Visitors with Intent

On the radio, Jesse’s in Dunedin, interviewing locals
spinning our attractions, the usual tropes, wildlife,
lack of traffic, the cold, how much they love it.

‘Safe for students,” someone says. I question
the veracity, knowing how many land in ED
on Saturday nights, knowing about peepers and worse.

A car follows us down the road, negotiating the slips
and stops at the entrance to the carpark.
I turn around from the path, notice again the car.

At the top of the dunes, a man is looking for sea lions
to show his visiting niece, ‘one here Tuesday,’
I say, ‘but most gone now for winter.’

No waves to catch today so the beach is all ours,
the air fresh, the sky unclouded, the island uninhabited.
Hip-sore, I go back first, open the boot. A waterfall of glass

falling at my feet, the back window shattered. ‘A flicked stone,’
I say, believing in random accidents, unable to take in
the chunk of concrete lying amongst the shards.

Not until we get home do I notice the absences, red bag,
with emergency hats, mittens, first aid kit, and remember
the car, the occupants watching. I think of that word

I took issue with—‘safe’. But I am for now.

Diane Brown

Diane Brown runs Creative Writing Dunedin. Her eight published books range over poetry, novels, and memoirs. She has recently completed a hybrid collection, Growing Up Late and is now working on a prose/poetic exploration of female ancestors, Straight as A Pound of Candles. 

Two poems for the preservation of Thomson Gorge, Central Otago

I   Dunstan Daybook

The undescribed moth
The unrecorded native daisy
The unsung rowanberries
The unheeded bidibid
The unimpeded lacebark
The unrecognizable cushion-plant
     laid down on its gravel sofa
The unapologetic Spaniards
The unsuspecting blue tussock
    browsing the false dawn
The unrelenting South Copper Tussock
The unassuming Woolyhead
    Hence to me, Molly Gray,
                               Low creatures of the Thomson Gorge Road!

II.   Rise & Shine Gully

There is a dancer in the gully. In Cromwell-broom and hard-tussock, in blue wheat grass. In the unrehearsed choreography of falling rock, shadow of passing bird, cloud drift. Switch off the hydrometer and rock-hammer, the stamper and pounder. Quiet the hydraulic shovel and excavator. Allow us this zig-zag stream, its curvaceous body, our handknit, our matagouri. And Mount Aspiring an otherworldly tent pitched on the horizon. There is a dancer in the gully, and the first synchronized bulbs of rumoured spring. And this her last dance. Everything disguised as every other thing: elusive lizard skin, bejewelled rockface, speargrass. The blue thread of our crooked stream. The earth on its axis. There is a dancer in Rise and Shine Gully, and humanity adrift on its own star.

 Gregory O’Brien

A brief note on poetics and politics

Poetry can be political, but politics is rarely poetic. These days, on the national as well as the world stage, spoken and written language has been reduced, denigrated and dragged through the mud. Luxon. Bishop. Shane Jones. Seymour. A sign of the times, maybe: this assault on language has been accompanied by a cold-blooded, hard-hearted approach to life in the broader human sphere and in relation to the natural world beyond. –

In recent months, photographer Bruce Foster and I have been completing a commissioned book about Central Otago (Tailings, Ugly Hill Press, forthcoming in 2026). Our many-facetted view of the region has now had to accommodate the advent of the Santana Mining Corporation’s plans to destroy a truly remarkable location in Central Otago. Bruce and I have both lived in that region and, like the local people, we know what there is to lose.

Central Otago is not a ‘mineral reserve’ (Shane Jones’s monstrous phrase), it is our collective body and our soul.

There is no up-side to mining. You only need to look around you. I have spent time every year since the 1980s in the Waihi district. Gold-mining has wrecked that town.  The place never boomed, the population never thrived, as we were told it was going to. Occasionally entire houses collapse into sink-holes left by previous mining misadventures. When you stand at the edge of the open cast mine and stare down into it, you don’t see hundreds of happy, well-paid, skilled workers—you find yourself staring into The Void. No one is there. There might be two or three oversized vehicles groaning beneath the weight of earth piled into them. Waihi lost its soul. It’s the same story wherever you find a gold mine. The town of Palmerston, the nearest ‘centre’ to the gigantic, open cast mine at Macraes in Otago, has gone backwards or, at best, weirdly sideways.

At the present time, it is hard to think about ‘poetics’ as distinct from the rest of life. In this era when the powers-that-be are intent on replacing ‘education’ with ‘training’, and we are expected to put all else aside in the interests of Unregulated Progress—the ‘Fast Track’ / ‘Quick Buck’ / ‘Drill Baby Drill’ mentality that stalks the corridors of power and is poisoning our public life. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote: ‘A few are riding, but the rest are run over.’

 Gregory O’Brien

Gregory O’Brien’s recent books are House and Contents (AUP, 2022) and Don Binney–Flight Path (AUP, 2023). Recent activities have been focussed on the wider Pacific region (he is currently working on a book of poetry and art with John Pule) and Central Otago. Last year Gregory was made an Honorary Geographer by the New Zealand Geographic Society. A short film of Greg reading ‘Thomson Gorge Road Song’ (text published on Poetry Shelf last month) can be viewed here:

Also filmed in Thomson Gorge, October 2025, the ‘dancer in valley’ can be seen in situ here:

Thanks to Bruce Foster for shooting both videos. Acknowledgements also to Sue Healey, Richard Harvey and Jen Bornholdt.

Save the date… Sweet Mammalian’s twelfth issue is almost upon us! Join us for readings from the new issue of Aotearoa’s most hot-blooded lit mag, and general merriment to follow.

This event is free to attend. We will provide light victual refreshment and beverages are available at your leisure from the bar.

Statues

The disappeared, the totalled, those who ain’t there;
whether hollow, solid, reinforced, bolted
or cemented to a pedestal,
nothing is as invisible as a monument,
until you turn the spotlight on it;
as ghostbusters prepare to topple another statue.

The past may be best understood
as the bust on a tottering plinth
of a complete unknown being wheeled away;
a once majestic face on currency and buildings
torn down and cast into the oubliette
of a long time ago.

Let them who are without sin
take up the correction chisel,
to hammer, smash, throw down in a puddle
of blood, sweat and tears, the unwanted;
surplus to requirements of the present;
to cast out the decapitated, sink them at sea.

There are multitudes in the cancelled lines,
depedestalled saviours awaiting de-installation,
deconstruction, decolonisation, defenestration.
They raise a monument to replace a monument.
Statues of different sizes await comeuppance.
Each bust gone bust and busted down to size.

Those once approved of are now torn out
of book pages; disambiguated, declassified
deselected, renumbered, and deported;
certain to have gone for a burton; at one
with the thrown shoe, the thrown stick,
the thrown bomb, the torn-off limb,
the over-thrown world we live in.

David Eggleton

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry chapbooks include Mundungus Samizdat (2024), and his most recent poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California in September 2025.