Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 50, 2025 i New Zealand Listener

Inauspiciously, the first thing I wrote for this magazine was a political column, at a time when there was pretty much no politics. It was 1996, after our first MMP election, and for nine weeks the ship of state was, if not rudderless, devoid of politicians. Labour and National were courting New Zealand First for a coalition deal while senior officials ran a caretaker government, and the cone of silence over both was absolute. MPs being terrified into keeping quiet, the nearest thing to a scoop was whether gingernuts were on the tea trolley. Had anyone leaked a Mallowpuff sighting, the stockmarket would have imploded. Obviously, once released from enforced inter-party ingratiation, they turned on one another with redoubled vigour, and the politics column sometimes practically wrote itself. Aptly, this,…

The sudden toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 marked the end of what was widely regarded as one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. It also marked the end, at least on paper, of the Syrian Civil War, which started in 2011 in the early days of the Arab Spring. Over 13 years, more than 13 million people were displaced, about half of whom left the country as refugees. Some 657,000 are estimated to have been killed. Hardline Sunni Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) previously held a modest sliver of the country in the northern Aleppo and Idlib provinces. HTS led the lightning offensive against Assad’s forces and took up residence as a transitional government. The group is led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. In a head-spinning turn of…

Simon Winchester, the celebrated adventurer, journalist and author, has a new book subtitled “the history and future of the wind”, so it seems only right to ask him what the wind is like where he is today. The British-American is talking from his home in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, population 800. He lives there on 30ha, most of it in forest, with his second wife, Japanese-American ceramicist Setsuko Sato, in a house built in 1750. There are four outbuildings, one for chickens with a weather station on top, a barn that is Sato’s studio, a place for a car and a kayak, and Winchester’s writing room and library, which is an old granary he saw in upstate New York. He had it dismantled and charmingly restored. His wife won’t allow him to…

It’s been a decent year for books about local music. We’ve had Craig Robertson’s prodigious Chris Knox biography Not Given Lightly; Bill Direen’s mini-memoir; The Other Side of Reason, Andrew Schmidt’s story of how Peter Jefferies took a road less travelled; and Gareth Shute’s compact New Zealand pop history Songs from the Shaky Isles. But a latecomer to 2025 deserves its own category. We can surely declare The Art of a Low Hum the most visually arresting NZ music volume of the year – or perhaps any year. Its author Ian “Blink” Jorgensen may be the most famous person in local music you’ve never heard of. Over the past 25 years he’s managed artists and their tours, run a record label and music venue and been a musician and DJ.…

WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY Directed by Rian Johnson For his third Knives Out whodunnit, writer-director Rian Johnson clearly knows what he’s talking about. His film explicitly references the 1935 locked-room mystery novel The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr for the construction of the crime, and his own Christian upbringing for the script’s theological musings. Over the film’s two and a half hours a fantastic Josh O’Connor (The Crown) holds us captivated throughout this wordy caper, as his pugilistic priest Father Jud Duplenticy is sent to a small New England town to assist in the parish of blustering, feather-ruffling Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). When the monsignor is mysteriously murdered in plain view, Duplenticy implores Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, the returning detective from all Knives Out…

There were some wonderful performances on stage in 2025. Recorder player Genevieve Lacey impressed in May with Auckland Philharmonia. Her rendition of Elena Kats-Chernin’s Re-inventions (after Bach) was full of sparkle, humour and extreme virtuosity on instruments too often dismissed as the province of early music specialists or kids. Thanks to the national orchestra’s NZSO+ streaming service, I could enjoy the world premiere of Kiwi composer Victoria Kelly’s deeply moving Stabat Mater from the other side of the planet (October). This may have played to my advantage; one reviewer noted balance problems at the Auckland concert. No such difficulties from where I was. Daniel Müller-Schott’s Schumann Cello Concerto with Auckland Phil (November) was special. Müller-Schott turned the piece into a series of beguiling duets: between himself and conductor Giordano Bellincampi,…

I am going to make a banana and artichoke wreath to put on the door. Why? Because ’tis the time of the year when one must, by law, deck the halls with boughs of holly while singing, tunelessly, fa, la, la, la, la, etc. And one must, again by law, have a homemade Christmas wreath to hang on the door to show you are not just the perfect homemaker, but you are also enviably creative. I don’t think anything could express your enviable creativity better than a banana and artichoke wreath. I don’t have the foggiest idea how to make a wreath. Thank goodness for Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Which is the first time any columnist has ever written that particular sentence. And the last. Honestly, I’m starting to feel…

There are only two New Zealand films that have ever brought me to tears. In April 1995, Once Were Warriors was released in the UK while I was bookselling in London. Watching those kids upstairs crying while Jake Heke bashed Beth downstairs, I was gone. A fortnight ago, with an old friend, we went to see Pike River. Watching Melanie Lynskey and Robyn Malcolm play Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse I was gone again, weeping in the dark. In the light of day, I ask myself: what good are tears without a response to this film, to 15 years’ neglect of holding to account those who allowed this to happen? As a miner’s son in Blackball, I was taken down into the Paparoa mine in my teens to the workings…

It was an unseasonably hot afternoon. Driving, listening to the radio, I complained to the dog about a verbal solecism I kept hearing: the justice system is “broken”. The health system is “broken”. It’s a very basic word to apply to complex situations. If a surgeon announced, “My patient is broken,” you’d think it was language worthy of a toddler. I thought about the writer Joan Didion, whose daughter was haunted by nightmares of a figure she called “The Broken Man”. As we drove sedately across an Epsom intersection a van rocketed at speed towards us. It veered off, hitting a stone wall with a sickening impact. In its wake, a power pole and its wires crashed onto the road. I stopped, stunned, in the middle of the intersection. Then…

When Geordie Beamish fell in the heats of the 3000m steeplechase at this year’s World Athletics Championships and a rival stood on his head, it seemed as if that would be that for the then 28-year-old. Before the September championships in Tokyo, the New Zealander’s best time in 2025 was only 31st in the world, so he hadn’t been given much of a chance, even before being forced to eat his opponent’s spikes. Incredibly, he didn’t just get up from the fall, but went on to finish second, qualifying for the final. That alone would have made for a pretty decent Hollywood ending had he not, two days later, produced one of the most incredible runs by a New Zealander since Kiwi in the 1983 Melbourne Cup. In sixth place…

NEW ZEALAND PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTED: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press) This is a fully revised version of a bestselling book from 2015, and of the more than 400 images in it, nearly half are new. There has been a 50% increase in digital scans of the 388,000 post-1850 photographs in Te Papa’s collection since the last book, and 25,000 new catalogued items. Images from the likes of Ans Westra, Brian Brake, the Burton Brothers studio and many other photographers, known and unknown, offer insight in delightful moments staged and candid, into the way we have lived and loved, worked and celebrated. WHENUA edited by Chloe Cull et al (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū) This impressive 400-page survey arose out of the He…

ETERNITY Directed by David Freyne Another year, another romcom about a woman who must choose between two men for a forever partner. But the delightfully clever Eternity tackles this theme a little differently. When Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) dies in old age and tips up to pre-heaven, she discovers she’s in a holding pattern while she decides which eternity she wants. Waiting for her in this leisure-filled limbo are her two former husbands: dashing Luke (Callum Turner), who died young in the Korean War and wants to spend forever in the wilderness, and Miles Teller’s curmudgeonly Larry, with whom Joan spent decades raising a family and whose dream is to retire to a beach. This brilliant conceit is played out beautifully in a twisting tale that’s loaded with laughs and never…

QUESTION: We’re encouraged to eat what we would normally discard to combat food waste. An example is orange skin – high in vitamin C and fibre – which I cut finely and add to anything. But what about egg shells: with their high calcium content could they see the end of osteoporosis? ANSWER: Many readers are getting creative about using parts of foods that once went straight into the bin. Orange peel in baking, eating kiwifruit with skin on, broccoli stems grated into slaws, carrot-top pesto – they’re all great ideas. But eggshells? It’s true that eggshells are packed with calcium. In fact, they are made of about 95% calcium carbonate, the same form used in many commercial calcium supplements. But chewing or swallowing pieces of hard, sharp eggshell is…

The year began with a death: that of DAME TARIANA TURIA, on January 3. Politics is the realm of cruel choices: for small parties, this is often the struggle between purity versus compromise, government or opposition. In 2004, Turia chose purity and left Labour over its foreshore and seabed legislation; in 2008, she took her newly formed Māori Party into government with National, where she built the Whānau Ora health and social services framework. Turia’s version of the Māori Party was voted out of Parliament in 2017; punishment from the Māori electorate seats for supporting a right-wing government. Yet Whānau Ora survived both Labour and the current coalition while the achievements of Labour’s much-vaunted Māori caucus are a series of smoking craters. In recognition of this, Turia is posthumously appointed…

Mercy was horribly absent in the recent case of the “suitcase murders”, so-called because Auckland woman Hakyung Lee killed her two young children and placed their bodies inside airtight orange suitcases, leaving them to mummify in a storage locker for four years until they were discovered. I attended the trial (Listener, October 11 & 18) and returned for the sentencing at the High Court at Auckland in the Christmas season. Mercy was remote. Crown prosecutors suggested the murders were premeditated. Her defence argued for insanity. The jury had reached a guilty verdict in three hours. At sentencing, just as she was at trial, Lee stood with her head bowed, her face covered by her long hair, and said nothing. Justice Venning asked, “Have you anything to say as to why…

It was the year the hype cycle cooled and the fundamentals got interesting again. Consumer-tech makers focused less on flashy gimmicks and more on fixing the basics: slimmer designs, longer-lasting batteries, better screens and smarter software that quietly leans on AI rather than shouting about it. The result is a wave of products that feel more refined than revolutionary, but far nicer to live with every day. This top-10 list celebrates those thoughtful, real-world upgrades. The prices are recommended retail, but you may find a bargain or two. 1. APPLE M4 MACBOOK AIR 13-INCH Apple’s M4 MacBook Air doubles down on what already made the Air the default laptop: a slim, fanless chassis, sharp liquid retina display, and all-day battery that comfortably outlasts back-to-back video calls. Performance is a step,…

ELLA McCAY Directed by James L Brooks Among Hollywood’s still-active directing octogenarians – Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott – 85-year-old James L Brooks might look like yesterday’s man. Ella McCay, his first film as director in 15 years after How Do You Know?, certainly confirms it. If the film feels stuck in the past, it’s set there, too. Its story of a young female politician and her colourful family being thrust into the spotlight takes place in a pre-Obama, recession-hit America of 2008. The director of Terms of Endearment (which won him three Oscars in 1983) and Broadcast News (seven nominations in 1988), still had it by the late 90s with the Jack Nicholson-led As Good As It Gets. The co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and…

SATURDAY DECEMBER 20 DR SEUSS’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS The green meanie TVNZ 2, 7pm Jim Carrey brought his animated self to this otherwise dull live-action adaptation of Dr Seuss’ classic about Whoville’s resident furry humbug hermit. (2000) ★★★ GREMLINS “Bright light. Bright light” Three, 7pm The near-classic Steven Spielberg-produced Christmas mini-monster movie that, along with Ghostbusters of the same era, introduced comedy-horror to a generation. (1984) ★★★★ SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING A galaxy far away Rialto, 8.30pm Daisy Ridley of Star Wars fame delivers an understated performance in this gloomy, dreamy, subdued American indie drama in which she plays a seemingly lonely office worker in the Pacific North-West who attracts the attention of a colleague wanting to connect. (2023) ★★★★ 3000 MILES TO GRACELAND Title not the…

Look upon it and sigh, for something like this, possibly, could have been ours. The lauded architect Frank Gehry has died in California, aged 96. Gehry’s legacy is buildings that turned ordinary towns into global sensations. His most famous is shown here, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on the River Nervión in northern Spain, which opened in 1997. The industrial backwater became a must-visit destination after the Guggenheim Foundation took a punt on the Canadian-American, who saw inspiration in crumpled paper and sculptural, organic forms. A few years before winning the Bilbao commission, Gehry worked with Kiwi architects Rewi Thompson and Ian Athfield to propose a design for New Zealand’s new national museum, Te Papa. It didn’t even make the shortlist, reportedly turned down for a few reasons, including not allowing…