The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best premium stories of 2020. Today we look at five of the best Canvas stories of the year.
Other people's holidays - what's it like to grow up in a motor camp?
When I was 9 years old, my family moved to a motor camp. We left Marlborough for the West Coast and, for the next eight years, other people's holidays came to us.
Friends imagine this time in the halcyon tones of a perpetual summer. It's true West Coast sunsets are pretty but, when asked to imagine the colour pink, the first image in my head is always shower scum.
Technically, we lived across the road from the Punakaiki Seaside Motor Camp. It was 1979 and Dad was a ranger for Lands and Survey. His job came with the house and a bonus job for the missus - $100 a month for looking after one kitchen, two ablution blocks, a drying room and assorted tent and powered caravan sites.
Auckland's club scene: scandals, secrets of the golden age of nightlife
For around 15 years in Auckland, there would be many people who would pack a pair of sunglasses when they went out at night because there was a major chance they'd be coming home in the daylight.
Sunglasses could even be purchased for $2 from behind the bar at the Supper Club on Beresford St for patrons arriving at the light-filled venue in the morning, determined to continue to party until it closed at 2pm.
It was often impossible to drive up High St at night in the 1990s because the road was so crowded with club-goers. When the Box, Cause Celebre, or Squid shut their doors at around 6 in the morning, pigeons would rise in flocks in front of rows of going-home taxis leaving from the Shortland St rank. Other club-goers would find a lift or catch that first bus or train back to the suburbs.
But this year when New Zealand shutdown due to Covid-19, when all venues and bars had ceased to operate, those all-nighters and dawns were well in the past.
David Herkt talks to Simon Grigg about the heydey of Auckland's nightlife.
The surprising secrets of Auckland's artificial eye-maker
You can lose your eye in the single flick of a cow's tail.
Golf balls and bar brawls. Car accidents. Once, a rooster flew at a 3-year-old eating an apple and pecked at her eye instead. Cancer. There are a lot of eyes lost to cancer.
About 3000 New Zealanders wear an artificial eye. Many of them have been made by Dr Keith Pine, a former dental technician turned internationally renowned ocular prosthetist.
Kim Knight and Michael Craig sit in on the five-hour creation process of a new eye.
'I think it's time': Stan Walker opens up about abusive childhood
Stan Walker (Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Porou, Tūhoe). He may be one of the country's biggest stars now but at just 3 years old, Stan Walker already wanted to die.
If he were to tell only half the story, his childhood would sound idyllic: growing up on Tamapahore Marae in Tauranga Moana, getting up to mischief with his cousins, being with extended family, camping all summer.
But a lot of his life was the complete opposite; it was dark, filled with abuse, fear and pain.
A lot of it he's already spoken about - often comparing his life to the film Once Were Warriors. He's been open about how his father abused him, his brothers and mother, how he was sexually abused by a relative over the course of nine months and that he previously turned to drugs and alcohol to cope.
Now though, he's releasing a memoir which goes further into detail than he ever has before because previously detail was something he didn't think was necessary.
After surviving cancer, Stan Walker is ready to share harrowing details of his childhood.
The thrill and the mystery of finding your family history
I have never found it harder to start writing than I do right now; intoxicated, paralysed, debilitated by the desire - nay, the need - to type new and additional names, dates, life events and family members into the magical mystery boxes of the genealogy websites made freely available during lockdown by Auckland Libraries. Every inch of me wants to stop typing this sentence, open ancestry.com and spend hours there, disappearing into myself. Over the past few weeks, I have done exactly that, hitting return like a lab rat salivatorily chasing the hit of the historical titbit that might unlock the life of Henry Bruce, died 1916, Murringo, New South Wales, born circa 1840, parts unknown.
Family history research is the adult version of the high school AV club: You really need someone to sell you on it, but once you're in, you're in. When you type that first ancestral name and date of birth and hit return and feel the sweet pay-off of the results page with its stream of blue, clickable links, maybe featuring the tantalising words "NSW Police Gazette", you understand immediately the power of knowing who you are.
Finding your family has never been easier, thanks to Auckland Libraries. Greg Bruce gets hooked.
