Sir Hekenukumai Puhipi: The bridge builder
Sir Hek Busby spent a lifetime building bridges – over rivers, between peoples, and across the mighty Pacific Ocean.
Read more
New Zealand
One man’s war: A Hokianga soldier remembers
Bill Guest only left North Hokianga once and reckons it was only luck that brought him back alive. The 96-year-old veteran shares some of the horror, and humour, of World War II.
Read more
Kiwi couple’s answer to the housing crisis: A tiny house on a trailer
Rangimārie Mules and Jared Hiakita didn’t want to start their life together shackled to a giant mortgage. Their solution was a tiny house on a trailer.
Read more
Walking New Zealand’s Hokianga Coastal Track
Three days of wildly beautiful coastline — and chances are you won’t have to share it with anyone.
Read more
Stairway to heaven
In the bush west of Kerikeri, a small town in northern New Zealand, a Korean spiritual leader says he is building a global headquarters for an organisation of 100 million members.
Read more
Waitangi Day in pictures
A selection of my favourite images from Waitangi Day, the anniversary of the signing of New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, taken since 2010.
Read more
Best photos of 2018
From a new Prime Minister’s visit to a tearful whale stranding and a mass haka in the rain, these are a few of my favourite news photos of 2018.
Read more
Brother’s bones home at last
In 1976 Paul Thomas promised his mother he would bring his brother’s remains home. In 2018 he finally succeeded.
Read more
The far-reaching wake of the waka
What makes a group of Dutch students so passionate about Māori culture that they travel halfway around the world each year to take part in Waitangi Day festivities?
Read more
The highwaymen of Hokianga
Once a year the Wild West saddles up and rides into Waimamaku for a day of highway robbery.
Read more
Godson to the Queen
The fascinating and little-known tale of how Queen Victoria came to have a Māori godson.
Read more
Hundertwasser in Holland: ‘Your loss is our gain’
How a ‘New Zealand monument’ designed by eccentric Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser ended up being built in Holland instead.
Read more
Te Paki: New Zealand’s top hike
Could the Te Paki Coastal Track around New Zealand’s northern tip qualify as a Great Walk? I decided to brave the mosquitoes to find out.
Read more
Against the odds: Surviving the Burma railroad
Seventy-five years after being conscripted into the Dutch East Army during World War II, a Northland man’s service – and his ordeal on the notorious Burma railroad – has finally been recognised.
Read more
Peace at last for shipwreck’s ‘hungry ghosts’
A Northland woman’s quest to discover the truth behind a century-year-old maritime tragedy has brought two peoples together – and brought peace to hundreds of “hungry ghosts”.
Read more
Where the sun rises
Travelling around East Cape in search of the easternmost pub in New Zealand – by bicycle.
Read more
An everlasting link
A traditional carved canoe has created a new bond between New Zealand and the Netherlands, two seafaring nations with a shared history going back almost 400 years.
Read more
In a corner of a foreign field
The author stumbles on something strangely familiar in an obscure corner of the former Soviet Union.
Read more
Journey to the end of the map
I’ve never been able to resist places at the end of the map. Show me a dead-end road, a peninsula or a cape, and I’ll show you somewhere alluring and mysterious.
Read more