Ernest Godward, the Invercargill bicycle dealer who out-invented his generation
He patented a hairpin that sat still, an eggbeater that did not skid across the bench, and a carburettor that ran a Philadelphia bus fleet on cheaper fuel. He won…
Category: Culture
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A leaking roof threatens New Zealand’s computer history and volunteers have just days to act
A burst of teenage high spirits on top of a shipping container has left some of New Zealand’s most important computing heritage at risk of being ruined by rainwater, and…
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The man who made faces, Harold Gillies and how a New Zealander invented modern plastic surgery
In 1917, in a hospital ward in Kent, a Dunedin-born surgeon stitched two raw edges of skin together and watched them curl into a living tube. Harold Gillies had not…
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Tommy Solomon statue on the Chatham Islands moves closer to restoration after $60,000 grant
A weathered bronze figure that has watched over the southeast coast of the Chatham Islands for four decades is a step closer to being restored, after the project to save…
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Three New Zealanders spend 100 days off the grid in Fiordland and win the country’s top adventure film award
Three New Zealanders walked into one of the wildest, wettest corners of the country, vanished from the modern world for more than three months, and came back out with one…
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Vaughan Jones, the Gisborne boy who tied physics to a knot
Born in Gisborne in 1952 and dead at 67 from an ear infection that turned, Sir Vaughan Jones is the only New Zealander ever awarded the Fields Medal, mathematics’ most…
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John Britten, the Christchurch shed and the motorcycle that frightened the factories
He had no factory, no engineering degree, no team manager, and roughly the budget of a mid-sized law firm. From a small Christchurch workshop and the garage of his own…
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Allan Wilson, the Pukekohe farm boy who built the molecular clock and found Eve in Africa
He grew up milking cows at Helvetia, south of Auckland, and ended his career as the most consequential evolutionary biologist of his generation. The Pukekohe farm boy who measured time…
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Peter Beck, the Invercargill apprentice who built a working rocket company
Born in Invercargill, Peter Beck did not go to university, was escorted off the premises of several American rocket companies in 2006, and went home and built a rocket company…
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Colin Murdoch, the Timaru pharmacist whose plastic syringe quietly saved hundreds of millions of lives
He patented the disposable plastic syringe in 1956, the tranquilliser dart in 1959, and the child-resistant medicine cap in the 1970s. He held forty-six patents, ran two factories in Timaru,…
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A Nelson exhibition is reviving the lost art of weaving with the mountain daisy
A small museum in Nelson has become the unlikely home of what is believed to be the world’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the mountain daisy, the hardy alpine plant…
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Dunedin’s beloved dinosaur slide will be saved in the 4.6 million dollar revamp of its St Kilda playground
For generations of Dunedin children, a first lesson in courage came at the top of a concrete dinosaur, peering down the long curved slide that runs from its open mouth…
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Joan Wiffen, the Hawke’s Bay woman who found New Zealand’s dinosaurs
For more than a century, New Zealand was thought to have been underwater while dinosaurs ruled the planet. A self-taught farm wife from Hawke’s Bay, working out of a rural…
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Alan MacDiarmid, the Masterton lab boy who taught plastic to conduct electricity
Born in Masterton in 1927 and dead at 79 in a Philadelphia suburb, Alan MacDiarmid was a barefoot Lower Hutt schoolboy who left high school early to mop floors in…
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What to plant in your New Zealand garden this June
Winter has arrived and the shortest day is at the end of the month. But June is still a genuinely productive month in the Kiwi garden — especially for garlic,…
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Bill Pickering, the Havelock boy who pointed America at the planets
He grew up in a sawmill town at the head of the Pelorus Sound, attended the same primary school as Rutherford, and ran NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the entire…
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Marlon Williams makes history with the first fully te reo Māori album to win Album of the Year
The 2026 Aotearoa Music Awards turned into a landmark night for the country’s music when Marlon Williams won Album of the Year for a record sung entirely in te reo…
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Sir Hirini Moko Mead, the scholar behind the Te Māori exhibition, dies aged 99
One of the towering figures of New Zealand scholarship and public life has died. Sir Hirini Moko Mead, the founding professor of Māori studies at Victoria University of Wellington and…
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Otago Museum named one of five global finalists at the Oscars of the museum world for a summer exhibition two staff mums dreamed up over coffee
A small summer exhibition dreamed up by two Dunedin mums over a coffee has carried Tūhura Otago Museum onto one of the biggest stages in the global museum sector, with…
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Bill Hamilton, the Mackenzie Country engineer who taught a boat to climb a river
Sir William Hamilton spent his life solving problems other people thought were unsolvable, from earthmoving scoops in a snowed-in high-country shed to a boat that could climb the Grand Canyon.…
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Colin McCahon, the painter who wrote on the land
He was the boy who watched a Dunedin sign-writer paint HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST on a window and decided that words on a flat surface could be a kind of magic.…
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Joel Vinsen wins 2026 Billy T Award at SkyCity Theatre as David Correos takes the Fred
Auckland comedian Joel Vinsen is the 2026 winner of the Billy T Award, taking home the prestigious Yellow Towel at a ceremony on Sunday night at SkyCity Theatre that closed…
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Dame Jools Topp of the Topp Twins dies aged 68 after living 22 years with breast cancer
Dame Jools Topp, the country singer, yodeller and comedian who made up one half of the Topp Twins, has died at her home aged 68 after living with breast cancer…
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Bob Fitzsimmons, the Timaru blacksmith who beat the world
He was freckled, balding, spindly-legged and weighed barely twelve stone. He learned to punch in his father’s forge on Stafford Street, won his first New Zealand title at seventeen, and…
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Auckland is still the City of Sails, but the home-built boats are mostly gone
For two decades after 1958, Auckland garages turned out plywood trailer sailers by the thousand. Muldoon’s 1979 Boat Tax knocked the production industry over and fibreglass killed the home-builder. The…
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Auckland may be the cradle of the Kiwi accent, researchers say after a lost 1921 Otago thesis turns up
The flat New Zealand vowel that turns “fish and chips” into “fush and chups” may have first taken shape on Auckland streets rather than in the small Otago and Canterbury…
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Katherine Mansfield, the Wellington girl who taught the modern short story how to breathe
Kathleen Beauchamp left Tinakori Road at nineteen and was dead at thirty-four. In the fifteen years between she wrote eighty-eight stories, became Virginia Woolf’s only literary rival, fought with D.H.…
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Ōtara bikelife and the talent the city is starting to make room for
Police seized three dirt bikes in Ōtara and Pakuranga Heights on Wednesday after a group of riders gathered at the intersection of Springs Road and Smales Road. One was tracked…
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Sir Āpirana Ngata, the Ngāti Porou rangatira who tried to save a people from inside the Crown
He was the first Māori to take a New Zealand university degree, the architect of the 1929 Native Land Development scheme, the editor of Ngā Mōteatea and the man who,…
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The towns New Zealand drowned to build the hydroelectric system
Old Cromwell is the famous one. Horahora is the forgotten one. New Zealand drowned a string of towns and settlements across the twentieth century to build the hydro system that…