The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best premium stories of 2021. Today we take a look at some of the best pieces from Joanna Wane.
'Why I couldn't stay': Auckland Art Gallery curator Nigel Borell
On December 4, 2020, some 800 people turned up at Auckland Art Gallery for the grand opening of Toi Tū Toi Ora, an extraordinary survey of contemporary Māori art spanning four generations of artists. By then, curator of Māori art NigelBorell had already resigned from the art gallery. By Christmas, he'd left the building.
Word of his departure sent shockwaves through the arts community, and rumours flew that some artists had threatened to pull their work. Yet despite widespread media coverage of the exhibition, Borell's exit went unreported.
Nigel Borell had resigned by the time the Toi Tū Toi Ora exhibition opened. Photo / Dean Purcell
New Zealand's obsession with 'green Easter eggs'
It wasn't kindness that got New Zealand through lockdown last year. It wasn't the lovely autumn weather or the Easter Bunny being declared an essential worker, although that certainly helped. It wasn't even "curve crusher" Ashley Bloomfield holding his nerve. It was feijoas.
Writer Kate Evans has spent a lot of time contemplating the way feijoas have become so embedded in our national identity, weaving threads of connection and creating sensory memories that instantly transport you back to childhood. There's nothing quite like their gloopy texture and a scent that's been likened to fine perfume.
Feijoas have become embedded in our national identity. Photo / Duncan Brown
'I kicked and fought for my life': Sue Kedgley reveals all in new memoir
Me too. Young women didn't say those words out loud when Sue Kedgley was at university, not even to each other. It's time, she says, for her to say them now.
Let's call the assault what it was: an attempted rape by a powerful, entitled older man used to getting what he wanted and who probably didn't give her a second thought after she fled his hotel room. Sound familiar? The parallels with Harvey Weinstein don't stop there.
There's far more to Kedgley's new memoir, Fifty Years a Feminist — an intriguing insider's view of gender politics from the emergence of women's lib in the 1970s to the hashtag feminism of today. But after decades of silence, she's chosen this as her moment to open up publicly about the incident for the first time.
Sue Kedgley, feminist and former Green MP, at her Wellington home. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Breaking the code of silence
Anger was written all over the walls when boys began arriving at school on a Monday morning earlier this year. The chalked slogans, calling out sexism and harassment by students from Christchurch Boys' High, washed off with water. The ugliness they exposed has not been so easily erased.
The conversation that's emerged since has raised some uncomfortable questions around the way so many teenage girls are treated with such casual brutality by both their male peers and older men. In a survey conducted at neighbouring Christchurch Girls' High in response to the controversy, two-thirds of those who took part said they'd been sexually harassed, ranging from verbal abuse to violent assaults.
More than 20 allegations of rape were made, a number that doesn't include other extremely concerning incidents where the details were not fully disclosed.
What's disturbing is not just the scale and seriousness of the revelations but the fact that so few of the students themselves found them shocking. "I was actually surprised it was so low; I expected almost double that number," says one student. "I don't know if there's a teenage girl who hasn't experienced sexual harm or isn't close to someone who has. I just don't think that person exists."
