Waitangi Day big reads: Our great New Zealand stories

Gottfriend Lindauer's Chief Ngatai-Raure and Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure, stolen in a ram raid on April 1, 2017. Photo / Police

This Waitangi Day the New Zealand Herald revisits some of our great New Zealand reads from Canvas magazine.

Who stole the Lindauers?

Very early on April 1, 2017, a stolen Ford Courier ute drives up Auckland's Parnell Rd and stops outside the International Art Centre. Bang! The vehicle reverses into the plate glass window. Bang! The driver slams the accelerator for a second hit. Glass shatters. Two men run to the window. They load two large canvases into the back seat of an almost brand new white Holden Commodore and they drive off.

It took just under 40 seconds to steal the pair of Gottfried Lindauer Māori portraits valued at almost $1 million.

Kim Knight revels the mysteries within the mystery.

The scene of the crime: Parnell's International Art Centre after the ram raid burglary of two Māori portraits by Gottfried Lindauer. Photo / Jason Oxenham

The family tree

Fanene James Joseph Meleiseā was an Auckland bus driver. His first wife was Patricia (Papi) Soo Choon. They had 10 children, 21 grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren, one great-great-grandchild and counting.

Their roots are in Samoa. Their roots are in Mt Roskill.

Half a century ago, Fanene dug into the dirt out the front of a four-bedroom weatherboard state house. He planted a phoenix palm. It grew and grew and grew.

Papi and Fanene died a decade apart. Their house is gone - bowled to make way for a motorway extension. But that tree?

Kim Knight tells this epic tale of a Pacific family, and a tree.

Papi with the baby palm tree.

What it's really like to be a funeral director

The conference had begun only that morning and I'd already heard numerous graphic, harrowing and traumatising stories about the things these people had seen, although the traumatised were never the ones telling the stories. It seems self-evident that dealing with death all day every day will mess you up but no one would cop to it.

Still reeling from the deaths of his parents, Greg Bruce attends a funeral directors' conference to talk to those who deal with grief daily.

Organised Fun at the Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand's annual conference. Photo / Supplied

One man, one week, one awful lot of makeup

On Monday I came home wearing concealer and tinted moisturiser and my wife didn't notice. On Tuesday I came home wearing full-face foundation, eyebrow pencil and lip conditioner and she didn't notice. On Wednesday I came home wearing mascara and on Thursday I came home wearing lipstick. On neither day did she notice. On Friday, I came home wearing eyeshadow, mascara, eyeliner and something called tightliner, some of which I'd applied myself.

"Oh my God!" she said, as soon as I walked in the door, "You're wearing makeup!"

Greg Bruce embeds with Big Beauty to report from the front line of the male makeup boom.

MAC senior makeup artist Kiekie Stanners at work on the writer. Photo / Jason Oxenham.

Kākāpō Apocalypse? Behind the quarantine lines

The race to save the kākāpō smells like breakfast cereal. Warm, brown mush, drawn into a syringe attached to a plastic tube that will be guided down the throat of a bird waiting on the other side of a red quarantine line.

Seven kākāpō died and more were left seriously ill. Auckland Zoo vet hospital was one of three centres that responded to the unprecedented crisis.

Kim Knight and Michael Craig spent a week alongside the staff and volunteers fighting to save a critically endangered species.

Kākāpō chick Esperance-2-B-19. Photo / Michael Craig