Two of the best known women in New Zealand music and broadcasting have marked forty years of friendship in the most permanent way available to them. Dame Hinewehi Mohi and…
She was thirty-eight years old, single, broke, refusing to do war work, and painting a brown-skinned blonde-haired goddess on a wooden chair facing the Tasman Sea. The Manpower Committee fined…
He had no degree in physiology, no laboratory and no gold-medal running career of his own. From a state house in Mt Roskill, with a clipboard and a stopwatch and…
Born in Te Awamutu in 1958, Neil Finn left school at 18 to fly to London and join his older brother’s band. By 27 he had written one of the…
Jack Lovelock won New Zealand’s first Olympic athletics gold in the 1936 Berlin 1500m, in a world-record 3:47.8 he called an artistic creation. He was 39 when he fell under…
In 2003 two brothers from a lifestyle block outside Cambridge boarded a plane to Hong Kong with a $20,000 loan from their parents and no language, no contacts and no…
A portrait of a Te Arawa chief that vanished from public view for more than a century has become the centre of a very public argument about whether it is…
In 1934 two young Auckland brothers-in-law-to-be went into business with their fathers, £40 in cash, a bank loan secured against a second-hand De Soto, and a consignment of American Crosley…
A Māori word for the duty to care for the natural world has been named the most beautiful word on the planet. The language-learning company Babbel gave the honour to…
He grew up in a lighthouse on the Marlborough coast, watched the sea move for a year and decided that motion itself could be a kind of art. By the…
Sir Sam Neill, the actor who carried New Zealand stories to the world for close to half a century, has died aged 78. His family said he died on Monday…
From a Kent Terrace motorcycle shop to a 109-mph speedboat and a 450-vehicle museum at Otaihanga, the long, practical life of Sir Leonard Bingley Southward is one of the great…
In December 1952 a 28-year-old patient at Seacliff Mental Hospital, north of Dunedin, was a few days from a prefrontal lobotomy when news arrived that her first book had won…
More than four decades after a Taranaki club recorded it on a shoestring, Poi E has been voted the most beloved homegrown song in the country. The Pātea Māori Club…
James Fletcher came off the SS Ulimaroa at Port Chalmers in October 1908 with twelve pounds in his pocket and a knee that did not bend. By the time he…
A young woman who started out washing dishes in a Takapuna restaurant has been named the best wine waiter in Britain. Emma Denney, 33, who grew up on Auckland’s North…
She left a Dunedin studio at thirty-one, taught at the most fashionable art school in Paris, ran out of money in Cornwall, designed dress fabrics in a Manchester mill to…
New Zealanders head into a long weekend on Friday for Matariki, the Māori New Year, and the celebrations stretch from a Northland forest strung with fairy lights to a dawn…
Richard Izard failed at almost everything until he was 44. Then he turned a Wellsford shed into the world’s biggest tungsten-carbide saw-blade factory, supplying as much as 40 percent of…
Anyone who has ever winced while a phone confidently mangled the name of their home town has a reason to smile this week. Google Maps has switched on a new…
The usual story says missionaries civilised Māori. The truth is the reverse. Freed captives spread Christianity and chiefs released their slaves before British law ever intervened.
Glenn Martin built a working personal flying machine in a Redcliffs garage over thirty years, mortgaging the family house three times to do it. The Martin Aircraft Company that grew…
New Zealand has its first Michelin stars. The famous restaurant guide arrived in the country for the first time on Tuesday night, handing out stars to 15 restaurants stretching from…
July is midwinter in Aotearoa. The garden looks dormant, but the patient gardeners are planting bare-root trees, pruning roses and getting the first summer vegetable seeds started indoors.
Twelve years before a Japanese chemist demonstrated soluble coffee at the Buffalo World’s Fair, and nineteen years before an American businessman put it in a tin and sold it to…
Pacific-owned restaurants and a clutch of South Auckland eateries have won places on this year’s Iconic Auckland Eats list, the annual celebration of the 100 dishes that locals say define…
Born in Wellington in 1924 and dead in Cleveland in 2006, Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes performed New Zealand’s first open-heart operation at Green Lane Hospital in 1958, pioneered the human cadaveric…
He was a reluctant dairy farmer, an inveterate tinkerer, and the eldest of six children on a Waikato family farm. From a shed at Horsham Downs in the late 1930s,…
He arrived at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead on the day Britain declared war and spent the next twenty years rebuilding the faces and hands of young men…
One of New Zealand’s most photographed buildings is back in view. The scaffolding that has wrapped the historic Bath House at Rotorua Museum for nearly two years has begun coming…