Samoan Kiwi tenor Pene Pati has been made a knight of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, joining Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Sir Peter Jackson as one…
On 29 May 1953, a 33-year-old Auckland beekeeper and a Sherpa from Khumbu became the first humans confirmed to have stood on the summit of Mount Everest. The climb made…
The Māori Queen, Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po, met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on Thursday in her first audience with the British monarch since…
Wellington writer Ingrid Horrocks has won New Zealand’s richest literary prize with a debut short story collection, taking home the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham…
In July 1893 a 270-metre roll of paper bearing nearly 32,000 women’s names was unspooled along the floor of the New Zealand House of Representatives. The woman who had glued…
One of only seven warrior cloaks of its type known to survive anywhere in the world has come home, after spending decades in storage on the other side of the…
Plans to build a new wharewaka in Tākaka for the ancient Anaweka waka, described as one of Aotearoa’s most significant archaeological finds, are heading to public consultation after the Tasman…
Born in a Nelson village in 1871 and dead at 66 from a neglected hernia, Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus, was the first person to deliberately split an atom,…
Aotearoa likes to tell itself that it has the cleanest founding story of any settler nation. There was no Trail of Tears here. There were no slave plantations. The Treaty…
Few peoples on earth have an origin story as well attested, as recently dated, and as scientifically dramatic as Māori. The ancestors of every Māori living today crossed thousands of…
Born on a butcher’s block in Pongaroa in 1916, Maurice Wilkins helped enrich the uranium that levelled Hiroshima, took the first sharp X-ray photographs of crystalline DNA, shared the 1962…
Christchurch astrophotographer Tom Rae has won the Capture the Atlas Milky Way Photographer of the Year competition for the third time, this time with a long, cold night above Lake…
A deep-dive profile of Nancy Wake — the Wellington-born journalist who became the most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War, an SOE agent in occupied France, and one of…
A deep-dive profile of Jean Batten, the Rotorua-born aviator who broke a string of solo flying records in the 1930s, became the most famous New Zealander in the world, and…
A deep-dive profile of Bruce McLaren, the limping Auckland boy who became the youngest Formula One winner in history at twenty-two, founded a racing team in his mid-twenties, and was…
A deep-dive profile of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, the New Zealander from Thames who ran the air defence of London in 1940 and the air defence of Malta…
A profile of Roy Kerr, the New Zealand mathematician who in 1963 wrote down the equation describing every spinning black hole in the observable universe — and who is still…
A deep-dive profile of Beatrice Hill Tinsley, the New Plymouth schoolgirl who founded the modern field of galactic evolution, became Yale’s first woman professor of astronomy, and died at forty…
Autumn is deepening and the soil is cooling, but May is still one of the busiest months in the Kiwi garden. Here’s what to get in the ground this month…
A deep-dive profile of Charles Upham, the Canterbury sheep farmer who became the only fighting soldier ever to win the Victoria Cross twice.
A deep dive into one of aviation’s most stubborn debates. Some nine months before Kitty Hawk, a reclusive South Canterbury farmer named Richard Pearse pushed a bamboo-and-canvas contraption onto a…
The day after Anzac Day is often a quieter moment of reflection, but the commemorations that have just passed carry a story that stretches far beyond Gallipoli. For the medieval…
Eight-year-old Maia Carran pressed the bugle to her lips at the Otautau ANZAC Day service on Saturday morning and did something no one in her family had managed before —…
Wellington’s Pukeahu National War Memorial carillon tower will ring for the first time in well over a decade on ANZAC Day, bringing back a sound that has been missing from…
They have been mobbed by fans at American gaming conventions, recognised on the streets of cities they had never visited before, and they have racked up more than five billion…
In the winter of 1977, a van carrying six maximum-security prisoners wound through Auckland’s streets towards the University of Auckland’s Maidment Theatre. The men inside — among them a drug…
Autumn is secretly one of the best months for Kiwi gardeners. Here’s what to get in the ground this April — from winter greens to sweet peas — and which…
Marlon Williams has emerged as the standout name among the finalists for this year’s Aotearoa Music Awards, earning seven nominations across major categories for his first fully te reo Māori…
We invented the microscope and found an entire world below us. We never invented the reverse. What if there is a level of organisation above us that we cannot perceive,…
If a shark can sense electric fields we cannot detect, and dark matter makes up 27% of the universe yet remains invisible to every instrument we have, what else is…