Ava Reid
Traps Jam starts playing. I hit every pothole and fill the car with dust, listening to MĀ sing as a possum and a kererū. The peninsula is nearly free of possums, 25,000 gone in this attempt.1 A difference is noticeable; the birds are noisier. Dirt roads loop over naked hills, down to the sea, flat and reflective, almost iridescent. I think of all the good things, and then every uncomfortable situation: the tension in wearing possum socks around your Australian friends. It would be shit to be a possum here, and shit to be eaten by one. The sky is a deep turquoise, and the wind is messing with my hair.
Walls of macrocarpa fly past on my right, and across the inlet to my left are endless paddocks. Foreign ecologies erected like IKEA flatpacks. The sun has nearly hidden behind Hereweka, and I feel a humming in negative space. Tī kōuka shake and shimmer. They look like me. When I was little, I would stand under the hand dryers in the Meridian Mall bathroom, tossing my hair. It felt like I was on America’s Next Top Model. Pools of light reveal pūkeko, stretching their legs. Tyra Banks would have loved them on the runway.
The part in my hair stings, and my left shoulder. This morning, I followed ultraviolet around the garden, raising my face to the sky with closed eyes. I try to remember the words said by some teenage boys, hanging around outside a bar in Aarhus: “Ladies, you look so much older than us, but it’s probably because you have a hole in the ozone layer”. That night, my pint had a single piece of glitter and a tiny fly in it.
Black swan aliens glide by. I think about synthetic, inflatable worlds. Early settlers practised multi-species colonialism, transporting foreign ecologies from London to Port Chalmers on boats with terrible names, like the Warrior Queen.2 Introduced ecologies crashed into contact with existing ones, mirroring wider colonisation as the landscape was re-designed. Some species were intended to be practical additions. Others were for nostalgia or aesthetics. George Grey is a disturbing example of the latter, with his colonial God-complex. Following two periods as the country’s imperial governor, he retired to a mansion on Kawau Island. He populated the island with imported animals, including zebras, monkeys, and emus.3 They stroll the Back Bays in my mind.
Shopping lists were written by acclimatisation societies, and creatures were uprooted from their homes. They were sent across the sea—to varying degrees of success. Liberating the rabbits was an enormous mistake, as they ate up the grass, which the farmers didn’t like. A solution was thought up. In the words of a man at the time, “ferrets will be the salvation of the country”.4 Mustelids were shipped in and released. This led to the decimation of native bird populations, and look! I’ve seen plenty of rabbits.
Browning grass, the land is scraped clear. No full bush summer for Papatūānuku. Out here, the world seems to be a collection of rectangles. You get the same feeling on a plane. Flying into Copenhagen looks a lot like flying over Palmerston, until you see the city. I slow down by Cape Saunders, pull over and pause my music. Something is squeaking out there in the shadows. My dash is glowing red. I see a star.
In the rearview, brown fur rolls over and over. I try to make sense of the shape. It divides into two, then reconnects. I get out of the car to look. It’s a still evening, calm, with only the crunch of gravel and that subtle squeak. A liveliness hangs in the air. I approach the lump of fur and it splits again. It is a stoat, and it has noticed me. Silently, it slinks into the grass. My stomach drops. Left lying alone, a rabbit quivers. Deep black eyes peer around. Hind legs kick helpless patterns in the dust. It seems like it should be able to get up, but it doesn’t. I feel a bit sick, which is stupid, I’m not going to revive a rabbit.
On May 7th, 1880, the Morning Herald wrote that “Bunny was one of the first that had the honour of a trip across the seas. […] he has certainly thriven wonderfully, and indeed threatens to take possession of the land”.5 A clipping of this paper is carefully stuck into one of the Otago Acclimatisation Society’s minute books. The article also explains, “He is, to be sure, very good eating, but the mischief is that we cannot eat him fast enough…” I take one last look at the rabbit’s face, trying to convey some sort of useless solidarity, then walk away. I can’t even hate the stoat. There was sand in my Birks, and it’s in the car now.
1 Tess Brunton, “Otago Peninsula on the Verge of Being Possum-Free,” RNZ, January 29, 2026, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/585365/otago-peninsula-on-the-verge-of-being-possum-free.
2 Otago Acclimatisation Society, Minute Book [A], 1864–1871. MS-378. Archives Collection, Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ.
3 Carl Walrond, “George Grey and zebras,” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, March 1, 2009, https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/17463/george-grey-and-zebras.
4 Philippa K. Wells, “ʻAn Enemy of the Rabbitʼ: The Social Context of Acclimatisation of an Immigrant Killer,” Environment and History 12, no. 3 (2006): 297–324.
5 Otago Acclimatisation Society, Minute Book [B], 1871–1891. MS-378. Archives Collection, Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ.
Ava Reid (Te Ātiawa, Pākehā) is a student at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, from Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her work has been published in circular, and she was the winner of the 2025 Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition.