Salient Issue 1 - Volume 89

ISSUE #1

23 February 2026

Editor

Phoebe Robertson

Designer & Cartoonist

Jim Higgs

Sub-Editor

Holly Rowsell

News Writers

Dan Moskovitz

Te Urukeiha Tuhua

Martha Schenk

Ryan Cleland

Columnist

Guy van Egmond

Critic-at-large

Jackson McCarthy

Comic Artists

Grace Elzenheimer

Jack Graham

Contributing Writers

Tamanna Amin

Zia Ravenscroft

Social Media Manager

Will Tickner

Photographer

Sophie Spencer

Distributer/Contributing Writer

Ali Cook

Centrefold Artist

Sanjukta Dey

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Read Online salient.org.nz issuu.com/salientmagazine

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Want to get published?

To contribute to Salient, you can submit poetry, creative writing, artwork, comics, puzzles, features, and other ideas. Feature articles must be pitched to the Editor before writing; send pitches to editor@salient.org.nz. Artwork should be sent to designer@salient.org.nz. Creative writing submissions are accepted through the form on our website. All other contributions, including puzzles and general ideas, should be emailed to the Editor. Submissions are welcome from first-time and returning contributors.

Kia ora to our returning students, and our new ones. To the freshers: if you’ve already gotten lost, doubled back, and somehow ended up at one of our stands—welcome.

My elevator pitch for Salient is simple: it’s your university magazine, it’s free, and you’ve picked it up in a very lucky year. Our puzzles have doubled—from two pages to four—for the entire year. You’re welcome, 08s. That’s a lot of premium procrastination, and if you behave, we might even do a puzzle issue later in the year as a little treat. If you want to try student journalism, get something published, or just join the team, scan the QR codes throughout the magazine to find out how to submit.

Now, what I actually want to teach you is how to order a drink at a bar.

I’ve worked as a bartender for years, but I too was once 18 and clueless. I turned 18 the day before moving into halls, went to a bar on my birthday, got asked what I wanted…and had absolutely no idea. I think I ordered a cider. From Ivy. Never again.

So here’s the basics, so you don’t repeat my mistakes.

Wine: if you drink it, ask for the house. White? Bars will always have a Sav, Pinot Gris, Rosé, and bubbles. Red? Technically an option—usually a Pinot Noir—if you’re keen to spill it on yourself. “House” just means the cheapest option, so you’re not being upsold and you sound like you know what you’re doing.

Beer: check the taps. If in doubt, ask for the bartender’s favourite or the cheapest one. It’ll probably taste bad, but you’ll learn which house beer tastes the least bad, and that’s how you pick your regular bar.

Spirits: always order the spirit first, then the mixer. You’re paying for the spirit—neat or with a mixer costs the same. Every bar will have a house vodka, gin, whisky, tequila, rum, and bourbon. Order like this: “vodka lemonade,” “gin and tonic,” or “rum and coke.” Juice mixers are common too—cranberry, pineapple, apple. Vodka cranberry is a classic. Tequila pineapple is underrated.

A rough guide: like Woodstock? Get a bourbon and coke. Like Cruisers? Vodka cranberry or vodka lemonade. Already have a favourite RTD? Check the back of the can and order the closest match.

If you’re brand new to bar ordering, start simple. Pick a mixer you already like (Sprite or ginger beer are safe bets) and ask the bartender what goes well with it. If you’re polite, they’ll happily help.

Finally, while I’ve spent a lot of time talking about alcohol (possibly too late for those who cracked it during O-Week), drinking shouldn’t be your whole uni experience. Enjoy the freedom, clubs, and independence—but do it in moderation, and knuckle down when it’s time to study. And if you don’t drink, bars now have great zero-alcohol options. Mocktails are elite, and places like Ballroom, Hunter Lounge, and JJ’s have pool tables and games, so you can still be social without drinking.

Enjoy the issue, enjoy the start of the year, and I’ll see you next week.

Phoebe Robertson

Salient is published by, but remains editorially independent from, the Victoria University of Wellington Students Association (VUWSA). Salient is funded in part by VUWSA through the Student Services Levy. Salient is a member of the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA) and the New Zealand Media Council. Complaints regarding the material published in Salient should first be brought to the VUWSA CEO in writing (ceo@vuwsa. org.nz). If not satisfied by the response, complaints should be directed to the Media Council (info@mediacouncil.org.nz).

Week of February 23 - March 1, 2026

TUESDAY WEDNESDAY

Moon Jam Nite

Venue: Moon Bar, 7:30pm

Cost: Free!

Every Tuesday at 7:30 PM, Moon hosts an open mic night with a fully equipped stage—electric guitars, keyboard, drum kit, microphones, lighting, and a sound technician. Just bring yourself and your music. Whether you’re performing or jamming, it’s an easy, well-supported way to take the stage.

FRIDAY

The New Things And The Beatdown

Venue: Moon Bar, 9:00pm

Cost: $10 with student ID

Two garage bands from Paekākāriki take the stage—two live sets for just $10. Great value, high energy, and a chance to catch local talent in one night.

Quiz Night

Venue: Eva Pub, 7:00pm

Cost: Free!

Wednesday is quiz night in Wellington!

Head out around 6:30 PM and choose your venue—most quizzes are free to enter and offer spot prizes. It’s a fun, low-cost way to get out of your halls, explore the city, and spend time with your new friends.

SATURDAY

Atomic

Venue: San Fran, 8:00pm

Cost: $20 (door sales only)

If Tau Mai or O-Week hasn’t drained your wallet, Atomic is a Wellington nightlife staple. Expect Bowie, Duran Duran, The Clash, Eurythmics, Talking Heads and more—music made for dancing. And if you don’t recognise those names, it might officially be time for me to retire from Salient.

SATURDAY

Funky Mama

Venue: Rogue & Vagabond, 9:30pm

Cost: Free!

Beers and live music in the sun—what more could you want? Rogue has long been a go-to, student-friendly venue for accessible gigs. Even if this one’s not your style, it’s worth keeping on your radar—there’s always another show around the corner.

Are you a Te Herenga Waka student with an upcoming gig or event? Scan the QR code to submit your details for potential inclusion on our gigs page. SHARE YOUR GIG!

About the centrefold artist - Sanjukta Dey

My name is Sanjukta Dey, and this work is a loose mosaic of my past year. I painted while eating, talking, laughing, and sobbing during beautiful moments shared with my friends and family. I moved between distraction and focus, without any vision. I wanted to play with space, colour, and texture, but above all, I wanted to play. This is the second part of a series, returning to a piece I made earlier in life.

Go to page 20 to see the centrefold, then rip it out and put it on your wall !

Student Health Plan to Offer Free ADHD Assessments From Trimester Two

Dan Moskovitz

Student Health is planning to introduce free ADHD (Attention Hyperactivity Deficit Disorder) diagnoses and prescriptions for students from trimester two—in a move it says could remove a major financial barrier to care.

ADHD symptoms include inattentiveness, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, which can make sustained academic work difficult and leave university students particularly affected.

Until recently, only psychologists and psychiatrists could diagnose ADHD and prescribe medication. Rule changes now allow trained general practitioners (GPs) and nurse practitioners to do so—but just because they legally can, doesn’t mean they know how.

“Our doctors and nurse practitioners have to undertake specific training to learn how to diagnose and prescribe ADHD medication safely,” Student Health Director Kevin Rowlatt said.

“It still takes four to five hours per patient to diagnose, prescribe, and follow up effectively.”

Rowlatt said he is aiming for the service to begin in trimester two while Mauri Ora ensured the clinic can absorb demand without extending wait times for other appointments. That will likely require additional staff, which has yet to be funded, though Rowlatt said he is confident of securing it.

Equally, Mauri Ora is intending to provide the service for free, which could save students thousands of dollars.

Law and sociology student Karmyn Gunn said her diagnosis required a referral from a friend, a six-month wait, and about $1200, wiping out her savings in the process.

But she says the medication changed her ability to study.

“My whole schooling life, I had been thinking there was something wrong with me,” Gunn said.

“It’s like trying to hold slime in your hands when everyone else has a container to hold it in. Ok, why isn’t this staying there? Why does everyone else have a container?”

Rowlatt compared ADHD diagnoses to gender-affirming healthcare, saying both produce “fantastic” wellbeing outcomes when accessible.

“I think it will be a really positive change for students to be able to access an [ADHD] assessment in primary care. We know a referral to a psychiatrist may have significant wait times,” he said.

“Furthermore, if students can access it here, through someone they know, they don’t have to repeat their story to a stranger.

“Primary care welcomes this change and is quite excited that we’re able to do this. It’s just going to take time to set up and we want to ask for a bit of patience because we want it to be safe.”

Outside tertiary study, ADHD assessments typically still cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. When asked by Salient if there had been any consideration of funding ADHD assessments, the Ministry of Health did not directly respond.

“By creating opportunities for more clinicians to offer this service, we expect availability to increase over time and for patients to have more choice in the market,” a

University’s New International Scholarships Operate as Automatic Tuition Reductions

Phoebe Robertson

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington introduced two new international scholarships in 2025, offering $15,000 for undergraduate students and $10,000 for postgraduate students. The University confirmed the scholarships were launched in September 2025 for students enrolling from Trimester 3, 2025, positioning them as an upfront financial incentive at the point of acceptance rather than a later academic award.

Nine students received the undergraduate award and 47 received the postgraduate award in the scheme’s first year.

According to the University’s scholarship pages, the VUW Undergraduate International Scholarship is valued at $15,000 for one year and is available to new international students entering their first year of a Bachelor’s degree.

The VUW Postgraduate International Scholarship is valued at $10,000 for one year and applies to new international students entering a Master’s degree or Postgraduate Diploma.

Both scholarships are described by the University’s website as “partial fee-based” awards that are credited directly towards tuition fees. Because the scholarships are automatically assessed and applied as a tuition credit rather than awarded through a competitive application process, they function structurally as a fixed reduction in first-year international tuition fees for eligible new students.

Students do not submit a separate scholarship application. Instead, they are automatically assessed when applying for their programme, and recipients are notified of the award in their Offer of Place.

The awards are available only to new international students paying full international fees who hold a conditional or unconditional Offer of Place. Returning students, study abroad and exchange students, students with credit transfer, government-sponsored students, and those with domestic status are ineligible.

Students can see the tuition reduction in their Offer of Place and in their Pūaha fees information, but not in academic transcript records. The University did not provide a percentage of recipients, stating it does not collect data on ineligible applicants.

Recipients who withdraw after the scholarship has been formally awarded may be required to repay some or all of the value at the University’s discretion.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Students) Dr Logan Bannister said the scholarships “help the University attract high calibre students at a time when affordability and value are key considerations for learners and their families.”

The University also stated that even with the scholarship applied, recipients still contribute more in tuition fees than the cost of the award, and that the scholarships are projected to deliver a positive financial return. The awards are expected to contribute to the long-term stability of international revenue by encouraging increased enrolments.

Bannister added that “the majority of applicants who meet the criteria receive an award.” And that the university “intentionally structured this programme to be accessible rather than competitive”

Enrolment figures provided by the University show that in 2025 there were 2,666 students categorised as “Other Funding (including International students)” out of a total of 21,143 students. Based on the University’s figures, 56 of these International students received one of the two international scholarships that year.

Te Herenga Waka said it was not yet in a position to provide the 2026 numbers until early March. By contrast, the University of Auckland—the only New Zealand university that provided comparable 2026 enrolment data by deadline—supplied current figures.

As of 12 February 2026, the University of Auckland had 9,527 overseas resident students enrolled (headcount), up from 8,129 at the same time in 2025. Auckland’s 2025 overseas headcount alone was more than three times Te Herenga Waka’s entire 2025 “Other Funding (including International students)” cohort of 2,666.

Furthermore, Auckland’s year-on-year increase in overseas residents—1,398 additional students— amounts to more than half of Te Herenga Waka’s total 2025 international cohort.

The Student Executive’s Year Ahead

Te Urukeiha Tuhua

Last year’s student elections for Victoria University of Wellington’s Student Association (VUWSA) saw a huge leap in candidates, with significantly more people running than in recent years.

Importantly, it was the first contested race for presidency since 2018, when current Wellington Central Member of Parliament Tamatha Paul was elected.

Now that the buzz has settled down and executive members have moved into their new roles, Salient reached out to hear about what they have planned for 2026.

The main priority for President Aidan Donoghue this year is to focus students’ attention to the 2026 general elections, and to campaign for students to make their voices heard by politicians. He said that VUWSA will soon be launching their new campaign, Show Up or Shut Up.

“We've modeled this off the successes of other fantastic campaigns, like the living wage movement,” he said. He wants to engage students across all three campuses by increasing VUWSA’s presence at both Te Aro and Pipitea campuses.

Donoghue said that the Student Action Hui is a way for VUWSA to directly engage and work with students on campaigns, and find out what issues are at the forefront for students heading into the election. The hui will take place on Wednesday 18 March at 5:30pm in the Hunter Lounge.

Previously established VUWSA-led campaigns including Where’s the Work?, Winter Energy Payment, and Study Wage for All will continue in the background, and will also be brought to the hui to see if there’s still demand for them.

Donoghue remains set on establishing a nonprofit op-shop on campus, however no timeline has been set as of yet.

“I’m hoping it’ll be within my term, but it is happening.”

Donogue’s ideas are currently in the planning stages, so students won’t yet see the direct impact of his presidency.

Meanwhile, Welfare Vice President Aspen Jackman is passionate about the return of a dedicated women’s space on campus. She said that she gathered data last year after putting out a survey to find out whether this was important to students.

“We got a resounding yes,” she said.

“There’s still misogyny and prejudice against women and gender diverse students.” She said that results from the survey suggested some people are afraid to be on campus, and that after attending classes many women and gender minorities would like a safe space they can go to study.

She intends to create this space at Kelburn Campus initially and then expand it to both Te Aro and Pipitea campuses, but was unable to give Salient a timeline. She said she is waiting to hear back from Property Services about available rooms, and that while they seemed “pretty on board”, added that they also “could be a little more eager.”

Jackman also said that she is organising a drugs week in week 7, which will be centered around drugs education and involve “fun events, a quiz, a political debate.”

She said that the need for drugs education has increased as there’s been a shift in student drug use. “Previously it’s been more alcohol and more marijuana… but it’s shifted to more ketamine and MDMA.”

Aiden Donoghue - President

Jackman said that people need to be aware that MDMA and ketamine are often not MDMA and ketamine. “Get drugs tested,” she said. “That’s really important.”

Know Your Stuff NZ tested over 1000 samples in February and March 2025, and found that 7% of samples had results inconsistent with the drug it was presumed to be. Further data on drug testing can be found on their website.

During drugs week, Jackman wants students to be able to have “good faith discussions with politicians” and “ask politicians questions in these debates”. She said that drug policies can be introduced as election promises.

“It’s important that people are educated on party stances going in, especially with a wave of new voters.”

Jackman will be getting a consensus on what students need through regular welfare dropin sessions which will happen three times per trimester at each campus. She said that this will help the welfare team to “make changes within the uni that are actually important to the students.”

She mentioned that there will be changes to the Student Equity and Diversity Committee to make it robust and to include other equity groups across the university.

On the other end of the spectrum, Academic Vice President Ethan Rogacion told Salient that this year the university is undergoing the Curriculum Transformation Project, a multi-year project that

places academic policy under review. He said that one of the focuses of this will be considering whether 15-point or 20-point courses should be the baseline for undergraduate courses.

“Both of them have different workload implications,” he said.

He has received feedback from students who are finding that their 15-point courses often have a higher workload than their 20-point courses. “The New Zealand Qualifications Framework actually says that one point is meant to be equivalent to around 10 hours of work,” Rogacion said.

“These students signed up for theoretically 150 hours, but they’re there day in, day out, weekend, mid-tri breaks, and that is fundamentally unfair.”

He said that he views student workload holistically, and that a large part of student workload comes from external factors.

“Students more and more are becoming increasingly time poor because they have to balance increasing workloads here at the university with the rising cost of living.”

“For a lot of students, it’s becoming more of a sacrifice to come to university because that’s time that you could be making money on shifts.”

Rogacion said that the elections will be at the front of mind for VUWSA this year. “Students are the only class of people who have to borrow money to survive.”

Aspen Jackman - Welfare VP

Ethan Rogacion - Academic VP

“Students are struggling all across the board. I do what I can within the university, but a lot needs to happen down the road at The Beehive as well.”

Rogacion said that he wants students to be at the core of all decision making within the university, and that there are mechanisms for students to make their voices heard. One way he will help ensure this is by bringing back the Student Academic Committee, which he said is a forum for faculty clubs and groups to discuss changes happening in academic policy with VUWSA and university leadership.

“There are very few instances where students are able to directly engage with university leadership.”

“The more that students can feed into decisions, the better they’ll be for students.”

With election campaigning, welfare initiatives, and academic reform all on the agenda, the executive has set an ambitious course for 2026. Whether these plans gain traction (and student buy-in) will become clearer as the year progresses.

Engagement Vice President Charlotte Lawrence was unavailable for an interview when contacted by Salient.

If you’ve got a news tip about what’s happening around Te Herenga Waka—or anything that affects students—we want to hear about it.

Scan our QR code or email editor@salient.org.nz.

We’re always keen to know what’s going on in the halls (yes, including the menu), anything unfolding around campus, or any questions you’ve got about what’s happening here. If there’s something studentrelevant you think we should look into, let us know.

New Drug Tests Ask One Question: Would You Make a Good Cop?

When Public Safety Requires Your Open Mouth

On December 15 2025, in what police are calling a “positive” development for road safety, the New Zealand Government quietly launched roadside drug testing in Wellington. Officials insist the initiative is simply meant to deter impaired driving— but independent sources now reveal a far more ambitious national project: the Government wants your DNA.

The Government claims that the newly introduced roadside drug testing regime rolling out across Wellington is about road safety. It insists this while collecting thousands of saliva samples from motorists and storing them long enough to confirm lab results, which, coincidentally, is also long enough to extract DNA. Officials say this is normal. The public, however, has begun to notice that “normal” is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days.

Under the new system, drivers can be stopped at random and asked to provide a saliva sample to test for recent use of cannabis, methamphetamine, MDMA, or cocaine. Refusal earns you a $400 fine, 75 demerit points, and a 12-hour driving ban.

Police say the tests are about deterrence. Critics say the technology is imperfect. Studies and overseas trials of rapid roadside drug screening devices show that a significant portion of initial positive results—in some drug classes, as many as one in four—later turn out to be false alarms once laboratory confirmation is done.

But the Government’s commitment to these tests persists, despite concerns from medical professionals, civil liberties groups, and anyone who has ever taken a prescription medication and then driven a car. Why push ahead with technology that misfires so often?

Because, according to a growing body of late-night theorists, bored policy students, and people who have read exactly one bioethics article, the drug testing isn’t really about drugs at all. It’s about DNA.

Saliva, after all, is not just a carrier of the truth about your weekend plans. It’s a genetic signature. A blueprint. A tiny wet resume of who you are and what you could become if grown in a lab beneath the Beehive. And when you place this quiet

nationwide swabbing exercise alongside another inconvenient fact—that New Zealand Police are facing a persistent staffing shortage—a new, more creative explanation emerges.

New Zealand is short on cops. Officially, the Government has promised hundreds of additional officers. Unofficially, recruitment has struggled to keep up with attrition, retirements, and the siren song of Australia, where Kiwi cops can earn more money and afford houses with walls. Some districts have been operating under sustained vacancy pressure. Applications fluctuate. Training pipelines bottleneck. The maths is unflattering.

So what do you do when you need more police, but humans are slow, expensive, and increasingly aware of their worth?

You clone them.

Not current police, of course—that would be far too confusing. You clone civilians. People already out there navigating traffic, obeying laws (mostly), and demonstrating a willingness to comply with authority by voluntarily getting swabbed on the side of the road.

The plan unfolds elegantly. First, expand roadside drug testing. Frame it as safety. Collect saliva at scale. Build a genetic archive robust enough to support future “innovation.” Meanwhile, subtly expand the idea that ordinary citizens can act as law enforcement through mechanisms like citizen’s arrest.

Normalise the idea that everyone already has a little bit of a cop in them.

Then, when recruitment targets inevitably fall short, pivot.

“Good news,” the Government announces. “We’ve solved the police shortage. The police were inside you all along.”

The clones, we are told, would be efficient. Conflict-averse. Already familiar with Wellington’s one-way road system. They would emerge pre-trained in passive aggression and queue discipline. Finally, a police force that understands the emotional complexity of finding a park on Cuba Street!

Officials deny any cloning agenda exists, pointing out that the saliva samples are used strictly for confirming test accuracy and are disposed of according to protocol. They emphasise that roadside drug testing is comparable to alcohol breath testing, despite the key difference that alcohol breath tests don’t accidentally accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit one quarter of the time.

That assurance further lands differently after it emerged in

Patrick Stables

October 2025 that more than 30,000 police alcohol breath tests were recorded without ever being conducted— phantom data entered to satisfy targets rather than reflect reality. An internal audit identified that simulated tests were logged due to quota pressure. Disciplinary scrutiny followed, though senior leadership maintained that performance goals had still actually been met.

This is revealing: if accuracy is flexible but volume is essential, roadside testing begins to look less like measurement and more like throughput. In that context, the expansion of saliva testing feels less incidental. When the system doesn’t require a real driver to generate real data, it’s reasonable to ask what, exactly, needs to be real at all?

Still, the optics are challenging. A government collecting genetic material. A policing workforce under strain. A testing regime with known reliability issues being rolled out anyway. In this environment, it’s hardly surprising that Wellington’s population—already prone to overthinking— has begun connecting dots that were technically never meant to touch.

The Government assures the public there is nothing to worry about. This is not surveillance. This is not genetic harvesting. This is not preparation for a future in which every false positive is merely a precursor to conscription into the cloned constabulary.

And yet.

About the writer:

Patrick Stables is a thoroughbred reporter who digs to the depths of the stories that no other reporters dare (or care) to go. Patrick founded The Horse's Mouth to bring professionalism and craft back to student media. He has a nose for the facts and the stamina for chasing down the truth.

About the movie buff:

If you’re going to ask people to surrender bodily material under threat of punishment, deploy technology with a high error rate, and do it in a country quietly scrambling to staff its police force—you have to expect some imagination will fill the gaps.

After all, when the state asks for your spit, the least it can do is explain what it plans to do with the rest of you.

Wuthering Heights

Dir. Emerald Fennell (2026)

Gus Saddleton is the finest movie expert in the Wellington region. Bringing his vast knowledge of cinema and pop culture, Gus delivers the most researched and sometimes profound film analysis. Gus uses the 'Bags of Popcorn' rating system, five bags being the highest rating a film can receive.

ON CINEMA

An adaptation of a classic novel which I will never read, Wuthering Heights is a transfixing romance story about two attractive Australian actors pretending to be British. Wuthering HEIGHTS must refer to the immense altitude of the main character Heathcliff (played by giant Jacob Elordi). This is a movie that must be seen on the big screen, Elordi’s stature being its own special effect, similar to the spectacle of Avatar (2009).

Rating: 5 bags of popcorn

Expert review by Gus Saddleton

This weeks film:

A Modest Selection

When I told my family I was moving from America to Aotearoa for university, they reacted as if I’d announced plans to join a cult—or worse, a megachurch. My uncle swore I’d lose all my rights, my guns first, though I had to remind him that I do not, in fact, own any. He warned me that I’d wake up each morning to fetch water from a river with my bare hands, presumably before churning butter and writing letters by candlelight.

He asked if I even spoke the language. Fair question. I do need to improve my te reo, though I suspect that wasn’t the language he meant. He asked whether New Zealand was near Germany. I said yes. It felt easier.

Needless to say, he does not own a passport. I do. Geography is relative, I suppose.

But despite his best efforts to preserve his all-American, football-watching niece in her natural habitat, I left for Aotearoa in April 2022.

The flight was long enough to interrogate my own optimism. But when I finally landed and climbed into a taxi bound for Capital Hall, something in me loosened. I was welcomed with what would become my least-favourite meal in halls: a Sunday roast that somehow tasted faintly of cannabis and cat food. It felt experimental, but it was fine. It was dinner. And no one was trying to sell it to me as revolutionary.

The next morning, much to my uncle’s imagined disappointment, I walked ten steps down the hall and filled my water bottle from a tap. Clean water. On demand. I hear they’ve even added an ice machine.

The first real shock arrived not in deprivation, but in proportion.

America does not simply build stores. It builds environments. Retail spaces that feel more like constrained weather systems—floresent, endless, humming with abundance.

At The Warehouse, I wandered to the duvet inners and blinked at the tiny selection. Where are all the options? I muttered to myself. There were perhaps two of each size, each in a different material. In the United States, I could have spent an entire afternoon choosing between down, microfiber, bamboo, hypoallergenic blends, or temperature regulating fibres allegedly developed by former NASA engineers. Ten brands per shelf, each promising identical sleep in slightly differentiated packaging. A marketplace engineered to transform rest into a core feature of my personality.

Here, I was confronted with the unsettling possibility that I might simply choose one and go home.

I stood there longer than necessary, feeling oddly deprived. Not of comfort—I had the exact duvet I needed—but of spectacle. Of comparison. Of the small, performative rush that comes from believing you are making a meaningful decision between nearly identical things.

The supermarket extended the lesson. Where were the thirty-five brands of almond milk? The seventy-five million varieties of milk generally? The cereals colonising isles? The chips, the pickles in flavours I didn’t even know existed? In the States, even if I bought the store brand, I enjoyed the theatre of considering otherwise. Abundance was part of the ritual.

In Aotearoa, I picked one of the three available oat milks and moved on with my life. It was liberating.

The food itself felt like an upgrade. I hadn’t realised how aggressively my American tastebuds had been trained. When something isn’t engineered to survive an apocalypse—it tastes cleaner. Less like it was formulated in a lab next to a missile prototype.

I slowly settled into my Kiwi routine. There were bumps— learning (the hard way) that speed and red light cameras exist here. In America, there’s often a small window to cry your way out of a ticket. Here? The camera does not care about your backstory. The fine arrives by mail. How efficient!

Efficiency appears elsewhere, too. I have never filed my own taxes in New Zealand. You still need an IRD number and all the official bits, but Inland Revenue simply…does it. For you. No TurboTax. No frantic Googling at 11:57 p.m. on the night before returns are due. No wondering whether a minor clerical error will result in federal prison.

Over time, I relaxed. My nervous system relaxed. I didn’t know how tightly I’d been wound until I wasn’t.

The first time I returned home—to Charlotte, North Carolina, the summer after my first year—the shock arrived all at once.

Moving from the U.S. to Aotearoa had felt like stepping into fresh air. Returning felt like walking into a wind tunnel.

America was louder. Bigger. Vast in a way that felt simultaneously architectural and psychological. The highways stretched into abstractions. The parking lots could be quantified as municipalities. Stores rose from asphalt like aircraft hangers, glowing late into the night. Everything appeared scaled for a population perpetually in motion.

Ali Cook

At Christmas, my mom and I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Target. It felt less like a store and more like a stage set—the lights, the abundance, the endless aisles. Everyone I had ever known seemed to be there, steering identical red carts through identical brightness, each basket layered with objects that would be unremarkable by morning.

And then there were the guns.

Men casually open-carrying assault rifles while picking up wrapping paper and stocking stuffers. I had forgotten people do that. Or perhaps, in America, I’d trained myself not to notice. After living in Aotearoa, seeing it again felt jarring. Not political. Not theoretical. Just terrifying.

In Pōneke, safety isn’t something I consciously think about; it’s the baseline. The background setting. In my hometown Target, I found myself begging my mom to let me wait in the car.

The scale of America is not just physical. It is emotional. It hums at a higher, insistant, frequency.

While I was home, I paid attention to my dad. He works for a bank, though it feels more accurate to say he belongs to one. The glow of his laptop spills across the living room long after midnight. There are weeks when sleep becomes an interruption.

We sit down to dinner, and his phone vibrates against the wood. He answers before it stops.

The voice on the other end is polite, measured. He is back at work before he finishes his plate.

The pace I’d felt in shopping centers and on highways wasn’t confined to those places. It followed him home. It sat between us at dinner. It lived in the ring of his phone and in the way he already returned to his office chair, planning ahead.

Being back made me anxious in a way I struggled to articulate. My chest felt tighter. Even the food tasted louder—saltier, sweeter, sharper. Everything seemed to demand attention all at once.

All I could think about was leaving.

Eventually, it was time to return to Aotearoa. I expected excitement. What I felt was relief.

When I landed and boarded the airport bus, I sensed it before I could even name it. My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. My breathing slowed.

I looked around at the other passengers. No one was pacing. No one was conducting business at full volume. No one was signalling importance. A woman stared out the window, unhurried. A man scrolled lazily on his phone. Someone boarded in jandals despite the weather.

As the bus wound along the motorway, I pressed my forehead lightly to the cool glass and watched the hills roll by—impossibly green, but not the manicured, hyper-saturated green of suburban America. This was a softer green. A lived-in one. The sky felt wider here, less crowded somehow. Even the sun seemed gentler.

There were no billboards screaming for attention. No giant flag flapping aggressively in the wind. The buildings sat low, tucked into the landscape instead of towering over it.

When I got back to my flat, I dropped my bag by the door and sat at the kitchen table while my flatmates made tea. The kettle clicked off. Someone opened a window. Late afternoon light pooled across the bench, catching in the steam.

I told them about the trip—the noise, the malls, my dad’s phone that never seemed to stop ringing.

One of them just got home from work. She listened, chin in her hand, hair still slightly damp from a shower. She looked rested. Not in a vacation way. Just… rested.

My other flatmate leaned back in his chair and mentioned taking time off to visit his family down south. He said it casually, as if it required no explanation. As if it had simply been available to him.

Time off.

The phrase lingered, unremarkable to everyone but me. Outside, someone walked past on the footpath. A car door shut. The evening moved forward at its own pace.

The kettle cooled on the bench, and we stayed there a little while longer.

NEW STUDENT DO's and DON'Ts

Add or drop courses within the first two weeks of class. After 8 March, the window closes to get your full course fees back. DO

DON'T

Don’t expect to get a full refund for any courses dropped after 8 March. deadlines are real.

DO

DON'T

Don't plagiarise. Don't use AI either. we can tell when you do.

Take a chance - students often get caught up being worried about how they’ll be perceived. But do take that chance. Talk to the person in your lecture you think is cool, sit next to some strangers in the Hub. you got this!

DO

regularlyCheckyouremails-andactuallyimportant,readthem.Ifit’sit’llthat’swhere be.

DON'T

Don’tleaveenrollment, applications,oradminto thelastminute.Nothing goodcomesfromthat.

from an VUWanonymous staff member

DO

Keep an open mind. You're here to learn, and you’re now part of a community, whether you’ve realised it or not.

DON'T

Don’t show off. It’s not a race or a everyonecompetition; is working towards the same goal.

DO

Don’tdrivetocampus. Evenstaffstruggleto findparking.Students don’tstandachance.

DO

Cometoclass.Showup inperson.Takenotes.

Treat study as a job. This is your opportunity to build skills that will directly translate to work life. You're an adult now.

DON'T

Don’t be a dick, respect the other students, staff members, and the institution.

DO

Sign up for tutorials the moment they open. Your course coordinators will tell you when - pay attention.

DON'T

Don’t show up to class late (and don’t forget to silence your phone).

DON'T

fromDon’tghostemails staff members. Ifwe’rereachingout, it’s for a reason.

DO

DO

Reach out to a Student Finance Adviser if money’s tight. University is expensive; pretending otherwise won’t help.

DON'T

DON'T

Don’t have your parents call, email, or show up on your behalf. Privacy laws apply - and, again, you’re an adult now.

DO

Familiarise yourself with the campus - book a campus tour, grab a map, find your lecture theatres before classes start. handy tip: room numbers are done by floor level, i.e. SU101 is in the student union building on the first floor.

DO availableUsetheservices Library,toyou:the Learning,Student StudentFinance,Success,Student theCareers Team.Team,theRainbow Helpingstudentsisliterallyourjob.

DO

DON'T

Don’tforgettobring photoIDduringexam season. You’ll need it togetin.

DON'T

Don’tforgetto LoanStudyLinkapplyforyourStudent wellandAllowance inadvance.

Ask for help when you need it - either from your course co-ordinator, peers, or staff at an Info Desk. that's what they're there for.

Don't be the silent person in the back of a tutorial. Participate. You’re paying to be here - may as well make the most of it.

Find a healthy work- life balance, make friends, sign up to clubs, take breaks when needed. have fun!

DON'T

DO

Usepublic transport.

Don’tlitterorplaymusic insocialspaces.People workhere.

DO

Collectyour student ID. it's great, you can get discounts and stuff!

DON'T

Don’tisolateyourself. Don’tleavethings to the last minute or overworkyourself. burn out is real and deeply unromantic.

DO

Get to know your Student Success Adviser. It will matter later.

DON'T

Don’t complain about the Student Services Fee. It directly supports students who need it most - possibly you, at some point.

This is Salient’s Bingo for our incoming first-year students. It’s designed to help you make friends and meet people, while also ticking off all of the ‘core’ memories you should have by the end of your first year in our capital city.

To win bingo, you need to cross off a line (diagonal, horizontal, or vertical). The first 10 freshers to complete it will win a prize from our team here at Salient. To claim your prize, either email us a photo of your completed sheet (editor@salient.org.nz) or upload a photo to Instagram and tag @salientgram in the post.

Ride the Cable Car

Late for Lecture

Watch someone’s umbrella turn inside out

Recognise someone purely from Halls

Lose a hat to the harbour forever

Get taken out by the wind

Complain about the hills (out loud, multiple times)

Make a friend while waiting for the bus

Send a “home safe?” text

Go to a club event with someone new

Pre-drink too hard and need to stay home

Knock on someone’s door to say hi

Miss the bus by 3 seconds

End a night out at Abrakababra

Get added to a group chat you immediately mute

Feel the wind push you sideways

Sit in the wrong lecture and stay out of politeness

Submit an assignment at 11:58pm

Say “I’ll catch up this weekend” (you will not)

Talk shit about Auckland

Lose your student ID

Invite someone to get food

Compliment a stranger’s outfit

Call someone the wrong name and Have chemistry with someone

Consider changing your degree

Forget to eat until 4pm

FREE SPACE

Sit next to someone you don’t know in a lecture

Spend $20 on food and still be hungry

Say “I’m not going out tonight” and go out

Forget someone’s name immediately after they tell you

Lose your voice from town

Play a drinking game with hall mates

Study with someone for at least 30 minutes

Wonder if everyone else is smarter than you

Introduce yourself in a tutorial

Think “I’ve changed” after three weeks

Say yes to something you’d normally say no to

Pick up a copy of Salient

Overshare within 10 minutes of meeting someone

Pre-drink with people you just met

Go to a uni event alone and meet people there

Have a 2am life crisis

Create a group chat that dies

Experience all four seasons in one day Cancel plans and feel relief

bigfoot advises: do not try to complete every single square on this bingo board. for your own safety and sanity.

Forget your hall key and wait awkwardly for an RA

Your bus just… doesn’t show up

An Insider’s Guide to the Wellington Fringe Festival

Rebecca Stirling

It's that time of year again. Boosted campaigns stalk your social feeds, posters multiply across campus, and theatre students begin materialising in your first lectures, eager—desperate, even—to tell you about their shows. Ah yes: the New Zealand Fringe Festival (just Fringe is fine) is nearly upon us.

For one month a year, artists truly run rampant across Wellington, transforming the city into a low-level state of creative chaos. More than 150 shows will pop up in theatres, bars, basements, and any other space with a power outlet and a tolerant landlord. With the festival kicking off on February 13, here are my top tips for making the most of Fringe 2026.

Tip 1: Get a Booklet

The Fringe booklet is your first and most faithful companion. It tells you what’s on, where it’s happening, and—crucially— how to begin pretending you have a carefully curated cultural calendar. You can highlight shows, tick off the ones you’ve seen, and even get it signed by the artists. It’s one of the most helpful guides throughout the festival and gives you something to look back at after it’s over.

You’ll find booklets at the Fringe Box Office on Allen Street, or in pretty much any theater that you pop your head into. Just be wary that a few shows were submitted just too late to make the print deadline, which leads us to tip number two.

Tip 2: Check the Fringe Website

If the booklet is your map, the Fringe website is your live GPS. This is the place to plan out what you’ll see, buy some tickets, and check whether events are still on. This is the most updated information you’ll find on every show. Bookmark it on your phone. You’ll thank yourself later, probably while standing on a street corner frantically checking whether the show you’re about to see still exists.

Tip 3: Cuba Street Fringe Summer Series

During fringe season, the city is a pretty exciting place to be. If you’ve completed tips one & two and are still thinking, But Becca, what should I actually see? look no further than the Fringe Summer Series on Cuba Street.

On Sunday, February 23, artists will take over Cuba Street for the Fringe Summer Series. Free taster performances from festival shows will appear all along the strip, providing bitesized previews of what’s on offer. It’s the perfect place to see what you like and what you don’t, and there’s even a box office on site in case something really takes your fancy.

Tip 4: Free and Koha Shows Exist!

Want to see some incredible live shows, but don’t really have it in the budget to pay $15-$30 a ticket? Welcome to the broke

student life, my friend—this is the place to look. There are some awesome free or pay-what-you-can shows in the festival this year that you are sure to love.

This year’s offerings range from clowning (The Fools) to Shakespeare (As You Like It), bands (The Rocking Rainbows), and even comedy (Liar Liar Pants on Fire). Fringe has something for everyone, even those who spent all their money on booze during O-Week.

Tip 5: See some international talent

Fringe makes it possible for artists from overseas to bring their work to Aotearoa audiences. If they've gone through all this effort to get here, you may as well go and see their shows! Some highlights for me are overseas comedy acts (Booze and Craic: A Night of Scottish and Irish Comedy, or A Scottish Bald Man Sings Rhianna) and circus performances (The Fijian Flying Circus). Come and see their award-winning nonsense, it may be your only chance.

Tip 6: Support Current Vic Theatre Students and Lecturers

There are so many sick up-and-coming artists, producers, and creatives coming out of Victoria University, and it's so exciting to see the works they’ve created. With Fringe being an open entry festival, it really provides a space for newer creatives to experiment, create, and test their craft.

Even our lecturers are getting involved! Our very own Dr James Wenley from the Theatre Department has created a Fringe show based on his current research, delving into Aspec lives and identities in We’re weird for other reasons. Below is a small (curated and researched, you’re welcome) selection of Fringe shows made by Vic students this year. If you can, go see them.

• Ecz-asth-perated Fever

• Phobia

• Yours Truly

• Amid the Summer’s Malice

• As You Like It

• New and MMMproved

• Horizon

• OneTwo

• The Lizards Lie Within: A Lizardmen Movie Play Musical

• Pōneke Gangster

• Last Straight Man on Earth

Wellington likes to call itself the arts capital of New Zealand, but living here can make it surprisingly easy to forget to actually attend anything. Life gets busy. Uni piles up. It's hard to get involved or get along to watch performances. Fringe makes theatre accessible for new artists, but also for audiences who want to see more of the arts without needing prior knowledge, deep pockets, or an encyclopedic understanding of contemporary performance.

As someone who once had to seek out these shows on their own, I hope that this helps. And as the festival founder Vanessa Stacey puts it: Happy Fringe-ing!

The only place you need to know is:

The Old Bailey You’ll be stuck here. Better learn to like it.

Do you like to know what you’re ordering?

What’s your degree?

Do you like wine?

Ballroom At least you can play pool while your friends drink.

Do you like cocktails?

Can you behave like an adult?

What’s your budget?

Student Date night StudyLink came thru

Hunter Lounge It’s cheap and low stakes.

Scopa

In town, convenient. Go to 1154 if you don’t like pizza. Cocktails?

Want food options?

Crumpet You’ll feel right at home with the suits.

Ombra For happy hour.

Want food options?

Are you sure you don’t just want to go to a restaurant?

Rogue and Vagabond Summer, beer and live music.

Do you like beer?

R Bar You don’t have one of these back home.

Do you like Pirates?

Ascot Yes, you want food, you’re drinking, give this one a shot.

Dive Bar Retro and fun.

Bebemos Uber to Newtown and enjoy.

Goldings

VUW

You’re

El Barrio

Ballroom

little secret San Fran

Circus Bar Red Square

Ahurea | Arts + Culture

voyeur’s martyrdom

Content Warning: Sexual Themes and Violence

the woman in black begged me to take her husband / she was a gentle figure of horror / and so i did. / i exist as her husband’s darkest secret / i’m not even back in black yet. / rough bites and cuts / swollen lips and bruised wrists / bodies swelling with pride. / his body is unforgiving, / and i am no priest to forgive such vindication.

inhabit me, instill jealousy and love within me / his skin leaves me delirious / his hands leave me hungry, breathless. / and i chant in the midnight air, / i will be her. / but nights like this / make my body swell with shapes of darkness / i could not make anyone—myself included—understand. / i am hungry for touch / i am begging for love / i am craving for desire / and i am ashamed to be looked at.

i exist to show someone their shame / nonetheless, i am embarrassed to be desired, / where the low, aching hum of life’s greatest horrors / has become the base of my despair, where my wings have remained at the greatest length of time. / say shame has left a permanent scarlet mark, / say my disgrace has been the world’s obsession, / say i roam for days until a body meets a body / burn my tongue. / my body is being crucified with the sins of her husband / he made a river of wine out of me / and a pomegranate out of my rib / he took seven pomegranate seeds / and now he can never leave. / she knew he was not pure. / she knew he was tainted. / she his nightly secrets, where his limbs tangled / with the graves of his sins and his blooming lungs. / she called for me to fix him / she demanded for

Elio Mikoi

his insides to be shown, / cast in marble, an exhibit to the shame of the world. / she wanted him to be hated, / and i wanted to be wanted. he turned my body into a cathedral, him the lone worshiper, / with his knees on the ground, / his lips all over my body. / and he prayed, please keep me safe. / how could i not listen to his prayer, him with scraped knees? / so i drank the wine from the cup of his hand. / here is / where my body was illuminated with blinding light / and five angels came down from where they are / a hand on my throat, a hand on my wrist, / one on my waist, / two on my shoulders, / two on my thighs, / one cupping the back of my head / one in my eyes / and one inside the fleshy heart of my body. / the center of my body / a river of dionysus, / where anyone could drink and their prayers will be heard, / he drank and drank, a parched sinner. / when the last drop brushed over his lips like the last pomegranate seed, / i felt like crying.

the scene unfolded like a vision in his wife’s dream, and i heard her scream / from miles away, tears of blood flowing, tip-tapping across her cheeks. / you / i want to melt you with the stars until you can no longer withstand your light. / you / i want to fill your river with acid, burn a parched tongue / i want to bite / you / out of the fruit / you / i, cursed to sink without a sound into the sea of my despair. / but darling, dearest, you could never do that / the nightmare that you’ve created. / his hands on my feet, my hands on his, / his hands on my heart, my hands on his eyes, / his hands on my life, and mine on his death / or his hands

on my glory, and mine to his shame. / burn me in the stars until i am filled with feverish dust / fill me with acid, my ribs will remain / bite me from the fruit, my seeds will linger in my heart / sink me into my sea of despair, i am addicted to it.

i have been a homesick angel, i haven’t seen my wings in a while. / but when his hands caressed the scars on my back, / i found my home within his touch. / his sins will become stars, which i will extinguish / my angels will weep, but my river will comfort their hearts / my mouth will burn as i kiss the taint from him. / i never wanted to be the cleanser of their sins. / but i never tried to be untainted, nor pure. / they ask for offerings, they ask for sacrifice, / they ask for my answer and when i bring my existence / they curse me for my oppugnant decisions. / they only wanted me to exist in a way that comforted them / never mind my unease. / and the only time i felt comfort was in the hands of my sinner.

if my angels knew that my curse is everywhere / even in the river of my own creation, / where my sinner weeps with forgiveness, endlessly blooming at the centre / doing this with every ounce of desperation, / to be forgiven / to be clean, to be new— / i swept him off of his feet, scraped knees and bloodied achilles’ heels, / his murmured prayers from his lips to mine, / then i stopped feeling raw, blue, half-eaten, rotting from the endless dream to be / loved and wanted / the curtains fell from heaven.

Elio Mikoi is a poet, essayist, author, and frustrated creative in a STEM field. They write queer, myth-drenched prose and poetry where desire, shame, Asian experiences, and devotion move as one. Their poems are published on Instagram (@eliomikoi) and Substack (philtatos).

Kia ora! i'm thrift-man, your friendly wellington superhero!

when i first came to wellington, i was a clueless first year student.

i was accidentally turned into this city's saviour after one of my chemisty lectures went wrong...

i have an array of powers, including pretty fast speed...

and flight... somewhat. a little help here fellas?

and while i'm not always the most successful hero in town...

i'm really just a dude trying to make a difference in my $25 fit from recycle boutique!

Free online mental health therapy courses for everyone in Aotearoa. Proven to help and backed by research, not just 'vibes'.

To check out our courses go to justathought.co.nz ...or scan this

Sustainability Team at Uni

Support student-led projects

Make events and labs greener

Host a sustainability toolkit for students

Hold giveaways and workshops

Cut waste and emissions campus-wide

Help you build real-world skills

Scan to find out how to get involved.

Auth by Tamatha Paul, Green Party MP. Parliament Buildings, Wellington. Funded by Parliamentary Services.

Hunk Unc may have hit the gym, but he’s still here for the people. If uni life has you stressed about flatmate drama, lecturer issues, or whatever is going on in your dating life, Hunk Unc has advice your parents definitely want to hear. Equal parts wisdom and gains.

To submit a question, scan the QR code on the page. If your problem needs a spotter, Hunk Unc might just get back to you.

how do i know my friendships are good and healthy? hey hunk unc,

Most people don’t realise a friendship’s off because something bad happens. They realise because something small keeps happening. You catch the bus home and feel oddly flat. You lie in bed replaying a conversation. You feel more tired after hanging out than you did before—that’s usually the first sign. Good friendships don’t leave you feeling like you’ve just done a full-body session you didn’t consent to.

I had a mate I used to train with three mornings a week at CityFitness. Same time, same rack. On paper, perfect. But every session turned into him unloading—his flat, his ex, his job, how nothing ever quite worked out for him. I’d nod between sets, spot him, hype him up, then walk out feeling absolutely cooked. Not physically— emotionally. Took me months to realise I was never actually sharing anything myself. I was just there to spot him while he talked.

A healthy friendship lets you be a bit useless sometimes. Not charmingly useless—actually flat. Quiet. Low-energy. If you always feel like you have to be “on,” that’s a warning sign.

Some of my best friendships are the ones where we can sit on opposite ends of the couch, scrolling our phones, half-watching whatever’s on, eating toast straight off the bench because no one could be bothered finding plates.

Pay attention to what happens when you say no. Not the dramatic nos—the boring ones. “Can’t afford it this week.” “Not drinking tonight.” “Need an early one.” A good mate might give you a bit of grief, but they’ll drop it.

They won’t guilt you. They won’t keep a mental tally. Anyone who only likes you when you’re available, agreeable, and useful isn’t your friend—they just like the version of you that fits their schedule.

Friendships should also survive change, because you will change. You’ll start caring about sleep. You’ll stop going out three nights in a row. You’ll get into running, or lifting properly, or therapy, or all three. Some people won’t like that. They’ll say you’re “different now”. The good ones adjust. They ask questions. They find new ways to hang out. They don’t try to drag you back to who you were just because it was more convenient for them.

I lost touch with a few mates when I stopped hitting the pub five nights a week. It hurt more than I expected. But the ones who stayed? They’re still here. They ask how my knee’s holding up. They ask what I’m training for. They show up, even when it’s boring or uncomfortable. Moving flats. Hospital waiting rooms.

Here’s the bit people hate admitting: you don’t actually need that many close friends. Two or three proper ones will carry you further than a massive group chat where your message gets seen-zoned and forgotten. “Quality over quantity” sounds like a fridge magnet, sure—but in real life, it’s how you maintain the best friendships.

So how do you know your friendships are good and healthy? When they’ve got your back. When they’re willing to give you a spot and listen to your problems, not just spill theirs.

Nau mai and welkom to Munch, your weekly guide to a bite to eat that won’t devour your budget. I’ll be your taste-tester of Wellington’s finest frugality; your penny-pinching truffle-pig to hunt down dining deals. My appetite is both discerning and decent, so if I’m full, trust that you will be too. But besides taste and portions, I also want to share the places in town that look after you—that feel homely (or surprisingly swanky)—and those that make their meals accessible. However, above all, Munch is concerned with value.

It pisses me off when food blogs tout deals such as half-price oysters or an $8 bao bun. I’m sure these have a demographic, but if I’m looking for a meal—one of those three-times-a-day affairs—then a gourmet little taster is useless to me.

Of course, a column about where to eat out will nonetheless cater to a select audience. I am very fortunate that I’ve never truly had to worry about having the money to feed myself, while for other people this is a very regular concern. So Munch will be as much a challenge as it is fun, because I want to find the places that truly anyone could eat at.

A meal cooked by someone else can be a joy, a convenience—a form of art that sustains you. Bourdain once said something along the lines of, as a chef, I am in the pleasure business. And who doesn’t deserve some pleasure in these trying times?

A FEED FOR F*CK ALL

Everybody Eats

What: Three-course menu (rotates daily)

Price: Pay-what-you-can

When: Sun–Wed; 6:00–8:00pm

Where: 60 Dixon Street

A safe and socially-conscious place to turn, early in the week.

Let’s start the year with a staple in the heart of the city: Everybody Eats. Just off Cuba Street, this “social dining concept” is open four evenings a week, serving a set three-course menu that changes each day. Each meal is made primarily with rescued food from businesses and charities—what’s donated dictates what’s plated. The cuisine tends to reflect what’s available elsewhere in Wellington: largely Western/European or Asian-fusion fare, always with a vegetarian option.

On the menu tonight was, to start, bruschetta topped with an avocadoricotta cream and a tomato-andpineapple salsa. This was followed by a ham and potato cabbage parcel with creamed chard & orange slaw (vegetarians could swap the ham for green beans), and a banana caramel cake for dessert.

As meals go, this covered a real dietary range. Everybody Eats will get you your 5-a-day and makes for a dependably tasty, nutritious dinner.

The bruschetta was a nice little canapé—nothing radical, but the balance of bright salsa on a smooth cream was well-paired.

The main course was quite light, mostly salty and creamy in flavour, but it had something homely to it, and the orange slaw brought much needed colour and brightness, like the starter’s salsa.

The fluffy banana caramel cake was—surprisingly—not too sweet and complemented well by a yogurt drizzle. However, the cake was also the most filling course of the meal, and the bar for that was low. The bruschetta was, in fact, one bruschetta, and the ham parcel was a singular, neat package. Everybody Eats has an incredibly high turnover and they stretch the food they receive a long way, but this does result in portions that err small.

That is my only critique. It’s a dependable place for a healthy, homely meal that does good beyond just your belly. Their open-plan dining area aims to tackle social isolation and leads to fascinating conversations between people from across in the city. Each meal is offered on a paywhat-you-can basis, so those with more can cover their own meal and another’s, while those with less can eat easy. If you have the cash or time, I encourage you to pay or volunteer for a night. But if you don’t, know that here you will be looked after.

guy van egmond

critic-at-LARGE

Jackson McCarthy is Salient's Critic-at-Large. His first book of poetry, Portrait, is forthcoming from Auckland University Press later this year.

New True Romance

Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights looks to the past to find a future

“Can I speak to you privately for a moment? / I just want to explain”. So begins Charli xcx’s ninth studio album, in a huskily-voiced spoken-word piece by John Cale (The Velvet Underground). But that opening track, ‘House’, with its creep and crescendo, its screams and distortions, is about as dark as Wuthering Heights gets.

Though it’s been conceived of as a companion piece to the new Emerald Fennell film, and though some of its material is used there, Charli’s new album is not exactly a soundtrack. Nor is it explicitly narrative, relaying the doomed romance and reckoning of Emily Brontë’s original 1847 novel.

Instead, the record seems to use Wuthering Heights as a premise, one that allows the artist to turn away from the sound of her 2024 breakout brat. On it, she finds reprieve in a lush, techo-gothic soundscape, replete with real string players (!), crafted alongside frequent collaborator Finn Keane, himself rebranded (he previously went by EasyFun) as a real-deal, first-name-last-name producer.

brat was undeniably massive—and not just by Charli’s standards, who’d been making waves (and the occasional critical splash) as a sly popauteur since at least as early as 2017. brat was an iconic kind of massive; a merch-making, profile pic-changing, feud-resolving, era-defining kind of massive. And then it steamrolled into a remix album whose list of features read like the contents page of a future history of 21st-century music. And then, just when you thought it was over, it found one final hit in Charli's muchoverlooked pandemic album how i'm feeling now: the yearning ‘party 4 u’.

But like anything so popular that even the Hallenstein's boys were frat-flicking to it at Laneway, there was always the risk that brat’s nervous, twitchy take on dance music—a take that, mind you, was deeply rooted in the UK’s queer and experimental scenes in the early ‘10s—would curdle into something uncool. It makes sense that Charli’s turned away from the brat-green limelight to seek something different on Wuthering Heights. So what about that “techno-gothic soundscape”? Well, it’s a soundscape that has, by comparison to the first impression that ‘House’ gives us, surprising moments of beauty, ease, and levity.

Take ‘Chains of Love’, one of the lead singles, for example, which recalls for me the chordal, anthemic sound of her 2013 debut True Romance—just as the loopy, rhythmic chorus on ‘Dying for You’ brings to mind deep cuts like ‘detonate’ from the aforementioned how i’m feeling now.

Or take ‘Altars’, which might just be the finest thing on here, and its riff on a line of Harry Nilsson's: “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do”. His is a song of despair after a breakup. But Charli’s take? “One is not the loneliest number / Won’t keep putting all my faith in you”. Charli hopes we’ll hear the tragic implication of these lines—when your boyfriend makes you feel like your “mind is torturing [your] body”, as she tells us elsewhere in the song, one really isn't the loneliest number: it's two.

I don’t mean to over-egg it here, but this is both incredible and incredibly simple phrasemaking. Charli's never been a verse-chorus-bridge kind of songwriter, but her lyrics do have that light, aphoristic touch—more Robyn than Nilsson, thankfully—of someone who can distil experience into a tiny string of words.

Tiny is the operative word, though: all of the album’s twelve tracks clock in at the two- or three-minute mark for a total runtime of thirty-four minutes. It is, if you’ll permit me the indulgence, a ‘suite’ of ‘miniatures’. If you won’t permit me the indulgence, the album might feel like a bit of a genre exercise; just too light for an artist of this calibre. But then there’s a flourish from those gorgeous strings, double-stopping and sliding through the sparky electronics. If it’s a gimmick, it’s at least got the guts to be convincing through its admittedlyshort duration.

As I hope is obvious, the tortured love songs on this record have as much to do with doubt, distance, and desire in the abstract as they do with the Wuthering Heights of either Bronte’s or Fennell’s conception. And, likewise, the framing of the album as a movie tie-in doubles as the cover under which Charli makes her escape from such a massive album as brat Wuthering Heights is something of a statement for Charli—a statement about who she was, where she’s at, and where she’s headed. Yet the record’s brilliance (and this has always been Charli’s brilliance) is that it comes off as understated; effortless.

This is Your Legacy

Mārama brings Māori gothic to the big screen

Minor spoilers ahead.

All the usual gothic markers are there: a lone woman in a strange place; sudden visions of violence; disembodied sounds and voices; false reflections in mirrors; rooms one mustn't enter; heavy footsteps at night—there’s even a gorgeous red gown, tensed for wear in a big finale. We know something’s up, we just don’t know exactly what.

Like any thriller worth the price of its ticket, writer-director Taratoa Stappard’s Mārama clocks in at a tight ninety minutes, knowingly

riffing all the while on these familiar tropes and cliches. What might be less expected, however, is the Aotearoa flavour his film brings to the genre. The orphaned Mārama “Mary” Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) arrives in Yorkshire in 1859 to learn about her whakapapa. But after a boat journey of seventy-two days, the man who initially summoned her has died. Welcoming her in his place is the charming Nathanial Cole (Toby Stevens), who kindly invites her to stay in his manor.

What follows is a genuinely thrilling albeit usual procedure as Mārama’s visions become more and more intense; as she, alongside us viewers, slowly pieces together the cruelty her tūpuna suffered at the hands of their colonists. Horror as a genre often works best when its gory theatrics keep us occupied with gasping and tensing—meanwhile its creators subtly raise the action from the literal to the figurative register. Just notice how, during a pivotal scene in which Mārama confronts Cole, the latter replies, “This is your legacy.” It’s a chilly line, devastatingly true, that resonates both with her character’s history and Aotearoa’s history at large. We can’t erase the past—but just how do we deal with the violent legacy we have all inherited on colonised land? (As an aside, Mārama certainly has its Get Out moments, too, as Cole’s mansion, adorned with stolen taonga, displays his out-of-touch, culturally-insensitive ‘respect’ for our heroine’s people.)

Thus, a conflict of ideas plays out through the instantiation of character, and vice versa: as we’re absorbed in character and plot, squealing and flinching at the moment-by-moment action, this dark, gothic period drama is thinking out larger ideas. It’s an unbeatable formula, because it has its cake and eats it, too—and it’s a special pleasure to see it in action so close to home. But I’d be remiss here not to mention David Ballantyne’s unbelievable, extraordinary, somehow-forgotten 1968 novel, Sydney Bridge Upside Down, which is, to my mind, something of a tupuna to any artwork operating in the genre of Māori gothic.

That novel is full of powerful moments of indeterminacy and doubt. What’s different about Mārama, then, is its surefire confidence. Ariāna Osborne is pitch-perfect in the lead role: at first shocked, then cold, then humiliated— then, finally, furious. But the film is not mere revenge fantasy; it’s a channeling of outrage, an outrage rooted in the real historical horrors its narrative is drawn from. Mārama’s moral is a simple one: colonisers cannot be redeemed, only disposed of.

want to get in touch, tip me off, or rage at me electronically?

jackson@salient.org.nz

Ithought it would be a good idea to drop a tab of acid at Laneway, even though I’d never been to a festival or a concert before in my life. I fought my way through the crowd hours early to get as close to the stage as possible for Chappell Roan’s performance, because I was entertaining my personal fantasy that being close to the stage would be similar to being at a huge party. My body was buzzing with energy and everything was fizzing around me, and I was ready to have the most magical night ever, and dance with all the people around me.

So that was how I found myself trapped in the middle of a huge crowd, with people pressing against me from all sides. The acid made me feel like I wasn’t a real person anymore, and I was nobody amongst the masses of people. Full ego death, except rather than being enlightening, it was scary. I realised that none of my thoughts or feelings or opinions or needs were important anymore, because I was but one of many. I became very claustrophobic, but there was nothing I could do except wait. There was still a couple of hours before Chappell Roan’s set. I kept repeating to myself, you are okay, because it was the only way I could control the panic which was threatening to bubble up out of my throat.

Then I heard a girl behind me saying that it was weird seeing me there, and I turned around to see who it was. Her face was vaguely familiar, but as far as I was aware we hadn’t actually spoken before. I smiled and said, “Oh, are you from (place) as well?” assuming that we were about to have one of those cute drunk moments where you recognise somebody and hug and get all happy to see each other.

But instead she gave me a dirty look straight out of Mean Girls, and said, “Yeahhh, weird seeing you here…” I felt very confused, and wasn’t sure how to respond. I stared at her for a moment, and my sister (who’s better than I am at picking up on social cues) grabbed me and turned me back around. I tried to ignore the girl, but she began loudly saying things like, “I don’t love SOME of the people here…” while continuing to throw pointed looks in my direction. I wished I could move away from her, but we were packed in so tightly that there was nowhere I could go, and I felt even more trapped. To make it all worse, the girl then started pointing me out to the people around us and asking, “Do you think they’re on something? I think they’re on something.”

And okay yes, I was high as fuck, but it was a festival! Was it really that big of a deal? She proceeded to start grabbing at my ID for some reason, which was clipped to the side of my bag on my keychain. I really don’t know why she was grabbing it, or why she wanted to look at my ID, but it made me freak out a whole lot more. I didn’t enjoy seeing Chappell Roan very much, because the girl was behind me the whole time. It’s very strange meeting

Content Warning: Drug Use

Oh Yes, Oh No is where sex stories go to be judged. Was it hot? Was it a disaster? You decide. All stories are submitted by readers, published anonymously, and guaranteed to make you say 'oh yes' or 'oh no'. Scan the QR code to submit your own and see if it makes the cut.

I've had a wank in the Sky Tower Bathrooms every year since 2020. There is a certain justification I feel in releasing at such a height. A confirmation of my existence that I hope to continue well into old age.

submitted by anonmous

Ok, I’m NB (afab) and in a poly marriage and this story happened about a month after we got married. My husband is asexual, so after we opened our relationship I got on the dating apps looking to have some casual hook ups. I matched with a pretty cute guy and he was very keen to come over because “it’s been a while” (his words, and they’re important).

So he comes over and we get down to it and I remember after 30 seconds of having this man inside me I was like “this is terrible, I barely feel anything, why am I here?” That continues for maybe 2 minutes (I’m being generous), and at this point I’m considering faking an orgasm to end this whole thing. Thankfully he mentions that he’s close, but then he asks if he can wank on my face…..

Now normally I’m not the kind of person to agree to that unless we’ve been in a long term relationship and have a good level of trust. I’ve known this man for less than 10 minutes, but I thought to myself “anything for him to get out of my house”. So I give consent and to save my bedspread I decide to hop onto the floor next to my bed so he can do it there. He does his thing, I do not care for it, and he awkwardly leaves after I say I need to clean up (duh, I’ve just had someone wan on my face, let me be

That’s right. This mfer wan IN MY SLIPPERS after deeply disappointing sex.

I had to throw the slippers out, I still miss them. They were really comfy.

Now that it’s been a few years and I’ve had plenty of damn good sex to make up for that horrid experience, this story has become a fun party story that is referred to by my friends as “the waz-in-your-slippers story”. It always gets a disgusted laugh at parties (though not so much at family events, weird).

All I can say now is, if you’re reading this and had really fast sex with a goth nb and wan on their face about 4 years ago, you owe me a new pair of slippers.

submitted by anonmous

mind your language

ACROSS

1 Official records of proceedings

6 Month often used as a date in notices

10 Man’s name commonly used in examples or stories

14 Chemical element found in data sheets and lab reports

19 French river appearing in many travel guides

20 Animal often used in fables and stories

21 Group known for songs with memorable lyrics

22 Polite form of address in formal correspondence

23 Serious in manner, as in formal writing style

24 State often referenced in reports about public health

26 Polite form of “sir” seen in written speech

27 Passageway in libraries or bookstores

28 Abbreviation used in technical documentation for “clear”

29 Quality described in vivid narrative writing

31 Act of stopping a message or signal

35 Ancient people found in historical texts

36 Word used to connect thoughts in speech or writing

37 Phrase meaning tentative involvement, often in conversation (“put one’s ____”)

39 Ending of many informational websites

40 Vehicle brand familiar from advertising

43 Unit sometimes referenced in scientific reportså

47 National League players listed in sports columns

49 Spanish for “more,” found in bilingual signage

51 Abalone, often named in culinary writing

53 Short plays performed in literary and drama events

55 Reductions or impacts noted in descriptive reports

57 Style often referenced in cultural commentary or media reviews

58 Move toward a quieter place, as described in narratives

59 University advisors frequently mentioned in campus communications

in bilingual materials

120 Staff members referenced in political or administrative reports

121 Latin for “others,” used in academic citations

122 Woman’s name frequently found in literature

123 Agreed or accepted, as found in archaic texts

124 Strength or quality often highlighted in CVs or references

125 Body art mentioned in personal descriptions

126 Original copy from which others are distributed online

127 Symbols used to rate films or books in reviews DOWN

1 Italian direction in sheet music meaning “very,” seen in scores

2 French word appearing in old literature for “prostitute”

3 Short speech honouring someone at an event

4 Old-womanish, as in character descriptions

5 Ritual meals described in religious texts and guides

6 Stand out positively in reports or evaluations

7 Abbreviation for Emergency Alert System in U.S. broadcasts

8 People supervising exams, named in test instructions

9 TVs mentioned in programme listings and guides

10 Extra detail sometimes cut from an article or script

11 Baseball stat listed in box scores and sports columns

12 Viral disease frequently covered in health news reports

13 Man’s name appearing in European novels and operas

14 Actress Kim, often cited in film credits and reviews

15 Surname in branding firm Wolff ____, noted in design case studies

16 Not often seen in print or speech

17 Lyric poems studied in literature classes

18 Plural of “nye,” often seen in older written dialogue

25 Suffix used in linguistics to show plural or collective forms

30 Planet frequently referenced in science reporting

32 Described as satisfied in personal accounts or profiles

33 Word root meaning “wing,” found in scientific classifications

34 French city appearing in travel articles and guidebooks

38 Grandparent name commonly used in memoirs and stories

40 Forms the start of a plan, as described in narratives

41 Woman’s given name found in novels and news features

42 Mark used in margins or ballots to indicate a choice

43 Civil wrong frequently defined in legal texts

44 Academic course label appearing in university catalogs

45 Withdrawing, as noted in reports or battlefield accounts

46 Dish often named in food columns and cookbooks

48 Expression indicating permission

50 Architectural feature described in building plans

52 Collection of fables cited in literature classes

54 Descriptive term for clear, concise writing style

55 Informal parent name seen in personal notes and stories

56 Glasses listed in hospitality guides or event checklists

59 Sleep stage frequently mentioned in health articles

61 Film frequently cited in discussions of 1980s westerns

64 Surname sometimes seen in TV credits or cast lists

65 French article appearing in bilingual texts

66 Number reported at the end of a tally or summary

69 Latin root for “speak,” found in academic language notes

70 Archaic contraction appearing in older literature

71 Determined tone often described in character

60 Scientific term appearing in biology texts and lab notes

62 High-speed aircraft featured in technical reports

63 Open-faced dish frequently named in food writing

64 Latin term meaning “but,” used in scholarly writing

65 Phrase describing false placement, often seen in reports of misstatements

67 Abbreviation for academic degrees in American college catalogs

68 Location often referenced in news articles about White House events

70 Type of financing explained in financial documents

72 Abbreviation found ingovernment forms and notices

74 Spanish for “dog,” appearing in bilingual signage

75 Informal mode of address in personal messages

76 Item mentioned in childcare guides and product instructions

79 Abbreviation for muscles often cited in fitness writing

81 Abbreviation for “diameter,” common in technical diagrams

82 Academic classification prefix used at universities

83 Nickname commonly used in sports commentary; American Football Team

84 Zodiac sign frequently referenced in horoscopes

86 Inquires into matters, as described in reports or conversations

88 Most piercing in tone, as described in sound reviews

89 Verb forms discussed in grammar explanations

91 Sea bird named in nature writing

92 Made a sheep’s cry, as noted in descriptive passages

93 Mentioned in notices or announcements as “after the expected time”

94 Shortened form for “segment,” common in media schedule

95 Friendly gesture often referenced in informal exchanges

97 Takes without permission, as noted in incident summaries >

portrayals

72 Thin panels referenced in design guides or building notes

73 Garment often described in cultural articles

75 International airline frequently noted in travel advisories

77 Annoyance described in personal accounts

78 Artist whose signature appears in print and poster reproduction

80 French possessive used in multilingual materials

82 Small amounts often listed in pricing or receipts

83 City in China mentioned in world news reports

85 Most calming, as described in product

87 U.S. agency commonly referenced in tax documents

88 Gruelling workplace invoked in commentary or memoir

90 Clothing item described in fashion writing

92 Slang for “crazy,” used in dialogue transcription

96 Cares for animals, as noted in classified ads or profiles

98 Simplicity often recommended in writing

style guides

100 A religious and political movement from Jamaica

101 Often a misspelling of “relay,”

102 Woman’s name appearing in classic short story “The Gift of the Magi”

104 Adjusted for sound or mood in production notes

105 Graphic used to display data in reports

106 Country frequently appearing in international news, North and South

107 Closing part of a report or story

108 Instruments’ mouthpieces referenced in music notes

109 Top-tier grade in rating systems

110 Greek letters used in formulas and academic writing

111 Small groups featured in documentaries or nature writing

112 Archaic phrase seen in olde legal or formal texts

117 Latin for “vessel,” appearing in anatomical label

118 Scots word for “one,” found in dialect writing

ACROSS

1 Red or white, but not blue

5 “Greedy” singer Tate

10 “I could be overseas playing ____ right now”

14 “Casablanca” heroine

15 “I’m on _____!”

16 Hand or foot

17 Have to have

18 You take these in class

19 They catch robbers (sometimes)

20 Teen TV soap opera, named after a body of water

23 Nintendo’s Super _____

24 Poet John _____ (for the English Lit students)

28 “Return to _____”

32 Botanical term of endearment

35 Actor Delon

36 “Icon” spelled incorrectly

37 “_____ Pen”

38 “Works for me!”

42 Mini-albums, for short

44 Moved stealthily

45 1960s hairdos, our Parliament building is one of these 48 Shells and twists, found at restaurants 49 Best treat for a vegan friend

50 “_____ b?”: “Which is it?”

51 Wellington is known for these, they take you up and down hills

59 Tiff

62 Nickname for Wellington

63 Remember to keep up with your _____ hygiene

64 Celebrity

65 Turn out to be

66 _____ Bell

67 _____ Street

68 Slobs’ hall rooms

69 “Peter Pan” pirate DOWN

1 What Wellington is known for

2 Lower intestinal parts, for you med students

3 The compass points

4 “CSI” actor George

5 Way of doing things, a street in Wellington without the “s”

6 Southern _____, otherwise known as Crux

7 American campus military org.

8 Yank or Ranger (find an American international student)

9 “Anything _____?”

10 Well known fountain on Cuba Street

11 “I’ll take that as _____”

12 Back talk

13 Abbreviation for “Lights”

21 Without stopping

22 Stretch (out)

25 Uncommon word for a little ape

26 Museum in Wellington

27 Peter, Paul and Mary

28 City in Japan, located in Nagasaki Prefecture

29 Runaway bride?

30 Sartre novel, with “La”

31 Racket

32 If they’re clear, they’re blue

33 Stir-fry vessels

34 Opposite of WSW

36 a German diminutive of Elisabeth

39 Ford Explorer, e.g.

40 Without _____ in the world

41 Letters on the 7 button on older phones

46 Winter warmer

47 “Sorta”

48 Sea anemones, e.g.

50 Once in _____ moon

52 Female sheep

53 Small change

54 German-based supermarket with about 2,500 stores in the U.S.

55 Camp beds

56 Composer Khachaturian

57 Marathon, e.g.

58 Gin flavoring

59 a Windows tool for repairing corrupted files

60 Six-time NBA All-Star _____ Gasol

61 UN delegate (abbreviated)

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If you have a story, confession, or experience you’d like to share—whether it’s an anonymous crush, workplace drama, or something else entirely—you may submit it using the QR code below.

After meeting my girlfriend, my flatmates implied she was unattractive and someone not worth dating, years later I'm still with her and I don't talk to those flatmates.

- anonymous

Welcome to the puzzle page from Puzzhead, your resident Puzzler.

These puzzles are provided to be fun and challenging. The Salient team and our contributors aim for accuracy, but occasional errors may occur. If you notice an error, you may write to editor@salient.org.nz. Please note that our puzzlers and contributors are doing their best, and none are professionals or working on these puzzles full time. For the word find, words may appear diagonally and backwards. To access solutions for the crosswords and connections puzzles, scan the QR code next to Puzzhead.

To solve a Set Square, use arithmetic and logical reasoning. You are given a grid containing six sums: three reading across and three reading down. The arithmetic operations (division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction) are shown between the grid spaces. Place each of the numbers 1 to 9 exactly once into the grid so that all six sums are correct. Note that calculations are carried out in left-to-right order, not according to BEDMAS.

To solve Word Wheels, form words of four letters or more using the letters in the nine-letter wheel. Every word must include the central letter. Each letter may be used only as many times as it appears in the wheel. The aim is to find as many valid words as possible from the target word list, including the nine-letter word that uses all the letters.

To solve connections, group the sixteen words into four sets of four based on a shared connection. Each word belongs in only one group. Continue until all four groups are identified. On our website, the groupings are uploaded one at a time, so if you get stuck, you can view the answer for a single connection without revealing the full solution.

Recent months have carried a significant emotional load, affecting relationships and selfperception. This week offers clarity. Intuition is becoming more reliable, and it’s time to act on it with restraint rather than second-guessing. There is a heightened need for intimacyemotional, physical, or reflective. Seek connection deliberately, whether through a considered conversation or time alone to process your thoughts.

Do: release expectations, trust your judgment, engage in grounding practices

Don’t: overanalyze to the point of anxiety, or assume all issues can be resolved immediately

You’ve spent the past few months in a holding pattern. This week marks a shift toward re-engagement. Relationships maintained out of habit or convenience will come into focus, making it clear which ones support your life and which ones complicate it. Use this time to be deliberate with how you spend your time, where you place your attention, and who you allow close.

Do: meditate, journal, practice mindfulness Don’t: force change, rush decisions, or adopt unnecessary early-morning routines

You’ve been developing a creative project over an extended period. This week is about visibility. Whether it’s art, music, or writing, the work is ready to be shared. Approach social settings with intention and look for community in places that align with your interests, both online and in person. The effort you’ve put in over recent months begins to produce tangible returns.

Do: socialise, take measured risks, share your work with your community Don’t: people-please, allow yourself to be taken for granted, overthink outcomes

This is a period for reassessing relationships and setting clear intentions for the remainder of the year. Address unresolved issues directly rather than allowing distance or assumptions to define outcomes. Conversations held now can determine whether relationships remain aligned with your values. Clearing unresolved tensions creates space for new connections, including potential friendships or romantic interests.

Do: practice self-care, attend to small personal needs Don’t: jump to conclusions, remain disengaged, or introduce unnecessary complexity into your dating life

Your living situation may not feel settled yet, which is a normal part of transition. After a period of adjustment, this week is better suited to rest and routine rather than further change. Focus on creating small, repeatable comforts and allow yourself time to recover energy. Solitude can be restorative when used intentionally.

Do: schedule time for yourself, establish simple comforts, engage in familiar leisure

Don’t: use isolation as avoidance, or disengage from low-pressure forms of connection

Regardless of relationship status, the end of the month calls for reassessment. Use this time to clarify what love, commitment, and reciprocity mean to you. This process requires honest communication and a willingness to articulate needs as well as boundaries. Change is approaching; it should be treated as neutral information rather than something to resist or idealise.

Do: communicate clearly, document your thoughts, engage in reflective conversation Don’t: attempt to control outcomes, or push yourself into unnecessary physical strain

Strange travellers from distant constellations have beamed you up to the Mothership to deliver some good news and hard truths. Consider the gravity of their words.

Opportunities are available this week, but they require initiative. Waiting for momentum to arrive on its own will limit outcomes. Take practical steps toward what you want, whether that involves career prospects or social connections. Progress depends on leaving familiar routines and engaging directly with the situations in front of you.

Do: take calculated risks, act with intention, stay engaged Don’t: commit prematurely, neglect your own needs, or default to managing group dynamics at your own expense

This week centers on finances. It’s time to approach budgeting with consistency rather than avoidance. Review your spending, create or update a system that works for you, and reduce costs where appropriate. Short-term restraint will support longer-term stability. Prioritise your own goals this week and limit social spending that doesn’t align with them.

Do: act in your own interest, remain measured, keep track of expenses Don’t: set unrealistic financial goals, make unnecessary purchases, or overextend yourself for people who wouldn’t reciprocate

Cancer, this is a period of consolidation and selfassurance. Confidence is increasing as you become more comfortable with your direction. Use this momentum to clarify longer-term goals and identify practical steps toward them. Ambition does not require drastic change; incremental skill-building or a new hobby is sufficient to initiate progress.

Do: release fixed expectations, approach new experiences with openness, remain receptive to learning Don’t: allow discomfort to stall growth, engage in unnecessary conflict, or indulge negative self-talk

The end of the month marks the beginning of a new romantic phase that extends into the coming weeks. This may involve deepening an existing connection, reassessing a familiar relationship, or redirecting attention toward self-connection. Use this period to clarify what intimacy and commitment mean to you, and allow space for those definitions to evolve.

Do: spend time with yourself intentionally, reflect through journaling, engage with material that encourages perspective Don’t: undervalue yourself or your time, particularly in transactional or relational settings

This week focuses on establishing routines. Goals should be realistic and proportionate to your current capacity. Overambitious plans are more likely to stall progress than support it. Break tasks into smaller actions and accept incremental improvement. Consistency matters more than intensity.

Do: invest in long-term systems, update existing task lists, build basic financial literacy Don’t: expect perfection

Pisces, attention has been disproportionately directed toward others at the expense of your own priorities. This week calls for rebalancing. Redirect energy toward personal interests and self-directed goals. A new creative project is well timed, even if outcomes are uncertain. Initial competence is not required; experimentation is the objective.

Do: explore a new creative medium, maintain basic self-care

Don’t: blur boundaries in existing relationships, or rely on low-return conveniences

Whai Wāhi

Melanie Tangaere Baldwin  Madison Kelly

Kura Te Waru Rewiri  Robyn Kahukiwa  Diane Prince

Emily Karaka  Te Waka Hourua  John Miller

Ngataiharuru Taepa  Sky Hopinka  Inas Halabi

Co-curated by Abby Cunnane & Brooke Pou