advice from the Climate Change Commission, the coalition resolved to go easy on methane. On this front we have not come far since 2003, when a tax on methane emissions by livestock was first proposed by Helen Clark’s government and scornfully shot down by, it seemed, the whole country. Ratepayers can’t get to grips with the realities of actually paying enough to keep things ticking over, so local governments have instead drop-kicked the infrastructure can, and millions of litres of raw human sewage, into Wellington Harbour. After a brief hiatus, officials are, inconceivably, once again inviting international companies to prospect for oil and gas at sea and on land. But good keen men need good keen jobs and it’s really very easy, and lately very Kiwi, to look only at such ordinary short-term needs and not at the existentially urgent imperative to stop burning things. Our climate policy, right now, is short-termism writ large. On which: in February the government announced its support, and likely significant financial backing, too, for a billion-dollar terminal in Taranaki touted to help plug a gap in the national energy supply. It would process liquefied natural gas, an expensive fossil fuel we’ll have to import using—more fossil fuels. As a country we abhor red tape. Enter the fast-track-approvals regime, which means you can get your coal mines and sand mines, your quarries and your sea-level property developments up and running lickety-split. The irony is that this legislation is precisely the sort of gear-change the country needs, were it to prioritise projects that will take us rapidly forwards. Solar. Wind. Resilient pipes and roads. Imagine. Instead, in the face of multiple, escalating crises, we are dithering and obfuscating and putting dangerously outdated cultural biases above clear and compelling evidence. We can fix it, all of it. But we have to get over ourselves first.
The lacemaker
In the studio with textile artist Rowan Panther
In Fiji, a wave of meth, HIV and shame
A dispatch from Suva, where cruel epidemics are racing in parallel.
How to stand alone
King’s Counsel Sally Gepp on the frustrating, high stakes, necessary work of environmental law.
“It’s just you and your dog.”
Every year, the finest sheep dogs and handlers in New Zealand and Australia compete for the prestigious Wayleggo Cup. The air is thick with expletives, the sheep are ready to bolt, and every second matters.
Life in the dying city
On paper, Wellington city’s not looking too flash. But photographer Louis Elorfi Macalister finds life—loud, colourful, and dynamic—on every corner.
How to dig a better hole
For many Māori, archaeology has a bad name, with treasures removed to museums, stripped of context and spiritual care. Now, as rising seas threaten ancestral places, one iwi is leading digs themselves.
Risk and reward
Outdoor education is at a crossroads.
Photo stories
Some of the most powerful moments in this job are when I open up a new gallery a photographer has sent in. It’s a story on screen, right in your face—gorgeous, gutting, often both at once. See: everything shot by Lottie Hedley, especially her warm, disciplined set on marching teams, published in Issue 193, and her work documenting the heartbreaking cyclone clean-up in Hawke’s Bay, in Issue 186. See: everything shot by Richard Robinson, most recently the feature about Tokelau, or chasing hāpuku in Fiordland. It is deeply unreasonable, as I told him recently, to point a photographer at a few muddy footprints and expect them to come back with magic. But check out the feature he shot on moa prints. The value of photojournalists extends far beyond the page. At this magazine, photographers drive our stories just as much as the writers do: often it’s the photographer who finds the angle that sings, or the people who turn out to be vibrant main characters. Occasionally, a photographer just turns up with a complete set of images so terrific they demand words to go with—that’s how our cover story, on lightstruck seabirds, happened this time. (See page 36—and thank you, Simon Runting.) It is a gift, for a writer tackling a big story, to have a photographer invested in the nuance, too. When I was a cub reporter at the Hawke’s Bay Today and Herald on Sunday, it was the photographers who taught me how to tell stories. Every job I was sent out on—a fatal car crash, a golden wedding anniversary, an A&P show—the photographer beside me had been shooting a version of it for decades. He’d know the cops and the backroads and every base that needed covering; he’d pep talk me on the way, deploy chirpy chit-chat during awkward interviews, help me figure out the best angle on the drive back to the newsroom. (I am saying “he” because they were almost all men.) On the roughest jobs I’d be shaking before knocking on a door; photographers are made out to be a callous breed but I suspect as a collective they’ve been the shoulder to cry on for every journalist in the country. The best ones know to keep tissues and biscuits in the glovebox. All of this was normal. It was just how writers got good. The number of times I have been saved by a photographer jumping in and asking the obvious question! (This does not run both ways. Only recently, two decades into this work, have I felt that I know enough about pictures to be able to nudge the photographer and say, ‘Hey, would that make a good photo?’) The past 10 years have been devastating for press photography. All over the world photojournalists have been cut from newspapers, their images replaced by stock photos, reporters’ snapshots and free tat from social media. Flicking through newspapers and websites now, I register these pictures as absences—an opportunity for better storytelling, lost. It’s not just the images that have been ditched, but the teaching, the nous, the institutional knowledge. One of the big pulls of New Zealand Geographic was the opportunity to work closely with photographers again, both in the field and in putting stories together. Some of those who showed me the ropes now shoot for this magazine; others are regularly named finalists in our Photographer of the Year competition. I’m always chuffed to see their names come up—glad that at least some are still in the job, still documenting those moments that need more than words. I have never worked with Iain McGregor, the career photojournalist who took the top prize this time, but we could not look away from his images. In these days of chaos and conflict, of so many meaningful stories waiting to happen, long live the photojournalist.
Good dogs
Because of Willy Marsh, hundreds of dogs are choosing not to chase kiwi and penguins.
Solomoni comes out of hiding
How the Pacific Leprosy Foundation is helping a Fijian father overcome the stigma of a debilitating disease.
Landfall Tauraka 250
Edited by Lynley Edmeades, Otago University Press, $35, October 16
New rules for a new world order
By Shamubeel Eaqub, Chief Economist at Simplicity
“We Play for Each Other”
Joe Harrison photographs an extraordinary league team.
Sit in on a meeting of the Taupulega
The Taupulega, or council, of each atoll holds the decision making power in Tokelau. It's made up of the heads of each family on the island and decides everything from spend of public finances to how to deal with waste. Here on Atafu, they begin proceedings with a song.
Take dip with the kids
After school the students of Fenua Fala hit the lagoon for some relief from the scorching tropical heat. The lagoon is a balmy 25º degrees or more most days.
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