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Articles by Philippa Johnston
Pure pleasure
Visitors are welcome at Welton House, Wendy Palmer’s playful garden on the outskirts of Blenheim. In fact, a couple of thousand people a year come to admire the artful waves of sculpted corokia hedges that mimic the Richmond Ranges beyond, poke around among the cornucopia of horticultural gems that thrive here, and inspect the abundant asparagus or tomatoes in the kitchen garden. It’s all pure pleasure for Palmer.
December 2023
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My first ever...Death threat
The first threat on my life didn’t come like it does in the movies: a brick with a note tied to it thrown through my window; the family cat strangled on the doorstep, the note stuffed in its poor little mouth. I didn’t even know a threat had arrived. It was delivered to the festival that was putting on my play, The Savage Coloniser Show. The producer (also my cousin) held off telling me for a while – there was enough crazy shit going on at the time.
End of an era
We have a strange and persistent love for radio in this country, but I can’t help feeling that Kim Hill deserves some personal credit for the endurance of the medium. When I was growing up, her voice was as familiar as Saturday-morning lawnmowers, and the neighbour’s kid, grudgingly practising his trumpet. The one time I ever bagged a spot on her show, I immediately got a text from everyone I knew over the age of 40, despite not having tipped anyone off, confirming her ubiquity.
Letter from Israel
It is now 1pm, Wednesday 18 October, and I am at home, in Tel Aviv. Eleven days have passed since the 7 October attack on Israel. At least 1400 people were killed in one day, mostly civilians, and there are around 200 Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Israel has since launched its deadliest attack on Gaza so far: around 3500 Gazans have been killed, about 1000 of them children. Hamas still manages to fire rockets at Israel, mostly toward towns closer to Gaza, but some toward Tel Aviv.
Power Play
Luke Blincoe, CEO of Electric Kiwi, is an affable, cheerful sort of bloke, but when it comes to New Zealand’s electricity market, he’s not one to mince his words. In mid-September he wrote a bluntly worded email to the company’s 70,000 customers that, among other things, accused the big four electricity companies of “squeezing retail competition out by subsidising their bloated retail arms with the excess profi ts from generation”.
Listen Up
Rob Ruha, Ria Hall, Te Matatini 2023, “Kia Kino Nei Hoki” “Kia Kino Nei Hoki” is a rousing trilingual anthemic waiata sung in Māori, French and English that has been gifted to NZ Rugby. It is a powerful waiata written by award-winning artists Rob Ruha, Ria Hall, Pere Wihongi and Devin Abrams, and truly celebrates the relationship between haka, music and te reo. It was released at the beginning of August in honour and celebration of Māori Music month.
How do you solve a problem like housing?
This February, Trade Me Property sales director Gavin Lloyd reported that the median weekly rent had reached a record high of $600. Like the neverending statistics of climate-change-induced heat records, this announcement arrived with the limp splat of an overcooked spaghetti noodle. We all know the New Zealand rental market is a disaster.
Legacy and loss
In 1935, he married Mandica Banovich, and they had four children, Elsie, Ivan, George and Peter. Like many Croatian families they toiled tirelessly to own their own land. Money was hard earnt and always short. Holidays were few. Reading was frowned on. Sport was considered frivolous. Work fuelled the engine of the immigrant dream. Croatian austerity was punctuated by exuberant community get-togethers.
Perpetual motion machine
“Artist residencies” are possibly an unfamiliar career quirk to anyone not entrenched in art-world terminology. For the last dozen years, I’ve been in motion between them. Yearly, I apply to arts organisations who host artists at their facilities. The ones I am accepted into determine where I will be located for a time. It’s akin to throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Possums of the Deep
A kina opener looks like a trowel crossed with a speculum. To open the urchin, as EnviroStrat senior environmental consultant Johnny Wright demonstrated to North & South, insert the tip of the “spade” into the hole at the base of the shell and give the opener a firm whack. Squeeze the spring loaded handle to crack open the shell, then, using a spoon, scoop out the five golden-brown “roe” (actually the urchin’s gonads).
Burps & Bluster
Essentially, CO2 emissions last for a millennia or more and this means that ongoing CO2 emissions keep accumulating in the atmosphere indefinitely, heating the world more and more. Methane, however, lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade on average and is almost entirely gone from the atmosphere within about 50 years, although a small amount of warming persists for more than a century. This short lifespan means methane emissions don’t accumulate indefinitely like CO2.
The heart of the matter
Not long after, I left that place for good. It was my second attempt, almost a year to the day after my first was stymied by the pandemic. The decision to go was mine, and I went with some sadness, but I knew I needed to make that call. Like leaving a bach, it is best to leave on a sunny day than be forced out by stormy weather. During those last months, my work brought me new riches.
One small cut
My husband ended up in intensive care from a scratch on his foot, barely 2mm wide. He’s not even sure how he got it, maybe from his own toenail? He was playing with our son on reclaimed land at the end of our street; a fatherly combination of grappling, Nerf guns and medicinal plant identification. We’re not a family big on organised sport, but we love nature — long walks, ocean swims, bike rides and moss gathering.
National treasures
Because steel and iron outlast raupō and rimu, and the written word is considered to be more reliable than oral history, some rural museums become collections of old agricultural machinery in various states of decrepitude. But Pātea, the town in South Taranaki where the eponymous river reaches the sea, has a treasure trove of artefacts that may reach all the way back to Hawaiki.
October 2023
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A Boy Named Sophie
When Sophie Ottaway was a teenager she often had to go to the doctor. She knew that she had been born with medical complications, that her ovaries were damaged and had been removed, and from the age of 11 she had to take hormones. But when she was 22, she went for a routine appointment for tonsillitis. Sophie hated medical appointments, so her mother always liked to accompany her on visits to the doctor. On this occasion her regular GP was on holiday and she saw a locum.
September 2023
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Guilt, Part 2: The robberies and the outcast
However, she goes on to tell me about a man she dated for nine months, and his bizarre disappearance on the night of Voudouris’s murder. “I had just gone upstairs to put my kids to bed and say good night. And when I came back down he was gone. He’d just vanished. I didn’t hear a door open or anything. It freaked me out.” Having searched every nook and cranny of her home, Fiona locked her doors and tried to call him only to find his phone had been turned off.
August 2023
If you want to get in touch with us, please send an email to info@northandsouth.co.nz
The art collector, the singer & the silence
Despite James Wallace being found guilty of indecent or sexual assault against myself and two other men, I still hear claims that his “minor indiscretions” should be shrugged off. That we can let this stuff slide, since he’s given so much money to artists and arts organisations over the years. I’ve also heard the view, often from the upper echelons of the arts world, that “we knew what we were in for” when we chose to meet with James Wallace. And I suppose that therefore, we deserved what we got.
Solar eclipse: Our renewable power struggle
While the solar boom may be good news for the country’s pursuit of decarbonisation, there are downsides. The footprint of a solar farm is much denser than the likes of a wind farm. While a 400MW wind farm may require about 100 wind turbines over 2000 hectares or so, a solar farm with the equivalent capacity will require covering about 60 hectares entirely in solar panels (based on SEANZ’s estimate of a solar farm requiring one hectare per 1.5MW).
Still not knowable
Do you enter the studio each day with a strong idea of what you’re going to make? The way I work with clay is iterative, so a mark in one work feeds the next, pulling that mark out or exploring it further. You can tell the works belong with each other through a shared tone, a series of gestures, or a colour palette, because they’re all getting fired through the same firing group and tend to have the same variations. There’s not really anything else I can predetermine beyond that.
Horsing around
“That was a special day,” she recalls, swirling her wheelchair through collections of horse- motif fireguards, an antique wagon wheel coffee table and pictures of horses jumping and prancing. A particularly fetching black-and- white print is of Stephen urging a team of 20 Clydesdales through a fast-flowing South Island high-country river, hauling a wagon stacked high with hay.
The Last Rider
“Tell me you’re American without telling me you’re American.” On TikTok, an American answers the challenge by pumping his fist and gently chanting, “We the best,” tears welling in his bloodshot eyes. The joke skewers the paradox of America’s self- mythology: America the conqueror versus America the underdog. The Last Rider, a new documentary about the first American cyclist to win the Tour de France, stumbles on this dichotomy. How to evoke an underdog spirit within the story of a lifelong winner?
Kicking on
Born and growing up in West Auckland, to a Samoan mother and Dutch father, Sarai Bareman quickly recognised that women’s football came second to the men’s game. Playing for Waitākere City, Sarai and her teammates wore uniforms passed down from the men’s team, and got changed in men’s changing rooms equipped with urinals. After a stint in the Samoa women’s national football team, Bareman became a football administrator, and has risen to become the most prominent female official in the world.
The Flames of Our Shame
In the days and weeks since the Loafers Lodge fire, which killed five residents of a central Wellington boarding house, the blackened soot marks on the building’s facade have – in some eyes – come to symbolise a much wider disfigurement.
Bone Hunters: The ancient lake revealing New Zealand’s mysterious past
Then there’s the mammal. In the early 2000s, Tennyson and the team found three tiny bones that didn’t look like birds, lizards or fish. The bones included two jaw bones and part of a femur, all only about half a centimetre long. They were sent to fossil vertebrate expert Mike Archer and bat expert Suzanne Hand, both from the University of New South Wales (New Zealand doesn’t have many mammal fossil experts, for obvious reasons).
July 2023
Paul Little writes his final North & South book review and bids us farewell, Colin Hogg talks to author Emily Perkins about her new novel, and Peter Bale interviews an author who knows all about the tricky China tightrope.
Murder in Paeroa
It was a cold winter’s morning, 18 June 2012, in Paeroa, when Tatiana stood and saw her beloved boss and pizza shop owner lying dead, crumpled against a chain-link fence, in a pool of blood, behind his iconic Mykonos Pizza. Murdered in cold blood by a single round from a .22 calibre rifle. “He was bright, bubbly, he always had a yarn to tell people.
Exploring the edge
Arriving at Esalen with all this cult baggage on my mind doesn’t lessen the appeal of the place though. Although fringe by mainstream standards, the current programme and biweekly “Voices of Esalen” podcast leans more towards social justice, diversity and progressive thinking than crystal-waving woo- woo. The organisation has a female CEO now, and women in senior leadership roles.
Follow Her Home
The penny drops, so to speak, four years later. My sister comes home fizzing from book club and holds an opened hardback to my face, jabbing her finger to the black-and-white photo inside. The book is 1972’s Moko – a work on traditionally-tattooed kuia by historian Michael King and photographer Marti Friedlander. The image shows a white-haired woman with a tartan blanket on her lap and a moko kauae on her lips and chin, a kind-eyed man in a hat and a young boy.
The Grapevine
John Hancock, of Hancock and Sons, who we caught up with last July in the Grapevine column, is now semi-retired. A small vineyard he knows well in Puketapu, another area hard hit, was washed away. “The Tutaekuri [River] ran right through there. There’s only nine strainer posts left. A hundred empty barrels are gone somewhere, scattered in paddocks all the way to the Pacific I guess.” I Shed 530, the restaurant venue there, is open again and Hancock is typically pragmatic. “I was there yesterday.
June 2023
Mere and Siulolovao, Otago Peninsula by Robin White, Screenprint, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Purchased 2004 Mere and Monty Robin White’s Mere and Siulolovao is a national favourite, and the story behind it only adds to its appeal. By Thomas McLean
The Awkwardness of AUKUS
AUKUS is only part of what is going on as the security focuses of our friends change. Australia is also buying hundreds of cruise missiles and investing in technologies with long-range strike capabilities. They are also concluding or upgrading defence agreements with Japan and South Korea and have started to prepare to host up to six United States Air Force B52 bombers in Darwin. Their long-standing cooperation with the New Zealand military has recently been boosted.
Help for Kelp
First, spore has to be collected from kelp growing in the wild. Divers don their wetsuits, masks and tanks, and head to the base of the kelp. Just above the holdfast, blades about a forearm long and a couple of fi ngers wide, cluster on the stems. These produce male and female spores, which are held in dark raised ridges. The divers collect these, and take them to a specialised laboratory and nursery set up at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in Wellington.
Profile: Fasitua Amosa
In the final two weeks of June, the Duke of Albany will find himself surrounded each night by a cast of awful, greedy and power-hungry characters who will do anything for control and wealth. Daughters betray their father, brothers scheme against brothers, and an old man is pushed first to insanity and then to wander a heath in a storm. On the stage of Auckland’s ASB Waterfront Theatre, Shakespeare’s ultimate tragedy King Lear will unfold night after night.
Homeward Bound
In a sacred resting place at Te Papa Tongarewa, hundreds of Moriori ancestral remains are waiting to make their final journey back home to Rēkohu, the main island in the windswept Chatham Islands group some 800 kilometres east of New Zealand.
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