At Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora, Joe Harrison documents an era of change and uncertainty. The mist hangs low over Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora, a body of water that’s not really a lake, nor a lagoon, but floats somewhere between the two. Reeds and wading birds puncture the dense bottle-green of the water, rich, fragile ecosystems swirling in […]

Six years and one month to the day after landing at Paihia in the Bay of Islands William Colenso finished a rush job. He was a printer, and in the early evening of January 30, 1840, he completed the last of a hundred invitations asking Northland chiefs to come to Mr and Mrs Busby’s house the next week to meet the “chief of the Queen”, who had arrived from Sydney to be “a governor for ...

Life in the subantarctic is difficult enough for those who arrive prepared. In 1864, castaways from two storm-wrecked ships, the Grafton and the Invercauld, landed on opposite ends of Auckland Island. Survival became a daily challenge. Each group tackled it differently: one fell to violence and cannibalism, while the other became a close-knit brotherhood.

Laura Ryan was studying the visual systems of fish when a spate of shark attacks at her favourite Perth surf spot got her thinking—why do these apex predators confuse tasteless humans with delicious seals? Great whites are by far the deadliest shark species to humans, though fatal attacks are extremely rare—there are only 59 recorded deaths in history, and we frequently …

Te Rōpū o te Matakite: the seers, the ones with foresight. That’s the name of the group that revered leader Dame Whina Cooper led on a 1000-kilometre march from the Far North to Wellington in 1975, protesting against more than a century of colonial laws designed to alienate Māori from their land. On the estuarine […]

In a land renowned for its unusual birds, the kākāpō—a giant flightless nocturnal parrot with a bizarre breeding system—has to be one of the strangest. Although it has been lingering perilously close to extinction for the past half century, there is renewed hope that this icon of conservation effort has a future after all. For […]

The Nelson area is one of New Zealand’s richest for minerals. Here, obsessives comb rivers for unusual and precious rocks. Yet despite these people’s shared passion, friction abounds within the community, raising questions: who owns the precious stones that tumble down rivers in the public estate? Can anyone take them? And, if so, can they sell them? Should they?

This summer will be remembered by many for the large numbers of stinging bluebottles (Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish) that appeared in the surf and on the shores of many New Zealand beaches. At the height of the Christmas–New Year holiday break the media ran hot with stories of swarms of abnormally large bluebottles. Reports came from as far south as Otago, …

Sea-level rise doesn’t affect coasts equally—one bay may be drowned while the beach next door remains the same as ever. Predicting sea-level rise needs to take into account tectonic movement of the land, prevailing winds, coastal erosion and Arctic meltwater. Now, the first-ever detailed map of New Zealand’s coastlines shows what may happen.

Preserved beneath three kilometres of frigid saltwater and up to five metres of floating sea ice, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary ship “looks like it sank yesterday”, says Nico Vincent, an expert in ultra-deep-sea salvage who helped produce this remarkable new mosaic image. Vincent was part of the Endurance22 team that discovered the wreck in 2022. This image, as well as a series of …