Alex Staines got together with Gerry Morris, trustee of the Phar Lap Charitable Trust, to pay homage to the enduring legend of Phar Lap, New Zealand’s greatest ever racehorse. There’s a saying in racing that a racehorse is an animal that can take several thousand people for a ride at the same time. In Phar…
Phar Lap – Big Red’s Enduring Legacy
Author:Alex Staines Last Updated:
Categories: Stories Tags: Curated stories, NZ themes
Count von Luckner, German Pirate in New Zealand
Author:Alex Staines Last Updated:
Regarded as one of the most colourful figures of the 20th century, Count Graf Felix von Luckner had a close connection with New Zealand. At 13, von Luckner, from a noble German family, ran away from home and signed up as a cabin boy on a Russian sailing ship bound for Australia. He had a…
Categories: Stories Tags: Curated stories, NZ themes
Chew Chong & James Ashbury Left Their Mark on New Zealand
Author:Alex Staines Last Updated:
Chew Chong One of New Zealand’s most extraordinary characters, Chew Chong was born in 1828 in the village of Hoi Ping in China. After various travels, he moved to New Zealand in 1866, basing himself in Dunedin where he collected scrap metal for export to China. Everything changed for Chew Chong when he discovered an…
Categories: Stories Tags: Curated stories, NZ themes
A Brief History of Bling
Author:Alex Staines Last Updated:
Jewellery as a form of personal adornment – from hairpins to toe rings – has been worn by people since prehistoric times. The earliest known items of jewellery are 100,000-year-old sea-snail shell beads, found in Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. The word “bling” has much more recent origins. It was coined in the…
Categories: Stories Tags: Curated stories
A Hatful of History
Author:Alex Staines Last Updated:
There’s a hatful of history in these head accessories: the chef’s hat, the dunce’s cap, and New Zealand’s unique hat that drove a native bird to extinction. Bird hat The huia bird, native to New Zealand, became extinct in the early 20th century due in part to hats. When the Duke of York visited Rotorua…
Categories: Stories Tags: Curated stories