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Tag >> Independent (The)
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
Compulsory age-ID for young smokers, and smoke-free zones in bars may be on their way in New Zealand.
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
“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…
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
“Watch out for the scary-sounding Mega Perky Nana from New Zealand,” now starring at Cybercandy, along with co-Kiwi sweet, the Pinky bar.
Blue Star Buyout
International book-giant W H Smith is in negotiations to buy Whitcoull’s, New Zealand’s largest book-sellers.
Splitting the Difference
Grant Dalton’s playing canny in the Race, “splitting the difference between east and west,” lying comfortably in second place.
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
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
June 2002 will see Nepal begin year-long celebrations marking a half century since Tenzing and Hillary knocked the bugger off.
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…
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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
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,…
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
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…
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
Week in the Life: Dean Barker, Yachtsman.
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 …
