Nominated Best Feature Writing
Voyager Media Awards 2022
Where do young sea creatures spend their first weeks? What’s at the root of oceanic food chains? Kelp forests are to Aotearoa what coral reefs are to other marine ecosystems. Or they used to be.
Last century, southern right whales were hunted until there were none left—none that we could find. A small group of these whales, also called tohorā, hid from the harpoon. Deep in the subantarctic, the survivors birthed and nursed their young. Now, tohorā are returning to the coasts of New Zealand. Are we ready for them?
In Search of the Lost Supercontinent
The Road to Gondwana takes the reader on a journey in search of the lost southern supercontinent. It traces the steps science took to find Gondwana, and the journey Gondwana itself took through 500 million years of Earth history. Our tour guide on this journey is Glossopteris, — an extinct tree that dominated the supercontinent for 50 million years, before vanishing in the most devastating event ever to strike life on this planet, the Permian mass extinction.
"It is a scholarly and persuasive work, dazzling in its detail, but immensely entertaining and intriguing"
-Susan Kurosawa, The Australian
We cull hybrids. We steal their eggs, and break up inter-species breeding pairs, all in the name of genetic integrity. Protecting the mauri. We created this tangle by bringing in exotic species. Can we ever undo it? And should we even try?
Out there in forest reserves, down remote back roads and tucked away in corners of small towns hide giant tōtara, mataī and rimu. A tiny group of obsessive people, guided by old records and half-remembered stories, regularly hit the road in search of these monsters. Their aim: to bag a champion tree, one whose size, age and majesty will put it at the top of New Zealand’s notable tree register.