Capital 81

CAPITAL Foreign bodies

Local folk to big smoke

SUMMER 2022 $9.90

Welly weed

The pest plant killing our buzz

Shutter speed

On the road with a photo essay

Hipster homes

Tour two trendy interiors

The away issue THE STORIES OF WELLINGTON

HAVANA COFFEE WORKS 163 TORY STREET WELLINGTON WWW.HAVANA.CO.NZ

Karl Maughan, Elstow, 2021, oil on canvas, 1000mm x 1000mm. Photo: Michael Mahne Lamb.

KARL 9 DEC 2021– MAUGHAN 22 JAN 2022 NEW PAINTINGS PAGE GALLERIES 42 Victoria St Wellington 6011

Tuesday – Friday: 10am – 5pm Saturday: 10am – 4pm

+ 64 4 471 2636 info@pagegalleries.co.nz pagegalleries.co.nz

WE’RE YOUR LOCAL Join the Kiwi Wealth KiwiSaver Scheme. Investing in companies all around the world, and some very smart Kiwi businesses right here at home.

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Kiwi Wealth Limited is the issuer and manager of the Kiwi Wealth KiwiSaver Scheme. For a copy of the PDS visit our website.

Where living’s a walk in the park Willis Bond’s latest Wellington residential development.

Launching 2022.

Register your interest at onetasman.co.nz for exclusive pre-launch details.

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Your summer adventure awaits at Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne

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10 7

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5

1. Zealandia By Day tour - gift vouchers available 2. Kererū silver earings 3. Zealandia tote bag 4. Rātā Cafe - open 9am-4pm daily 5. Zealandia By Night tour - gift vouchers available 6. Zealandia Keep Cup 7. Wild Kiwi t-shirt range 8. Zealandia stainless steel drink bottle 9. Zealandia Twilight tour 10. Zealandia membership - gift memberships available 11. Birds of New Zealand book - Melissa Boardman 12. Enamel pins and jewellery - Natty

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VISITZEALANDIA.COM

STAY

Over-Seas

AT HILTON AUCKLAND

SLEEP Sitting 300 metres out to sea, inspired by the nautical environment and designed to reflect the image of magnificent visiting cruiseiners, Hilton Auckland is a hotel unlike any other hotel in the city. With large open rooms, enjoy stunning views from your balcony and the smell of fresh sea air.

EAT Served with spectacular harbour views, FISH Restaurant offers a relaxed – fine dining experience, with a creative menu focusing on sustainable, fresh, local produce, prepared well and served simply. Playing homage to the restaurant name, FISH aims to showcase only the best of what New Zealand’s oceans have to offer.

DRINK Bellini at Hilton Auckland is situated in a prime location to enjoy a drink and a bite to eat while watching the harbour activity in a sophisticated yet relaxed environment. Bellini also offers signature Cocktail masterclasses, and a delicious Contemporary Afternoon Tea from Thursday’s – Sunday’s.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED AT YOUR DOORSTEP Book your next holiday at www.hilton.com/auckland | 09 978 2024

Gardens Trail Wellington City Council presents

Tue 11–Sun 30 Jan 10.30am–6pm daily Wellington Botanic Garden ki Paekākā | Free entry A self-guided daytime tour – featuring an enchanted Gardens Gallery of art and sonic installations.

Find the map at wellington.govt.nz/gardens-trail

With thanks to:

With support from ThemeWorks and Streamliner Productions

YEARS AND COUNTING

Join us in 2022, as we celebrate our 75th anniversary and look forward to a golden future.

TICKETS FROM $21

nzso.co.nz/2022

CAPITAL

The stories of Wellington

I

t’s a brave new year, and in Wellington we share a cautious optimism. This might be the year we can look Away, at least slightly further afield, and maybe visit a Pacific island or in my case catch up with family and friends in Australia.

Away, of course, can be within New Zealand and we’re always about supporting local; but in this issue we are talking to a few former Wellingtonians who have established themselves in lives far away. It was a delight to realise that that among the capable and coping people we found is Zoey Radford, who as a student featured on the cover of a very early summer issue, Cap#8, in a quintessential Wellington beach scene.

Of course we also have a wealth of “local” lined up for you to enjoy. Sarah Lang talks to two of the Hager siblings about growing up and family values. Matthew Plummer engages us with tales from early city maps. And we talk to four contented home-owners about their reno projects.

Food is high up the list of summer enjoyments, and what says summer more than salad. Three local foodies give Nicola Young their tips for ensuring salads are crisp and dressed for Christmas.

And we haven’t forgotten your holiday entertainment We have an Away-themed crossword for you, compiled by Callum Turnbull, and a short story by Sally Ward.

Our Capital Photographer of the Year competition returns, after its highly successful first outing. We are delighted that our sponsors from last year are keen to continue, and look forward to being showered again with talented entries. Paul Hamer, one of last year’s section winners, contributed the photo essay in this issue.

Our first step into this brave new year is a refresh of the cover design and a special summer image. This is quite a democratic office. Anyone who steps in at the right time, from contributors to couriers gets a vote and then, our talented art director Shalee Fitzimmons and I, choose the cover we like best. We hope you like it. We’ve had fun working on the new version. Do let me know what you think.

Subscriptions $73.50 for 6 issues $119 for 12 issues New Zealand only

To subscribe, please email accounts@capitalmag.co.nz or visit capitalmag.co.nz/shop

Stockists Pick up your Capital in New World, Countdown, and Pak‘n’Save supermarkets, Moore Wilson's, Unity Books, Commonsense Organics, Magnetix, City Cards & Mags, Take Note, Whitcoulls, Wellington Airport, Interislander, and other discerning nation-wide outlets.

Distribution: john@capitalmag.co.nz.

Contact Us Phone +64 4 385 1426 Email editor@capitalmag.co.nz Website capitalmag.co.nz Facebook facebook.com/CapitalMagazineWellington Twitter @CapitalMagWelly Instagram @capitalmag Post Box 9202, Marion Square, Wellington 6141 Deliveries 31–41 Pirie St, Mt Victoria, Wellington, 6011 ISSN 2324-4836 Produced by Capital Publishing Ltd

Happy New Year from all the team at Capital.

The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. Although all material is checked for accuracy, no liability is assumed by the publisher for any losses due to the use of material in this magazine.

Alison Franks Editor

Copyright ©. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of Capital Publishing Ltd.

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Staff

Featured contributors

Managing editor Alison Franks editor@capitalmag.co.nz Campaign coordinators Haleigh Trower haleigh@capitalmag.co.nz Sophia Montgomery sophia@capitalmag.co.nz Ava Gerard ava@capitalmag.co.nz Milly Brunel milly@capitalmag.co.nz Factotum John Bristed john@capitalmag.co.nz Art director Shalee Fitzsimmons shalee@capitalmag.co.nz Designer Elaine Loh design@capitalmag.co.nz Writer Arthur Hawkes journalism@capitalmag.co.nz

A R T H U R H AW K E S Writer Arthur is a writer from a rural English backwater. He’s written for Dazed in London, and started his Kiwi writing career in Masterton, which felt like home. He takes semi-regular breaks from the media, writing comedy scripts, working in the film industry, and playing music.

S A L L Y WA R D Sh or t f i c ti on w riter Sally has studied at the International Institute of Modern Letters and was the editor of Salient magazine in 2021. Now she’s writing plain English legal information at Wellington Community Law.

Publishing coordinator Sophie Carter hello@capitalmag.co.nz Accounts Tod Harfield accounts@capitalmag.co.nz

Contributors Melody Thomas, Janet Hughes, John Bishop, Anna Briggs, Sarah Lang, Deirdre Tarrant, Francesca Emms, Dan Poynton, Chris Tse, Claire Orchard, Harriet Palmer, Jess Scott, Claire O’Loughlin, Chev Hassett, Joram Adams, Sanne Van Ginkel, Rachel Helyer Donaldson, Matthew Plummer, Fairooz Samy, Adrian Vercoe, Sasha Borissenko, Siobhan Vaccarino, Annie Keig, Courteney Moore, Lauren Hynd, Josiah Nevell

Submissions We welcome freelance art, photo, and story submissions. However we cannot reply personally to unsuccessful pitches.

TESSA JOHNSTONE Journ a li st Tessa is a sometimes-journalist who has lived in Wellington so long she complains when the wind stops. Most often seen ferrying her energetic children from place to place, writing optimistic submissions on environmental issues, slurping a third cup of coffee and weeding to little effect.

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IAN APPERLEY Writer Ian is a freelance writer and prolific blogger. He blogs on local issues, and writes for the National Business Review.

After living for the majority of his life in Wellington’s Eastern Suburbs, Ian and his partner Karene exchanged the city life for a farm in Wairarapa where they train horses, grow chillis, experiment in horticulture, and spend a good deal of time working from home.

M a d e b y our g r o u p o f f r iend s f o r y o u t o sha re wit h y o u rs. . .

An award-winning tantalising fusion of global botanicals small-batch distilled right here in New Zealand.

Available today, online and at your local bottle store.

tw el f th h o ur d i s t i l l e r y .c o .n z

DISTILLERY

C O N T E N T S

14 LETTERS 16 CHATTER 22 NOTEWORTHY 25 BY THE NUMBERS 26 NEW PRODUCTS 28 TALES OF THE CITY 33 CULTURE

38 Alphabet soup The year past from A–Z

40 Echo through the ages Lord Echo returns to the stage for the summer season

62 Disease, demolition, and developers Early city maps reveal contagious construction

MAKING SUSTAINABILITY SIMPLE

@THEMINIMALNZ WWW.THEMINIMAL.CO.NZ

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Anchor me

Full fathom five

Foreign bodies

Stormy seas and a refugee crisis

Six locals invite us into their homes away from home

69 Road trip Buckle up for some petrol-scented nostalgia with this photo essay

C O N T E N T S

118 Hard to be Hager Critics and kinship with Mandy and Nicky Hager

A home of contrast

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78 LIFESTYLE 92 BUG ME 94 EDIBLES

Couture meets Kmart and dark meets light in Mt Vic

108 Wellington’s beard problem Something's hiding in the bushes

112 98 Tossed Salad secrets, dressed and undressed

106 TRY THIS

Scrap it Original, compostable short fiction from Sally Ward

114 BY THE BOOK 117 REVERSE

122 Over the hill and on the ladder Take a tour of the Rosati’s black bolthole

130 WELLY ANGEL 132 WĀHINE 134 CALENDAR 136 PUZZLED

L E T T E R S

D1 XXX

PET TINESS AND PA S SI V E E A R N I N G Am I correct in assuming our city councillors have put the pettiness of earlier times aside and are getting on with the job they were elected to do? It really feels like Wellington could finally be on the verge of “moving’’.

I’m particularly delighted to hear discussions are planned for the new year where the pros and cons of de-privatising core council services will be debated.

This discussion is long overdue, especially as I was rendered speechless when told it costs around $1 to hire one road cone per use. Someone is definitely onto a lucrative passive earner – and it’s not the ratepayer.

This is an important topic and one that demands councillor civility together with transparency, clear decision making and effective action. I’ll be following their progress with interest.

Gaye Hutton, Vogeltown D E SIG N D E L IG H T I loved the mugs you offered online but was too slow putting in an order. Will there be more available at some stage?

Hazel Mead, Miramar The collab with Paige Jarman was a limited edition offer and has sold out. We hope to work with other local craftspeople to bring you more special offers – Ed. A J E L LY R EV I VA L

give a gift that keeps on giving twigland gardeners world

I did enjoy your annual special Christmas themed food feature, with a Dasher, a Prancer and a Dancer (Cap#80 p96). I think I have seen all the versions you have done, each year with this local foodie theme, and I have enjoyed them all. I think my favourite was probably the year of the Three Kings, (Cap #47) but the very retro jelly recipe, from the Deck the Halls year (Cap#67) has become part of our family’s Christmas food tradition. Thanks for the fun.

A Harding, New Plymouth

Send letters to editor@capitalmag.co.nz with the subject line Letters to Ed

middleton road | glenside | open 7 days 14

S E C TCI HO AN T TH EE RA D E R

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Fiddle Leaf Fig

B l a n ke t s o l u t i o n

Names such as these It’s a familiar name, ficus lyrata, and there are a few about. The fiddle leaf fig has a thousand or so cousins; think Benjamina, Ruby, Sophia, bambino, elastica, etc. But why the fiddle, you ask? It’s obvious really, the plant gets its name from the violinshaped foliage.

Commonkind is a new social enterprise based in Pukerua Bay. Using a buy one, give one model, they design New Zealand wool blankets and share them with those in need across the country. The team gifts a wool blanket to a child through community organisations whenever a customer purchases a bespoke blanket. Kelly Olatunji and Olive Riley, founders, met while studying at Massey. Their blankets have been distributed in the region through organisations The Nest Collective and Wesley Community Action.

Let’s have a look Although strong in stature it has a delicate nature (some even say emotional) and you must resist the temptation to move it about your home. Even a trip from the garden centre to your lounge can result in a few well-established leaves falling to the ground. Do not fret, if you have chosen its location well it will settle in and command attention in no time.

TLC When placed in bright, dappled light – and well away from drying heat pumps, heaters, and the glare of the sun – it should be a happy plant. Water well, thoroughly soaking the soil. Leaving it to sit in water will guarantee leaf drop and a full-blown sulk. The lyrata is not one for constant fertilising – just a few times over the warmer months will do the trick. Only repot when the roots start showing at the bottom of the pot.

Our plant of the month comes from Katherine Beauchamp, owner of Palmer’s Miramar.

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Free ride The month of March might be your chance to enjoy free bus rides in Wellington. Free or discounted rides on Wellington train and bus services during that month are proposed as part of a trial by Greater Wellington Regional Council to explore new fare settings, and to get ready for a new national public transport smart card.

The council is also considering free services for students and those with community cards, and even for residents of lower socio-economic suburbs.

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C H AT T E R

New in town

Three

Cos m i c fu n

Losing Mana

At Te Papa this summer, head into outer space on an interactive experience where gaming wizardry is combined with captivating live action, creating a high-stakes adventure! Saving Mars is bound to work up an appetite, so Te Papa are serving up an intergalactic menu featuring a Cosmic Burger – with edible soil from Mars (probably) and fries (from Earth), complemented with a glittering galaxy desert. A true inter-planetary experience!

Book at tepapa.govt.nz/visit/exhibitions/destination-mars

The Victoria University Students’ Association Trust recently sold a painting from their collection by the late Don Binney. Mana Island went for $600,000, the buyer paying a total of $720,750 after GST and premiums.

Binney painted the Mana Island landscape while he was a visiting lecturer at the university. It would be the largest artwork Binney ever produced, measuring 2.6m by 3.6m. His students assisted him in its creation. The money achieved from the sale, the union says, will be used for their general running costs.

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Spelling spree Max Carter, a Scot’s College 14-year-old, recently won the Aotearoa New Zealand spelling bee championship from a strong field of 20 year 9 and 10 students from all around the country. The spelling bee is an oral test, and generally regarded as trickier than a written test. Max says he found the word exchequer most difficult; he won with gossamer. After a bit of questioning he modestly admitted there’s a $5,000 prize which he’s putting aside for his future studies.

Ga rd e n g a l l i va nt i n g You can explore a new self-guided walk in the Wellington Botanic Garden this month. The Gardens Trail will give Wellingtonians a free, fun day out, following the cancellation of popular music event Gardens Magic, which would have run through January. The walk will feature the Gardens Gallery, with art, large polycarbonate chandeliers, sculptures by artists Jason Hina and Johnny Turner, and sonic installations.

The daytime trail runs for three weeks from 11 January. Find your map at wellington.govt.nz/gardens-trail

It's cool to kōrero Hey, if you’re going to the shops, get us some ice cream.

E tai, ka haere koe ki te toa, kia hokona ētahi aihikirimi mā tātou.

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S E C TCI HO AN T TH EE RA D E R

F i ve P u b l i c o r p r i va t e?

Wellington City Council is investigating bringing all outsourced council services back in-house, including rubbish collection, traffic management, road up-keep, water network and general maintenance. Nine of the 14 councillors said they would like to either consider or pursue a reversal of the current privatisation, but Councillor Nicola Young highlights possible pitfalls. “My feeling is that the council is already overwhelmed with policy work: why would you give them even more work? It’s going to cost millions.”

S eve n

Re t u r n of the photograph Capital Photographer of the Year is back for a second season, with three new categories. Enter online from 1 January at capitalmag.co.nz/cpoty, it's free.

Whenua Whenua is land, territory, and the ground beneath our feet.

In this category, photographers should celebrate the mighty lands and seas of Wellington that give us so much life.

Warren & Mahoney: Structure From our dwellings to our roadways, the region we live in has been built by human hands over generations. This category celebrates the constructed elements that form Wellington.

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Masonic Villages Trust: Society A place is nothing without its people, and our region has some of the best. This category is all about showcasing the humans of Wellington – the things they do and the things they love.

Two new species of lizard have recently been confirmed after genetic testing – a skink found in Southland’s Mataura Range and a gecko from the Nelson Lakes. This brings our endemic lizard tally to 126, greater than the number of endemic bird species. A recent report from DOC on our cold-blooded compadres said that 36.3 % of species were classified as Threatened, and 49.6 % At Risk.

Just 3.7 % were Not Threatened. They say this is partly due to predation from mice, weasels, and feral cats. Find your local Predator Free Wellington group at pfw.org.nz

Inside NEW Never before have we spent so much time indoors. We want to see photography that reflects our intimate new relationship with our personal spaces.

N ew Ye a r : N ew l i za rd s

Movement NEW Show us movement in a still image. That’s the key to this category. We want to see subjects that are moving or that communicate the idea of motion.

Rangatahi NEW This is an open category for photographers aged 21 and under. We want to celebrate our creative rangatahi, whether you’re in high school, university, or still on the playground.

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258 THORNDON QUAY | WELLINGTON | BOCONCEPT.COM

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Entries now open

Capital Photographer of the Year (CPoTY) is back for 2022.

With some of Aotearoa’s most prestigious creative minds as judges and significant cash prizes, CPotY celebrates the region through the lens of its clever residents.

The categories: • Whenua • Society • Structure • Inside • Movement • Rangatahi [21 and under]

How to enter: Entry is free, so have a go!

Submissions close April 27 2022.

For more info or to enter, visit capitalmag.co.nz/cpoty

CPotY will culiminate in an award ceremony and public exhibition.

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High St Dairy by George Staniland

capitalmag.co.nz/cpoty

Helping Hand by Lewis Ferris

N O T E W O R T H Y

U P P E R H U T T PA S S E S O N PA S S P O R T Upper Hutt City Council will ask entrants to show their vaccine passes at only one of their public facilities, despite most other councils in the Wellington region requiring them. The exception will be Whirinaki Whare Taonga, Upper Hutt’s councilowned arts centre. The council’s chief executive, Peter Kelly, highlighted accessibility issues in a press release: “Our pool, libraries, and customer services functions at the council building are public facilities.

It’s important to us that we continue to allow access for everyone in Upper Hutt.”

CANTER IN KĀPITI

DANISH DELIBERATION

TRANSMISSION TROUBLES

Giddy up! To entice more visitors and their horses to the Kāpiti Coast, the District Council is funding the hire of a portable shower and toilet block at the Ōtaki Māori Racing Club to create an area for “horse camping” in the club’s grounds. The council hopes the camping area, looking out onto the Tararua ranges, will prove attractive to trekkers on horseback.

Wellington High School student Jasper Greenberg has just returned from Europe, where he spoke at the Children’s General Assembly in Denmark, alongside 19 other students from around the world. The summit is designed to mirror the United Nations. Jasper is a member of the Big Buddy scheme, an initiative that pairs men with boys who do not have a father figure in their households.

Steen Videbeck is Jasper’s mentor and encouraged him to apply. His speech focused on global inequality.

For the fifth time in two years, the opening of Transmission Gully has been delayed. Costing $1.25 billion, the 27-kilometre motorway section is now intended to open mid- to late January. Brett Gliddon of the New Zealand Transport Agency said they have been working with Wellington Gateway Partnership and their contractors, who manage the build, to address outstanding issues. Fewer than half of the 100 complex safety and assurance tests required for the road’s opening have so far been submitted.

Synthony

YOUR ULTIMATE TARANAKI ADVENTURE AWAITS AN INITIATIVE OF VENTURE TARANAKI

Oxfam

N O T E W O R T H Y

LU NA R LANDING The Chinese New Year Festival is rebranding as the Lunar New Year Festival, it will run from 1 to 12 February. This year is the Year of the Water Tiger.

While the Tiger zodiac is fixed to certain years, the tiger cycles through the traditional Chinese Five Elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. “We are looking forward to welcoming many more communities to work with us to create a festival that will further increase exposure, awareness, understanding, and acceptance of Asian art and culture,” says Asian Events Trust chair Linda Lim.

SEAS SIZZLING

A FOR EFFORT

COMMERCE ON CAMPUS

Rising coastal sea temperatures are a cause of ecosystem imbalance and extreme weather. Marine heat wave conditions, when sea temperatures occuring above the 90th percentile are recorded for at least five days, were recently observed all over New Zealand, the capital being no exception. “Sea temperatures around Wellington are currently 16 to 17 degrees, and it’s about 1–1.5 degrees Celsius above average for the time of year,” says NIWA meteorologist Ben Noll.

Wellington has been named as one of 95 cities worldwide to receive a top mark of “A” on climate action from the Carbon Disclosure Project. It is an international nonprofit organisation founded in 2000 to track the carbon reduction performance of cities and corporations. Almost $30 million of Wellington City Council’s budget will be allocated to climate initiatives over the next decade, on top of a $226 million investment in cycling. The city’s first electric cross-harbour ferry was also launched recently, at a build cost of $8.5 million.

Property developer Willis Bond has broken ground on a five-hectare Upper Hutt business park, which they estimate will add an annual $250 million to Wellington’s regional GDP, at a build cost of $100 million. Blue Mountains Campus will offer 36,000 square metres of space with a mix of old and new buildings, which they say will be highly earthquake-resilient. KiwiRail has taken a 20-year lease on a refurbished building, which will include a high-tech control room.

New-built premises on the campus will be ready by 2023.

WOMAD

Experience Taranaki at its best this summer. With events for everyone, there’s never been a better time to plan your ultimate escape to Taranaki, a region like no other.

WHAT’S ON • • • • • •

L.A.B at the Bowl of Brooklands – 8 January Taranaki Off Road Half Marathon – 15 January Synthony – 5 February AmeriCARna – 23 - 26 February WOMAD – 18 - 20 March Oxfam Trailwalker – 26 - 27 March

Taranaki.co.nz/visit

3 DEC 2021 – 20 MAR 2022 At The Dowse 45 Laings Rd, Lower Hutt

EVENING DRESS, CAPE AND CAP BY VINKA LUCAS. PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE POOLBURN DAM

BY DEREK HENDERSON, 2019.

Presented in partnership with the Central Otago District Council and Te Papa

B Y

Roadtrip stats

Backyard bonanza

Summer weather

T H E

N U M B E R S

15,000

60%

4.4

400

kilometres of coastline surrounds New Zealand

households have two or more cars

million passenger vehicles in the country in 2021

vintage vehicles are housed by the Southward Car Museum in Otaihanga

85%

250 million

616m

Kiwis say they love a game of backyard cricket

units of the Super Soaker water gun sold since its release by a NASA engineer in 1989

length of the world-record slip and slide

80%

2019

19.7

23

accuracy achieved by the five-day forecast, thanks to big tech advancements

the last time Wellington reached a temperature of 300C

degrees Celsius, the average temp in Wellington last summer, very mediocre

the average temperature in Auckland over the same period – who wants that

CO M P I L E D BY CA L LU M T U R N B U L L

Valentine Schmalentine

368%

12%

170,000

30.8

increase in online shopping for St Valentine’s Day over the past decade

of respondents in a recent survey have been on a ‘Zoom date’ in the last year

condoms dropped in mailboxes by Hell Pizza on St Valentine’s Day in 2006

median age for a woman’s first marriage, nearly 10 years older than the median in 1961

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N E W

P R O D U C T S

3.

2.

1.

5.

4.

7.

6.

8.

10.

9.

Sand witch

1. Sophie So shady natural hat, $42, Stitch Boutique 2. Polaroid Now i-Type camera, $265, Splendid Photo 3. Cover me plaid natural throw, $199, BoConcept 4. Emma Kate Co A5 notebook, $24.99, Small Acorns 5. Seed & Sprout CrunchBox and pots, $110, The Minimal Co. 6. Hypnotic Eyes coffee, $10, Good Fortune Coffee Co. 7. Frank Green ceramic reusable cup, $54.90, Te Papa Store 8. Saltwater olive classic slides, $129, Gubbs Shoes 9. Ashley & Co Soothe Tube, $24.99, Small Acorns 10. MM linen Tusca bath sheet, $79.90, McKenzie & Willis

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Say hello to the newest members of the Hop Federation whānau S E C T I O N

H E A D E R

HAZY IPA

AVAILABLE NOW

at your favourite beer outlet or hopfederation.co.nz 27

S E C T I O N

H E A D E R

TA L E S

O F

T H E

C I T Y

Kaitiaki Kurt

BY A RT H U R H AW K E S P H OTO G R A P H Y BY SA N N E VA N G I N K E L

FOOD

LEISURE

MUSIC

SUBURB

FILM

Roast

Playing instruments

Ka Hao

Kingston

Boy

Just what does it take to build a marae?

K

urt Komene has nurtured something beautiful. As tikanga advisor he's helped to create Te Rau Karamu, the new marae on Massey’s Wellington campus. With specialist knowledge of te reo and tikanga Māori, Kurt is a performer, musician, artist, and weaver.

Living in Kingston, he’s greeted each morning by a spectacular view of the city. “I can see Island Bay, Berhampore, Newtown, all the way to Shelly Bay. I’ve got a big view where I call home.” While he now lives and works in the capital, he grew up in Parihaka in Taranaki, the historic Māori settlement famed for non-violent resistance to the British. Many Parihaka residents relocated to Wellington. “The design of this marae was very similar to one I had seen planned on paper back in Taranaki”, says Kurt. So he has found seeing the finished marae “absolutely amazing.”

While he was working for Māori health organisation Te Tihi Hauora in Taranaki, Kurt was deeply involved with a community of elderly women. He filled the role of kaumātua so the health team could visit the marae within protocol. “My involvement with the nannies inspired me to be the person I am today.

When you hang with our older generation they give you a gift that will keep you intense, keep you strong, and if you ever needed someone to cuddle, you had your old people, you had your nannies.”

His role at Te Rau Karamu in Wellington involved a similar responsibility for care and guardianship, ensuring the space and customs observed upheld the

wellbeing and safety of the artists who adorned the marae with art celebrating the natural world and the creation of Te Rakau Tipua, the cosmic tree. “When you look at what they’ve contributed to this project, the work is just magnificent, the mahi is magic.

There’s no other marae like Te Rau Karamu. Other maraes link to ancestors, but our marae talks about the importance in what’s around us.”

Kurt and the team also set about establishing a space of care and sanctuary for the students. “Sometimes they struggle. That’s all part of life: the emotional changes and anxiety – but when you come out of it in the final year, you’ve made history, and that’s a message we share to everybody. Be aware and strive for what you feel, and what you dream.”

Two people heavily involved in the marae were the late trade unionists, Māori activists, and kaumātua Te Huirangi Waikerepuru and Mereiwa Broughton, both immensely special people in Kurt’s life, and that of the marae. The team started in 2014 on what would be a seven-year project; Mereiwa passed away in 2016, and Te Huirangi during lockdown in 2020. Kurt saw the project through to its completion, which he describes as a moment evoking all the memories and wisdom of the two kaumātua. “When you lose a loved one, you’ve got to realise that they’re moving on. We’re all just passing through, that’s something that’s really important.

So no matter where you go, they’re always going to be there, and that’s a really special thing.”

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S P O N S O R E D

C O N T E N T

Summer in Queenstown

With a vast range of experiences, a warm welcome and cosmopolitan vibe paired with warm days, long evenings and dazzling starry nights, Queenstown is irresistible in the summertime. Soak up the

sunshine while enjoying an array of summer adventures – whether you fancy hiking and biking, or a slower pace indulging in local food and wine, there’s an experience here for you.

The tastes of Queenstown Queenstown is a vibrant, multicultural town offering a diverse, innovative culinary scene and an adventure for your taste buds. Every palate is catered for with over 150 bars and restaurants ranging from fine dining to bustling eateries, family-friendly cafes to boutique restaurants. Talented chefs create delectable food and wine experiences infused with international influences, whilst celebrating the best of New Zealand’s flavours.

The long, warm summer evenings provide the perfect opportunity to dine alfresco, take in the scenery, and sample the local game and fresh produce sourced from around the region which features heavily in seasonal menus. Gibbston, the Valley of the Vines, is home to some of the region’s oldest vineyards and is world-renowned for its pinot noir. Located an easy

30-minute drive from Queenstown’s CBD, it is home to a number of wineries, restaurants, pubs, boutique accommodation, activities and the historic Kawarau Suspension Bridge.

Queenstown is the gateway for some of the most iconic New Zealand ‘Great Walks’ including The Routeburn, Milford Track and Kepler Track. There are many opportunities to immerse in nature particularly in the stunning Glenorchy, a UNESCO World Heritage Site offering activities such as walking, biking, canyoning, fishing, pack rafting and more.

Off the beaten path/track Queenstown’s breath-taking scenery has inspired outdoor exploration for generations. The pristine natural environment sets the stage for a variety of pursuits, inviting outdoor enthusiasts and burgeoning adventurers to step out and explore.

From day walks to iconic multi-day hikes, Queenstown has a variety of easy to access trails through native forests, alongside rivers and waterfalls, lakes and mountains. Many of Queenstown’s best walks are close to downtown Queenstown, such as the stunning Ben Lomond, a challenging climb and a full day hike with an elevation of 1,438-metres, or Queenstown Hill Time Walk, a 500-metre climb through pine forest to the summit of Te Tapu-nui (mountain of intense sacredness).

Alternatively, follow the footsteps of the early gold miners by wandering along Arrowtown’s historic gold mining trails. From easy one-hour strolls to more strenuous treks through Lord of the Rings country, the Arrowtown trail networks link to Mahu Whenua trails and sections of the Te Araroa trail, offering unique landscape and beautiful scenery only minutes from the heart of this little town.

No matter if you’re a confident outdoor explorer or a city-dweller just looking to step into nature for a stroll, Queenstown offers a variety of outdoor adventures to discover beautiful sights and reconnect with nature.

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C U L T U R E

LIFE EXPERIENCE Five fictional 20-something friends will wrestle with what it is to be Māori in the Wellington “dramedy” Not Even. NZ On Air has granted it up to $1,130,770 (a very specific sum) to be drawn as required, to take it from script to screen.

“It’s more comedy than drama,” says scriptwriter Dana Beaming (Ngāpuhi). She will also direct the film, mentored

by Ainsley Gardiner, whose company Miss Conception Films is the producer. “It’s very loosely based on my life,” Dana says. “My mannerisms, experiences, funniest moments, most humiliating moments.” It will screen on Prime, and on Māori Television.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Baroque Series returns with concert The Art of Fugue (11 February, Wellington; 12 February, Paraparaumu). The titular composition is one of Bach’s greatest works – made up of 20 fugues, complex musical structures in which melodies overlap sequentially, “chasing” each other. The NZSO will play a selection of these fugues, all arranged for string orchestra (Bach did not specify instrumentation, and the fugues are most often performed on keyboard instruments). Also to be performed are Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin, and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Boréades Suite.

Art

Design

Cooking

Fiction

Poetry

Art

PARK(ing) Day is back! The Wellington edition of the annual global event calls attention to how public space is used. On Cuba Street on 4 March, artists, architects, designers, dancers, musicians, students, and community groups (anyone, really) will transform parking spaces into, well, anything, really – for instance, a giant board-game or a poochpetting pavilion. Submissions due 31 January; successful proposals get $300–500 per install.

Design

For Pātaka Art+Museum’s exhibition Mischief Makers (until 6 February), technicians drilled through a wall between two rooms to install Turumeke Harrington’s circular pink tunnel, which people may climb through. Ioana Gordon-Smith, Pataka’s Curator Māori Pacific, explains the idea behind this nine-artist exhibition: “Stereotypes about the indigenous outlook, and Māori and Pacific art, often exclude playful, humorous sides. Mischief can actually be a transformative power in the arts. This exhibition centres on the idea of an aloof ‘trickster’.”

Cooking

BACK TO BACH

Fiction

FINDING A PARK

Poetry

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C U L T U R E

ON TO THE OSCARS When the Show Me Shorts Film Festival Awards were announced at a virtual ceremony, Wellingtonian Bree Greally was so sure she wouldn’t win anything that, being busy, she didn’t watch. But Bree’s and Lily MartinBabin’s four-minute animated movie, which they made as film students, won the Department of Post Best NZ Film Award. “Thankfully Lily was online to accept!” Miro Wine is the poignant, funny story about the friendship between a grumpy kererū and a persistent pīwakawaka. The win means it can enter the Oscars. “Let’s do it!” exclaims Bree.

ON TOPP

RIGHT OF WAY

COUNTRY FOLK

Postponed because of covid, the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s triple bill Venus Rising (24–26 February) captures the bright spirit of the star. Feted Australia-based choreographer Alice Topp (pictured), an RNZB alumna, choreographed the award-winning work Aurum, inspired by the Japanese art of ‘kintsugi’: mending broken ceramics with gold and lacquer in a way that “illuminates the joins rather than disguising them,” Alice says. The dancers, who embrace and seem to almost fuse together, capture the beauty of the broken.

In the 1960s, when a motorway bisecting Thorndon was proposed, artist Rita Angus was appalled at the demolition of old houses and removal of graves from Bolton Street Cemetery. Her painting Flight (1969) shows a dove (a symbol of peace) flying above gravestones, beside Wellington’s harbour. It was one of her last works before she died of ovarian cancer. Showing 70 works, Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist / He Ringatoi Hou o Aotearoa runs at Te Papa until 25 April.

Motorhomes and caravans (and cars, too) come from all over to the Wairarapa Country Music Festival, returning to Featherston’s Tauherenikau Racing and Event Centre, and featuring 13 acts (28–30 January). Barry Saunders (above), one of Aotearoa’s most successful recording artists and lead singer of the Warratahs, is among the performers, as is Dunedin’s Melissa Partridge, winner of four 2021 Gold Guitar Awards.

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C U L T U R E

FOLLOWING HER FOOTSTEPS American author Chris Kraus is known for her unconventional, semi-autobiographical novels. Theatre collaborators Eleanor Bishop and Karin McCracken – big fans of Kraus – have created a boundary-pushing multimedia production, Aliens & Anorexia (3–5 March), based on Kraus’ eponymous book.

Eleanor directs, and Karin plays Kraus, who traverses Berlin, New York, Marseilles and New Zealand – a journey the real Kraus made. “It’s also a journey through her mind,” Eleanor says, “and a contemplation of success and failure”. Four other actors play 49 characters, including people who inspired Kraus. The performance is part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Arts Festival.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

ON THE UP

TIKTOK TIME

On 23 January, from 2pm to 4pm, 12 performers will pace back and forth along the waterfront carrying wireless speakers. They’ll play tracks by composers and musicians including sound and installation artist Flo Wilson, and punk band DARTZ. Waterfront Monophony is being organised by Jesse Austin-Stewart (pictured), a sonic artist and audio engineer. “This event makes sonic art – which is all about sound moving around a space – more accessible to the public.”

And yes, the tracks factor in the possible acoustic problems of waterfront wind.

Wellington indie-folk band French for Rabbits has launched its third album, The Overflow, and has an album-release tour slated for March/April. The five-person “dreamy” pop group has toured Europe twice, opened for Lorde, and featured on TV series soundtracks including The Vampire Diaries and Being Human. Liimited-edition vinyl and CDs are also available.

TikTok, the video-focused socialnetworking behemoth, has teamed up with NZ On Air and Screen Australia to deliver Every Voice, an initiative to create innovative content for TikTok audiences.

One of four Aotearoa teams selected is Ngā Pakiaka. This is an Ōtaki “rangatahi roopu” (youth collective), aged from 14 to 24, who will make Te Pae Tata, a 15part series profiling indigenous creatives worldwide. Ngā Pakiaka also makes films, runs workshops, and programmes the Māoriland Rangatahi Film Festival (16–20 March).

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F E AT U R E

Alphabet soup

D

is for Destroyed

Dreams have been destroyed this year across the region as the CBD slumps into decay, tourists stay away, and hospitality hangs on for grim life.

I

is for Ignored

The rural divide increased this year as politicians on both sides played the political football. Meanwhile, the region got on with the business of living and working together, ignoring the posturing from the Beehive.

J

is for Jabber

Jibber jabber reigned supreme as councils struggled to manage rates increase of up to 39% in some areas such as Martinborough. Talkfests degenerated into shoutfests and local politicians were sent with their tails between their legs to try and fix the problem.

Ian Apperley reviews the year that was.

E

is for Escape

F

is for Featherston

In the warmer months, Wellingtonians flocked in droves to Wairarapa, driving a mini boom in the valley’s economy. An hour from Wellington, the valley promises solitude and wine, so much wine.

A

is for Angst

2021 has been another unusual year, with the spectre of covid hiding around every corner, forcing lockdowns, lockups, and loopy behaviour. It’s okay though, the traffic lights will save us.

B

is for Broken

The Wellington City Council continued its chaotic in-fighting this year, lurching from one crisis to the next, its members publicly battling with each other on social media, promising to make things better, and then collapsing into a teary heap.

C

is for Climate

Despite multiple climate crises declared by councils and the Crown, no real action has taken place as the world’s weather slowly warms.

Low-lying suburbs should invest in pontoons as soon as possible.

Featherston undergoes rapid gentrification as country life pulls people to the provinces. Shops spring up, community groups, hospitality locations, and a new bookshop.

G

is for Government

Once again, the Government attempted to deliver multiple new initiatives in a continued climate of crises and change.

So far, nothing much has stuck, and you can expect that next year will see frustrated ministers demanding their Ministry engines deliver faster.

H

is for Housing

Despite a housing crash being predicted at the beginning of the year, the reverse happened. It seems in these uncertain times that whenever an economist predicts one thing, the exact opposite happens. House prices punched new records across the region, some regions jumping in average value by over 50%.

38

K

is for Kāpiti

L

is for Lurching

Kāpiti was quiet this year as it busied itself with welcoming an ever-increasing population of city-folk who were over the concrete, gridlocked jungle or just wanted to be able to hear the sea.

As Transmission Gully comes online, demand will increase, and the migration from Wellington continue.

When New Zealand needed a strong opposition party, National lurched around like a drunken bull in a china shop, finally seeming to find some way out of their disastrous year by electing a new leader. Time will tell if they come back as strong as they once were.

M

is for Millennials

With a year under their belt in local politics, the new Millennial politicians found themselves making some small

F E AT U R E

gains, bringing much needed “truth speaking” to political institutions who pride themselves on process, not results.

N

is for Noxious

As the Council in Wellington rallies to fix collapsing pipes, our streams and beaches are frequently closed due to overflows and breakages. Eventually the war will be won, but at a cost.

O

is for Regional

Outside of the city, the regions boomed as city slickers realised that they could afford a house, work from home, and have a quality of life undreamed of within the capital’s concrete walls.

Young people and families packed up and joined the outflow of residents, finding a different life.

is for Passport

Vaccine passports were made mandatory across most places we visit and where we work. The new normal saw increasing vaccination rates and a return to the favourite places where we eat, drink, and interact with each other.

is for Queues

Another year passes, and traffic queues continue to increase as the slow investment in necessary infrastructure goes on. Whomever makes orange road cones had a bumper sales year as they proliferated around the region.

is for Vacant

W

S

is for Stuck

The Wellington City Council remained in stasis for the year. Significant projects slowed and went over budget, while the council argued with itself as party politics again came to the fore. Next year sees elections once again, with councillors already on their very best behaviour.

T

is for Terra Firma

Across the region, the amount of farmable land was reduced again. Sold off to lifestylers, broken into bite-size blocks, or bought by international companies to plant useless pine trees. Bare block listings in the Wairarapa jumped significantly at the end of 2021, with one day seeing 22 new listings as the demand for a piece of Terra Firma jumped.

Q

V

As covid tangled with the economy the number of vacant hospitality venues in Wellington increased. Hopefully, as the vaccine passport rolls out, they will see a return to former fortunes and new ideas as we sit down together again.

is for Overseas

Overseas is a place that we could visit this year, but we could not return. The one-way door system left us feeling like we were living in the Hotel California, we could check out, but we couldn’t leave.

When borders open both directions we will see old friends depart and new arrive as the world reopens.

P

R

U

is for Undone

Water woes in the Wairarapa were guaranteed to continue for another decade as much supported schemes were undone. With climate change mooted to turn parts of the valley into drought zones, the valley is struggling to find positive solutions to the impending issue.

39

is for Working from Home

Working from home increased greatly as large companies and government agencies mandated that staff be in the office only once or twice per week.

Urban and regional communities thrived as a sense of community returned to suburbs and towns.

X

is for Xerox

Y

is for Young

Z

is for Zest

In many ways this year has been a carbon copy of the last with the general mood one of waiting for the one o’clock news rather than planning into the future. As Wellingtonians, we are generally positive, shrugging off the year like a bad southerly and looking forward to our next fine day.

This region keeps us young. With outdoor activities from deep-sea fishing to mountain climbing, tramping, camping, and white water rafting, we have it all right on our doorstep.

Wellington and the regions retain a zest for life despite all these challenges.

There is a positive attitude persisting through the continuously lousy news.

Defiance that cannot be curbed.

S O C I A L

N O T E S

Echo through the ages Mike Fabulous is gigging again this summer after a pandemic hiatus.

He talks to Arthur Hawkes about self-reflection, and the Masonic lodge he bought in Taranaki.

U

nder the towering kahikateas of Tauherenikau racecourse, Mike Fabulous (aka Lord Echo) played his last live set for a long time. The musician, producer, and former bassist for the Black Seeds had been at Wairarapa’s 121 Festival, accompanied by a full band. Festival-goers would pack up their tents on 15 March, and the first lockdown would come just 11 days later, and with it a period of major change and self-reflection for the artist.

As Lord Echo, Mike had released three albums between 2010 and 2017 – Melodies, Curiosities, and Harmonies – synergising elements of rocksteady, dub, Latin, and reggae. Harmonies saw Mike living and recording underneath a plastics factory in Lower Hutt. He slept during the day, recorded in the quiet of night, and drank “too much”. The many solitary hours of tweaking and re-tweaking the soundscape resulted in something totally incongruous with its birthplace – a beautifully crafted homage to the music he loves.

Following the sometimes chaotic recording of the album, music-making stopped; he hasn’t released an album since. “Having a relationship with art is akin to an intense, dysfunctional romantic relationship: you have very little selfcontrol and it doesn’t always make you happy.

It’s this fantastic, totally overpowering distraction from anything else that’s going on.”

A year ago, Mike moved from Wellington to a Masonic lodge in Patea. “I wanted somewhere quiet, preferably by the sea, within short driving distance to an airport.” After “a few good years”

40

of income from music and performance, he could purchase the spacious hall on the Taranaki coast, which is now his live-in studio.

“For MIDI keyboards and headphones, space doesn’t matter too much,” he explains. “When you’re using real instruments, and for the sounds I want to make, you need space for the sound to grow, you need air particles.” And space is expensive, just less so in Patea.

The lodge has a wood-panelled interior, with columns, and long benches upholstered in red.

The carpet is a dark blue, emblazoned with the Masonic square and compasses emblem. He acknowledges he could now be “that hermit that lives alone in a Masonic lodge”, but he’s happy – an emotional state he’s had to get accustomed to over the past two years.

The first lockdown, he says, was his chance to stop playing live and to think about the way he was creating and living, which eventually sparked a change in focus and location: “How’s the best way to live? What happens if I do this thing? It gave me time to explore all these options.”

Looking forward, Mike’s got a wealth of summer billings, with Soundsplash, That Weekend, Flamingo Pier, and Havelock Festival taking him through to March. Then on 19 March he returns to Womad, the festival he closed in 2017. With live Lord Echo sets back on the cards, and a quirky creative sanctuary to call his own, Mike says he’s happier and wiser. “As you get older, I guess you do just get a bit better at living.”

Lace, lurex, and tractors

Miss New Zealand contestants who’d road-tripped to see him. He was involved in the fashion side of the pageant.

Now the Eden Hore Museum of Fashion is housed in the Central Stories Museum in Alexandra, and is considered a nationally and internationally significant collection of 1970s high-fashion garments.

Claire Regnault, a Te Papa curator who specialises in fashion, is on the Eden Hore Steering Group, which looks after the Eden Hore Trust. Te Papa lent Claire to the Dowse Art Museum to co-curate Eden Hore: High Fashion/High Country (on show until 20 March). The 25 gowns displayed on mannequins are all striking. Some look whimsically romantic, others have hints of the hippy, and a couple could be 2022 statement pieces.

There are hotpants under Pauline Kingston’s wool-andlurex dress, as its ankle-to-thigh splits were very risqué.

One Kevin Berkahn dress looks as if it’s made of lettuce leaves rather than pleated Swiss lace. Eden once flew to Australia to purchase four Berkahn gowns at a fundraising parade for the Sydney Opera House’s opening.

Also displayed: Derek Henderson’s photographs of a model wearing Eden’s gowns on Otago farmland.

BY SA R A H L A N G P H OTO G R A P H Y BY D E R E K H E N D E RS O N

In central Otago in the 1970s, a sheep and cattle farmer collected 276 haute-couture garments, including 261 gowns, from cutting-edge New Zealand designers. His name was Eden Hore (1919–1997).

Eden was an eccentric embraced by his conservative community as a successful farmer and an amiable character who wanted to provide his beloved central Otago with a destination attraction. Locals and tourists stopped into his property, Glenshee, to see the tractor shed he had converted into his “Museum of Fashion”. “I’ve always been a bit different,” he once said. “A bachelor with all these dresses!”

He’d invite visitors to garden parties, with “fashion parades” of local women in the dresses; he donned a dinner jacket. A photo shows him wearing a woollen jumper, with

42

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F E AT U R E

Anchor me Full fathom five

44

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY FA B I A N M E L B E R

Joe Morris plunged headfirst into a stormy Mediterranean scene when he began to rescue refugees. He talks to Sharon Greally about work at sea.

45

F E AT U R E

S

kala Sikamineas sounds exotic.

It’s a quaint fishing village on the northernmost coast of the Greek island of Lesvos. The rugged volcanic landscape, olive groves, and local ouzo appeal to tourists.

But the tides bring in more than fish these days, as thousands of refugees make the perilous journey to Europe. Desperate migrants wash up on Lesvos in dilapidated dinghies, smuggled mainly from Libya, Turkey, and Morocco. People desperate to escape their circumstances are exploited by racketeers. The Libyan coastguard works hard to prevent people from disembarking, which means conditions on the boats are horrendous. Many refugees do not survive the crossing.

Wellingtonian Joe Morris was living in London, when he learnt about the work being done to help refugees. He went to Lesvos for a month in 2017, and offered his skills as “a general hands-on Kiwi kinda guy”

with a knowledge of boating. He “fell in love with the people,” and became the shore-based rescue team lead, and then became involved in rescue on the sea.

“The volunteer members of our team were crucial to our operations, but they rarely had sufficient experience in emergency response. I was considered experienced after only three months in Skala.”

Like so many Wellingtonians, Joe grew up mucking around on boats and by the sea; heading down the Sounds for summer, fishing in Cook Strait, walking around the south coast with his mum as a child. His grandfather built the family boat at his home in Lower Hutt in the late 50s.

“The boat (Tapanui) has outlasted him and Dad. Dad competed very successfully in open ocean yacht races in the 80s, although by the time I came around he was happy to go slow and catch a fish. I never felt the urge to race yachts. I feel happiest at sea, which no doubt helps me to stay calm in rescue situations.”

Responding effectively and humanely to the systemic refugee crisis poses a huge challenge to governments and NGOs, something Morris has seen first-hand. The refugees who reach European shores can’t always be saved, and it’s devastating, he says.

“They’re often severely dehydrated and traumatised.

Petrol is stored in very unstable containers, so people

46

F E AT U R E

can end up with horrific burns. Many are unable to swim, and many drown leaping off the boats to reach shore.”

Skala Sikamineas, Morris explains, has been the focal point of migration into Europe since 2015. In the initial stages of the influx, fishermen and the ill-equipped coastguard were the only emergency responders until support arrived from the UNHCR and NGOs such as Lighthouse Relief and Refugee Rescue.

The locals provided knowledge of the physical and political terrain, and many of them also became friends. “I managed to blend in, so wasn’t a target for these fascist groups that were arriving to protest against the refugees’ arrival. I felt fairly safe, but it was scary. One time they threw petrol onto a boat, with people on it, and set it alight. Aid workers as well as refugees' were targeted.”

Morris served as media coordinator for Refugee Rescue in Lesvos for a year, and completed further search and rescue training there. Then, in September 2019, he embarked on a post-graduate diploma in Global Health in Barcelona. But he couldn’t keep away from Lesvos, spending Christmas and New Year there as part of Refugee Rescue’s skeleton lifeboat crew, in terrible weather.

“During a storm close to Christmas we received some dodgy information from the coastguard: there ‘might be’ a boat in distress. With no exact location, we sat out on the border in our tiny lifeboat for hours. The weather was too rough to perform any search patterns.

“It took the SAR coordinator several taps of my shoulder, and then several more to turn the boat around and take us home. It was

maybe 1am by the time we got in. In the daylight of the following morning there were no signs of a boat, but in that kind of weather there wouldn’t have been.”

They had several rescues over the holiday period.

“After one false alarm, we made it back to the taverna just in time to count in the new year, only to be called back out half an hour later.” Crazy hours were the norm: the volunteers spent their down-time playing backgammon and drinking Greek coffee.

In February 2020, he finished his diploma, and a month later Refugee Rescue asked him to return to Lesvos and help restore operations that had been shut down under threat of fascist attacks.

Most of the staff and volunteers had been evacuated, including vital workers from Médecins Sans Frontières.

He returned to Lesvos, intending to stay several months, but Coronavirus intervened. After just 10 days of preparing the lifeboat, and providing ad hoc support for arriving refugees, a total lockdown of the island was announced.

“Refugee Rescue were again forced to suspend operations. This was an incredibly tough decision to stomach. I had little option to stay, and within 24 hours I was on a flight back to New Zealand, scampering home via Istanbul and Singapore. The flight was packed. It really felt like the world was shutting down.” Morris was heartbroken at having to leave.

After a frustrating year of watching events from afar, in March last year, he joined German NGO Sea-Watch to crew on their rescue ship Sea Watch 4 as a RHIB (Rigid Hulled Inflatable Boat) driver.

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F E AT U R E

Sea-Watch operates rescue missions in the central Mediterranean, mainly in the large expanse of sea between Libya and Italy, including Malta. While many celebrities support this work, some governments do not. Boats carrying migrants are turned back to their ports of origin.

This is not only dangerous, but also illegal under the Geneva convention and EU legislation. Sea-Watch states, “We stand up against criminalisation of people on the run.”

Morris travelled to the port of Burriana, south of Barcelona, to join crew in pre-mission quarantine, then training and familiarisation with the vessel, and reuniting with old friends.

“I love the camaraderie of the team, and the adrenalin rush of the job,” says Morris. “I feel I have the skills and motivation to make a difference long term.”

He studied History and Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington. “I love history but I’m glad, in hindsight, I stopped after my Bachelor’s degree. The last few years would look very different if I’d gone down the career path of an historian,” he said.

In April the team sailed from Spain to the Libyan Search and Rescue Zone. “During the transit from Spain to the Southern Mediterranean, I found out my partner back in New Zealand was pregnant. I suddenly started paying a

little more attention to the safety protocols on board.”

They carried out six rescues within 72 hours. “With 456 rescued people on board, there was very little space on deck, yet still we were hearing of distress cases. It was tough.” And the need is growing: in May this year, Sea Watch 4 pulled 450 migrants from the ocean, compared with 150 for the same period the previous year.

The harrowing rescues take their toll. The crew comprise four full-time staff and, ideally, at least 12 volunteers. Most volunteers only stay a short time, suffering mental anguish and physical exhaustion. Mental health resources have improved, says Morris.“They were initially pretty much non-existent.”

Morris met his German partner Elena while she was studying and working in Wellington in 2019, during a brief period back home. They got together last year, before he left for the Sea-Watch mission. He now works remotely as the media coordinator for Sea-Watch from his home in Strathmore.

The future is uncertain for Morris. He’s learning German, and would like to return to Europe next year, and to live in Germany near his partner’s family, closer to the coal face – “to continue this work, with a few alterations to incorporate, including fatherhood!”

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Foreign bodies We spoke to a few Wellingtonians who’ve established themselves overseas, asking about the depths and differences of their new locales – and whether they still reminisce about broken brollies and the town belt.

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F E AT U R E

Big Apple juice Photography by Tom Kneller

Z

oey Radford Scott, 29, and Tom Wright, 31, live in Alphabet City, in New York’s East Village. Toms Juice, his business, began during the early days of the pandemic.

He used social media to sell fresh home-made juice, delivered on his bicycle. In Wellington, he founded the popular streetwear label Shark Week. Zoey, a stylist, has worked with some of the biggest names in music and fashion in the USA. She moved to New York with Tom in 2016. In Wellington her first foray into fashion was modelling.

reasons, but it was really just a platform to do me. Zoey and I were going to book flights back to New Zealand, but just as we were about to pay for them, a feeling came over the both of us that this wasn’t the right thing to do.

What happened after you decided to ride out the pandemic?

Tom: After we decided to stay in New York, I had to make the juice thing work. I thought if I can sell 20 juices per day at $5 each for five days a week I will be able to survive in New York, just. I would take orders each day, wake up before sunrise, head to the market and get the produce, juice it, then bike all over New York delivering the juice.

By the end of 2020 things were starting to snowball a bit.

I had the juice on the shelves at great restaurants and delis, featured in magazines, raised money for charity, and got a feature on CNN. Most importantly I had great people drinking and enjoying Toms Juice. In mid-August 2021, I signed my first lease located at 75 East 4th St, New York. Stoked!

Tell us about where you live Zoey: Alphabet City, East Village, New York City. My friends live close by, easy access to everything, and close to the water.

Tom: It’s a super chill neighbourhood with a good mix of students, young families, artists, small mom-and-pop businesses, lots of bars. The East River is right there, Tompkins Square Park, and lots more.

Is New York more affordable than Wellington?

Zoey: It depends how you want to live, but I would say it’s more expensive.

Are there other Wellingtonians in your circle?

Zoey: Yes, all of the friends I moved here with are from Wellington. We all studied fashion together at Massey and decided to move here on the J-1 visa. I’m so lucky to have been in that year – I don't know if I would be here if it wasn't for them. Most of them have left now, but there’s a big bunch of people who studied in Wellington here.

What is your connection to Wellington?

Zoey: I studied at Massey and then worked at Good as Gold while I saved to move to New York. It’s a huge part of my memories. Lots of our best friends live in Wellington, so it’s a strong connection. It’s also where Tom and I met.

Tom: I’ve always loved Wellington. My first memories of it were as a kid getting the train there with my family from Napier and going to watch Christian Cullen and Jonah Lomu at the Cake Tin.

Is there a memento from home that you keep?

Zoey: My photographs of my family are my favourites, my biggest inspiration. If I'm ever feeling lost I look at them and it gets me back on track.

Tom: There’s nothing more special to me than friends and family. I wish they could all be here.

What are some of the highlights of your careers?

Zoey: Travelling the world and working with people and companies I had only dreamed of. Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell, Bruce Irons, Toms Juice, Beach Boy, Supreme, Harmony Korine, Jacquemus. Releasing my book Motor.

My job is a huge highlight for me. It’s taken me on a lifechanging journey.

Tom: I had a clothing brand called Shark Week which kept me busy most of the time that I was in Wellington.

I had a couple of long term pop-up shops in the city and sold the brand all over the world: New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, USA. By the time I moved to New York around 2018 I was really over the clothing industry. In March 2020 I started a brand called Toms Juice. There were lots of

What’s your favourite activity in New York?

Both: Getting a buzz on and walking the streets.

Is there any part of your experience that has helped you being a New Zealander abroad?

Zoey: I think the appreciation for life and being openminded. Everything is so different here, so I think the enjoyment of the new is really helpful. Kiwi ingenuity.

Hard working and a can-do attitude.

Tom: Everything I have achieved and failed has led up to my living in New York without even knowing that this was going to happen. Be yourself, and be the best you can be.

That way you can’t lose.

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Seoul merchant Photography by Diane Suarez

A

ria McInnes, 25, is Wellington born and bred, and has lived in the Gangnam district of Seoul, Korea since 2019. She is an educator, designer, style consultant, and a vintage fashion buyer, undertaking projects in the creative and entrepreneurial sectors. She designed the shoes she wears in her photo. In Wellington, she worked for fashion boutiques, including Emporium and ENA (now Kaukau), travelling sometimes to the USA. She returned there recently for a cryptocurrency conference in New York.

Aria keeps busy.

Tell us about Seoul I’m in the heart of the financial district. It’s full Gangnam style out here, opposite some royal tombs and next to a giant department store plastered with high-definition screens. It’s all very lit up, with bustling streets with lots of groups doing big after-work drinks, called a Hweshik.

It’s the perfect mixture of barbecue chains, mom-and-pop restaurants, and slightly seedy massage parlours.

Is Seoul more affordable than Wellington?

Seoul’s pretty comparable to Wellington, although I live far more glamorously! I pay similar to my last Te Aro flat for my current place which is very spacious for a single in Seoul.

What are some of the biggest differences?

It goes without saying that Korea is incredibly different culturally, although I think resilience is a large feature in both cultures. Age is really important here, as it dictates the way you speak the language socially, although people tend to make allowances for foreigners. We have a real generational gap here as Korea experienced such incredible technological and economic growth in such a short time.

Is there something uniquely Korean you’ve picked up on?

Koreans are amazing at doing trends. One person does something that catches on and then suddenly the entire

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population is behind it and doing it in a fully committed way – with the highest-end equipment. This could be fashion, food, or activity. You want natural wine? So does the rest of the city. Boutique makgeolli? Done. Hiking, camping, glamping? Get in line. You saw a coat you like? So did everybody else – and you can buy it at any underground station mall, cheap.

Is there any part of your experience that has helped you being a New Zealander abroad?

I’m an alright cook which I think is a very Wellington thing. When I first arrived and was super broke I used to charge people for homemade lunches. I would send a group poll with my week’s menu and people would select what they wanted and bring Tupperware – genius!

What about work ethic?

I think New Zealanders are regarded as hard workers.

If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s hustle. I went to art school so I think that having some creativity and criticality has been helpful. I also like to think I have a good sense of humour and a relatively thick skin, which I think is a pretty New Zealand thing, although maybe I’m wrong – maybe I’m not funny at all.

If you could summarise Seoul with one item, what would it be and why?

An air conditioner. Important all year round. Second would be an air purifier or humidifier, although you only need it during winter, in summer you’re a walking humidifier.

Favourite spots in Wellington when you were last there?

I don’t know what’s cool anymore – which hurts because I liked to use “exceptional Wellingtonian” for my social media bios! I love the beaches. I grew up in Island Bay and used to spend the summers swimming out to Tapu Te Ranga with friends and family.

F E AT U R E

Shanghai shakers Photography by Graeme Kennedy

H

What are some of the biggest differences?

Hannah: The thing that is most noticeable is the pace.

Work is fast, projects are completed fast, life is fast.

People are connected 24/7 through social media, making for fast decisions and constant updates with work and friends. The other major difference is the ability to get anything delivered to your door. Delivery is an amazing service here, from groceries and takeout within the hour, to large appliances, clothing, almost anything you can imagine.

adleigh and Hannah Churchill, 39 and 37, founded Shanghai design and architecture firm hcreates in 2010 and have been in the city for 14 years. Hannah has a design background and worked with various firms after the couple’s permanent move in 2009. She’s now involved with every part of the process, from the board room to the building site, utilising her degree from Wellington School of Architecture. Hadleigh previously worked in advertising, starting with a Shanghai firm in 2008.

After a couple of years they took the plunge and started hcreates, which would go on to design and fit out a slew of luxurious premises in China, growing a team of employees in Shanghai and Hong Kong. The company was named among the AD100, Architectural Digest China’s top 100 design and architecture firms.

If you could summarise Shanghai with one item, what would it be and why?

Hadleigh: My electric Scooter. I have never driven a car in China in my 14 years here. It doesn’t look like much fun.

Scootering is a great way to get around and every time you stop at an intersection for a brief moment waiting for the green you have two minutes just hanging with random Shanghai people. You are at one with construction workers, delivery guys, granddads taking kids to school, aunties on their way to the park, a lawyer late for a meeting. It’s a beautiful mishmash of people and always reminds me I’m in a different place.

Where are you living now?

Hadleigh: Jing An. It’s one of the older districts right in the middle of Shanghai. It’s constantly evolving as old areas are pulled down to make way for the new, so it’s got a bit of everything. It does have a lot of tree-lined streets which is really nice. It’s good to be close to some greenery.

Favourite spots in Wellington when you were last there?

Hannah: One of my favourite spots is the Chocolate Fish at Shelly Bay. It’s such a great spot for the kids to run around and relax with Kiwiana food and a quintessential Wellington view (and wind) to remind you where you are.

What’s the pace of Shanghai like?

Hannah: The city is constantly alive and changing.

Due to the intensity and turnover of expats here you make lifelong friends fast. We are lucky to have a crew that has been here a long time. People are very spontaneous and the ability to go grab dinner or a drink any night of the week makes for a very sociable community.

I find a huge plus here is having home help (called “ayi”). As a working mother of two kids this has allowed me flexibility with the business and time for both myself and family. This has also allowed the kids to grow up speaking Chinese which I see as a huge advantage, to be able to learn a language without realising it!

Is there any part of your experience that has helped you being a New Zealander abroad?

Hadleigh: “She’ll be right” as a mantra fills me with a relatively healthy sense of optimism that a solution can be found; but equally it has led me down some phenomenally gloomy paths to nowhere. But I think we are very practical and when things are swirling around we have the knack to keep looking for a solution.

Is it more affordable than Wellington?

Hadleigh: It’s definitely more expensive than Wellington: rent, healthcare, eating out. I can’t even begin to talk about the school fees. Flat whites are now more readily available, but are between $8 and $12.

Have you taken on any characteristics of Shanghai culture?

Hannah: It’s probably not a characteristic, but I have learned so much about the depth and regionality of Chinese food. There are some really game-changing dishes out there.

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Foreign bodies

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Brixton blender Photography by Sarah Burton

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ick Mabey, 35, co-founded roastery and coffee specialists Assembly Coffee in London. He got into coffee in Wellington, at a time and place he describes as the best in the world for coffee culture.

He lives in Surrey, just outside of London, but the suburb of Brixton was where Nick originally lived and grew his business. Before directing at Assembly and sourcing beans and blends for Volcano Coffee Works, Nick was a drummer with his band Mooga Fooga.

Wellington, under the direction of Jeff and Bridget Kennedy. My music career flourished in Wellington.

It was certainly an exciting time to be a musician in New Zealand around 2005–2009, when there was a distinct transition from Kiwi music playing a novel role internationally to establishing itself with a real identity.

Tell us about Brixton Brixton is famous for its diverse and rich culture as a centre for the Caribbean community. This is still palpable everywhere you go despite the gentrification.

Brixton has changed a lot since we set up here, and has become more and more a focus point for the young creative industry, hospitality, and entrepreneurship.

Is London more affordable than Wellington?

London is about as expensive a place to live as you could imagine.

What are some of the biggest differences?

What I think strikes me time and again is the real palpable difference in the pace and ease of life in New Zealand relative to anywhere else I’ve lived. This is probably a huge cliché and I don’t want to suggest that living in New Zealand you are immune to stress and economic realities. However it’s clear to me that most of the time, when you are in New Zealand, it provides a perpetual bubble, and most people adopt the mentality that results from that, whether consciously or not.

What’s your connection with Wellington?

It’s where I lived and studied, completing my Bachelor’s at the New Zealand School of Music; it’s also where my career in coffee formed in its infancy.

I worked at L’affare, probably then the best café in

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What are some of the highlights of your career?

I spent my twenties avoiding all responsibilities and playing music which is exactly what I set out to do. From a coffee career perspective I’m very proud of what I have created with my partners at Assembly, and have been successful in global coffee competitions (UK roasting champion, Coffee Masters champion).

Assembly is known in the industry as one of the best coffee roasteries in the world and I am immensely proud of that.

What skills did you need to survive in London?

I’m most proud of my ability to adapt and succeed in a really unforgiving marketplace. London can be really taxing and you need a purpose to survive here. And if you create one it can be an amazing opportunity.

Is there a memento from home that you have with you?

I have some gifts from my family from years ago that I’ve carried with me ever since I left Wellington. A St Christopher medallion from my mother, and pounamu of the Ngāi Tūhoe iwi from my two wonderful sisters.

Have you taken on any characteristics of British culture?

I distinctly remember having to curb my directness with people when I moved here, less in a personal setting, but very much so in a professional one. One thing that you cannot escape about British people in general is that they are very reserved in their opinions.

S P O N S O R E D

C O N T E N T

Vibe check in Hawke’s Bay An unforgettable Kiwi summer includes a few musthave ingredients.

Long, hot days are a given, as is delicious food and wine shared with mates. Another critical ingredient is at least one incredible music, arts, or food and wine festival, gifting you a lifetime of memories in just one day.

Thankfully Hawke’s Bay’s line up of events for 2022 is out-of-the-park, ensuring everything you need for an unforgettable summer is just a short drive north.

From early January, a stream of artists will perform at various venues across the region. The iconic Sir Dave Dobbyn takes centre stage at Black Barn Vineyard on January 9, before New Zealand’s best indie festival, Nest Fest, welcomes Marlon Williams, LadyHawke, and Liam Finn among many others, on January 15.

Outfield Festival, a celebration of music, food, arts, and community on February 12, is headlined by Young Franco, The Chills, JessB, and Weird Together, while SIX60 will rock McLean Park on April 2.

Foodies must mark January 28 to February 6 in their calendar for the 10th celebration of Summer F.A.W.C! Food

Black Barn Amphitheatre Concert. Photo

by Brian Culy

and Wine Classic. Hawke’s Bay’s signature culinary festival has a spectacular line up across 10 stunning days, including a Grand Long Lunch, with dishes from five of New Zealand’s leading chefs, all set in a secret location.

On January 22, The Bridge Pa Wine Festival brings together six of the region’s leading wineries for a celebration with six food and wine festivals in one!

New to the events line up is First We Eat at Church Road on March 24, which combines delicious food, award-winning wine, and Kiwi legends The Black Seeds, The Feelers, and Tami Neilson; while The New Zealand Cider Festival will run in the North Island for the first time on February 12.

The region steps back in time from February 16–20 as Gatsby-fever takes hold for the Art Deco Festival, with a range of outdoor concerts, vintage car parades, fashions shows, dining experiences, great Gatsby picnics, prohibition parties, and so much more.

And with plenty more to be discovered at www. hawkesbaynz.com, Hawke’s Bay has a summer festival or event to make your summer unforgettable.

www.customkit.co.nz enquiries@customkit.co.nz 1/25 Kitchener Road Pukekohe 09 238 6518 If you don’t have ideas; don’t want to be different; insist on conformity; and dread having to make a statement about YOU; then Customkit might not be the right building company to choose.

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F E AT U R E

Disease, demolition, and developers Typhoid grips a suburb, gaudy casinos threaten our waterfront, and a prescient planner envisages the pedestrianised harbour we know today; a bold blueprint for city improvement. Map enthusiast Matthew Plummer unveils these fascinating nuggets, as told through our historic maps.

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Proposed Extension of the City of Wellington 1877 In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym “Mr Darnoc” – drew up plans to transform Wellington’s waterfront. His imagination was fuelled by a big reclamation completed a year earlier, creating 190,000m² around the northern end of Featherston Street – almost a third of all Wellington’s manmade land.

Seidelin’s credentials had been established by his master-planning the redesign of Copenhagen, where his scheme to demolish the city's walls had won Denmark’s Medal of Merit two decades earlier.

Wellington was an ambitious city, and the Danish architect didn’t hold back, with a master plan straight out of the Renaissance’s urban planning playbook. Heavy on symmetry (a challenge given our terrain), the city’s centrepiece was to be a curved waterfront basin where Te Papa is located today, with tree-lined avenues drawing people to the waterfront.

The plan was a rejection of the closely packed laneways and squalor that characterised Te Aro. Seidelin’s map left the ghostly outline of the recently completed Queens Wharf in his layout as a reminder that his vision was of a modern city, rather than a colonial outpost; public facilities and businesses would have to make way. Ornamental gardens at Herd Street would have required the demolition of the recently opened Te Aro Baths, and warehouses around the northern end of Taranaki Street were to be replaced by a large piazza – a concept that has never really worked in New Zealand.

Wellington's city councillors sensibly considered the design impractical and expensive: curved docks and further enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill afford. The proposal was rejected, and expansion into the harbour continued piecemeal for the next 50 years – a situation resembling the remodelling of Copenhagen, where many of the ramparts and lakes Seidelin wanted removed were eventually retained and are popular parts of the Danish capital today.

Seidelin’s vision is intriguing because it merges radical urban form with the streets we know today. The map was drawn before the railway arrived in the city, but the Government Building, opened in the previous year, is clearly identifiable the end of Lambton Quay.

The idea of an accessible waterfront would have seemed fantastical in the late 19th Century – yet 150 years on visiting cafes at the water’s edge as envisioned is central to the Wellington experience.

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Typhoid in Te Aro 1892

W

ellington’s emergence as a shipping hub facilitated the spread of disease, with SS England bringing smallpox to the city in 1872.

Surges in measles occurred every five years, and pertussis (whooping cough) killed 24 people in 1891 alone. Typhoid first appeared in New Zealand as an epidemic disease in 1860, and the period between 1886 and 1891 became known as the “typhoid years,” with 548 Wellingtonians dying from bacterial infections (including cholera).

Meanwhile the city grew from around 15,000 people in 1875 to 49,344 in 1901. Densely packed Te Aro was particularly vulnerable, with infrastructure hopelessly unable to keep up. It was hardly surprising that many Wellington families fled to settlements like Karori, including the Beauchamps with their young daughter Kathleen (who was to write as Katherine Mansfield), following the death of their baby Gwen from cholera in 1891.

William Chapple, a 28-year-old doctor fresh from his previous practice in Motueka, set about mapping the deaths in the tradition of English physician John Snow, who Chapple would have learned about as a student at King’s College London. Snow, one of the fathers of modern epidemiology, had pinpointed the source of a cholera outbreak in London four decades previously by plotting the location of cases, and tracing them eventually to a contaminated water pump at Broad Street.

Chapple quickly identified Holland Street as the centre of the Wellington outbreak, where he found blocked pipes and lavatories causing excrement

to flow under the cottages’ floorboards, sewers venting directly into the houses, and residents without plumbed lavatories emptying their “night soil” onto the street. Unsurprisingly an inspection of the hospital’s admission records showed typhoid cases soaring after heavy rainfall, when excrement sluiced into the harbour in rivulets around and under people’s homes.

None of this squalor is obvious in Chapple’s deceptively simple map. The coloured dots reflect cholera’s “blue death” nickname, with the victim’s skin turning bluish-grey from loss of fluids, their distribution reflecting the slums that lined Te Aro’s laneways.

Chapple recommended “a complete system of sewerage on modern principles” to empty the city’s waste into Cook Strait, rather than Lambton Harbour, via a sewer tunnel under Mount Victoria. The cost was controversial (£165,000, or $35m today), but the incidence of sewagerelated diseases treated at Wellington Hospital fell dramatically once the infrastructure was completed in 1899.

Chapple later became a prominent eugenics advocate (“habitual drunkards and nocturnal house-breakers” were on his list of undesirables).

He holds the unusual distinction of being elected to parliament in both New Zealand and the UK, and retained his New Zealand medical registration throughout, returning to work at Wellington Hospital as the Resident Casualty Officer in the 1930s – perhaps he regaled the junior doctors with accounts of the city as he recalled it four decades earlier.

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Plan of 12 Building Sections on the Te Aro Reclamation 1906 Established in 1880, Wellington Harbour Board was tasked with operating and expanding the city’s port. Starting work three years after Seidelin’s master plan was rejected, the Harbour Board embarked on a programme of reclamations driven by chief engineer William Ferguson that laid the foundation for the inner city waterfront of today.

Ferguson aligned the new wharves so that the prevailing winds would help ships manoeuvre, and reduce the requirement for tugs to help vessels berth; he also drove investment in hydraulic cranes. The port was recognised as one of the best equipped in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ferguson created a partnership with the government and City Council to deliver a series of new wharves and land reclamations – including the Taranaki Street Wharf development, completed in 1905.

The reclaimed land was “a magnificent block,” according to auctioneers George Thomas & Co. ahead of its sale in February 1906 – and for once the claim was justified. A flurry of investment had transformed the surrounding area since the turn of the century, with a new fire station (reassuring for commercial building owners) on Lower Cuba Street, opposite the City Council’s impressive new Town Hall which opened on 7 December 1904. Concert-goers arrived on the electric trams that had commenced service in the preceding months, and, in the summer, rowers in the Star Boating Club’s boathouse enjoyed music from a new bandstand on the Cuba Street side of Jervois Quay.

It was all remarkably modern. The map reassured buyers that the land on offer was anything but the Te Aro of the typhoid years; it even shows the Polhill Gully Watercourse (described by the Evening Post as “exceedingly offensive” a decade earlier) now buried in a long culvert under the city’s streets. The map omitted the city’s waste incinerator at Chaffers Park; it was expanded shortly after the Taranaki Street reclamation was auctioned off – caveat emptor.

The sale was well attended, and two buyers bought all but one of the lots; the State Coal Department purchased the land south of Cable Street (a new road named after the Harbour Board’s outgoing Chairman William Cable). The modernist John Chambers Building was completed in 1918, and the smaller Inglis Bros & Co motor importers at the Taranaki

Street end of the block – the Wakefield Market food stalls was the building’s final incarnation before its demolition in 2007.

The land to the north was purchased by timber merchants C & A Odlin’s. The company completed its eponymous building within 19 months of acquiring the site. Shed 22 was built as a wool store by the Harbour Board when Odlin’s moved its timber yard to Petone in the 1920s. In the mid-1990s there were plans to raze the empty buildings and replace them with a reviled casino-hotel, but resource consent was withheld when the extent of the public opposition became clear.

Aside from those replaced by the One Market Lane development, the buildings that sprang up from the 1906 auction remain in situ, historic waterfront buildings that are fully renovated, earthquake strengthened, and home to blue-chip businesses like the Stock Exchange and architects Warren and Mahoney. A magnificent block – just as the auctioneer promised 115 years ago.

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F E AT U R E

Ford Fairmont in Masterton

Road trip

Paul Hamer is a Ngaio photographer with a penchant for all things four-wheeled. Vintage icons from years gone by, mostly immaculately restored – Fords, Saabs, Citroëns, Volkswagens – are paired with Wellington landscapes and architecture to anachronistic effect. Now 52, Paul began snapping aged 17 when he was overseas, with “some kind of Ricoh I borrowed off my sister”, although he now shoots almost exclusively on digital. While some of his compositions are so flawless they could be staged, Paul insists that it’s just him and his camera. Sometimes he stakes out a good location and just waits for a good car to show up; other times he catches sight of a subject while ferrying his three children about and returns with crossed fingers and his trusty DSLR. When he’s not snapping Wellington wagons for his Instagram (@paul.hamer), he’s a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, where he works mainly as a historian and researcher. He also won the Whenua category at the inaugural Capital Photographer of the Year in 2021.

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Ford Thunderbirds in Carterton

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Volkswagen Dormobile in Paekākāriki

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Ford Mustang in Masterton

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Ford Prefect in Foxton

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Mini in Moera

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S P O N S O R E D

C O N T E N T F E AT U R E

Summer is heating up, and so are bookings for Kiwi baches The latest data from Bachcare, New Zealand’s largest

keep the house looking lovely. Bachcare go the extra

serviced holiday home management company, shows

mile – especially our local manager”.

just how eager Kiwis are to travel this summer.

Bachcare helps guests find their happy place and Bachcare bookings for the Wellington region and

enables holiday homeowners to share them with others,

Wairarapa are up 50% on this time last year which means

while generating a second income. Bachcare handles

Martinborough holiday homeowners like Kristin Davis, are

over 2,000 properties across Aotearoa, taking care of

looking forward to a busy summer of bookings ahead.

everything that comes with running a short-term rental.

Kristin has been with Bachcare since 2018. After selling the

They professionally clean the property in between

family bach in Taupo, she listed the Martinborough Olive

bookings, manage nightly rates, and even list the holiday

Estate (search bachcare.co.nz for property ID 1046941)

home on other popular booking sites like Airbnb and

in March 2020.

Bookabach to maximise exposure and booking potential.

Plus, owners can still use their bach whenever they want

While the family only live an hour away in Wellington,

by blocking out dates in the Bachcare owner portal.

and still love to holiday at the Olive Estate, it made sense to rent it out when it was empty. Kristin loves the hands-

Make the most of summer and relax knowing your

off approach that Bachcare and the local manager bring

rental is all taken care of this season. Contact Bachcare’s

to her holiday home rental. “It’s just easy. I don’t have to

team of advisors on 0800 42 22 42 or visit newowners.

think about anything. Also, they have high standards so

bachcare.co.nz to get your free rental appraisal.

Summer at Circa Theatre

The Little Mermaid – The Pantomime

By Simon Leary and Gavin Rutherford Directed by Susan Wilson Music arranged and directed by Michael Nicholas Williams $18–$52

2–15 Jan

A wonderfully watery Wellington tale!

If you didn’t catch our recent season of The Little Mermaid why not to dive into the New Year and get tickets for our short Jan return. It’s Crabulous! Gavin Rutherford, our all-time favourite Dame plays Shelly Bay, a poor lonely widow fisherwoman.

There’s fun for all the family with fantastic songs and lots of our favourite hijinks.

F E AT U R E

A Natural Woman

Celebrating the music of Carole King

By Ali Harper Ali-Cat Productions Ltd $25–$54

22 Jan–19 Feb

Carole King – extraordinary, timeless, iconic! Hailed as the greatest singersongwriter when her landmark album “Tapestry” was released in 1971. Fifty years on, it’s timely that we come together and be wowed by her intensity and vigour. I Feel The Earth Move, It’s Too Late, So Far Away, (You make me feel like) A Natural Woman, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, Smackwater Jack, You’ve Got A Friend… Join Ali Harper and her stellar band for an unforgettable show!

By Arrangement with Playmarket.

Where Our Shadows Meet Original devised work from the company Director/Dramaturg Laura Haughey Equal Voices Arts $20–$30

15–19 Feb

When you and your father don’t share the same language… A story about love, loss and language, told with physical storytelling, live music, New Zealand Sign Language, and spoken English. This piece is performed by a Deaf and hearing cast and designed to be accessible for d/Deaf and hearing audiences. ‘The most innovative and collaborative use of NZSL anywhere in the New Zealand arts sector’ — Richard Benge, MNZM, Arts Access Aotearoa.

NZ Fringe 2022 Play Readings The Body Politic

By Elspeth Sandys Directed by Jane Waddell $16–$20 Sat 19 Feb, 2pm The Coven On Grey Street

By James Cain Directed by Cassandra Tse Starring Hilary Norris $16–$20 Sat 26 Feb, 2pm A Rich Man

By Sam Brooks Directed by Tessa Waters $16–$20 Sun 27 Feb, 2pm

By Arrangement with Playmarket.

Shows daily Tues–Sun 1 Taranaki St, Wellington 04 801 7992 I circa.co.nz As of Friday the 3rd December 2021, we will require all patrons over the age of 12 years and 3 months to present a My Vaccine Pass to enter our premises at any traffic light setting. At traffic light Orange or Red, face coverings will be required when visiting Circa.

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KĀPITI C ATA S T R O P H E Kāpiti contains 11% of the region’s population, but has only 2.6% of its public housing provision.

To understand residents’ feelings about the housing squeeze, the council has sought information from them. In the space of a month, more than 1300 Kāpiti residents shared information about their housing situations and aspirations. Councillor Rob McCann, housing portfolio leader, visited one respondent’s three-bedroom house, which housed nine people. McCann said there was a strong indication of housing stress, calling it a “catastrophe”.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

LANDFILL LOAFERS

PARKING PROHIBITION

Smoking and vaping inside cars have now been banned in New Zealand if anyone under the age of 18 is present. This news comes after a decade of campaigning by community groups such as Drive Smokefree for Tamariki. The bill, titled “Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children”, now makes the practice a legal offence.

Associate Minister of Health Jenny Salesa says this is “because children are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of second-hand smoke due to smaller lungs, higher respiratory rate, and more immature immune systems”.

White-coloured and leaving no environmental trace, a new biodegradable shoe named Ghost is the brainchild of Kāpiti inventor Greg Howard. Humans manufacture a (very spooky) 20 billion pairs of shoes a year, with almost all eventually going to landfill. The new shoe manufactured by Howard’s company Orba is 94% plant-based, made with flax, kenaf (similar to hemp), and ramie (similar to thistle). The sole is a natural rubber, with ricehusk ash and coconut oil. The insoles are cork, coconut husk, and natural rubber. Boo-tiful.

When parking, you sometimes have to creep onto the footpath, right? It’s a balancing act, dividing room on the road but not hogging the pavement. From 1 February, Wellington City Council “may” issue you a parking ticket for this, perhaps hinting at some discretion – which is probably wise considering areas like Devon St and Palliser Rd, where cars invariably have to park on the footpath. Guidelines from 2005 that allowed the practice outside of urban and suburban centres were recently scrapped, citing “safety risks to footpath users”.

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Ahhhh - summer.

Sunshine, sand, the sound of the sea, ice cream, long lazy days, camping, conviviality, swimming, time spent with a good book or two, box sets, gin & tonic, iced coffee, dahlias, twilight, long walks, summer fruit, tennis, the lake, picnics... good times xx

cnr Blair & Wakefield Streets, Wellington www.smallacorns.co.nz / 04 802 5795

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A home of contrast P H OTO G R A P H Y BY A N N A B R I G G S

Tenant and teacher Glen Jorna liked the neighbourhood so much he came back with his partner to buy and build. Sharon Greally talks to the contented couple about their Mt Vic reno.

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uch like artist Glen Jorna’s art work, the 80-square-metre bijou home he has renovated with partner Andy Pickering is full of contrast and variety. I visited them on a Saturday morning, sitting around their engineered-stone island drinking coffee.

The Resene Dark Knight kitchen had the snug feel of a wine bar, and indeed Glen says they were inspired by the mood of Hawthorne Lounge in Tory St. The copper pendant lights reflect the rich copper tones of the benchtop.

The house was built around 1914 on a one way street in Mt. Victoria, and before the renovations two years ago was a simple cottage. It’s now a clever and sensitive nod to the past, incorporating modern influences. A small adjacent cabin has been transformed into a guesthouse, and enjoys a special privacy.

Glen explains that he had lived in the house for some years as a renter. “I instantly felt like this was home.” He moved away, then a former neighbour told him it was up for sale. “We moved in here around eight years ago. I love the neighbourhood. It’s a really special street,” says Glen. Nestled between two houses, and

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shielded by a bank at the back, the south-facing home is mostly protected from the prevailing nor’westerly wind. Between the house and the guesthouse there is now a sheltered courtyard, where a serene Buddha welcomes guests as they come up the path. “One of the first things we did was put the deck in.” Getting rid of the the grass extended the living space, and the sheltered deck created a sun-trap. “It can be blowing a gale down on Kent Terrace, and here it’s so sheltered.”

During the renovations, they moved into the guesthouse with Lumi, their Malteseshitzu.

“It was just one room with an outdoor shower, and the builders put in an outdoor sink for us.

We had a portaloo on the street for about six months, which I don’t think was quite legal.

It was like camping. It was an ‘achievement’.”

But it was tight and stressful: “There’s dust in the toaster, the budget blows out. It puts a bit of pressure on a relationship. We’d only been married a couple of years, but thought if we could get through that, we could get through anything.

And we have!” Glen reflects that they were lucky to have finished the job before covid struck.

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The ideas for renovation began simply, as in “We might just put another room on”, but it became a complete rebuild. “We were going to do it in stages, but our builder encouraged us to do it all at once. An architect friend drew up some concept plans, we had it priced, and we thought let’s just do the whole thing.” That included adding an ensuite to the guest house for flexibility. Extensive rot meant they had to replace 80% of the walls of the main house – “It was a shell really, but we could see everything that was wrong with it, and also see its potential. The concept went through a few iterations, and we ended up making changes the day before it went to council.” And not small changes: walls were extended to make more room, and the aspect reoriented to the south, to create an outlook. And the bedrooms are now separated by the living spaces. They toyed with but rejected the

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idea of joining the studio up to the house. The result, says Glen, was not so much a renovation as a rebuild: “It’s about 80sqm, originally 60, and now the guesthouse brings it up to around 95sqm. For a small house, it feels quite big, and very light.”

This is art teacher Glen and Andy’s first renovation.

“We realised early on we just had to trust each other. Going through renovations you can almost kill each other. We split up the jobs. Creative design and research was my job, and Andy, an inflight services manager for Air New Zealand, was to guide the ship in terms of finances and logistics.”

As their vision shifted, they became more deeply engaged in the design detail. “Our builder, Dan Alkema from Megastructures, asked what we were going to do with the kitchen and bathroom. And I said ‘Aren’t you just going to put one in for us?’”

He put them on to Joneen Rodgers. They had been thinking all black and white, but she pushed everything in a

B O O K

different direction with a copper, blue, and black penny-tile sample. In the bathroom, tiles, cabinetry, and paint colours feature. Using multiple elements in such a small space was a bit of a gamble, says Glen, but it works. “There is one drawer each, and shelving for our fragrance display. What with Andy’s job we have quite a selection.” The skylight follows the light and dark theme, illuminating the tiles. The concrete-effect floor and wall tiles are an engineered stone, and the floor heated. “We love the coppery accents in the concrete, and we have used Resene Dark Knight on the tongue and groove on the walls which is also featured in the living room, so it all ties in.”

In the kitchen they sought to avoid dominating dark cabinetry, using open shelving in the same engineered oak timber as the floor. The kitchen island uses the same concrete finish as the bathroom tiles.

The kitchen tiles were rather contentious. Andy wanted to bring some blue into the originally black scheme, evoking

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peace and tranquility, and softening possible harshness. The larger hexagonal tiles looked unremarkable in a sample, “but as an artist, I could visualise what it would look like. Andy struggles with that, so that’s where the trust thing comes in. It all looks quite bejwelled, and we’re really happy with the end product.” Glen reports that the finished product moved Joneen to tears. The tiler used a grout that reflected the browny coppery tones of the bench top and also picked up the distinctive edges of the tiles. The tones also reflect their earthenware displayed on the shelves, and link to the tiles in the bathroom. “They talk to each other”.

Anything they would change in the whole renovation? “Putting in one of those longer extendable taps in the kitchen.” Everyone told them the dark colour scheme in the small kitchen was a huge risk – even the fridge is black – but Glen was adamant.

“Those sort of things don’t scare me. And now everyone that sees it goes ‘wow!’” Even the painter said they were crazy, since it was the darkest corner of the house. “I wanted to embrace the moodiness.

The light area of the house is light, and the dark area creates that duality.”

The laundry sits discreetly in the walkthrough between the bathroom and the kitchen,

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instead of the intended spot in the bathroom.

“We had to think really cleverly about this.” They also gave up the bath for a walk-in shower and a more open feel.

The lounge and dining area is bathed in sunlight by the large double-glazed windows and French doors opening onto the deck. Making this area larger and reconfiguring the formerly weird space has “revolutionised” the way they live in the house, says Glen. The original uneven matai flooring has been replaced with light oak. “We’ve ended up with a bit of a Skandi look, which again has that duality of light and dark. We still have the dark flooring in the spare bedroom, and it’s a nice contrast.” They had to lose the original sash windows, but the double glazing makes a huge difference to comfort. The three triangular units used as display shelves in the living area are from Warehouse Stationery. The Resene paint colour Heritage in the lounge again sets up a clever play of light and dark with the Robin Egg Blue, by Karen Walker, in the adjacent master bedroom, which can also be closed off with cavity slider doors. A low futon-style bed helps to give the illusion of space. The second bedroom is still a work in progress, though it’s ready for guests.

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Glen and Andy are collecting works by New Zealand artists, much of it picked up at art shows. In the snug or TV room, with its blue velvet couch from Freedom, the interplay of dark and light seems palpable. This is Glen’s favourite room, it feels “really nurturing”. A lightbox artwork, Orange Road Cone by Jason Courtis, adorns the snug. In the lounge/dining area a dark leather couch sits on the light oak floor along with mid-century chairs picked up from friends. The round white dining table, also from Freedom, sits in a light- filled corner. The glasstopped gilded side table was a $35 Salvation Army shop find, and a favourite piece. Again it picks up the metallic accents.

“It’s hard to describe the styling of this house,” says Glen.

Bargains from charity shops, Kmart, and so on are mixed with more expensive pieces, new items with second-hand. “There are certain things you don’t skimp on.” So the kitchen bench was expensive, but it’s combined with stools from The Warehouse.

There is also a “merging” of the owners’ somewhat divergent tastes. “I love Industrial, and Andy likes more of a Skandi feel.” The muted colours, rich textures, and tonal variations of blues, browns, and coppers recall aspects of Glen’s canvases. In

his work as in the interior design theme, he tends to stick to a restricted palette but pick up different notes in each work.

“Beauty and decay, light and dark, taking the old and giving it some new life.” He uses old posters, turning them into pieces of art, adding texture using collage. His creative bent is always at work, thinking, seeking out things to recombine.

“Andy was very supportive of my suggestions. He took control of the budget, the organisational-type things” at which Glen declares he is “useless”. He credits Andy not only with trusting him with design choices, but also practical input – “He also did a lot of the physical labour on his days off.”

The building took around six months, and the finishing off another three, so nine months in total. “The budget blew way off which was a bit stressful. But it was totally worth it. Now we don’t care. If we were to give any advice, we’d say ‘Go for it!

Don't even think twice about skimping on anything. You won’t regret it!’” And worth it, it has been. The bathroom won the National Kitchen and Bathrooms Association's people’s choice award in March of this year. With a dramatic hint of mystery, this is a home that brings peace and rest. Light and dark.

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For Everything

Outdoor Living

At McKenzie & Willis we believe your outdoor space is an extension of your home.

The pieces you choose should be characterised by quality and perfect finishes that compare to the finest interior furnishings. Handpicked for the New Zealand lifestyle, our exclusive Outdoor Living Collection features outdoor lounge and dining pieces from the world’s finest brands.

Manutti River Armchair

0800 888 999 | mcw.nz Interior Design | Furniture | Curtains | Blinds | Beds | Linens | Flooring | Wallpaper

The best little suburb by the sea

The Dutch Shop Your destination for a truly authentic taste of the Netherlands, whether it’ll be liquorice, cheese, deli meats, or homeware. www.thedutchshop.co.nz

Light House Cinema Great films, great food, great coffee, great atmosphere! Escape from the everyday. Open 7 days. 52 Beach St. 04 939 2061 www.lighthousecinema.co.nz

Goodness Boutique

Style on Jackson Selling pre-loved designer clothing, footwear, and new accessories, handpicked for their quality and style. On Jackson Street since 1996. www.styleonjackson.co.nz

Schrödinger’s Books NZ Bookshop of the Year 2021! Enjoy browsing our eclectic range and ask our friendly team for summer reading recommendations. www.schrodingersbooks.nz

Viva Mexico Petone For a Mexican food fiesta, look no further than Viva Mexico Petone, the most authentic Mexican restaurant in Wellington. www.vivamexico.co.nz

Jewel Classically trained, experienced boutique jewellery design and manufacturing studio. We specialise in reinventing past treasures into new heirlooms. www.jewel.net.nz

UK Goodies

Gorgeous Café

GOODNESS is home to some of the most desirable and coveted designers from New Zealand and afar.

Come and see us for all your UK goodies; crisps, cereals, biscuits, chocolate, sweets and much more. 243 Jackson St, Petone.

Gorgeous Café is the delicious partner to renowned Goodness Boutique, offering fine food and fashion on Jackson St, Petone.

www.goodness.co.nz

www.ukgoodies.co.nz

www.gorgeouscafe.com

Celebrating 40 years of her work, this landmark exhibition presents Rita Angus, the feminist, pacifist and artist.

Complement your experience, with our charming high tea, immersing yourself in an experience that is quintessentially Rita with a selection of dainty savouries and delicious pastries.

Find out more or book online at tepapa.govt.nz

FEMINIST. PACIFIST. ARTIST 18 Dec - 25 Apr | FREE ENTRY

B U G

M E

Blue Damselfly

BY M E LO DY T H O M A S

Māori name: Kēkēwai or tīemiemi

metamorphosis takes place; the flies emerge in their adult form between October and February, the bulk of them in January.

Scientific name: Austrolestes colensonis Status: Endemic, widespread

Look/listen: Keep an eye out for larvae and nymphs in water, and adults nearby, especially in areas with reeds and rushes. One way to tell whether you’re looking at a damselfly or a dragonfly is that, when the insects are resting, dragonfly wings stick out at an angle to their bodies, whereas damselfly wings lie flush with the body.

Description: If you’re out and about this summer and you spot a bright blue, rather skinny looking dragonfly, chances are what you’ve seen isn’t a dragonfly at all, but a damselfly. Damselflies are generally smaller than dragonflies, and kēkēwai (the biggest damselfly in Aotearoa) grows to just 40–47mm long. Males are dark purplish-black with brilliant blue markings, whereas the markings on females and juveniles are an iridescent blueish green.

Tell me a story: Damselflies take love-making to a whole new level, coupling in a “wheel position” which actually looks like a love heart. The male uses the claspers on the end of his abdomen to hold the female in place, just below her head. He then uses his scoop-shaped penis to scrape out any semen left by competing males, before inseminating the female himself. It’s hard to describe but looks pretty amazing, and it’s well worth Googling “damselfly mating” for the pictures (especially the ones showing multiple damselfly pairs seemingly mating in a synchronised sex dance).

Habitat: Kēkēwai are found in and around weedy streams, ponds, and lakes throughout New Zealand, including Stewart Island and Chatham Island. Blue damselfly eggs are laid in summer and some will hatch almost immediately, though others will overwinter and hatch the following spring. Once an egg is hatched, the nymph will live for a year to a year and a half in that state before

Supplying Kiwis with the freshest fish for over 20 years.

Wellington Seamarket brings the seashore to your door.

Order online or visit us in-store today

www.wellingtonseamarket.com @wellingtonseamarket

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Available Tuesday to Saturday in pints, halves, riggers, 6 packs, singles and tasting paddles.

WWW.CHOICEBROS.CO.NZ 04 282 0583 62 GHUZNEE STREET, TE ARO, WELLINGTON

IT WOULDN’T BE SUMMER WITHOUT IT FIND YOUR LOCAL AT BURGERWISCONSIN.CO.NZ

E D I B L E S

SMOKING ALLOWED Hoot Sauce has launched a new smoked chilli oil for all those wanting a smoky kick. Hoot is owned by the father and son team behind popular paella caterers Pan Man: Dad Ian Hornblow, and sons Zach and Rhett. The oil’s signature vibrant red colour is created by using all-natural ingredients including chilli peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, smoked paprika, and capsicum, which are combined in small batches by the Hoot team at their Wadestown headquarters.

FROM DONUTS TO SONUTS

HIA’S A GOOD ONE

SUPPLEMENT SAVIOUR

First there were donuts. We all knew what they were: long and filled with jam and cream, or circular with a hole in the middle. Then came the cronut (croissant-donut hybrid), invented in 2013. Next came the bronut (briochedonut hybrid). Now there’s the sonut (sourdough donut). Made using a sourdough starter, sonuts taste a touch more savoury – try them at Lashings café. We humans love a cool twist on a comfort food – hence the challenge to upscale the donut.

Hiakai serves up beautiful plates of food at their Mt Cook premises, and their cookbooks are given the same aesthetic treatment. Hiakai: Modern Māori Cuisine, authored by founder Monique Fiso, has won Best Cookbook at the Publishing Association’s Book Design Awards. The winning design was created by Cat Taylor and Rachel Clark. Rachel won Young Designer of the Year at the same awards in 2018. Judges called Hiakai a “beautifully produced and important book for Aotearoa.” Ka pai!

A recent scientific study has linked the chemical element selenium (Se) to the prevention of covid infections and the reduction of its severity. The element is found in meat, fish, eggs, offal, spinach, lentils, mushrooms, and sunflower seeds. Brazil nuts contain the highest concentration of any food source. The University of Verona paper says, “the available data so far strongly suggest that Se is essential for prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection and may negatively impact on Covid-19 outcome particularly in populations where Se intake is low.”

1-12 february 2022

lunarnewyearfestival.co.nz

lnyfestival

E D I B L E S

CONCORD L A N D S AT L I D O After more than 30 years of service, Lido is set to close after owner Frank De Roose made the decision to sell up after three years at the venue. The founders David George and Leigh Missen opened the spot in 1990, and it would quickly become part of Wellington’s café culture. De Roose sold the business to Sean Golding and Shepherd Elliot, who plan to reopen it as a traditional bistro, called Concord. Golding is currently involved with Golding’s Free Dive, restaurant Shepherd, and hotel The Intrepid.

COOKING WITH CHRIST

YOU ARE BEER

TOAST TO SUMMER

Anglican vicar Andy Eldred of Carterton completed his last service on Christmas Day. He now plans to open a food court with a live music focus on Carterton’s High Street, serving hearty American classics.

For the past 13 years he’s led congregations in Greytown and Carterton, where he was known as the Rockin’ Reverend. US-born Eldred performed in a number of heavy metal bands before moving to New Zealand after a prophetic vision.

Will it be a gulp in Glenside, an ale in Avalon, a swifty in Strathmore, or a shoey in Shelly Bay (heaven forbid).

Capital has been hard at work on their seventh annual Beer Guide, which showcases the best spots for lager lovers and pint pundits – and it’s available for summer drinking. Whether you’re into the golden nectar or not, the Beer Guide will provide you with some truly great places to try one or two, and the best local breweries to buy one or two, so you can imbibe at your leisure.

If you missed out on Toast Martinborough tickets, there are a host of other foodie fests to whet your appetite.

First We Eat (5 February), a food and music festival which started last year in Tauranga, has added a second leg in Napier (26 March) due to high demand. The Wellington Wine and Food Festival (12 February) will return to Waitangi Park in Te Aro. And the Wairarapa Wines Harvest Festival (26 February) will take attendees to a riverside idyll in rural Carterton.

www.thepowerplant.co.nz

16 Maclean St, Paraparaumu Beach

HOUSEPLANTS PLANTERS GIFTS

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Subscribe at capitalmag.co.nz

Made in Wellington 96

CapitalMagazine Wellington @capitalmag

11 Egmont St @egmontst.eatery

With a newly renovated minimalist interior, here at Egmont we have created unique and contemporary food and beverage menus to elevate and refine the customer experience while retaining our signature Egmont flair.

04 801 6891 www.egmontstreet.co.nz

Serving brunch Wed–Sun | Serving dinner Wed–Sat

IT SEEMS THE JUDGES WERE STUNNED. GolD aT THE BREWERS GUIlD of NEW ZEalaND aWaRDS.

MALTY

HOPPY

LIGHT

DArK

sweet

bitter

E D I B L E S

Tossed Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the source of the still current expression “salad days”: the ruler recalled a past when she was “green in judgment” and “cold in blood”. Perhaps salads are an emblem of youth, with their jumbled presentation, stimulating crunch, and healthful benefits. We’re taking a moment to celebrate green grub. No longer a sullen side-dish, but a stunning centrepiece gracing lowly lunch tables and renowned restaurants alike.

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The great Wellington salad bowl

Salad fingers

Recipes

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Mesclun 6%

Iceberg 14% Cos 28%

Red leaf 3%

Fancy 7%

Kale 2% Spinach 16%

Rocket 24%

The great Wellington salad bowl From fenugreek and feta to pine nuts and pomegranate, we love a jazzed-up salad – but you can’t forget the fundamentals: leaves. We asked our savvy social subscribers for their favourites, presented to you in this giant green salad. Why? Just cos.

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Homegrown food at your fingertips

69-71 Miramar Avenue, Miramar, Wellington.

04 388 8435 www.palmers.co.nz miramar@palmers.net.nz

E D I B L E S

Salad fingers

BY N I CO L A YO U N G

S

alads have been popular since the days of the Pharaohs, and for centuries they stayed much the same – raw vegetable leaves with a salty oil dressing.

It wasn’t that long ago that salads in New Zealand were termed rabbit food; shorthand for healthy eating, or food fit only for women on diets. Then immigration and international travel changed our eating habits. Salads are often now the sophisticated option, and leading Wellington foodies agree – good salads depend on freshness, texture, and the dressing.

Nikki Chung runs four Nam D kiosks serving Vietnamese street food. She came to New Zealand as a small child with her family; they were “boat people” who, sponsored

by Rotary, moved straight to Masterton. “Asian ingredients were scarce so my mum Thu – a great cook – had to improvise. There was one shop in Upper Hutt that stocked things like Thai fish sauce, so we’d head there once a month to stock up.”

Nikki started out in banking, then set up and oversaw an Asian foods section for Foodstuffs. She opened her own Vietnamese restaurant 10 years ago – Nam in the Willis Street Village. When a kiosk in Cable Car Lane became available, Nam D was born and her restaurant premises became the prep kitchen.

“Thu inspired me, she teaches my chefs, and they use her recipes. Everything is prepared from scratch: the pickled daikon and carrots, the pâtés, the marinaded, roasted meats. Mum still makes the Moon Festival cakes we sell every September.

“Vietnamese eat a lot of salads and not many cooked vegetables, because the weather is so hot. The food is all about freshness and texture with the liberal use of herbs, and the pickled vegetables and roasted peanuts supply the crunch.

Sauces mean everything. Meats are marinaded with fish sauce and lemongrass, then garnished with spring onion oil (made with a neutral oil and salt) just before serving.”

Bridget Dunn, the doyenne of Prefab Eatery, agrees on the crunch factor. “In summer, the base is always cos or iceberg lettuce. It should be washed, spun, and then dehydrated in a plastic container in the fridge for a few hours; that makes the lettuce really crisp and helps the dressing stick to the leaves.

It’s fine to use some rocket or mesclun but eat it on the day it’s bought, otherwise it gets mushy very quickly and dies – just like herbs – once dressed. And no one wants to eat mush.”

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And she is full of tips for using seasonal bounty and avoiding monotony and mishaps: “Diversify according to the season; in winter, roast vegetables to boost their flavour, then add a grain like quinoa.

In the spring and summer there are so many wonderful vegetables: asparagus (blanch then run under cold water to keep the crispness, or try roasting them), avocados, fresh peas straight from the pod, beautiful cherry or truss tomatoes, baby carrots (raw, or roasted with some honey and cumin); add some red or black rice for extra crunch, toasted almonds, cashews, or perhaps some fruit. Sometimes sprinkle a little goat or feta cheese. Beetroot – pickled or smoked – is fabulous; scatter it on the top for serving.

Add your favourite herbs. And only toss the salad when you’re about to eat it.

“Anything goes! Experiment! But don’t use too many ingredients. There’ll be lots of suitable things in your fridge – just don’t use them all at the same time. You don’t want the kitchen sink in your salad. Don’t store tomatoes in the fridge.

“I will happily eat anything salady, but the classic Caesar salad is my favourite. Some think it’s boring, but it can be tarted up with salmon, grilled halloumi, or chicken.”

Wellington-raised Taylor Annals returned home last year because of covid, having worked in some of Melbourne’s best-known restaurants. He’s now head chef at Egmont Street Eatery, after a stint at Ortega Fish Shack. Taylor shares Bridget’s wariness of mesclun and rocket: “Go gently with them, as they can be peppery”.

“Lettuces with body are best because they hold the dressing. I like to shred iceberg because it gives a more even coating. Preparing the lettuce is important. Wash it thoroughly. Strong lettuces, like cos, can be spun; otherwise leave it dripping upside down on the bench in one layer on a tea towel, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

“A balanced and seasoned dressing is another essential.

Mustard adds some piquancy. And use good quality ingredients – like Forum’s Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon vinegars from Spain. If you’re serving barbecued or roasted meats, add about two tablespoons of their resting juices to the vinaigrette. And don’t forget the salt.”

Finally, Taylor says, salads need to be seasoned aggressively, although the dressing should be added only at the very last minute – after all, no one likes soggy salads.

E D I B L E S E D I B L E S

Mustard vinaigrette Taylor Annals, head chef at Egmont St Eatery 40ml finest white or red wine vinegar 3.5 tbsp Dijon or whole grain mustard 130ml extra virgin rapeseed oil 3 pinches salt 1 pinch black pepper To mix, combine ingredients in a jar and shake aggressively.

Add small handful of finely chopped roasted hazelnuts or walnuts for a more nutty option

If serving with barbecue or roasted meats, add 30 ml of the meat’s resting juices to the vinaigrette

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The dressing should be well-balanced with salty, sweet, sour and umami

Vietnamese dressing Nikki Chung, owner of Nam Đ 120g castor sugar 100ml lime or lemon juice 3 tbsp fish sauce 1 red chilli, finely chopped 2 crushed garlic cloves Mix together and dress.

Acme aioli Bridget Dunn, doyenne of Prefab Eatery Dress your salad at the very last minute for freshness

2 eggs 3 cloves garlic 1/2 cup grated parmesan 2 stalks spring onions, chopped 1 tbsp Dijon mustard 1 pinch black pepper 1 pinch salt (not much) 1 splash lemon or lime juice 1 tbsp parsley 4 tsp finest white wine vinegar 1/2 tsp sugar High quality olive oil Blend until lovely and creamy.

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C O N T E N T

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C O N T E N T

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S O C I A L

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Wellington’s beard problem There’s a slow creep of well-grown beards spreading through Wellington and the Hutt Valley. No, it’s not gentrification, it’s Clematis vitalba!

Tessa Johnstone looks into our gnarly weed problem.

I

took botanist David Bellamy seriously when he sprang from a bush and yelped in his signature lisp: “Old Man’s Beard must go!”. That 1989 Department of Conservation campaign raised awareness of the invasive weed, and its potential to overwhelm native vegetation. Ever since I’ve kept a diligent eye out for its smothering creep.

So I was alarmed to notice recently that it was gaining a stronghold in Wellington’s green spaces. Over autumn and winter the fluffy white seed heads for which it is named could be seen growing in straggly patches and sometimes great plumes around the city – growing on the fringes of nature reserves in Island Bay, on the barbed wire fences around the old Tip Top bread factory in Newtown, in the overgrown gardens of rundown rentals. During Wellington’s iNaturalist City Nature Challenge in May, which saw nature lovers logging nearly 7500 observations of plants and animals from around the city, it was the second most commonly observed plant, trumped only by the ubiquitous kawakawa.

Old Man’s Beard ain’t any old weed. It’s a woody climber with stems up to 20 metres high – a single plant can cover an area the size of a tennis court and, left to thrive, it eventually overwhelms trees and causes canopy collapse.

Thankfully, I’m not the only person that’s noticed we’ve got a problem.

“Anecdotally and visually, it seems worse,” says AJ Hawkins, one half of community conservation group Old Man’s Beard Free Wellington. He too traces his aversion to Old Man’s Beard back to David Bellamy – “It’s culturally ingrained in Generation X so I was pretty primed for it.” Hawkins was roped into clearing a patch of Old Man’s Beard in Tanera Gully by his friend Nigel Charman back in 2017, and the pair have

been fighting its spread around Aro Valley ever since.

He takes the battle personally: “I have quite a strong emotional response to it sometimes, it’s like botanical vandalism. If it’s not addressed, you’re going to have hillsides that are held together by weeds.”

Nigel and AJ, with the help of a few other hardy volunteers, have now cleared more than 1000 plants.

The plants can be so big they earn themselves names like the Norway Monster (named of course after the infamous street) and can each take several weeks to clear.

“It looks like something you’re not going to be able to achieve,” says Nigel, “but you chip away at it. Every year you do a bit more, chop it down to the trees, then down to the roots. They come back, you chop them again – slowly you get to it.”

But the work they’ve done is just a fraction of what needs doing – there are 40 sites just in Aro Valley that they could be working on, and they’ll only get through a few this year.

“It does have the potential to be disheartening when you look at how much there is to do,” says Nigel, “but if you flick it round and look at how much you’ve already done, that’s pretty awesome.”

They are not tackling this scourge alone. Up the line, Upper Hutt Busters of Old Man’s Beard (UH BOMB) are doing the same. The group has now cleared the weed from more than 100 hectares of native bush. Their first site in 2015 was two hectares of bush on steep, rocky terrain on the escarpment north of Silverstream Bridge and clearing it took more than 200 hours. But it’s worth it, says UH BOMB coordinator Chris Cosslett.

“When you look back at where we started, and there’s this beautiful face of bush there now, and you see kererū, and resident kārearea, and we meet whiteheads in flocks on that face every time we go in there. If we hadn’t done

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that, that bush would have just disappeared and those birds wouldn't be living there.”

Cosslett started clearing Old Man’s Beard after noticing it smothering regenerating native bush alongside State Highway 2: “I’m a person that gets upset about these things and has to do something.”

He connected with the Upper Hutt branch of Forest & Bird, which paid him out of its own reserves to start managing the problem with some volunteers. They now have community funding for the project, and Cosslett says the combination of volunteer and paid labour is a model that could work elsewhere. Certainly, it seems that a different approach is needed. A recent report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment on New Zealand’s invasive weed problem pointed out that we don’t have a national policy on pest weeds, there’s no coordination on managing the problem, and it’s a serious threat to forests.

Wellington, Hutt City, Upper Hutt, and Greater Wellington councils all have different policies on controlling Old Man’s Beard; the patchwork approach on weeds that care little for territorial boundaries is contributing to the problem.

“The results of the different approaches are clear for everyone to see,” says Cosslett. “Travelling from Upper Hutt to Wellington there’s no doubt when you’ve left Hutt City and you’re entering Wellington city, because suddenly there it is, all up above the motorway. It’s really disheartening.” Greater Wellington say as the plant is now long-established and widespread, it’s not an effective use of their budget to attempt to control it everywhere.

Wellington City Council has a site-led approach, they control it on sites of ecological significance, but they only have the budget for weed control in 11 percent of their parks and reserves. Even on council-owned property such as road reserve, they won’t touch it.

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Wellington City Council biosecurity advisor Illona Keenan says it would be great to have more resourcing for pest plant control but councils won’t be able to address the issue on their own.

“We need everything in weed control. Weeds don’t respect boundaries. We need people to look after their gardens and pathways, to volunteer in reserves. Council needs to support those volunteers. All parts of council need to think about the management of our areas, and we also take a longer-term view in terms of cost.”

Chris reckons the job is now too big to be solved with manual labour alone: “I see our job as keeping the bush alive while we wait for an effective biocontrol agent. It wouldn’t eliminate Old Man’s Beard but it would reduce its vigour so that it doesn’t dominate the bush.”

Such an agent may not be far away. Horizons Regional Council and Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research have just released a microscopic eriophyid mite in Taihape, which they hope will eat enough of the leaves and buds of Old Man’s Beard to stunt its growth.

This will be New Zealand’s fourth attempt at introducing biocontrol for Old Man’s Beard. A leafmining fly and a fungus both failed to take hold.

And the third agent, a sawfly, was also thought to have failed, but was recently spotted alive and well in Nelson after 20 years under the radar. Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research scientists are now nurturing communities of the sawfly in the South Island in the hope of distributing it to other parts of the country; and the eriophyid mite is showing promise too.

In the meantime, the same community effort that’s buoyed Predator Free 2050 is needed for weeds. “Predator Free 2050 is great,” says Chris, “but the birds have got to have somewhere to live and something to eat, so it’s all part of the same story.”

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S H O R T

F I C T I O N

Scrap it

BY SA L LY WA R D

A

t the back of their garden the compost bin stood tall in the weeds and calendula. It was four years old. While the plastic was faded, it looked inoffensive and at home: a tomb for food forgotten in the fridge, bananas that couldn’t be saved by cake, and burnt toast.

Eventually Maggie emptied the scrap bucket on the bench.

She felt like she was the only one who remembers. The routine went: turn the key, open the French doors, run across the bricks in slippers, remove the block that keeps the rain out, open the lid to a swarm of little flying insects, tip the scraps onto the heap. Run to the outside tap and rinse the bucket, use a stick to clean the sides (don’t look too closely at the bottom), knock on the door that slammed shut in the wind. Repeat.

That evening, Maggie and Sophie fell into a doom spiral about the cost of fruit and vegetables over their Friday-night dinner. “I paid $5.70 for a bunch of asparagus the same size as the one I got for $2.50 from that place on the way to Napier. Devastating.”

They talked about what to do with the garden and where the compost could go, imagining things beyond what was possible in a Mt Vic flat. Sophie wanted more herbs. Maggie wanted tomatoes because they reminded her of home. The climate wasn’t as good here for growing tall leafy things. The sage has done well over winter and so has the rosemary. What about lettuce?

How far in advance do you need to plant asparagus?

Sophie brought up Wellington’s landfill, which was at a critical point – something to do with the consents expiring. It apparently wasn’t getting any emptier and sending things to the tip wasn’t getting any cheaper. Maggie often worried about what was thrown away; people can be so quick to classify something as rubbish. Food that could be eaten, socks that could be repaired, or duvets that just needed a dry-clean. Maybe the contents of the Wellington landfill would fossilise, and be dug up in hundreds of years so people could build houses. They’d find mattresses, single sneakers, and irons preserved in puddles of toxic soup. She wanted to change the subject and focus on things she feels a sense of control over.

“The weather looks all right tomorrow. We should turn the compost. I’ll text Benny and make sure he’ll be home.

That boy was bloody slack last time; helped for two minutes and then went off with that girl even though he stank like dirt.” Maggie knew he only pretended to be into composting to impress girls who were looking for an earthy guy who cared about sustainability.

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“And I haven’t seen any cats for a while so I reckon we’re safe.”

Maggie was referring to the events of last year. She had seen numerous neighbourhood cats come by and watch the bin for hours, taking turns, tails curled, sitting on their secrets. And then at least two mice had jumped out when they tipped the compost over, to everyone’s terror.

The next day, Maggie, Benny, and Sophie put on their old tee shirts with weird stains, assorted hats, and shoes that would never be worn past the letterbox. Sophie took off the compost lid; it was nearly full and stank like manure.

They debated how best to work with their spade and rusty fork-thing. Benny started shovelling compost onto a tarp and Sophie took over when he had to go inside for a glass of water.

It looked pretty okay at the bottom, but too wet. Maggie was combing through the contents on the tarp and mixing it together. A few worms had been severed by the shovel and looked desperate. Some banana and kiwifruit stickers hadn’t been removed. The colourful labels stuck out like rubbish on a beach, inorganic. Avocado stones were intact, whole apples preserved. She pulled out bits of plastic that hadn’t degraded, even if the label had said it would. Maggie also found a fork, a missing lunchbox lid, and a peg.

Sophie handed the shovel back to Benny and sat down to figure out how to dry the compost out. She smeared brown sludge all over her pants, and then her phone as she typed a question. It looked like their compost needed more “carbonrich matter” – cardboard, garden waste, coffee, or corn husks. They shovelled it back in with layers of cardboard, as if making a Christmas trifle. When it was done, they washed their hands and left their grubby shoes on the doorstep.

Maggie pulled beers out of the fridge. No one wanted to eat anything for a few hours.

“The sun’s hanging around for ages,” Benny said, as if it was a surprise and not something that happened every year.

Weeks later, Maggie took the scraps out again and a cat was sitting on top of the bin. Did the smell not bother him?

The compost was shrinking quickly in the warmer weather, even though it was Wellington hot, not hot hot. Maggie opened the little chute bottom and collected some compost for her new tomato plants. She’d tried to find a sheltered spot and was hoping they’d fruit soon. She patted the compost around the stalk of her favourite (it was smaller but greener than the others). She’d already lost one plant to the wind this week. She wanted one fresh tomato to remind her of home, and to make it taste like summer.

Short story

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DIFFERENT STYLES How to Marry Harry has nothing to do with the married Prince Harry. It’s a light-hearted chick-lit novel (out 1 February), written by sisters Nikki Perry and Kirsty Roby while they were bored during lockdown in 2020. “While pondering characters, I came across Harry Styles, listened to his music and thought ‘he’s a nice young man,’” Nikki tells Capital. Harry isn’t actually a character in the book, which has middle-aged sisters Jo and Bobbi visit the UK, half-jokingly wanting to matchmake Jo’s daughter and Harry. The real-life sisters wrote collaboratively using Google Docs.

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Sarah Forster was surprised and “elated” to get a phone call saying she’d won the Storylines Betty Gilderdale Award for outstanding service to children's and young adults’ literature and reading. “I still feel like a new kid in the industry!” says Sarah, co-founder of The Sapling – a website focusing on children’s and youngadult books. She’s also been an administrator, communications advisor, advocate, and volunteer in the field.

Sarah received a $2000 award.

“New Zealanders are turning to books as a source of entertainment and comfort in these pandemic times,” says Nevena Nikolic from Nielsen Book NZ. Its BookScan data shows sales over the year ending mid-November 2021 were up 17% (in dollars spent) from the preceding year.

Adult Fiction climbed 21% to $27 million ($5 million more than the preceding year).

Award-winning author and urban historian Ben Schrader (Capital #41) is the 2022 JD Stout Fellow at Victoria University. From March, he’ll work on a book about historic conservation in New Zealand. “As a child in 1970s Wellington, I used to admire the Victorian and Edwardian buildings that lined Lambton Quay,” Ben says. “When almost all of them were demolished in the 1980s, I decided that one day, I’d like to find out why Aotearoa’s cultural heritage is so often destroyed.”

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e to yo

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About the poet: Louise Wallace is the author of three poetry collections published by Victoria University Press, including Since June and Enough. She is the founder and editor of Starling, a literary journal showcasing young New Zealand writers. Originally from Gisborne, she now lives in Dunedin where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Otago.

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Re-verse I N T R O D U C E D BY C H R I S T S E

In brief: It’s a common sight every summer: Kiwis flock to coastal towns to escape city crowds, only to find that everyone else had the same idea. This poem considers the traditional Kiwi summer holiday from a different point of view, eschewing rose-tinted nostalgia for something a little more prosaic and cynical.

S U M M E R H O L I DAY

Why I like it: This poem is an excellent example of the competing tensions throughout most of Wallace’s work, which has a sly observational quality about it. Many of her poems take familiar social experiences and zero in on the things many of us think but don’t say. While it’s not explicitly a concrete poem, the shape created by the line breaks suggests an ebb and flow, which could refer to the waves at the beach or the arrival and departure of local tourists.

It's not just us: Everyone is on their summer holiday. We have flocked to the coast like gulls, to get ourselves back to nature, irritating the steady local population.

This is the red zone for tsunami. Salt dries stiff in our hair, and as we walk back from the beach, there are the jet skis, the barbecues, the cars with silver jaguars launching from their bonnets, the kids’ bikes, kids’ friends’ bikes, a litany of stuff and the pressure to have it, and it joins to form a mountainous wave that's high enough to dwarf even the most assured among us.

Why read it: Everybody looks forward to a summer beach getaway, but there’s a special type of stress that comes with it. All that relaxation is going to take a lot of planning and packing. Wallace captures this pressure with surgical precision, skewering the exodus of city folk escaping to golden beach towns with their “litany of stuff ” which is displayed as symbols of wealth and privilege, emphasising the chaos that these holidaymakers bring with them. This poem feels even more apt in a year when we’ve been told to stay away from popular holiday hot spots to protect vulnerable communities from Covid-19.

By Louise Wallace From Bad Things (Victoria University Press, 2017)

Read more: In addition to her own collections, Wallace’s work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including the recent A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019. Her collection Bad Things also contains a great poem addressed to her namesake, the actress and reality TV star Louise Wallace.

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Hard to be Hager P H OTO G R A P H Y BY A D R I A N V E RCO E

Writers Mandy and Nicky Hager tell Sarah Lang about the shaping of their social consciences – and their relationship as siblings.

Mandy Mandy Hager is a prolific, multi-award-winning author, primarily of young-adult novels, as well as adult fiction, non-fiction, a picture book, and many educational resources. Her most recent book is Protest! Shaping Aotearoa.

W

e grew up in Levin. Our father established a clothing factory there. Our mother initially had four of us under five: Debbie, then Nicky, then me, then Belinda. There weren’t really any big-sister or big-brother dynamics, because we were so close in age. We had a lot of freedom and spent a lot of time at the river and the beach. We played imaginary games, and built forts. We were really close as a family. Our parents, Kurt and Barbara Hager, were only children, so it was important to them to create a tight family unit.

We grew up with a strong social conscience, instilled by our parents. Our father escaped Austria with his parents as a refugee of the Hitler era. Our mother, a New Zealander, was raised in Zanzibar, where her father was a doctor. Those experiences hugely influenced the way they both viewed the world. They both had incredibly strong beliefs about social justice, human rights and the environment. They always modelled how to behave in a kind, generous, and empathetic way. They encouraged us to ask questions, discuss important things, and notice what was going on in the world.

During our childhood, they invited people who needed respite into our house. We had unmarried mothers having babies. We had gay couples when it was still illegal. We had people who were having breakdowns. I think my parents heard about these people in need from friends of friends.

We were too young to understand too much.

The arts and culture were very important to them, and

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we were exposed to all sorts: classical music, opera, contemporary theatre, dance. We went to performances. We had a huge home library and walls filled with original art.

We girls were encouraged to go to university and experience the world without gender restrictions. Sometimes people gave our parents a hard time about the work Nicky was doing, but they backed him 100%.

Nicky is my role model. He’s always been completely clear about what needs doing, and what needs to be written about – and he’s done that calmly, ethically, and with integrity. He doesn’t only do difficult work, and stand up to people, but he’s also an amazing father, and a loving, kind person.

My first husband died when my kids were little, and the support that Nicky gave me, and gave my kids as a male role model, was extraordinary and I’m very grateful. If I need somebody to bounce ideas off, or to get my head around something, he’ll give me a really reasoned response. I can be overly emotional, such as with my recent despair over climate change, whereas Nicky is calm, reasoned, and logical.

Writing is the way I’m most comfortable expressing myself, and how I get out how I’m feeling. During a teenageangst stage, I only communicated to my parents via notes!

I'm quite shy if I don’t know people well, so I’ve found public speaking a strain.

I’m currently finishing a young-adult novel. Next up is a crime novel for adults. I’m also President of the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa Inc. We’re working on issues such as lobbying for authors’ rights regarding copyright.

My sister Debbie is a public-health educator and researcher at the University of Auckland who advocates for the disabled, and works on preventing violence against women.

My sister Belinda is a jewellery maker, who has exhibited, curated, and run Quoil gallery, and is now a qualified metal conservator. Belinda recently moved to Waikanae, which means she’s pretty close to me in Raumati.

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Nicky Hager

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My son Thom lives next door with his partner and children, aged three and seven. My daughter Rose lives 10 minutes away in Paraparaumu, so I feel honoured that they want to live near me and my husband [Brian Laird].

My sisters and I frequently get called “Nicky”. I recently spoke at an event and said “I’m the lesser-known Hager”. Afterwards someone walked up to me and said “Hi Nicky” by accident. We all joke about it. We’re in touch sporadically, but we’re all close.

We each love gardening, cooking, and family gatherings at Christmas and other times.

I feel particularly proud of Nicky when his books come out.

He’s got an unusual ability to put negative comments about him aside. Judith Collins [who was featured in his books The Hollow Men and Dirty Politics] said in public that he “needs to meet his maker”. That’s not okay.

Nicky Nicky Hager is an author and investigative journalist who has written seven books about subjects including the military, intelligence agencies, and the unseen sides of politics. He also writes occasional investigative articles in the media.

W

hen we were kids, the four of us hunted as a pack. We were a team. We were naughty sometimes. Once we ran away from home when our grandmother was babysitting us. We only made it to the back of the garden.

My siblings and I are all products of our upbringing. We had our Austrian father, Kurt, with his strong accent, and our dynamic Zanzibar-born mother, Barbara. They had a strong sense of social justice and an empathy for others. Our mother had a degree in horticulture, which was quite unusual then. While we were growing up, she spent 11 years doing extramural study and got a BA in social work. She became a family counsellor and a district councillor.

Our mother came from a line of doctors, for whom serving other people is what life is about. An old saying among her family was “You never regret your generosity” – words I think of often. Our father, having as a refugee escaped extreme danger from Hitler, spent his life showing respect and care for others.

They brought us up on Dr Seuss values like “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.

With our parents, it was probably inevitable that we’d feel different in Levin. Feeling different can be difficult as a child but I think it’s also a gift – it allows you to plot your own course.

From age 12 to 16, I went to boarding school, so became a slightly more remote member of the family for those years.

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When I was a teenager, my father asked me if I’d like to take over the family clothing factory, but I don’t think he expected a yes. It would have been obvious that my life was going in a different direction.

When people ask why I do what I do, and why I am who I am, I say, “Let me introduce me you to my three sisters’. I’m proud of them all. Debbie recently launched her report for the Human Rights Commission about the violence and abuse experienced by disabled people including tāngata whaikaha Māori [Māori people with disabilities]. Meanwhile Belinda is in Antarctica, using her metal-conservation skills to help maintain historic sites.

Mandy is brave, loving, and wise. She doesn’t always realise how special she is. She cares deeply about her family, her readers, and the ideas and issues that underpin her books. Issues don’t always make good books, but Mandy combines them with telling a good story. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as she does.

Mandy is one of my greatest supporters. When I’m attacked in public, she leaps to my defence privately and publicly. She’s fiercely loyal. It’s a great thing to have your sisters on your side.

Currently, I’m in an in-between phase book-wise, which means I’m writing some articles in the media when I’ve got interesting information. With books, I never say what my projects are in advance for two reasons. Firstly, so they don’t get hindered in some way; plus the worst thing is to boast you’ve got a piece of work coming then not manage to do it.

Yes, what I earn is minimal, but it’s a privilege to do what you want with your life. If the price of that is not earning much, then it’s trivial as long as I get by. I live in the same house I’ve been living in for 30 years. It’s very Wellington in that there are more than 150 steps. I enjoy being part of a choir and tramping. My daughter Julia, 30, lives in Wellington. We’re very close.

I get approached by a lot of people in need. Over the past few years I’ve helped some Afghan refugees – who are some of the most marginalised people on earth – come to New Zealand.

They’re now safe at last. It took a huge effort and I expect they and their families will give back to New Zealand ten-fold for being given a home.

Often people say to me “Don’t you agree that the world is doomed?” and I say, “No, that’s not fair” – because we owe it to people, particularly young people, to do our best to confront what is before us and make a better world.

I think many people try to answer the question about how they can make a difference and be useful in the world. I’d say that I, Mandy, and our sisters have been working on that question all our lives so far. We’ve tried to find ways that we can help people the most and to help with important things the most. It’s that simple.

Mandy Hager and Nicky Hager talk together at Writers Week session “A Write Powerful Challenge” (26 February) as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts 2022

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H O M E

Over the hill and on the ladder P H OTO G R A P H Y BY J OS I A H N EVA L L

Katie and Carl Rosati have found their feet in Featherston with a property dressed in the most fashionable colour of them all.

Sarah Catherall talks to the couple.

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H O M E

D

own a suburban street in Featherston, Katie and Carl Rosati’s black house sits behind a giant macrocarpa tree. Low-slung, with a sloping roof and a bright pink front door, it looks to be a stylish new build.

It’s hard to believe that the house was built in the 1970s, and cost the young, single-income couple just $350,000 when they bought it three years ago.

The couple returned from the UK nine years ago after Katie’s father became ill.

Carl, a lead designer at Catch agency, and Katie, a florist, had their daughter, Ida, who is now four, and moved around three rentals in Wellington. Like many couples, they struggled to get on the property ladder.

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C U L T U R E

Recalls Katie: “We looked at houses to buy but they were out of our budget. Wellington was really competitive. We had friends who had placed bids on something like 10 houses and missed out.”

They had friends who had moved over the hill to Featherston – single-income couples like them, who were drawn to the artsy, low-key community which still had relatively cheap property.

They fell in love with the house they eventually bought, and their daughter, Soren, now two, was born there. While the house was in a good state, they immediately painted the exterior a modern black, hiding the spots of lime green and beige popping through the old paint. Carl laughs. “The house is pretty rough around the edges. Don’t look too close. When you squint you notice things.”

It’s small, at just 90 square metres, but the living room has a high, sloping ceiling, giving

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D I R E C T O R Y

H O M E

the semblance of more space and making the room feel light and airy. Most of their furniture was from the 1970s, and it fits in perfectly. The open-plan living and dining area is the hub of the home. A pot plant sits in the corner near a sideboard and the walls are still the original soft grey hue, though the light fittings are new. They sanded and waxed the dining room table. Most items in the living area were bought from thrift shops or Trade Me. The 1970s kitchen is original and in good shape.

Off the hallway, Ida’s bedroom has a teepee in one corner and an original 1970s glass door patterned with yachts. Next door, Carl and Katie’s bedroom is simple, with a view of the garden and trees.

Soren sleeps in a cute bedroom at the back of the house which doubles as Carl’s

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office. Carl grew up in Norfolk, in the UK, where he found a passion for collecting things and foraging at car boot sales. When Katie met him in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she worked as a nanny, Carl was an artist and designer, and his hobby was collecting cameras.

A bookshelf in Soren’s room is full of Carl’s current obsessions: the Lego cars he bought and built sit in front of his collection of lime green “Fighting Fantasy’’ books.

Says Carl: “I’ve always had to collect something. It’s the surprise of looking for something you want to find. You get a little buzz when you do.”

On that note, the junk shops lining Featherston’s main street were among the things that lured him over the hill. “I also liked the fact that Featherston was a bit grungy.

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H O M E

I expect it will become a bit gentrified and when it does I’ll probably look for the next grungy town,’’ he laughs.

While the house was in good condition when they bought it, the 1000-square-metre land it sat on was another story. Carl points to the back garden, which is now alive with colour: mandarins and grapefruit hang on trees, near lemons like drops of sunshine. The back is now covered with grass, replacing rubbish, weeds, and thick bush. “It was trashed,” laughs Carl. “The back third of the property had dirt up to the height of the fence. You couldn’t get within five feet of the fence.”

They got a digger in and took months to clear it. Katie dragged a box around and filled it with rubbish. “It was like a forest in there. We were like goblins chipping away out there,’’ says Carl.

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C U L T U R E

“I found some big bones in there. There was a bone graveyard behind the garage. Twenty years ago, people would warn ‘You shouldn’t go into Brandon Street after dark’.”

Katie says: “Over the years, I think the owners buried a lot of rubbish in the ground. We found that lemon tree near the chicken hutch, but it was lost in the mess until we cleared it.’’ She describes the overgrown yard as “the opposite of an enchanted forest.”

Carl loves tinkering in the back yard. He’s building a treehouse for the children which is getting bigger. “I’m working towards a space in my head that I imagine the kids having fun and playing safely. I want to build interesting areas that stimulate them.”

Katie grew up on a sheep farm in Kimbolton, in the Manawatū, and likes the familiar sense of space

D I R E C T O R Y

for her children. Chickens run around in a pen with a hutch inside it, and she has built a flower garden behind the shed. Tulips are bursts of red and white, and Lady's Mantle blooms along the fence line.

Carl loves his home and garden. He reflects that if they hadn’t made that decision to move they’d still be renting. “I can’t fathom what it must be like trying to buy now,” he says.

There are many things they love about the Wairarapa, including the junk shops. Katie drives along the highway to her part-time job glazing for Wundaire, a ceramics studio in Greytown, and she also works as a self-employed designer and web developer from her dining room table. Says Katie: “The community is amazing, full of creatives, and we are still only an hour away from the city via train or car.”

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W E L L Y

What would Deirdre do?

A N G E L

the contribution is intended to ensure the rent is covered?

Maybe they won Lotto. Talk it out and aim for transparency on your part, as long as this feels right? Clarity may save ill-feeling in the long term. Good luck.

A DV I C E F RO M D E I R D R E TA R R A N T

SP Y C A M E R A S

P L E A SE D O N ’ T L O O K AT M E

My flatmate, who also owns our house, is planning on putting security cameras around the outside of the property.

I feel like it’s a breach of my privacy but she insists it’s for our safety. What should I do?

Private person, Brown Owl

I’m off to the beach with a bunch of friends this summer.

I’m really self-concious about my body, and the idea of getting into a pair of togs gives me the heebie jeebies.

How do I enjoy the beach while feeling like I need to be covered-up to be comfortable?

Over anxious, Kelburn This is surely something everyone has felt at some stage.

You don’t have to wear togs or swim. Get a lovely summer dress or shirt to wear at the beach. Wear whatever makes you feel great about yourself in particular and the world in general, and go to the beach. Sounds blissful. Enjoy! Don’t forget to slip! slop! slap! Find a fabulous hat, or try one of the numerous versions of cover-up togs.

B IG SP E N D E R S I help, along with one other of my four siblings, to support my parents. My partner and I pay a sum of money each month to them, which is used towards rent and other costs.

They have recently embarked on spending which I think is extravagant. How much say do I get in how they spend money?

Dutiful daughter, Lower Hutt Sounds like a family meeting time is due. Suggest a time for coffee or a family pot-luck dinner and have a general debrief on how your parents are going. Keep it general, but there should be some ground rules for you all. You do not indicate why all four of you do not contribute but certainly it would be good for you all to have a sense of the big picture, and some input into plans to help. Would it work to stipulate that

You have shared tenancy and financial input through rent, I assume. Maybe she is right? Have a talk about cameras/ alarms/monitoring details and get a good firm to advise you. Is she nervous? Talk it out from both perspectives.

Sounds like she cares, so see if you can find a way to respect both of your wishes.

FRIENDS INDEED After I started a new business and enthusiastically posted about it on my social media, one of my closest friends unfollowed me. I messaged her and she let me know it was because I only post about my business and that she’s not really interested in it. I was shocked. Am I right to feel offended?

Highly sensitive, Porirua Welcome to the real world! A bit harsh, but her call. Maybe include other stuff on your social media for balance. Your business and your friends don’t need to meet. Keep both and good luck with the work/life balance. It is a juggling act but totally worth it.

If you’ve got a burning question for Deirdre, email angel@capitalmag.co.nz with Capital Angel in the subject line.

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WĀ H I N E

S’livin the best life

BY M E LO DY T H O M AS

T

he other day I sat for a few minutes in the car doing a quiz to estimate my life expectancy. Apparently, I have a 75% chance of living til 87, and a 50% chance of making it to 95, so unless I’m statistically unlucky or the random quiz I found from a google search is not scientifically accurate, I’m likely to die between 2073 and 2081. I found this oddly reassuring.

The thing that got me pondering my mortality was the Hilma af Klint exhibition at City Gallery (it’s wonderful, and on til March 27; go see it). Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist born in 1862, who painted lovely landscapes and portraits before throwing it all in, to conduct seances with four fellow female artist pals.

Together known as “The Five”, they channelled spirit powers in order to create bold, colourful abstract works full of binary symbolism: life and death, male and female, age and youth. Her works were barely exhibited when she was alive. She was female and a medium, so was doubly not taken seriously, and in the end she stipulated that the world would not see her work until 20 years after her death. Since its reveal, af Klint’s art has been shown in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries, including the Guggenheim in New York, where it attracted the largest audience in the museum’s history. The art world continues to grapple with how her legacy complicates the previously-tidy (and mostly male) art-historical timeline, which positions Kandinsky as the pioneer of abstract art, despite the fact that af Klint started painting abstract works five years before him.

As I stood in front of af Klint’s series The Ten Largest, 10 towering paintings depicting the human life cycle, from conception to old age and, presumably, death, I decided to play a game with myself to find out which of the 10 trippy, pastel giants was “mine”.

“If you lived to 100, each of these paintings would represent a decade,” I thought, “so mine would be number three” (turns out this is not how af Klint had arranged the paintings, but still...).

132

I’m in the final years of my 30s, my eldest child is approaching 10, I’ve been with my husband for more than 15 years and known my oldest friends for more than 20. These are very big numbers, and while I know it’s ridiculous to spend even a minute of your 30s wondering if you’re fading into obscurity, I’ll admit that I’ve done it. Yet there I was, much closer to the beginning of my life cycle (as inspired by a misreading of Hilma af Klint) than I was to the end, with several decades of life stretching out in front of me.

I mentioned this to my husband, thinking he would be pleased too, but that was a mistake. One of his favourite subjects on which to wax lyrical is the relativity of time (I know, what a nerd), and the short version of his thinking is as follows: a year of a five-year-old’s life is 1/5th of their total life, whereas one year of my life is 1/36th so, relatively speaking, the former will feel longer than the latter. His point was that even though technically we might be nearer the beginning of the lifecycle, because time moves faster as we age (relatively speaking) we are actually nearer the end than it appears.

I do actually agree with all of this thinking (annoying as it is), but I also believe that our experience of time can’t hinge solely on such an inhuman calculation. What about the effect of new experiences? Years spent going from the same old job to the same old house to the same old bed are likely to blend into a great, forgettable fog, but pepper those same years with adventure and parties and ocean swims and suddenly you have a well of memories to draw on. Wouldn’t those years feel longer? Or at least, that much more full? And what about mood and vibe? You can’t tell me that half an hour in the dentist’s chair is the same as half an hour with a book at the beach. One crawls and the other flies by.

Which brings me to the fault in my logic, which has just occurred to me: if time flies when you’re having fun, then what I’m proposing (a life fully lived) is likely to hasten death’s arrival rather than delay it. But then maybe that’s okay. Maybe we are further along in the lifecycle than we would like to be, but if the picture of our lives is anything like as colourful, bold, and inspired as af Klint’s incredible panels are, then it’s hard to feel anything other than immense gratitude.

Surely what’s more important is not how long we’ve lived, but how much we lived the life we had.

C U L T U R E

Distant Kinship | Verre Verwanten

D I R E C T O R Y

Goethe on Demand

The exhibition showcases the work of 18 printmakers from Grafiekgroep Bergen in the Netherlands and the New Zealand Print Council, exploring the artistic kinship that exists between the two countries.

Supported by: Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands | New Zealand Embassy | Mainfreight.

Goethe on Demand, the streaming platform of the Goethe-Institut, presents a variety of online film programmes that can be streamed from home. All films are presented in the original language with subtitles.

They are accessible online and free of charge after registration.

27 Nov–20 Feb 12 Bruce Street, Masterton. aratoi.org.nz

Jan 2022 goethe.de/nz

Sci-Fi Sundays: Aotearoa How bizarre! Space Place presents a trilogy of Aotearoa originals screened in the stunning planetarium. Be immersed in the supernatural worlds of kiwi-made films including cult classic The Quiet Earth (1985), comedy-horror Black Sheep (2006) and alien adventure Under the Mountain (2009). Tickets include complimentary popcorn and lollies. Book online.

13, 20, 27 Feb 6pm 40 Salamanca Road, Kelburn. spaceplace.nz

Mansfield & Music

Natasha Cousens at Aratoi

Dressed to Thrill!

Did you know that as a teenager Katherine Mansfield wanted to be a professional cellist?

This exhibition explores the important role music played in Mansfield’s life and in her development as a writer, and highlights some of Wellington’s key musical figures at the turn of the 20th century.

Imbued with visual storytelling and wonder, Natasha Cousens’ exhibition draws on notions of emotion, spirituality, life and death, purposely blurring the lines between reality and the surreal. Full of symbolism, these sculptures suggest links to shared emotions and experiences whilst allowing the viewer to create stories of their own.

Hot on the heels of the Whanganui Regional Museum’s vibrant exhibition Dressed to Thrill: Fashion and Accessories from the 1870s and 1970s comes a dynamic new exhibition which turns its attention to two wildly different decades in fashion history – the 1890s and the 1990s.

14 Dec–13 Mar 25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon. katherinemansfield.com

Until 20 Feb 12 Bruce Street, Masterton. aratoi.org.nz

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Open from December 2021 1 Watt Street, Pukenamu Queens Park, Whanganui. wrm.org.nz

C A L E N D A R

January JAE HOON LEE: BRIDGE OF NOW AND HERE New work from the artist’s Tylee Cottage residency Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, until 30 January MISCHIEF MAKERS Exhibition of Māori and Pasifika contemporary art Pātaka Art + Museum, Porirua, until 6 February WAIRARAPA ART REVIEW Selected exhibition of artists living in Wairarapa Aratoi, Masterton, until 13 February DESTINATION MARS Interactive exhibit at Te Papa with games and live action Te Papa, Wellington HILMA AF KLINT: THE SECRET PAINTINGS Body of work exhibited for the first time in New Zealand City Gallery Wellington

PICNIC IN THE VINES Food and wine event with live music and games Gladstone Vineyards, Wairarapa 2 THE LITTLE MERMAID Family-friendly pantomime directed by Susan Wilson Circa Theatre, Wellington, until 15 January 6 WELLINGTON v OTAGO Super Smash cricket double-header with Wellington Blaze and Firebirds Basin Reserve, Wellington, 11am 8 PICKLE POT BE-IN Youth-operated music and arts festival Tilley Road Reserve, Paraparaumu 11 GARDENS TRAIL Free day-time arts and installation trail Wellington Botanic Garden, until 30 January

A NATURAL WOMAN Celebration of the music of Carole King Circa Theatre, Wellington, until 19 February BRIDGE PA WINE FESTIVAL Festival with tastings, food, and live music Abbey Winery and Brewery, Hastings, 10.30am JUNO CELLAR DOOR Tasting and celebration at boutique gin distillery Westown, New Plymouth, tickets online 23 DRIVE-IN MOVIE Summer cinema showing from Greater Wellington Regional Council Battle Hill Farm Forest Park, Paekākāriki, 7pm 29 WORLD WETLANDS DAY Family activities and informative talks Zealandia, Wellington, 10am

February

18 LET IT GO Songs from Disney’s Frozen in concert The Opera House, Wellington

1 LUNAR NEW YEAR FESTIVAL The Year of the Water Tiger, Chinese New Year festival Wellington, until 12 February

KEENING Major exhibition of new works by artist Jack Trolove Te Manawa, Palmerston North

20 WELLINGTON BUSINESS NETWORKING Early morning business networking event and mutual support group Urban Hub, Lambton Quay, 7.30am

3 TUATARA OPEN LATE Art talks and music performances in the gallery space City Gallery Wellington, 5pm

1 CPOTY Capital Photographer of the Year submissions open Online at capitalmag.co.nz/cpoty

22 PASIFIKA FESTIVAL Music, food, art, and performances celebrating Pacific culture Odlins Plaza, Wellington, 12 noon

5 FIRST WE EAT Food, wine, craft beer, and music festival featuring The Black Seeds Tauranga and Wharepai Domains, Tauranga

RITA ANGUS: NEW ZEALAND MODERNIST Large exhibition of paintings Te Papa, Wellington

C A L E N D A R

6 TE RĀ O WAITANGI Māori musical acts, food, and culture to celebrate Waitangi Day Waitangi Park, Wellington, 12 noon

17 THE PERFORMANCE ARCADE Festival of arts, music, and installation Wellington Waterfront, near Te Papa, until 27 February

25 BLACK CAPS v SOUTH AFRICA Second Test match Basin Reserve, Wellington, 11am, until 1 March

11 THE ART OF FUGUE The NZSO’s Baroque Series returns with Bach and Rameau Alan Gibbs Centre, Wellington College, 7.30pm

18 FRINGE FESTIVAL Popular comedy and performing arts festival in various locations Wellington

26 THE COVEN ON GREY STREET

By James Cain, directed by Cassandra Tse Circa Theatre, Wellington, 2pm

12 SLAV FEST Cultural festival celebrating Eastern Europe and the Balkans The Polish House, Newtown 11am VIOLENT FEMMES American folk-punk band come to New Zealand for first time since 2016 The Opera House, 8pm

19 THE BODY POLITIC

By Elspeth Sandys, directed

by Jane Waddell Circa Theatre, Wellington, 2pm 20 ROUND THE BAYS Mass-participation running race offering options from family walks to half marathon Jervois Quay, Wellington

WELLINGTON WINE AND FOOD FESTIVAL Local cuisines, wineries, and breweries join live musical acts Waitangi Park, Wellington, 11am

21 NEW ZEALAND FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS Music, opera, dance, visual arts, and literature festival in various locations Wellington, through March

13 ISLAND BAY FESTIVAL Entertainment, food stalls, and family activities Shorland Park, Wellington, 10am

23 MOD WELLINGTON Two-day festival with talks and workshops on human-centred design Dominion Museum Building

15 WHERE OUR SHADOWS MEET Deaf and hearing cast, performance in English and NZSL Circa Theatre, Wellington, until 19 February

24 VENUS RISING Three works from the Royal NZ Ballet: Aurum, The Autumn Ball, and Waterbaby Bagatelles Opera House, Wellington,until 26 February

ŌTAKI KITE FESTIVAL Spectacular kites from around the world flown on the beach Ōtaki beach, Kāpiti Coast, until 27 February PIPES IN THE PARK Highland-Games-style cultural event with games and Gaelic fare.

Waitangi Park, 10am 27 A RICH MAN

By Sam Brooks, directed

by Tessa Waters Circa Theatre, Wellington, 2pm

March 5 TOITŪ TE WHENUA Five artists investigate social forces shaping environment Aratoi, Masterton HURRICANES v CRUSADERS Super Rugby, third round fixture Sky Stadium, Wellington, 7pm

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1. Gateway to Rakiura/Stewart Island (5) 3. Kiwi fundraiser, sausage ______(6) 6. Board, ice, roller activity (7) 8. Upper Hutt entertainment centre (8) 10. Great day for it; a _______ (7) 12. Light or heavy, holiday essential (7) 14. Surname of People’s Sexiest Man Alive 2021 (4) 15. 90s group behind hit-single How Bizarre (3) 17. Wellington suburb that translates to landing place (9) 18. Pre-mixed alcoholic beverage (3) 20. Famous lighthouse past Wainuiomata (6,4) 24. Best played in the dark; crafty vendor (9) 28. Beach in te reo (7) 30. Oxymoronic ice block (8,4) 31. Small town known for its corrugated artwork (5) 32. NZ beach known for its TV series (4) 33. Camping; “were you born in a ____?” (4) 34. Popular east coast holiday spot (10) 35. Sleep lightly (4) 37. Biggest lake in the southern hemisphere (4,5) 38. Good on a hot day or, with corn chips (3) 39. Tasty tapioca tea (4)

2. Not close (3) 3. Where the residents of Home and Away live (6,3) 4. Van Gogh’s, The ______ Night (6) 5. Wellington's most expensive suburb (9) 6. Vitamin D generator (3) 7. NZ’s 5th to be built in Porirua (7) 9. West coast surfer’s haven (6) 11. Australian jandals (6) 13. Beach house (4) 16. Fashion atrocity or comfy classic (5) 19. Spanish island host to reality TV show, Love Island (8) 21. Predator-free island in Wellington harbour (5,5) 22. The highest visible mountain on Wellington’s city skyline (5,6) 23. End; dorsal appendage (3) 25. The title of Benee’s best-selling single (10) 26. Red and yellow wave warden (9) 27. British chip sandwich (5) 29. NZ music legend (4,6) 30. Peace treaty (5) 36. Big ball in Rotorua (4)

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Answers will be published online at capitalmag.co.nz/crossword

Martinborough Magic

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