Five flatmates who shared a rented house in Upper Riccarton, Christchurch, have been awarded $2500 by the Tenancy Tribunal after the property owner’s mother repeatedly let herself into their home…
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…
A New Zealand mother has gone to the High Court to try to free her autistic son, who has now spent 21 years locked in secure care after he was…
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…
Plenty of New Zealanders are already leaning on artificial intelligence to get through their working day. They just do not want their boss, or their workmates, to know about it.…
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…
A small radio tracker that fits on a beaded necklace or a wristband is quietly helping New Zealand families keep their most vulnerable loved ones safe, and demand for it…
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…
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…
From today, water in the Wellington region is delivered by a new organisation, and for the first time in living memory households will pay for it on a bill of…
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…
Shoppers across Auckland are being warned to keep their wallets shut when approached by people dressed as Buddhist monks who hand over a bracelet and then press for cash, after…
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…
Glass pipes designed for smoking methamphetamine are still being sold openly across the counter in Northland shops, more than five years after a national ban was supposed to take them…
New Zealand homes are noticeably warmer than they were two decades ago, but the rooms people sleep in are still running cold, according to a major new study of how…
For one winter month, the quietest patch of central Christchurch is about to get a lot busier. A real ice rink opens in Cathedral Square on Saturday, giving the city…
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…
On a hill country station in northern Wairarapa, raw fleece comes off the sheep, gets washed, carded, spun and dyed, and ends up as finished yarn without ever leaving the…
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…
Every second week a small bus pulls up outside a North Shore rest home and unloads its noisiest, most unpredictable visitors. A group of preschoolers from a nearby early learning…
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…
New Zealanders have delivered a resounding vote of confidence in their local libraries, with a major new survey finding the country’s public libraries are doing far more than lending books.…
Young New Zealanders are drinking and driving far less than they used to, with new Ministry of Justice figures showing the biggest falls in drink driving convictions are concentrated among…
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…
The SPCA wants the government to bring in dog breeder licensing, arguing that almost anyone in New Zealand can churn out puppies for sale with no oversight and no limit…
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…
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…
A simple change at Auckland Council’s dog shelters is quietly sending more pets home and reducing the number being put down. Since April the council has let owners pay their…
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…