Behind the Scenes

The respective owners of a 50-year-old caravan and an even more venerable car join forces to show off their treasured conveyances. Words: Ann Warnock; Photographs: Alistair Guthrie.

IN DESPERATION Rose Fuller advertised in newspapers in a bid to buy a real McCoy bubble caravan and it worked. “I knew exactly what I wanted – a 1959 Starliner Standard. I’d looked for two years without success so I advertised in local rags from the West Coast and Marlborough to Canterbury and Southland,” says the Christchurch licensed property agent. “I asked people to email photos. I got pictures of caravans with hay in them; one was even used as a pigsty. Then I heard from a lovely man in Invercargill and the search was over. This is it. I’ve been told it’s the best example of its kind in the country.”

Lissa Twomey spends two years pursuing the performances that will thrill audiences for just three weeks at the nation’s International Festival of the Arts. Words: Victoria Moss; Photos: Nicola Edmonds.

SIX HUNDRED PEOPLE have gathered in Wellington for the programme launch of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts. The chatter hushes and the crowd inches forward. Lissa Twomey, the Festival’s Artistic Director, faces them and declares that the Festival has been upstaged. “At One Red Dog restaurant tonight there’s a four-year-old’s birthday party that is, apparently, the hottest act in town,” she says, referring to her daughter Annabel and a party where the main attraction is a cake smothered in pink icing and decorated with sugar butterflies.

Lissa’s life has two distinct parts. As creative head of an international arts festival she jets to theatres and stages across the globe to entice performers to come to New Zealand to dazzle audiences hungry for new international arts. And as mum to Annabel and Jonathan, 10, her life is all about birthday cakes, homework and bedtime stories. An Australian, Lissa thrives on the balance of the two spheres, both equally captivating to her.

Her role with the Festival entails a huge amount of overseas travelling to scout for performers. She’s away for up to a month at a time, two or three times a year. She maximizes every minute on the road by cramming her itinerary with shows and performances and then squeezes in more discovered along the way. “It’s a fantastic job but it’s not a holiday. There is a lot of travelling. It’s a balance we negotiate as a family.”

She’s a hot international movie director, he’s an award-winning architect and they have two young daughters. Niki Caro and husband Andrew Lister do whatever it takes to keep their family together wherever they are in the world. Words Kate Coughlan; Photographs: Mark Smith & Andrew Lister.

IF EVER that clever Niki Caro were to direct her cameras on herself and husband Andrew, the resulting film would be a love story. “He is magnificent,” she says about him as an architect, a father and a husband. “Niki is everything to me,” he says, “so whatever she’s doing I want to be there for her.”

Niki’s latest work, The Vintner’s Luck, which opens nationwide this month following an invitation to screen the première at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival, took the family to Beaune in the heart of the Burgundy wine district of France. There Andrew set up home for the four months that it took Niki, working six days and all hours weekly, to translate the magic of the novel by Elizabeth Knox into film.

Compiled by Tracey Strange

Bello bellissimo

If you’re in the market for treasures, take a look at the beautiful mouth-blown and handmade Bollen range of glasses. Founded 20 years ago in Amsterdam, Bollen is a small family company which uses centuries-old methods to create the type of exquisite glassware you might see in paintings by Dutch old masters such as Vermeer or Rembrandt. You’ll find Bollen in New Zealand at Wellington’s Bello Traders (04) 385 0058.

Heartfelt

Leanne and Brian Culy aren’t new to NZ Life & Leisure. Their cute-and-quirky Haumoana beach house was featured in Issue 23 and our sister publication NZ House & Garden recently covered their Napier homestead, Balquhidder House. It’s testament to the artistic talents of the couple who together own Home Base Collections, a design company producing an ever-changing range of fabrics, greeting cards, art and homewares. It’s well worth checking them out at www.homebasecollections.co.nz

There’s nothing like a wintry blast to remind us of what lies south of New Zealand. Antarctica does coldness like no other place on the planet – Silent, desolate, ferocious and fragile. we look at ways this frozen continent has inspired artists, scientists and explorers