North & South

Kia ora koutou, If the power hadn’t gone out one midwinter’s evening in Peta Carey’s home, she probably would have passed on attending a meeting in nearby Queenstown. As Peta (pictured here on Tamatea/Dusky Sound) explains in our cover story, “Not If, But When”, the decision to spend the evening at a talk about earthquakes led her to a deep exploration of the Alpine Fault and our preparedness for a big, dramatic quake known as AF8. While the science says the South Island will be most affected — the West Coast in particular — the ramifications will be nationwide. The North Island power transmission grid depends on the South Island supply, so there is every chance there will be power outages for us all. Are we ready? Are you ready? I’m no…

Watching “The Commos” It was great to read Nicola Saker’s article about her father and the 1950s “Vegetable Club” (North & South, May). I have a ‘work in progress’ about surveillance of the left in Aotearoa so I already knew about the Vegetable Club, but not about Dr Saker and his earlier “subversive” writings. Nicola is right, Special Branch and its SIS successor put a mammoth effort into spying on individuals and monitoring the organisations and social groups they were part of. Their “targets” included many remarkable New Zealanders. For example, Dr John Beaglehole is remembered today as one of our most eminent scholars. However, he was also a staunch civil libertarian who believed in the right of free speech for everyone including communists. Beaglehole’s son and biographer, Timothy, deposited his father’s declassified…

Meet award-winning multimedia journalist Charles Anderson (left) and interactive developer Allan Walker, childhood friends and now, the creative partnership behind Vanishing Point, an interactive storytelling studio based at the top of the South Island. Their work has won both local (a slew of Voyager awards) and international recognition — Vanishing Point was placed alongside Vanity Fair, CNN and Fortune at last year’s Webby Awards (aka the Oscars of the internet). For their first, and we hope not last, collaboration with North & South, Charles and Allan worked closely with writer Peta Carey and a crew of digital, photographic and design specialists to create our cover story, which begins on page 24. “Travelling the length of the Alpine Fault gives you a huge appreciation for the geological power that birthed our awesome landscapes,”…

The amount of stuff in the yard could feel oppressively apocalyptic, if it wasn’t for the staff. Some are dressed extravagantly in frilled retro dresses, showing off stock to customers. One man, in an orange high-vis vest, smiles at two friends folding and unfolding a steel tube chair as its left armrest hangs loose. He assures them it’s an easy repair — “I’ll give it to you for a fiver.” Welcome to Wanaka Wastebusters, a trading post for unwanted, unneeded things ready for second lives. It’s a mecca for scavengers with a keen eye for an unexpected bargain. The path to the warehouse is bordered by old fridges, and at its door a sign advises you can fill a bag with clothes for $5 — including shoes. Outside in the yard,…

William Peterson kept a loaded gun in the corner of the schoolroom where he taught. A man who wore many hats, he was known as “The Dom” and worked as a teacher, preacher and postmaster on Rakiura Stewart Island in the late 1800s. He was also imbued with the authority to shoot the legs of runaway sailors. You will find Peterson’s story at Te Puka o Te Waka, also known as the Rakiura Museum, which has recently been upgraded into an award-winning new building about twice the size of its previous premises. “We’ve timed ourselves,” says trustee Margaret Hopkins. “If you do everything, watch everything, you can spend two and a half hours here.” The museum’s publicly accessible taonga — more than 1000 pieces — is contained in a single large room,…

One day in 1908 Alf and Elizabeth French opened the door of their Ponsonby home to a small man in his mid-30s who was looking for lodgings. That man, future prime minister Michael Joseph Savage, would end up living under their roof for 30 years. The arrangement wasn’t completely out of the ordinary for the time, but it was somewhat unusual. The Auckland Star, in a profile shortly after the 1935 election in which Savage led the Labour Party to victory, noted of him: “He is a bachelor — one of the few in Parliament.” In 1999, Savage was declared the “Man of the Twentieth Century” by the New Zealand Herald, but there are virtually no biographies of him: Barry Gustafson’s From the Cradle to the Grave: A Biography of Michael…