This coastal walk is arguably one of the best overnight tramps in the Waitakere Ranges, the densely forested hills on Auckland’s northwestern flank. It’s a tramp through subtropical forest to a ...

Growing up in the eastern Hutt Valley, before PlayStation, TV and stranger danger, my brother John and I would be given a jam sandwich after school and sent out to play. Often we were never heard of ...

Feijoas have become a New Zealand emblem. So how did they end up in Aotearoa, and how did we end up adoring them—to the point of obsession, for some—when feijoas have not really caught on anywhere ...

A resonant whoosh of air and water blasts skywards as a Bryde’s (pronounced “broode­rs”) whale surfaces 60 metres in front of us. The twin blowholes on the top of its head are clearly visible. The ...

Pumice and ash, scoria and grit-the harsh layers of pulverised volcanic refuse that form Rangipo Dessert east of Mount Ruapehu-may offer little succour to plants, but from such unpromising materials ...

In the last century illegal whisky production in Southland’s Hokonui Hills was a subject of police investigations. Today that shady past is a cause for celebration. The legend of Hokonui leads back to ...

Some 130 years after Jakob Lauper and John Whitcombe made the first nightmarish traverse from Canterbury’s Rakaia River to the West Coast via Whitcombe Pass, a pair of New Zealand adventurers revisits ...

More than technical prowess, the photographs that were short-listed in each category share an original perspective—a insight into the fabric of our country and society that tells us something new ...

In days of old, the night forests of New Zealand echoed to the screeching “laugh” of an owl twice the size of a morepork, which preyed on any creature smaller than itself. Although the laughing owl ...

In 1767, the year that Endeavour put to sea, Banks was 25 years old. He had inherited a considerable fortune, the estate of his father who had passed away in 1761, and had grown used to indulging his ...

The migration of Oceania’s humpback whales, and their final destination in Antarctica, has remained shrouded in mystery. This year, a team of scientists travelled north to intercept and track the ...

This tiny octopus campbelli, meas­uring barely a centimetre round, was found clinging to a kelp holdfast on Berghan Point at the fringe of Doubtless Bay, Northland. For the carnivorous octopus—as well ...