Articles by Julie Halligan

Part 2 in a 6 part series looking at the ‘scumbuggering’ that has happened through the years in New Zealand. The Georgian England of the 1800s was a savage regime still attempting to come to grips with the sweeping social changes that had arisen as a direct result of the industrial revolution of the 1700s. A massive exodus of country folk from off the land into the newly emerging industrial cities had created a social earthquake that had…

The question hung in the air between us ‘So what drew you to the Chatham Islands in the first place? The two pairs of eyes looking back at me widened, the heads nodded together and two voices in unison replied ‘Fossilised sharks teeth’. · Kiri jumped up from her chair and disappeared into the farm house returning minutes later with an oblong box. Plonking it down on the table she reached in, pulled out a jar and unscrewing the lid tumbled the…

‘Once Were Whalers…’ is part 1 of a 6 part series looking at the ‘scumbuggery’ that has happened through the years in New Zealand. It was the era that has retrospectively been described as the Age of Discovery, a time when the commercial and imperial interests of Europe sought to expand their power through global exploratory expeditions. It was also a time when the foreign policy of the day was to weaken a nation by strangling its access to…

Situated on the picturesque Otago Peninsula perched atop a rising ridge stands the imposing and lasting monument to one man’s insistent desire to announce to the world that he had arrived, that he was someone and that he had ‘done good’. William Larnach had grown up on the rural estate of Rosemount, in the Patrick Plains of the Hunter Valley near Singleton in New South Wales, the land holding of his Scottish father John Larnach and his English…