Coming Soon

Right. I've been sitting on this one for a while, and I've got to the point where telling people about it is the only way I'll actually finish it.

It's called Bloody Legends. It's a podcast about New Zealand's legends, told like a yarn at the pub rather than a lecture at a museum.

One story an episode. Explorers, athletes, war heroes, larrikins, scientists, crooks, and the occasional one who might not have existed at all.

Mostly it's just me talking, which in practice means telling the story and then stopping halfway through to argue with it. That's not a bug. A decent chunk of what I reckoned I knew about our own history turned out to be shakier than I'd like, and I'd rather you watched me work that out than have me pretend I had it sorted the whole time.

Here's who's up first.

One — Sir Ed

Yeah, I know. Open with the most famous man we've ever produced. Very brave, Charlie.

But stick with me, because the mountain isn't the interesting part. Beekeeper from Tuakau, 29 May 1953, him and Tenzing Norgay standing on top of the world, and the line he supposedly comes back down to camp with: "Well George, we knocked the bastard off." Everybody knows that bit.

What gets me is the rest of it. Five years later he's in Antarctica on a modified farm tractor, officially there to lay supply depots for someone else's expedition, and he just… keeps driving. All the way to the Pole. Then he spends the next fifty years building schools and hospitals for the people who got him up the hill in the first place. The question I couldn't let go of isn't how you climb Everest. It's what you do with yourself afterwards.  And, amongst all of that, casually went hunting for the Yeti!

Two — Joan Wiffen

Her father reckoned higher education was wasted on girls, so that was that. No science at school, no training, no letters after her name. Housewife in Hawke's Bay.

In 1975 she's up a stream called Mangahouanga with a hammer, and she cracks open a boulder and finds a tail bone. Took a few years to be certain, but it turned out to belong to a theropod. A meat-eating dinosaur. In New Zealand. Where, as absolutely everyone knew at the time, there had never been any dinosaurs.

She taught herself to get fossils out of rock by trial and error, in her own time, and ended up with an honorary doctorate from Massey, a CBE, and an award from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. They called her the Dinosaur Lady. Which I love, and also reckon undersells it a bit.

Three — Jean Batten

In 1936, twenty-seven years old, on her own in a little Percival Gull, England to New Zealand in eleven days and forty-five minutes. A record that stood for forty-four years. For a while there she was the most famous person in the country, and not far off the most famous woman in the world.

And then she died in 1982 in a flat in Majorca, from an infected dog bite she never got seen to, and was buried in a paupers' mass grave. Nobody back home found out for five years.

Five years, mate. I've read that sentence about a dozen times and it still doesn't sit right.

That's the first three. There's a long list behind them, and some of the ones I'm most excited about are names you've never heard.

No launch date yet, but, soon. Follow along using any of the social links on the website, or subscribe to the newsletter and I'll let you know the second it's up.