It should have been routine. A police caution for a broken tail light. A ‘get off the road and get it fixed’ situation. Until something went very wrong. The I-phone 11 didn’t appear and start filming until Lee Ropata was on the ground bleeding from a blow to the
I first read about the Passenger Pigeon when I was but a boy. Then, as now, it was a staple of the eco-doom narrative kick-started by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. And, like Carson’s book, it’s a severely flawed narrative which overlooks key facts. The Passenger Pigeon was
The next white turnips to wander into this wild, lawless mix of Maori, muskets, traders, sealers, whalers, ex-convicts from Australia, and “adventurers” from all over the world; are missionaries. The saviour of souls. Samuel Marsden is an Anglican missionary sent from Britain to be a convict chaplain in Australia. On
After Cook’s last trip (1777), there are no more foreign visitors to New Zealand for some time. The fierce reputation of the Maori has spread and put off tourists (especially the people-eating part); and the major exploring nations of the world at this time (Britain, France, Spain), have other
A little mystery rippled across Wellington last week. Some public-spirited soul attached a stainless-steel plaque to an Aro St retaining wall commemorating the incident from 1974 when senior public servant and Soviet spy Bill Sutch was apprehended while passing a dossier of documents to KGB officer Dimitri Razgovorov. The plaque
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For four years now, we’ve had to endure the media elite’s incessant shrieking that President Donald Trump is “literally Hitler”. This is a failure of both English language usage and historical awareness. By definition, Trump cannot be literally Hitler – only Hitler was or ever will be literally Hitler.
IINZ History israelinstitute.nz Kia ora, Talofa lava, and greetings to you all. I have a question, – Can we know who the Jewish people are and where they come from? The answer is, Yes we can. In almost every language, other than English and French, Jews are referred to as,
History is said to be written by the victors – war history no less than others. So it’s often surprising to read loser’s accounts of famous military events. Through German Eyes, Christopher Duffy’s history of the Somme from the German side, reveals, among other things, just how close
At Cape Runaway Cook sees for the first time the large double-hulled Maori war canoes who he has to fire on and run away from as they are decidedly not friendly. In the Bay of Plenty (which Cook thought looked fertile, cultivated and well-populated), the mood of the people is
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We cannot retain a Prime Minister who does not act constitutionally if we wish to remain a First World democracy In British Commonwealth countries the rule of law is a long-established principle relating to the way in which the country is governed, dating from Magna Carta in 1215 and the
“The more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be.” Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu “Never f**K with another man’s rice bowl” A lesser, unknown Chinese Philosopher When future historians describe what happened to the New Zealand economy in 2020 they will no doubt lay the
