Shanti Mathias

5 days ago | thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias

Last year, 20,000 observations of Christchurch species were made during the annual City Nature Challenge, a way for anyone to get involved in biodiversity. It’s back again this month. Even in suburbia, even on grey autumn weekends, there is biodiversity. You just need the time to look for it: to name the bird flapping through your backyard or identify a spider dangling from the corner of a shed or a frothy lichen growing across a park bench.

1 week ago | thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias

The internet seems to be permanent. But all those dead links are a reminder that useful information sometimes only stays accessible when someone is paying for it. Sometime in the early 2010s, it occurred to my high school teachers that they ought to be teaching us something about how to interact well on the internet. “The internet lasts forever,” I remember being told, with the vague threat that future employers might find my nascent Facebook accounts and judge me based on their contents.

1 week ago | thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias

Two members of Peace Action Ōtautahi, an activist group, were taken into custody after police requested CCTV footage from the University of Canterbury showing them briefly interacting, which contravened their bail conditions. At the start of March, two protesters from activist group Peace Action Ōtautahi chained themselves to the building of NIOA, an Australian arms manufacturer that supplies the Israeli Defence Forces and has an outpost in Rolleston, just outside of Christchurch.

2 weeks ago | thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias

German butcher Lisa Willert is proud to keep Christchurch’s oldest butchery going. She gives Shanti Mathias a quick tour. Lisa Willert’s six-year-old daughter understands her mum’s work solely in terms of the TV show Peppa Pig. That makes sense: Willert is a butcher, the owner and operator of Everybody’s Butchery in Addington, Christchurch. “When the meat plant guy rings while we’re driving to school, she screams from the back, ‘can we please have Peppa Pig?’” Willert says, laughing.

2 weeks ago | thespinoff.co.nz | Shanti Mathias

Shanti Mathias scrolls through council archives and Papers Past to discover where street names come from. In Sydenham, a suburb south of Christchurch’s CBD, there are some familiar names on the road signs. Milton Street. Coleridge Street. Wordsworth Street, which, naturally branches into Shakespeare Road. There’s Tennyson Street, of course, and Shelley Street. Walking around, or even just looking at a map of the area gives me vivid flashbacks to first year English literature papers at uni.