Category: Travel

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a selection of music is curated to go along with the blog. The playlist can be heard on the player above or by heading over to Spotify and searching for “Music to read a blog by”. The selections have something to do with the entries on the blog. Depending on the listener’s subscription…

  • Aboriginal art in New York

    Aboriginal art celebrates the land, for it is through painting, singing and dancing that the land can express and become itself. A show in New York’s Asia Society of seventy-four pieces includes video to provide a context to the beautiful artwork – bark paintings (not all on bark) – on display until January 2025. Seventy-four…

  • Hawaiian quilts and island ecology

    A new book has just been published by Common Threads that explores fifteen contemporary quilts and their relationship to the ecology of Hawai’i. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a Research Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford leads a project to enhance the Museum’s collections, commission new work and develop relationships with communities represented in the…

  • CuzyT

    The recent trip to the Costume and Textile Association of Aotearoa New Zealand symposium in Whangārei included a surprising discovery. The North of the North Island/ Te Ika-a-Māui is home to Tāne Mahuta, the giant kauri tree. To get to it from the East Coast one travels across the island on a meandering road that…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist is compiled to complement the blog articles. The audio is on the Spotify platform and each piece has some relevance to the blog articles. Sometimes the piece is directly influenced by the article, sometimes the audio is less direct; the link is always there though! The playlist includes sound from human…

  • A visit to the white herons

    South of Māwhera Greymouth is the settlement of Ōkārito. A couple of weekends ago I spent three days in the area, camping out in a thunderstorm and enjoying the beautiful wildlife, scenery and weather of this part of the West Coast. One of the reasons to go down was to see the kōtuku – the…

  • The Australian autograph textile with a South African link

    In 1894, as was a custom in those days, a quilt was created to raise funds for a new Anglican church in Sunbury, Australia. People were able to subscribe to the undertaking by having their names, signatures, motifs or initials embroidered onto squares that were then stitched together to form the completed quilt. This particular…

  • Spotify this week

    Each week a playlist is curated to reflect the blog articles. The whole playlist is available on the Spotify platform and can be heard by clicking on the player above or by searching for “Music to read a blog by” on Spotify.

  • This week’s Spotify playlist

    Each week the blog is accompanied by a Spotify playlist of pieces that are somehow connected to the entries. To listen to the playlist you can click on the player above or search for “Music to read a blog by” on the Spotify platform. If you have a paid subscription you will hear all the…

  • The identity of language

    It is the end of te wiki o te reo Māori – Māori language week. Language is the key to identity and so it has often been subject to the politics of the day. There is debate about how natural the death of a language is, and research on the topic, but what is undeniable…