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Anzac Gallate’s been obsessed with Antarctica since he was 10 – and after a trip to the ice he’s helped create content for an augmented reality app so young Kiwis can explore it without leaving the country.
THE PRESS 160 YEARS is a series marking the launch of
The
The Press will revisit stories from every year of publication. For more than 50 years, starting in 1937, poet Allen Curnow had a side project, writing satirical verse for
The Press and then other newspapers under the name Whim Wham. It began when he worked as a reporter and a sub-editor at
The Press.
The first poetry book I ever bought was R.A.K. Mason’s
Collected Poems, which opens with his debut collection
The Beggar. The collected edition was published in 1962, and I got it for half price (eight shillings and sixpence!) twelve months later. I was sixteen, in my final year at high school. There was an introduction by Allen Curnow, declaring Mason ‘his country’s first wholly original, unmistakably gifted poet’. This may be why I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending. In New Zealand, Mason (1905–71) is a famous case of a brilliant young poet who somehow lost sight of himself. The
They were kind of pleasantly revealing at the same time as being kind of creepily revealing. Public figures live in goldfish bowls but it was strange to see the leaders of New Zealand political parties in such a personal and intimate nook of their respective goldfish bowls. We are what we read; a bookcase is an X-ray of its owner, their ambitions and fears, their IQ and their desires, as well as the things they choose to decorate their bookcases.
Former National party leader Simon Bridges in casual repose in front of his bookcase at his Tauranga home. Photograph: Steve Braunias/Newsroom
Mr O Regan asked the premier if the government are in favour of changing the present inappropriate name of the colony for the more suitable one of MÄoriland . [Premier Richard Seddon] thought, for weal or woe, we had better stick to the name of New Zealand, and he was not inclined to change the name.
MÄoriland. If you used that term today, nobody would know what you were talking about (unless they were a film buff, in which case they might think you were talking about the MÄoriland Film Festival).
But if you jumped in a time machine and headed back to the 19th or early 20th century, everybody would know that MÄoriland meant New Zealand.
Analysis - In 2015, New Zealand s Parliament was in the middle of a fierce debate to change a part of our heritage, the national flag.
But 110 years earlier, there was an argument over an even more fundamental part of NZ identity. Our name.
Musings in Māoriland was a collection of poetry by Thomas Bracken, author of NZ’s national anthem.
Photo: Supplied / Te Ara
It was 1895 and the radical liberal MP Patrick O Regan took the floor of Parliament with a proposal to ditch New Zealand in favour of a new name. Mr O Regan asked the premier if the government are in favour of changing the present inappropriate name of the colony for the more suitable one of Māoriland .