On August 17, 1942, an Italian prisoner-of-war ship carrying Allied soldiers was torpedoed off the coast of Greece. Crammed into the forward hold were 174 New Zealand servicemen. One of them was Ben ...

There’s a dark side to herpetoculture—the hobby of keeping reptiles. Attempts to bring exotic reptiles into New Zealand put native species and ecosystems at risk, while demand from international ...

New Zealand’s forests were once the home of the largest eagle in the world. This enormous bird had claws as big as a tiger’s, and could strike its prey with the force of a concrete block dropped from ...

The first Europeans to reach Sāmoa—aboard three Dutch vessels in 1722—reported that the locals who paddled out to them were dressed from waist to heel in fringes and “a sort of artistically made silk ...

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 ...

There was snow on the mountains nearby, and in the dark gorge the winter water was icy. We sloshed up the meandering stream bed, examining the rocky walls as we went. Parallel layers of whitish rock ...

A cave beneath Mt Albert, was found to have become a dumping ground for rubbish. One hundred kilometres below Auckland, a vast reservoir of magma seethes, still testing the crust that keeps it captive ...

There is a house, surrounded by swamp and a deep, dark lowland rainforest, in tropical Australia. Galmara is its name, Galmara the poet, the singer of songs. Galmara fears for its future. It was built ...

Evolution has made certain that we cannot ignore the distress of a child. It takes just 140 milliseconds for an upset child to trigger a caregiving response in the orbitofrontal cortex of our brains.

Sew Hoy was a merchant rather than a miner—his Dunedin store imported and exported goods to Australia, China, the United States, and Great Britain—and in the late 1880s, he persuaded other Otago ...

Travel down State Highway 5 and it’s hard to miss Tirau. The township’s big sheep and matching dog cause many a visitor to do a double take. Those tourists alighting for photo opportunities find a ...

At night, the only light in the warehouse comes from row upon row of truck-sized tanks, each lit from within like a gigantic lava lamp. The contents roil, the colours shifting with the movement from ...