Scout

Well, we all survived another winter without going to Tuscany. Yay us! Who needs hilltop towns and 16th-century churches anyway? Personally, I found New Zealand had more than enough to offer over the colder months. Since our last issue, I’ve snuck in minibreaks to the Far North (twice), Hawke’s Bay, Waiheke Island and the Kapiti Coast, and even dusted off my passport for a week in Rarotonga. I do love a roaring fire in a rustic cottage but you can’t beat swimming in the sea when it’s 25 degrees outside. My heart, however, belongs to our cover star, Ōamaru. I’m a Mainlander by birth, so I get more and more feels the further south I go, but this little east coast town punches way above its weight when it comes to…

As with many an Aotearoa gem, if you fail to take a crucial turn as you swoop into Ōamaru, an hour and a half north of Dunedin, you’ll miss the staggering genius of this stunning east coast Otago town. So stop. Do a U-turn. Head straight back down Thames Street, and a wonderful world awaits: an untouched historic quarter, a steampunk museum, an apothecary, a craft brewery, another craft brewery, gorgeous galleries and, to top it all off, the Pacific Ocean. I could go on – and indeed I will. But first, the history. You can get this yourself at the charming Whitestone City museum on Harbour Street, housed in one of the glorious white stone buildings that make up the Victorian area. Yes, I too thought everything was named after Whitestone…

Before Covid, some years I’d spend more of my time overseas than I would in Wellington – in the last few years I’ve worked in Israel, Italy, Romania, London, New York and Los Angeles, as well as attending the Toronto International Film Festival each year. Thanks to Covid, this is probably the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place. But being home has actually been great because Wellington is so beautiful and because the last year has been a fruitful one for us. My husband [writer Stuart McKenzie] and I wrote a play, Transmission, about our government’s response to the pandemic, which recently played at Bats Theatre. I’ve also been able to do a lot of acting coaching from home, which sometimes means getting up in the middle of the night,…

I wake to the sound of a howling gale and rain hitting the window and look at my watch. It is 6am Chatham Islands time – or 5.15am back in “New Zealand”, as the locals here call it. I don’t want to get out of my sleeping bag nor leave the Department of Conservation hut we’re staying in. Being more than 600km from the mainland, I know how exposed the island is to wind from any direction – not to mention how grim fishing can get when things get rough offshore. But fishing is what I’m here to do, so I quickly get dressed for what’s going to be a tough day out. The ocean looks wild as we stand on the end of the wharf in Owenga watching Delwyn Tuanui…

My family are from Rotorua – the grandparents started up a department store there, Mathias Drapery, and I spent my Auckland childhood visiting the cousins every year, mostly at Christmas. I remember the mellifluous waiata, I remember the sulphur smell, I remember the rēwena (potato bread). Later, I filmed an episode on Rotorua for Taste NZ and discovered Māori cooking with master weaver Emily Schuster. I learned how to make fry bread, oven hāngī, boil-up with kūmara dumplings and hot pool-steamed kamokamo (squash) and freshwater kūura (crayfish). It was Emily who explained the importance of whakapapa – if you don’t know where you come from, you can’t know who you are. But I digress, and that is a tendency of mine. Photographer Sally Tagg and I hopped into the rental car and…

When Scout invited Whangārei artist Olivia Garelja to create an artwork for this issue, she knew straight away which New Zealand landscape she wanted to paint: Taratara Mountain in the Far North “Since the age of five, I used this maunga as a marker of distance – it’s roughly 90 minutes from seeing my grandparents in Kaimaumau, East Beach. I have felt spiritually drawn to this beautiful gem of the north forever,” she says. Olivia has always been creative, honing her artistic skills on colouring books in the early 1990s. “My mum soon realised she had a perfectionist on her hands at age four when her attempts to fix the slight mistakes with twink weren’t good enough, as the white of the paper was always different,” she says, laughing. “My style over…