Tag Archives: Independent (The)

Historian Remembered

Historian Remembered

Professor Neville Phillips – erudite, open-minded “sometimes spiky”. One of New Zealand’s leading historians, remembered for the day he stood up to Rob Muldoon in defence of the university and intellectual freedom. Neville Phillips: Died July 2001

Writing With a Cause

Writing With a Cause

Working for international NGOs appeals to journalists as “an honorable route forward”, including former New Zealand reporter Brendan Parry, now working for Amnesty International, where there is “a huge amount of recognition if you do good work”….

Best Beaches

Best Beaches

New Zealand Beaches: solitude, expanse, beauty. The best. “At the back of the beach was a huge whale vertebra, bleached and scoured by the surf. I took a break on a huge log facing the sun,…

Hairy Summer

Hairy Summer

On the track of the elusive ape-drape, found among “isolated sporting tribes such as New Zealand rugby league players, Czech speedway riders and the pantomime grizzlies of the Worldwide Wrestling Foundation”.

Life full of words

Life full of words

Alison Waley, Hokitika-born poet, artist and writer died aged 100. Most famous for her marriage to Arthur Waley, Waley also had “strength of purpose and character, and a way with words, written and spoken,…

Mahon’s Final Stroke

Mahon’s Final Stroke

“Laconic, grizzled New Zealander” Harry Mahon, legendary international rowing coach dedicated to creating the perfect stroke, died of cancer aged 59. Mahon took team after team to the top, including the British gold medallist eight at Sydney…

Fusion Capital

Fusion Capital

The Independent takes a tour through the capital’s cultural collage: fusion cooking, Te Papa, cafes, Mansfield, transexual MPs, colonial history and Pacific awakenings, and finds in the cosmopolitan brew that “It is hard to know which flavour…

Bert Sutcliffe Retires

Bert Sutcliffe Retires

Bert Sutcliffe, New Zealand left-handed batsman “of the highest class”, joins the “Gentlemen of Heaven XI” – a player fit to share a wicket with the late Don Bradman. Sutcliffe  was “a superlative cricketer and a very…

Anti-Terror Laws

Anti-Terror Laws

New Zealand Parliament looks to pass new anti-terrorist laws, “strengthening New Zealand’s ability to deter and react decisively to international terrorist attacks”.  

No smoke, No Fire

No smoke, No Fire

Compulsory age-ID for young smokers, and smoke-free zones in bars may be on their way in New Zealand.

Into Left-field

Into Left-field

Labour hits 50%, Helen Clark does a pb of 36%. “The government is the only game in town,” says Clark.

Finn and Games

Finn and Games

Playing with Neil Finn: “It may well be hair-raising, disastrous, funny or sublime, but it will certainly be an adventure…” Finn on the Auckland all-star band: “The idea is that over the course of…

Cross-course Appeal

Cross-course Appeal

“Sunline, a huge bay five-year-old, is one of those rare beasts to have jumped the fence between her sport and the wider public. She has her own website, an official fan-club and a range of merchandise.”…

No talk, just sex

No talk, just sex

Intimacy is a smouldering film about a man who is living in a basement in south London who has a sex affair with a woman at his place every Wednesday afternoon. They don’t talk,…

Kiwi Leads Brits

Kiwi Leads Brits

“Most of Kiwi Andrew Longmore’s working life has been devoted to the pursuit of sailing’s Holy Grail. No one has helmed more miles in an America’s Cup boat than Barnes, in racing, testing and development over…

Leader Saluted

Leader Saluted

“They don’t make people like Bob Mahuta very often,” said former treaty negotiations minister Sir Douglas Graham, paying tribute to the Tainui leader who died early this month.

Dalton Speaks

Dalton Speaks

“Home, however briefly, is beckoning. We should be through the Cook Strait, which separates the North and South Islands of my home country, New Zealand, in four days and that means we will, as far as I…

Fast Sail

Fast Sail

Grant Dalton’s big cat Club Med stripped 33 hours off the trans-Indian Ocean record, sighting Australia seven days, fourteen hours after passing the Cape of Good Hope.

Scary candy

Scary candy

“Watch out for the scary-sounding Mega Perky Nana from New Zealand,” now starring at Cybercandy, along with co-Kiwi sweet, the Pinky bar.

Splitting the Difference

Splitting the Difference

Grant Dalton’s playing canny in the Race, “splitting the difference between east and west,” lying comfortably in second place.

Blue Star Buyout

Blue Star Buyout

International book-giant W H Smith is in negotiations to buy Whitcoull’s, New Zealand’s largest book-sellers.

Figuring It

Figuring It

Britain’s Chief Statistician, New Zealander Len Cook is “in the hot seat” over the accuracy of official figures.

De-mining for Peace

De-mining for Peace

New Zealander Greg Lindstrom co-ordinates the de-mining operation in Lebanon. “There’s a peace dividend to all this,” he says. “Clearing minefields means that people can come back to their lands”.  

Because it’s 50 Years

Because it’s 50 Years

June 2002 will see Nepal begin year-long celebrations marking a half century since Tenzing and Hillary knocked the bugger off.

Coin Fever

Coin Fever

Tennis ace Dominik Hrbaty is a New Zealand coin buff in his spare time: “They are so beautiful, so nice. Every year there is a different picture(?) and on the other side is Queen Elizabeth.” …

Miracle Bang

Miracle Bang

After a decade of blindness, Auckland woman Lisa Reid went to bed, bumped her head and woke up sighted in the morning.

Guru Gilson

Guru Gilson

Clive Gilson, University of Waikato Professor, co-author of Peak Performance: Business Lessons From the World’s Top Sports Organisations, and motivational coach, “is to turn the Football Association from its traditional home for semi-retired blazers into…

Going Cold Kiwi

Going Cold Kiwi

The League World Cup Lebanon vs NZ match was played in bitter weather. Three Lebanese players became hypothermic, but the New Zealanders seemed to cope OK. “The New Zealanders were probably used to it,” said…

Healing Touch

Healing Touch

A new London centre devoted to the study of the “healing touch” is “an outpost of a university in New Zealand whose ideas are based on feng shui and other Oriental philosophies.” Could tight…

Murderball Awe

Murderball Awe

New Zealand collected the Bronze at Sydney, impressing with their toughness along the way. “These are the hard men of the Paralympics. New Zealand’s heavily-tattoed Curtis Palmer emerged unscathed from a high-impact collision that sent him somersaulting…

Choice Joyce

Choice Joyce

Leilani Joyce, New Zealand #1 since ’97, didn’t drop a game on the way to becoming British Open Champion and World Squash #1. “The plan was quite simple,” says Joyce of her final game against England’s…

Speed + Power = KO

Speed + Power = KO

That’s the equation chalked on Kiwi David Tua’s wall as the build up to the Tua-Lewis fight continues. In this interview Tua promises to put that equation into practice. He also talks about the importance of…

Team NZ Pickup Pace

Team NZ Pickup Pace

Having carried off the wine prizes, we’re now taking skippers. Bertrand Pace, who skippered the French boat in the last America’s Cup, has signed on with Team NZ. “I am very pleased and excited to join the…

Braces, John

Braces, John

John Bracewell, the New Zealander who has coached the Gloucestershire County Cricket team to the top of the sport in England, says that he has been preparing himself to become an international coach. Though his first loyalty…

Does This Man Have a Government Scholarship?

Does This Man Have a Government Scholarship?

It’s more cost-effective than traditional space-flight, and it’s spiritually enriching … the New York-based International Institute of Projectiology and Conscientiology has been guiding consciousnesses’ astral bodies through the extraphysical dimensions since 1988. Kiwi attorney David Lindsay, who is…

No Time Limit on Retrieving the Dead

No Time Limit on Retrieving the Dead

In May 1941, a Fairey Battle bomber crashed in remote Iceland. New Zealand Flying Officer Arthur Round’s body, and the bodies of the three other casualties, have just been retrieved from the glacier and returned to England…

Riff-Raff #2

Riff-Raff #2

“I didn’t want a conventional actor, and Richard O’Brien is in some ways very close, in our day, to what Farinelli was in his – a cult hero whom everyone loves,” says Robert Shaw,…

The New Zealand Presence at Wimbledon

The New Zealand Presence at Wimbledon

Unfortunately it wasn’t a tennis player: “New Zealand’s profound influence on international sport goes beyond the haka and influencing the bidding of World Cup football finals. Consider, for example, Aorangi Park, the area of the All England…

Sun, sea, sand and … guns: Palm Beach Hotel (Gaza)

Sun, sea, sand and … guns: Palm Beach Hotel (Gaza)

New Zealand journalist Phil Reeveson, writing for the Independent, visits the chaotic and ‘screwed up’ Gaza Strip – the conflicted strip of land between Egypt and Israel. Including a visit to a Jewish luxury…

Kiwi Killer Lady of Kingairloch

Kiwi Killer Lady of Kingairloch

In a shooting career from 1930 to 1999 the huntress of the highlands Patricia Strutt shot more than 2000 stags. With her death, aged 89, the Scottish highlands lost one of its most formidable…

Jesus and the Second Coming

Jesus and the Second Coming

Kiwi director Alison Maclean wowed Cannes with the moody Crush, then took a seven year maturing process, through Sex and the City, Homicide and a Natalie Imbruglia music video, to release the indie-hit Jesus’…

Cuizean

Cuizean

Kiwi super-chef Peter Gordon is one of the “illustrious visitors” concocting culinary creations at Henrietta Green’s Food Lovers’ Fair. The fair brings together specialist food producers and suppliers hand-picked by the redoubtable Miss Green…

Building Rome and other literary Pastimes

Building Rome and other literary Pastimes

“I like computer games – of the world domination kind.” She-Devil/New Zealand reared novelist Fay Weldon, in the Independent’s 50-best list, admits she has a soft-spot for empire building, channelling her desires through computer…

“I’m Quite a Fearful Person Actually”

“I’m Quite a Fearful Person Actually”

Sir Ed might have to do some convincing – he will go down in history as one of the Twentieth Century’s great adventurers. The Independent asks if the 81 year-old has any mountains left to climb,…

Kiwi Linguists Chart Man’s Journey Across the Pacific

Kiwi Linguists Chart Man’s Journey Across the Pacific

University of Auckland linguists Russell Gray and Fiona Jordan, “may have solved one of the greatest mysteries in human prehistory – how people managed to colonise the Pacific”. Writing in the journal Nature they analysed 77 languages…

Kevin Roberts Punts Saatchi & Saatchi into the Premier League

Kevin Roberts Punts Saatchi & Saatchi into the Premier League

The ideas shop meets ‘La Difference’ when it was announced that Saatchis was to merge, for £1.24 billion, with French giant Publicis. Celebrating the merger, as well as scooping creative awards at Cannes and the company’s…

j’accuse! Greg Turner and the European PGA

j’accuse! Greg Turner and the European PGA

When Greg Turner left last week’s Wales Open before it even started he accused, in his unique way, the European Tour of stifling healthy debate by placing commercial interests before course quality. On the Ryder Cup…

Kiwi Chosen to Restore Sparkle to Britain’s Millennium Crown

Kiwi Chosen to Restore Sparkle to Britain’s Millennium Crown

Kiwi Former head of British pay-TV operator BSkyB, Sam Chisholm, has been appointed the new head of the much hyped, but troubled, Millennium Dome. Despite anger from Labour backbenchers at its public cost, Chisholm insists he will look to…

Looking Down: Fleur Adcock reaps poetic insight from the fringe

Looking Down: Fleur Adcock reaps poetic insight from the fringe

“Strangers are good for us, they help us see ourselves in unfamiliar ways. They take slightly different routes across our wearisomely footslogged home turf.”  poetry is acute, intelligent, fastidious, sceptical, often disturbingly funny….

Barbara Anderson’s

Barbara Anderson’s

“Any fan of sharp, poised social comedy, driven by immaculately droll prose, should investigate the New Zealand writer Barbara Anderson”.

Going to work on a memoir

Going to work on a memoir

NZ-edged Fay Weldon has signed a reputed £250,000 deal with publishers Harper Collins to write her memoirs, The Word, the Flesh and the She-Devil, a frank account of life, love, religion, psychoanalysis and the…

Commonwealth to Help Develop Vulnerable States

Commonwealth to Help Develop Vulnerable States

So stated Don McKinnon on his first visit to Bangladesh since being elected Secretary-General of the 54-country assembly last November.  

New Zealand at Forefront of ‘World Citizenship’ Project

New Zealand at Forefront of ‘World Citizenship’ Project

The World Citizenship Curriculum is to develop and implement in Bangladesh a pilot plan, led by Dr. Muhammad Nur Nabi, to educate people to become true citizens of the world and also to promote social justice….

Boat Race to Put Coaching Philosophy to the Test

Boat Race to Put Coaching Philosophy to the Test

“Harry Mahon, the New Zealand coach who has worked in England for eight years … is the nearest thing that the sport has to a single font of wisdom …”  

Special Reserve Drinks from the Cup of Victory

Special Reserve Drinks from the Cup of Victory

Week in the Life: Dean Barker, Yachtsman.

Great Red Hope

Great Red Hope

It’s not New Zealand’s fault. Little more than 10 years ago they took the world by storm with their fruit-packed, freshly acidic, amazingly aromatic Sauvignon Blanc. Now …