The Unmaking

“I’ve always loved creating space for conversations that matter.”
Ed Cruikshank grew up between Liverpool and Manchester, trained as a cabinetmaker, then studied industrial design in London before spending over a decade working at LINLEY, the bespoke furniture house founded by David Linley, the King’s cousin. Starting as a go-between for the designers and the workshops, Ed ended up leading the design team, and working on projects as varied as chairs to neighbour a 900-year-old bishop’s throne in Norwich Cathedral, and limited-edition Range Rovers.
A yacht project in Auckland brought him to New Zealand in the late 1990s, and after spending just 24 hours in Queenstown he had a feeling on the wharf that this place would play a part in his life. A ski season turned into twenty-five years and counting, a design practice, and a body of work that has slowly shifted from furniture towards something closer to art.
We recorded our conversation parked beside the historic stone cottage on the shores of Lake Hayes where Ed moved a month earlier, at the conclusion of a year of intense personal upheaval. We cover what the years at LINLEY taught him about craft, clients and the value of a brand, why he almost turned the job down, and why he later stepped away from management. He tells the story of turning up to an Auckland boatyard in a suit, and what New Zealand’s boatbuilders taught him. We talk about how he came to hide messages in his work in Braille, and why almost nobody has ever asked him to translate them, as well as his evolution from craftsman to artist. We also get into what his parents and his own yearning for connection have to do with the work, and a year of moving between homes that taught him about advice, blame, and listening to your own inner voice. Finally, we get to the “red thread” to be found in everything he’s made, the work he wants to spend the rest of his life doing, along with the serendipity of a fire poker that connected the two of us before we’d ever met.
🎙 The Unmaking Podcast S02E03: Ed Cruikshank. Designer, Craftsman, & Artist. Hidden in plain sightLake Hayes, Queenstown. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.Check out Ed’s work at https://www.edcruikshank.com/ Subscribe to 1964 magazine at https://www.1964.co.nz/unmaking/Learn more about The Unmaking at https://theunmaking.studio/


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Tony O’Regan is the founder of the Wānaka App - locals’ trusted first digital port-of-call when it comes to regional news and events, and New Zealand’s first hyperlocal community news app.Nine years after he and wife Pip launched the App using a shared phone and a white-label platform built for restaurants and schools, software development has been inhoused, and now handles around 150,000 interactions a month.
But before any of that, there was a kid enjoying an old-school upbringing in a big family on a West Coast farm, with parents who simply saw council meetings, committee work and other community involvement part of everyday life, working when not at school because that also just went with the territory, and who was already looking beyond the farm gate before he’d reached his teens. At fifteen Tony got his first real wing-spreading and horizon-expanding opportunity, leaving home to attend boarding school in Christchurch. It was here he discovered the world held many more kinds of people and opinions than his remote Coast upbringing had let on, and he credits the school’s rugby, rules, and diversity of thinking with opening his eyes and mind and preparing him for the big, wide world.After his mother was quick to discourage a nascent interest in operating heavy machinery, he trained for three years as a Telecom draftsman, mapping underground cables up and down the West Coast, before he was driving home one day frustrated about his employer’s seniority-based pay scale, heard a radio ad for a commission salesperson, and seduced by the prospect of limitless earnings, thought: “what a great job!”.
What followed was two-and-a-bit decades climbing a commercial radio career ladder: Greymouth to Wellington to Masterton to Nelson to Palmerston North, to Canberra, then six years supporting Astro Radio’s commercial network across Malaysia - all with the unwavering support of Pip, a woman whose answer to nearly every major fork in life’s road, including one delivered as “would you go to Kuala Lumpur?,” has been some version of “let’s do it!”. We cover the fourteen years raising kids as expats, a terribly-timed (aren’t they all?) redundancy that forced a pivot into three and a half years running an indoor snow resort in Auckland, and finally, their relocation to Wānaka in 2015. The move initially had nothing to do with journalism or the media, until boredom, some consultancy downtime, and a long look at the New Zealand Herald’s digital offerings turned into New Zealand’s first local community news app and Schistrockmedia Ltd - Tony and Pip’s vehicle for licensing the Wanaka App’s underlying software platform to independent publishers across New Zealand and Australia.
We delve into getting an idea past a boardroom “yes” and turning it into something that actually gets done; the six months of respectful silence he recommends when working inside a new culture; the secrets to a successful business partnership with your spouse; why the classified ads that used to fund every newspaper in the country are never coming back; why a local news archive is worth so much, and why it’s taking so long to work out how much to charge for it; the one advantage against Google and Meta that no algorithm can replicate; and his advice, after thirty years of watching the industry get smaller and more urgent at the same time, to anyone still considering a career in journalism.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com

“The way that nature works is beautiful irrespective of its visual appearance. Everything’s interconnected. Everything operates in cyclical flows that produce more beauty, and more life, and more vigour, and more joy.”Environmental artist and photographer Martin Hill discovered rock climbing in the swinging sixties, the same decade he graduated as a graphic designer. The disparate needs and expectations of these two worlds caused much introspection over the coming years, until he learned how to combine both, interweaving his unique combination of skills and talents to share what he really had to say. The career that laid the visual communication foundation for it all was graphic design, and Martin spent two decades in well-paid, yet soul-searching, creative director roles across London, Nairobi, Sydney, and Auckland. A complex internal struggle provided a philosophical dilemma to this early career success, as Martin juxtaposed two versions of himself: the working-week version that would ignore the increasing volume of his conscience while applying his abilities to aid the influence of consumers; and the altogether more altruistic member of the human race, who would spend his weekends rock climbing with friends and enjoying wild nature.An overland trip to Everest at twenty, a near-fatal bout of hepatitis, real wilderness experience in East Africa while working in Nairobi, and eventually, in the early 1990s, an eco-design conference in Melbourne and a reckoning that changed the direction of his life. We talk about the climbing philosophy that led to his meeting Philippa Jones climbing at Lake Taupo, and how together they built a practice creating sculptures from nature - sand, ice, stone, reeds, leaves - photographing them, then leaving them to be reabsorbed back into the landscape from which they came.
We cover Martin’s design career and his transition from graphic designer to environmental artist; building a life and a body of work alongside Philippa; the twenty-five year Fine Line Project that took their work to twelve points around the earth linked by a symbolic line; what it means to build an entire practice around the idea that nothing - neither sculpture, reputation, nor person - is too precious to be unmade; and what’s left behind when the whole point of your work is its ephemerality.
Martin Hill in collaboration with Philippa Jones has exhibited in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, China, Europe and USA; published three books (Nature Works, Earth to Earth, and Fine Line); is the subject of a documentary film about his working practice (Delicate Canvas); and won a prize at the International Fine Art Photography Awards as well as a Pingyao International photography award for excellence. His projects were recently added to PhotoAnthology, the encyclopedia of photography’s art and history. He and Philippa were featured in the BBC documentary Nature and Us, a history through art. A new exhibition Burning Issues runs throughout November 2026 at Te Atamira in Queenstown. He lives and works with Philippa Jones in Wānaka, Aotearoa New Zealand.
🎙️ The Unmaking S02E01: Martin Hill. Environmental artist and photographer. Wānaka, New Zealand.https://www.martin-hill.com1964 Magazine subscription offer: www.1964.co.nz/unmaking


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Jo Mills and I met up at The Outlet, the point where Lake Wānaka becomes Mata-Au / the Clutha River. Jo and her then-boyfriend Nick first lived together here, in a tiny crib that’s now part of the campground, and it’s where Nick proposed, in the kitchen of that cottage in 2005. They’ve since camped here with their kids, walked the dogs here, and Jo still points to this spot and that time as the moment she realised Wānaka was going to be her home.
Jo Mills is a writer working across Central Otago and beyond. Whether that’s as publicist for the Wānaka Festival of Colour and the At The World’s Edge chamber music festival, doing comms for zero-waste social enterprise Wastebusters, writing copy for luxury real estate brands, editing multi-million-dollar EU tenders, or, on one memorable occasion, proofreading a dystopian novel of epic proportions.
Jo’s mother was a publisher who retrained as a doctor, her father a hobby cook who traded his suit jacket for an apron every evening, and words, flavour, and healing would go on to become the holy trinity of her own adult life.But before any of that, there was a girl who grew up in West London creating “newspapers” on the family’s bubble-jet printer, went on to study English at Oxford University, became so captivated by the world of wine at a tasting in her final year, that she pivoted from English Literature and studied for and completed the first of her wine-related qualifications during her holidays at Oxford. In 2003, after carpet-bombing New Zealand vineyards with emails asking for work, Jo arrived in Central Otago on the strength of a recommendation from Marks & Spencer’s wine buyer Sam Harrop (there’s lots more to do here than in Marlborough) and an offer to introduce and connect her into the local industry from Central Otago wine-growing pioneer Alan Brady.
What followed was fifteen years building Rippon, one of Central Otago’s founding wine estates, from a two-person office in her mother-in-law’s house into what it is today. Through brutal frost years, the GFC, a year in the Beaujolais, and a pandemic that very nearly broke it all. It was also fifteen years spent learning where the boundaries of a marriage end and those of a family business begin. When she finally stepped back from her role at Rippon in 2021, she registered her trading name The Write Path on the Monday and watched the country go into lockdown by the Wednesday - a fateful timing quinella that would repeat itself the following year, when her son Toby’s life-changing spinal injury occurred on the very day she was offered a job interview elsewhere.
We cover the unique challenges of marrying into such a storied family business; what you learn about small-town Aotearoa when your family’s in crisis; the conceptual evolution of her understanding of land ownership; how she’s dealing with the threat to her work posed by AI; and why, over twenty years after arriving at The Outlet, Jo’s third act is opening, and those still, deep waters are really just starting to flow.


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"I pinch myself every day"We recorded this one sitting outside Ed Leigh’s home above Lake Wānaka’s Peninsula Bay. Bought as a bare section by Ed and his wife Sian back in 2019, they’ve built something that is, in his own words, the culmination of their personal and professional lives made real. In addition to the beautiful home and working spaces, there’s a micro skatepark on the driveway - as Ed puts it, it’d be criminal to pour concrete and not bend it up at the corners. Mountain bike trails start ten metres from the gate.
Ed Leigh is one of snowboarding’s greatest ever ambassadors, and has become the voice of action sports for a generation of BBC viewers - nine Olympic Games across winter and summer, two decades of their legendary winter sport magazine show Ski Sunday - the commentator who was able to translate the nuances of sports like snowboarding, freeskiing, skateboarding, BMX or surfing into mainstream British living rooms like no other.
He’s also co-founder of All Good Productions NZ, host and commentator for the Natural Selection snowboarding tour, and the Commercial Director driving Natural Selection Bike Aotearoa - an eight-year labour of love with sustainability built into its DNA from the ground up.
But before all of that, there was a kid in Gloucestershire whose world got turned on its head when he saw his first ollie. He proceeded to get on a train to Swindon every weekend to skate the town’s mini ramp, lost his mind at the concept of “skateboarding on snow” after watching the sport on TV one morning, paid his dues on the local artificial slope (plastic bristles!), found his way to a snowboard shop in Chalford, and spent five winters in Val d’Isère before the busted knee that ended his professional snowboarding career and accelerated his transition into roles such as magazine editor, MC, commentator, producer, and event organiser. A string of live events from festival vert ramps to inner-city snowboard contests inadvertently started his broadcasting apprenticeship, so that by the time the BBC came calling in 2005, he’d already spent a decade learning how to captivate a mainstream audience without losing the sport’s core.
What followed were lives built around the dichotomy of managing absence and maximising presence - relocating the family from Europe to Auckland so Sian could have her parents close while he was gone for the Northern Hemisphere winter, years of January and February without a summer holiday with his kids, a Red Bull contract that pulled them back to Europe and three formative years in Verbier, and eventually the return to Aotearoa, this time to Wānaka, and to something that finally feels permanent.
We cover what it means to be an industry lifer; saying yes to too much and rocking in the bath wondering how it all went wrong; what it takes to build a life and maintain a marriage across opposite hemispheres; straddling the conservative world of mainstream broadcasting and the action sports culture that made you; what snowboarding gained and lost by going Olympic; and why, thirty years on, he’s still going sideways fast and bending the concrete up at the corners.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com