About Gondwana Man

 

Gondwana – the original ‘Great Southern Land’. 

Gondwanaland is the name of an ancient super continent. It formed around 500 million years ago during the Cambrian, and began to break up in the Jurassic – 167 million years ago. Traces of this ancient land can be seen in the fossil record and in extant flora and fauna, such as the strikingly similar Nothofagus species, the southern beech trees of New Zealand, Australia, and Patagonia. 

This blog is a journal about the journey of Gondwana man, a native of New Zealand (one of Gondwana’s outliers), to a sustainable future. It mixes personal reflection with commentary on public issues, and ranges over a nexus of matters – the environment, energy, water, land use, transport, resilience, the natural world, history and politics. The focus is largely, though not exclusively, New Zealand.

Gondwana man lives on the southern shores of Te Whanganui-a-Tara (“The Great Harbour of Tara”), otherwise known as Wellington. He is a keen outdoorsman, keeps fit by swimming and walking the dog, reads extensively, drinks single malt whisky (Islay and Irish), red wine and beer, and tries to live simply. Favourite films include ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Kingpin’. Favourite authors include Livy, Tacitus, Machiavelli, Turgenev and James Belich. If he was marooned on a deserted island, Gondwana man would want a copy of Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean to keep him occupied.