Dan Carter's DC10 Signature fragrance was launched this year - just one highlight in a year full of memorable best bits.
Kim Knight on the people, places and supermarket rodents that deserve a place on the 2024 podium.
Every year, a collective amnesia sweeps the nation. It starts when you spot your first Christmas mince pie at the supermarket (Easter). By December, you’re entirely in its grip.
The murmur becomes a scream. It races up the grocery aisles, across your social calendar and right through the front door of your home where you’re desperately trying to hold it together for the kids: WHERE DID THE YEAR GO?
It is human nature to forget. Keys, phones, manners. But some things are too important to leave in the back of an Uber. Some moments are worth reliving. And, every year, there is merit in celebrating the randomly weird and wonderful.
Herewith, the best of the best - 21 awards you didn’t know you needed, to celebrate the year that was.
1973 called and it has meat envy. Schnitzel came back and it was much, much better. No animal-based protein is more perfectly suited to these financially fraught times than the dish first perfected in kitchens with formica tables and orange fondue pots. When eye fillet costs an arm and a leg, order the thin-cut schnitzel. When you don’t want to eat arms or legs, take a tomato leaf out of Josh Emett’s book. At his Auckland restaurant Gilt, the “schnitzel” is sometimes made from tomato. Heirloom, we assume.
Ghost sharks live in the cold, dark depths of the ocean and, this year, scientists collecting samples in the Chatham Rise discovered a new and distinct species of the mysterious creature only found in the waters around Aotearoa and Australia. The ghost shark’s formal name, chimaera, was (in Greek mythology) a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid lion-goat-snake. In modern times, the Australasian Narrow-nosed Spookfish is a shrimp-eating, beak-toothed reminder of just how much we’ve still got to learn about the planet.
In 1974, the domestic goddess kept her beef tallow in a jar in the fridge. Before every roast dinner, she’d chuck a scoop of “drippings” in with the potatoes and then, after every roast, top the jar back up with renderings anew. In 2024, a container of smartly-packaged Wagyu beef fat costs upwards of $25 and the modern goddess is just as likely to smear it on her face as her spuds. (See also: Salmon sperm facials).
House of Chocolate’s cookie dough croissant chocolate bar. Daily Bread’s cherry jam and mascarpone cream-stuffed Black Forest croissant. Amano’s whitebait fritter and lemon aioli croissant. Copain’s nutella-filled “crookie” and many, many other variations on that theme from bakeries up and down the country. It was a very big year for pastry layered with butter and nobody minded a bit.
Poetry was the winner on the day, via Danielle Kionasina Dilys Thomson’s brilliantly evocative Moire Park from the debut collection Tusitala (Tagata Atamai, $30). Sample lines: “Hot chips burn your tongue - your eardrums are / assaulted by dads declaring their love for their sons.”
When you’re just one of a bajillion worthy organisations scrapping for ever-decreasing supplies of cold hard cash, it’s hard to get cut-through. Kudos to two unexpected movie fundraisers - a night of the internet’s best cat videos (courtesy of the NZ Cat Foundation) at Auckland’s Capitol Cinema and a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror classic The Birds at the Hollywood Avondale (in aid of Birdcare Aotearoa). Hard to believe nobody proposed a double-billing.
“I’m telling you, right now is where the gold is.” The Life of Dai (HarperCollins NZ, $39.99), the book comedian Dai Henwood wrote with friend Jaquie Brown, contains a million sentences to live by - but its sum is so much greater than its parts. Silly and sad, inspiring and commonsensical, it’s the book you might consider reading if you know someone with cancer but don’t know what to say or do about it.
The honey toast from Rhu, Auckland. Because every second brunchstagrammer cannot possibly be wrong.
The oldest contemporary jewellery gallery in Aotearoa turned 50 this year. Auckland’s Fingers celebrated its golden milestone with a sparkling group show. We loved Jane Dodd’s carved bone Unbel holding a graph of gold prices since 1974 but, when considering the year’s ultimate statement jewellery moment, we must herald one of our own. At the Voyager Media Awards, Viva creative director Dan Ahwa embellished his T-shirt and suit jacket with a $268 Carla Zampatti black c spot fiore brooch. In a room full of borrowed suits, badly sewn sequins and sports reporters, it was a fashion power move.
Anika Moa played a mermaid, Jennifer Ludlam played a pirate and if you took the grandkids expecting a rollicking romp, you possibly had some existential explaining to do afterwards. Nightsong and Auckland Theatre Company’s Peter Pan collaboration was dark and thoughtful and awash with musical gorgeousity - most notably from Lotima Nicholas Pome’e. His lost boy (with a plot twist) solo was an ethereal showstopper.
In a year when people wanted to work from home but the Government said we couldn’t, the crisp, striped untucked single shirt tail was a symbol of quiet protest. Were we coming or going? Dressing or undressing? Did we have one foot in the office - or one foot just out of bed? Nobody knew and, around the world, workwear sloths rejoiced.
The label on the wall said June Black recorded the relationship between fashion and the psyche. There were many luminaries in Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s Modern Women: Flight of Time show (on until February 23) but in our opinion, Black shone brightest. Consider her “costume in which to keep from flying apart in every direction.” Or her “costume in which to crumple a poem you have spent two years writing”. Black (1910-2009) was a painter, playwright and ceramic artist and best new/old New Zealand artist we discovered this year.
Seriously, did anyone NOT go to Japan in 2024?
A toilet roll cover from Cromwell, a pineapple-inspired egg cosy from Ōamaru and a rainbow jacket with deer antler buttons and three folded raffle tickets in the left hand pocket are just some of the treasures in the Heather Halcrow Nicholson knitting collection. She was the first New Zealand woman to conduct a field-based geology thesis (mapping the entirety of Waiheke Island on foot), a science teacher, and a champion of fibre arts and craft. This year, thanks to the IDEA (Improved Documentation Enhanced Access) Project, 60 of the objects she gifted to Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum went “live” online. A browsable treasure trove of handmade history for scholars, artists and anyone who loves forest green jumpers with orange reindeer motifs.
Think Dan Carter, think … Rugby? Undies? Not everyone could pivot so gracefully from Jockeys and sweat to a signature scent, but DC10 Signature was launched this year with an olfactory profile that included bergamot, black pepper, orange zest, lavender buds, violet leaves, cedar wood, patchouli steam, cedarwood and amber resin. To put this another way, Carter’s new Eau De Toilette has more fragrance notes than the All Black’s have Rugby World Cup wins.
From the moment Jaz announced “someone’s about to have a very full [*redacted]” you knew that Madam was a workplace drama that might not be that safe for work. The story of an ethical, feminist brothel in smalltown New Zealand starred a script that was risque (“could I request a song with a little more bass?”), romantic (“did Ayla want to see Jondalar?”) and refreshingly indicative of just how far local television programming has, er, come. [* rhymes with “tum”]
It was moments like these we truly missed Twitter Original which, surely, would have spawned a plucky rat posting from the cheese aisle. Grocery store rodents plagued the headlines this year, with reported sightings from the salami aisle, the wine aisle and (memorably) the potato salad section of a refrigerated deli counter. Frankly, that’s a dinner party we wouldn’t have minded attending.
There is a flash of brilliance in the opening minutes of A Remarkable Place to Die (think The Brokenwood Mysteries for Central Otago) that has nothing to do with the acting or superlative scenery. Who made the gloriously glossy piece of art that hangs near the piano in Detective Mallory’s childhood home? We checked the credits. Artist: Dale Drank. Related, we assume, to the quite famous Australian resin and perspex artist Dale Frank.
Literary prizes have long been associated with hot air, but absolutely no-one delivers flatulence with the brutal elegance of Emily Perkins. Her novel Lioness won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It featured menopause, the middle classes and this absolute ripper of a sentence: “As I stood up, a tearing fart escaped me ...”
Sylvia Park, where you will find: “Simon Lewis Ward’s giant knucklebones and his 375 glass replica jet plane lollies falling from a replica packet suspended from the ceiling. The former is a great place for kids to play, while the latter makes them whine at you to buy them treats, which you probably will, because Sylvia Park makes you feel like it’s the right thing to do.” (As recorded by Premium Lifestyle writer Greg Bruce in an epic ranking of capitalism’s greatest achievement which you can read here and wonder, perhaps, whether his declaration that Botany Town Centre is the Louvre of Auckland malls might have afforded it a higher public art ranking?).
Back in March, an 810g chondrite hurtled to Earth on a trajectory that would put its landing somewhere within a 700,000 sq m area of the Mackenzie Basin. Its fall was witnessed by a meteor enthusiast sitting in a spa bath in Queenstown; it was located 20 minutes into the official search by a volunteer with Fireballs Aotearoa who was combing terrain described “as a big glacial plain covered in stones” for an object about the size of a tennis ball. Moral of the story: There is nothing lost that cannot be found, even car keys at the beach.
Kim Knight is a senior journalist with the New Zealand Herald’s Premium Lifestyle team.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.