January 28, 2026

Letter from New Zealand
January 28, 2026

I was looking, the other day, at two photographs taken in New Zealand on the same Saturday morning. The first shows a hillside at Mount Maunganui – or what remains of it. Where there had been grass and pohutukawa trees, there is now a river of mud and debris that has buried campervans and tents at the base. The second photograph shows a wet paddock near Whanganui, where a young border collie named Trix has just been sold for twelve thousand, two hundred dollars.

The auction, I should explain, was not for show dogs or pets, but for working farm dogs – the sort that herd sheep across New Zealand’s hill country. More than three hundred thousand dollars changed hands that Saturday for sixty dogs, despite rain that would have sent most auctions indoors. A huntaway called Mufasa fetched ten thousand five hundred dollars. His owner, a young farmer named Peter Wilson, admitted it was hard letting them go. “At the end of day, they’re good mates of mine,” he said.

Now, you might wonder what a dog auction has to do with a landslide. Nothing directly, of course. But taken together, these two events on the same morning tell you something essential about New Zealand – a country that exists in constant negotiation with forces it cannot control.

The landslide came down at half-past nine on Thursday morning at a holiday park beneath Mauao, the volcanic cone that gives Mount Maunganui its name. Six people were killed: a Swedish tourist, two teenagers on summer holiday, two women in their seventies who camped there every year, and a fifty-year-old schoolteacher from Morrinsville. Fire services had been notified of smaller slips hours earlier. Council staff drove past them. Whether anyone could have prevented what happened next is now the subject of investigations that will occupy officials for months.

What strikes one about New Zealand’s landslides – and there are many – is that they represent the country’s fundamental geological truth. This is a young nation built on the collision of two tectonic plates, a fact that expresses itself in earthquakes, volcanoes, and hillsides that periodically decide they would rather be somewhere else. Landslides kill more New Zealanders than earthquakes do.

And yet people camp beneath unstable cliffs during the wettest day on record. They build cities on fault lines. They farm steep hill country where the soil itself is provisional. This is not recklessness exactly, but rather a kind of practical fatalism – the understanding that to live in New Zealand is to accept certain risks in exchange for extraordinary beauty.

Which brings us back to those working dogs. In a country where much of the land is too steep for machinery, where sheep must be mustered across terrain that would terrify a mountain goat, the relationship between farmer and dog becomes essential. These are not pets. They are colleagues – specialists whose skills cannot be replicated by any technology yet invented. That a good one might sell for the price of a used car makes perfect economic sense.

There is something characteristically New Zealand about spending twelve thousand dollars on a dog the same week a mountain falls on your fellow citizens. Both acts acknowledge the same truth: that life here requires accommodation with forces larger than ourselves, whether geological or economic or simply practical. You do what needs doing, and you get on with it.