Alaskan Roadhouses – 1890s

Mushing in Alaska

Roadhouses in Alaska, before motorised travel, were both a feature of safety in the bitterly cold wilderness, and a license to print money for the operators Arthur Dallimore journeyed from England in the early 1890s to settle in New Zealand. When he heard about the gold rush in Alaska’s Klondike, he jumped onto a boat […]

Yvonne Rust, QSM

Yvonne Rust: Maverick Spirit by Theresa Sjoquist (David Ling, 2011)

Beginning in August 2007, I started research for the biography, Yvonne Rust – Maverick Spirit. The completed work included the location and interview of 400 people, approximately 80 of them in depth. Yvonne’s great grandfather, John Stewart Rust, arrived in Whangarei when thirty-six houses constituted the township.  His son, Gordon, Yvonne’s father, was a native schools headmaster. In 1928, when Yvonne was six, he […]

Measurement of Writing Quality

Pittasporum - Photo Theresa Sjoquist

Ultimately, it is we who must be served by our own writings and to write for any other reason, invites the internal, ever-vicious critic.  Here’s what Virginia Woolf had to say on the subject: Extract from A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf, 1929 I do not believe that even the Table of Precedency, which you […]

Anty

Argentine Ants - Photo Chris Green - DOC

The other day, walking with a bucket full of vegetable and fruit scraps, past the ancient plum tree, down to the compost bin, I noticed one of the main branches of the tree, almost eight inches thick  looked a bit rotten. It was so rotten that it might easily be broken off, so with an […]

Teaching Your Cockatiel to Step Up

Jupiter

Step up, or up, or hop up, are all commands to get your pet cockatiel to hop up on to your finger. Birds have an inbuilt safety mechanism which stops them being knocked out of trees. When they sit in trees with moving branches, particularly in the wind, they could easily be knocked off their perch by a […]