News of New Zealanders via Global Media

One Fast Growing Underwater Volcano

One Fast Growing Underwater Volcano

Scientists have discovered a submarine volcano in New Zealand waters, 1000km northeast of the North Island, that has undergone the fastest episode of collapse and growth ever recorded in a volcano. The Monowai Cone…

Mountain Biking for the Well-heeled

Mountain Biking for the Well-heeled

Queenstown’s Fat Tyre Company is recommended for “those who like riding down and can afford not to pedal up” in the Globe and Mail’s travel pages. “For the well-heeled rider, there’s a…

Funky Cuts for Rolling Stone

Funky Cuts for Rolling Stone

“Inventive New Zealand singer-songwriter Kimbra stopped by the Rolling Stone studio to play a few funky cuts off her experimental pop debut LP Vows.” “After impressing with her intense live looping technique, she talked…

Sevens Title Won at Twickenham

Sevens Title Won at Twickenham

New Zealand have retained their Sevens World Series title, ending the season with a third-place spot at the London Sevens to finish on 167 Series points, six ahead of closest rivals Fiji. A record…

Reviewing Safety in a Major Export

Reviewing Safety in a Major Export

“Adventure tourism is one of New Zealand’s biggest drawcards, but sometimes tourists can get far more adventure than they bargained for,” begins a report by Dominque Schwartz for ABC. “This week, the industry made…

Hypnosis as Anaesthetic

Hypnosis as Anaesthetic

Auckland Regional Pain Service pain specialist Dr Bob Large says he expects hypnosis will be used more widely in the future as a form of analgesia and anaesthesia. Large, who was a guest speaker…

Committed to Social Cohesion

Committed to Social Cohesion

Helen Clark, formerly New Zealand prime minister, has just announced that she will be seeking a second term as the first female head of the UN Development Programme. While visiting Brussels, she spoke to…

All Systems Are Go

All Systems Are Go

New Zealand’s largest solar power plant, a 68-kilowatt farm, has opened in Drury, South Auckland and “if – or perhaps when – the world’s natural resources run out, New Zealand will be laughing all…

From a New Perspective

From a New Perspective

Christchurch-born singer Bic Runga, 36, has released her first album in five years, Belle. Runga, who is currently on tour in Australia, tells the Illawarra Mercury’s Kate Walsh that since her 1997…

One of the Best Places for Mothers

One of the Best Places for Mothers

New Zealand has been rated the fourth best place in the world to be a mother, in line after Norway at the top followed by Iceland and Sweden. Just ahead of Mother’s Day, Save…

Cambodian Mountain Discovery

Cambodian Mountain Discovery

Two researchers from Otago University’s anatomy department are using radiocarbon dating technology to unravel the mysteries of a lost culture that once inhabited the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia. The researchers have dated samples of…

Owls Resonates Fifty Years On

Owls Resonates Fifty Years On

Janet Frame’s debut novel, Owls Do Cry, released by New Zealand’s Pegasus Press in 1957, is the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s ‘Book of the Week’, reviewed by Sabine Doering. Doering writes that in the novel the…

Living Shrine to Deco

Living Shrine to Deco

Within two years of Napier’s devastating 1931 earthquake the city, which had chosen to rebuild in the Art deco style, was being dubbed the “most modern town on the globe”. “Much of the innovative…

On Set with One Beautiful Caster

On Set with One Beautiful Caster

New Zealand-born actress Alice Englert, the daughter of Academy Award-winning film director Jane Campion, stars in Warner Bros.’ supernatural thriller Beautiful Creatures, a film adapted from the first book of the Caster Chronicles series,…

Counting the Bleat

Counting the Bleat

Principal investigator at New Zealand’s Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre (NZAGRC) in Palmerston North, Peter Janssen hopes that by measuring every belch and bleat of their sheepish subjects they can come up…

Diversity Under the Gold Coast Sun

Diversity Under the Gold Coast Sun

Controversial New Zealand reality television show The GC, about young Maori living on Australia’s Gold Coast, has prompted comparisons to America’s Jersey Shore, and heated debate about whether the show was seen as a…

Super Image of Cosmic Lunar Event

Super Image of Cosmic Lunar Event

Auckland photographer Simon Runting captured this once-a-year cosmic event which lit up the New Zealand night sky as the full moon passed at its closest point to Earth, making it appear 14 per cent…

Arrival Delights Korean Audience

Arrival Delights Korean Audience

Award-winning play, The Arrival, performed by New Zealand’s Red Leap Theatre and based on Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, “fascinated” a Korean audience at the LG Arts Center in Seoul recently. The Arrival,…

Chopper Ride into Cloudless Bliss

Chopper Ride into Cloudless Bliss

“It’s supposed to be ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’”, but when Helen Parker of The Australian visited the North Island’s east coast “there wasn’t a cloud in sight – or people for that…

Introducing a Guardian Fan

Introducing a Guardian Fan

New Zealander Roger Cowell, a UK-based freelance writer and registered nurse, features in the Guardian’s reader series, ‘Good to Meet You’. “In 1974, aged 23, I came to the UK from New Zealand and…

Homemakers Reunite in Indiana

Homemakers Reunite in Indiana

Apparently, when a New Zealander makes a promise, it’s a vow to remember – even if it means travelling halfway around the world to attend a birthday party. That’s just what Yvonne Moore (left)…

Dr Bogan No Dimwit

Dr Bogan No Dimwit

Dave Snell has graduated from Waikato University with a doctoral degree that examined the social habits of bogans, who are typically portrayed as “dimwitted, uncultured, and unworthy of serious academic study,” Snell writes in…

Headrushing Pop Fusion

Headrushing Pop Fusion

Ladyhawke’s May concert at the Ruby Lounge in Manchester is reviewed in the Guardian by Dave Simpson who says that “the verdict from the front row is a shouted: ‘This is good…

Top Prize for Robotic Whizz Kids

Top Prize for Robotic Whizz Kids

Onehunga High School has won the VEX High School Robotics World Championships, which were held in Los Angles in late April. The team has qualified for the world championships almost every year since it…

Local Wineries Entice Chinese Market

Local Wineries Entice Chinese Market

New Zealand winemakers are preparing for a major push in China this month with their biggest-ever road show taking place in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. The New Zealand government and wine industry are…

Border Control Arguments

Border Control Arguments

New Zealand may be one of the most geographically isolated nations on Earth, but its leaders say the country is not immune to the risks of refugees arriving by boat and have now drafted…

Fashionable Favourites

Fashionable Favourites

Wellington band The Black Seeds latest album Dust and Dirt featured at No 4 in Deutsch Vogue’s May Playlist. “Reggae from New Zealand?” the publication questions, “Yes,” mentioning the “airy” title track, sure to…

Fitting Local Tastes

Fitting Local Tastes

Auckland café and bar The Imperial Lane features in the Travel Edits section of Monocle’s May issue. “Since December last year the cobblestone passage of the historical Imperial Buildings has been home…

We’ve Heard of Her

We’ve Heard of Her

Former prime minister Helen Clark, who is now administrator for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), has topped a list of 25 women in a Foreign Policy magazine article called, “The most powerful women…

Royal Dons NZ Designer

Royal Dons NZ Designer

An indigo tweed skirt suit designed by New Zealander Rebecca Taylor was recently worn by the Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton when she stepped out for an event at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London. When…

Art the Lifeblood on Waiheke

Art the Lifeblood on Waiheke

“‘There’s something about this stretch of water that changes everything,’ sculptor Chris Bailey says, gesturing towards the Hauraki Gulf. ‘It has an almost cleansing effect.’” “Clambering out of Bailey’s cluttered ute, we…

Banking on Nigeria

Banking on Nigeria

Stephen Jennings, the New Zealand-born founder and chief executive of Moscow-based investment bank Renaissance Capital, is setting up a consumer finance business in Nigeria with hopes to tap the fast-growing economy’s rising…

Ballistic on AFL Boundaries

Ballistic on AFL Boundaries

New Zealand Olympic hopeful Aucklander Veronica Torr, 24, who is on the brink of qualifying for the London Games in the heptathlon, has been head-hunted by the Australian Football League (AFL) as a boundary…

International Success Story

International Success Story

New Zealand filmmaker Anna Cottrell has been filming the story of Ethiopian refugee Terefe Ejigu since he was 16, when newly enrolled at Wellington College he began running. Ejigu’s talent as a runner was…

Spotlight on Adolescent Health

Spotlight on Adolescent Health

New Zealand has the second highest overall mortality rate and the highest suicide rate in those aged 10-24 years among developed countries, according to recent analysis undertaken by medical journal The Lancet. In the…

Ultimate Legend Remembered

Ultimate Legend Remembered

Rugby legend Fred “The Needle” Allen – who at age 92 was the oldest living All Black and one of the rare group of players to have both played in and coached the national…

Making Records Trumps Study

Making Records Trumps Study

Kimbra started writing songs at the age of 10 as a “natural way to express myself as a kid” she tells Mel Evans of the Sunday Magazine. “It wasn’t until I started listening to…

Gobsmackingly Good Wine

Gobsmackingly Good Wine

“Martinborough, at the bottom of the North Island, is alter ego: small, intimate, friendly and with gobsmackingly good vino,” Ian Verrender, business columnist, writes in The Age. “Marlborough produces the bulk of New…

Cup Makes Television History

Cup Makes Television History

Last year’s Rugby World Cup final, in which the All Blacks beat France, was the most-watched event in New Zealand television history “attracting a 98 per cent audience share,” Rugby World Cup Limited (RWCL)…

Terrifically Exciting Force

Terrifically Exciting Force

When chef and author Robert Oliver was growing up in New Zealand “restaurant culture was just beginning and eating out was considered to be an indulgence, a rare treat.” “Ironic really, considering that, as…

Technologically Outnumbered

Technologically Outnumbered

Mobile phones in New Zealand outnumber the country’s population, according to a study conducted by global market research firm TNS, which surveyed 48,000 people in 58 countries finding that almost half of New Zealanders…

Short Sequence, Sharp Response

Short Sequence, Sharp Response

A 10-minute sequence from Peter Jackson’s forthcoming two-part Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit has been shown to conference goers at the annual CinemaCon in Las Vegas. The conference featured a presentation from…

Time to Pause for Thought

Time to Pause for Thought

An estimated 15,000 flocked to this year’s dawn service ceremony at the War Memorial Museum in Auckland to mark the 97th anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli and to remember fallen servicemen and women….

Taking on the World

Taking on the World

In the worldwide food shortages that developed at the end of the Second World War, tiny New Zealand grew fabulously rich. New Zealand dairy farmer Thomas Lambie recalls: “ had the second-highest per-capita income in…

Joyfully Optimistic

Joyfully Optimistic

“New Zealand is an otherworldly mash-up of climates, geologies, adventures, and luxuries. (Oh, the things you can do!)”, writes Condé Nast Traveler’s Susan Hack, who “tries it all in the Southern Hemisphere’s hot zone”,…

Mad for it in Wellington

Mad for it in Wellington

Wellington’s St James Theatre heaving with a full-capacity crowd features in the Guardian’s ‘24 Hours in Pictures’ as One Direction fans watch the British boy band perform. One Direction’s 2012 tour of New Zealand…

Computer Games Raise Spirits

Computer Games Raise Spirits

A computer game designed to lift teenagers out of depression is as effective as one-on-one counselling, researchers at the University of Auckland have found. Researchers tested an interactive 3-D fantasy game called SPARX on…

Trojan War Maori Style

Trojan War Maori Style

The director of New Zealand’s version of Troilus and Cressida Rachel House explains how she put Maori culture at the heart of Shakespeare’s Trojan tragedy. Thirty-seven theatre companies from around the world are presenting…

Reflections on Survival

Reflections on Survival

Mayor of Wellington Celia Wade-Brown has opened the capital city’s Holocaust Centre on Holocaust Remembrance Day — an “asset for all New Zealanders to reflect on the importance of harmony, diversity, resilience and survival.”…

Emergency Place of Worship

Emergency Place of Worship

“Christchurch, New Zealand, where an earthquake last year killed 185 people, is still struggling with how to treat another of its casualties, the city’s Anglican cathedral,” Wall Street Journal reporter Eric Felten writes, beginning…

Top of the Pops

Top of the Pops

New Zealand singer Kimbra, 22, featuring on Belgian-Australian Gotye’s single Somebody That I Used To Know, has made it to the top of the American Billboard top 100. It is the first time a…

Acting Against Bullying

Acting Against Bullying

Eighteen-year-old founder of Two Face Drama Charlizza Harris from Lower Hutt was one of 33 teenage entrepreneurs honoured at the first annual Dare to Dream awards dinner in New York City on…

Illuminating North America

Illuminating North America

The first of the two-day New Zealand in L.A. festival at the city’s REDCAT theatre featured eight chamber and solo works by New Zealand composers and renowned performer on Maori instruments, Richard Nunns. Los…

Dangerously High Salt Levels

Dangerously High Salt Levels

New Zealand’s fast foods on average contain 8 per cent more sodium than comparable foods in the UK and a massive 18 per cent more than those in France, as shown in an international…

Coffee Without the Schnauzer

Coffee Without the Schnauzer

Berlin-based New Zealand author Sarah Quigley pays a visit to Antipodes coffee shop in the German capital’s area of Prenzlauer Berg where NZEdge web editor Jane Nye and partner Paul Milne, both…

Emotional Provocateur

Emotional Provocateur

Auckland singer-songwriter Sam RB’s song Stand Tall has been chosen from more than 300 entries as the theme of the New Zealand contingent at the London Olympics. The New Zealand Olympic Committee invited songwriters…