North & South

local, vocal bodies

COVER CREDITS Design: Jenny Nicholls Photography: Getty Images FOR THE PAST couple of months in my east Auckland neighbourhood, Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown’s youthful face has been plastered on fences, inviting residents to a public meeting on transport.By the end of February, some of the billboards had been embellished with taggers’ favoured facial features: the mono-brow and toothbrush moustache. But Brown’s timing was spot-on as Auckland commuters prepared for “March madness”, the city’s perfect storm of traffic congestion, with schools back, the university year starting and everyone bar a few malingerers home from their summer holidays. All you need is an actual storm, even a decent downpour, and gridlock is pretty much guaranteed.East Auckland is also about to experience stage one of AMETI, the friendly-sounding acronym for…

toot toot!

Ken Downie photographs Ja1271, a coal-fired steam locomotive, at Paekākāriki station. (JENNY NICHOLLS) When photographer Ken Downie came face to face with the 100-tonne, coal-fired steam locomotive that stars in our travel story (The Flyer, page 106), little did he realise he was meeting a fellow Dunedin-ite. Both Downie and locomotive Ja1271 hail from the city – one from the drowsy beachside suburb of St Clair, and the other from South Dunedin’s Hillside Railway Workshops, a few miles away. Downie was also startled to discover the symbol of a bygone era was only three years older than him: it was built in 1956.That same year, the very last steam locomotive made at Hillside, Ja1274, rolled off the production line; it’s now on display at Toitū Otago Settlers…

the old, the young and the restless

A nurse with elderly patients in a day room at the Netherne Mental Hospital in Surrey, England, 1953. (HULTON ARCHIVE, GETTY) IN DEFENCE OF STATE CARE Farming out our demented old folks to privately owned rest homes is a recent idea (Inside a Rest Home Horror Story, March). Not so long ago, our designated psychiatric hospitals would always accommodate these sufferers, but we destroyed those institutions for ideological reasons in the 1990s. An application for admission (usually by family or whoever held power of attorney) needed the signature of two medical practitioners. The police would then place the patient in the nearest Join the chat about issues of the day on our Facebook page: facebook.com/northandsouthnz. We welcome your views while keeping you up with North &…

strength in numbers

Most companies tend to focus their purchasing efforts on areas where there are large costs – which is typically around their strategic suppliers. However, every business has many low-value suppliers, where cost savings can still be achieved. Businesses often struggle to justify focusing on this diverse pool of suppliers due to the time and effort required to deal with them, even though the collective costs savings that they could achieve can be large. Our contracts provide members with cost savings across the board that all add up to make a big impact on overall operational costs.“Many businesses are resource-constrained so are unable to justify working on the tail-end spend and its perceived low-value transactions,” says Iain Livingstone, Procurement Manager at n3.That’s where the strength of n3 comes in. For…

whiz quiz

1. Waitangi’s Treaty House was originally the home of which British official? 2. Tūranga was the former name of which New Zealand town? 3. American Evelyn Berezin, who died in December last year aged 93, is known for what? 4. What line of work is a taxonomist involved in? 5. Who won the Cecil B. DeMille Award at this year’s Golden Globes? 6. Which three US states have only four letters in their names? 7. How many fingers did the monster Tyrannosaurus rex have on each of his tiny forelimbs? 8. How often does a private car need a warrant of fitness inspection? 9. The abbreviation SPQR, besides being the name of an Auckland restaurant, has a long history. What does it stand for? 10. What is that…

invitation to illustrators

Hachette NZ is delighted to launch the Margaret Mahy Illustration Prize. Mahy’s books have entertained generations of Kiwi readers and this prize offers the unique opportunity for an unpublished, New Zealand-based illustrator to illustrate her 1971 classic, The Boy with Two Shadows. The Margaret Mahy estate and Hachette NZ invite illustrators to interpret this iconic story of a witch asking a young boy to mind her shadow while she goes on holiday. Creativity is encouraged: The Boy with Two Shadows could be The Girl with Two Shadows; the setting could move to the future or to a mythical land.The winner will receive a $1000 cash prize, a $500 library of books and the opportunity for this project to be developed into a published picture book. The Margaret Mahy Illustration…