Is head of natural science at the Auckland War Memorial Museum and has a keen interest in fish. This month he heads to the Kermadec Islands on a research expedition
Dr Tom Trnski
You moved to New Zealand from Sydney in 2007. Is the culture here very different? Yes and no. Two things: one is that the brand of “natural New Zealand” is a fallacy, so that really shocked me. I’ve explored the entire North Island and a little bit of the South — there’s very little natural landscape left. It’s either turned into forests with introduced trees, with their own consequences, or there’s heavy intensification of farming. Australia is a dry continent with huge erosion problems. New Zealand has young fertile soil, high in nutrients, but I’ve actually seen erosion here worse than anything I’ve seen in Australia,
Classifieds and it’s quite horrifying. Second thing: the marine environment is colder than I’m used to, but I found the transition relativity easy because although New Zealand has a high rate of endemic marine species, which is really cool, those species have the same families as those you find in Australia. So it made it easy to learn the fish. I’d recognise the family. What about the people, though? Australians tend to class New Zealanders as a bit geeky — have you found that to be accurate? No, I’m not really big on stereotypes.
Weather
Puzzles Coming here I really felt for the first time that I was living in a bicultural society. In Melbourne when I was growing up, there were zero Aboriginal people, or they weren’t visible. The other thing I like about Auckland is the diversity and how it all fits together and no one feels out of place. Although, interestingly, when we first moved here my daughters started at a school and everyone was saying “yes, that’s a very good school”. Almost all the kids there had blonde hair and my wife’s Indian so our kids are Eurasian I suppose, and they really felt out of
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