A dog-eared pile of responses from last year’s reader survey has been sitting on the editorial desk for the past 12 months.

There was a sense of expectation as we drove down the broom-lined track towards the Manuherikia River. It was December 2001, and we hoped that exposed layers of sediment in the Bannockburn Formation ...

What would New Zealand be without kiwi? Without Fiordland rainforest, or the haunting call of kōkako? If we run down our ...

One of the rarest ecologies in the world is hiding in plain sight, in the centre of the most central suburb of the largest city in New Zealand. Of more than 5000 hectares of rock forest that once ...

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 ...

In spite of a widespread belief that their race and culture are extinct, Moriori people have survived on the Chatham Islands and are undergoing a cultural revival similar to that of their mainland ...

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 ...

“Epic” is an overused word. I’m in the heart of Mount Aspiring National Park. We’re surrounded on three sides by 400-metre cliffs, over which tumble curtains of water. Boulders the size of townhouses ...

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 ...

A rare and misunderstood octopus, the argonaut lives far out to sea, where females construct fragile shells to live in, marble-sized males woo them with severed arms, and much of their lifecycle has ...

The proposed Kermadecs Ocean Sanctuary stretches over 620,000 square kilometres of sea, pocked with small rocky islands and riddled with underwater volcanoes and deep trenches. It supports life not ...

A forest is a place of peace. We go there to soak up the stillness, the quietude. But even the most Zen of gardens is in fact a frenetic trading floor, abuzz with an exchange of commodities and ...