The human capacity for wondering about things is both a blessing and a curse. It's how we got nuclear warfare but it's also how we got candy floss. It's also how I ended up second row at Friday night's Cabinet of Curiosities session at WORD Christchurch. Because the premise of this event is that you simply don't know what you're going to get when five inquisitive minds take turns at the lectern, and that frisson of possibility is just too tempting. These people could talk about literally anything. It could go to VERY weird places. No wonder this thing is always a sellout
The assembled cabineteers were wrangled by horror film academic and owner of tremendous jumpsuits, Erin Harrington, who, rather than dinging an anodyne and impersonal bell to indicate that a speaker's time was running out, instead held a rubber chicken aloft and squeaked it treating us to a sound both comedic and tragic*.
Molly Crighton and the canonically sexy bull
First to the mic was Molly Crighton, an author that I was thoroughly unfamiliar with but guess what? My curiosity is now firmly in "piqued" territory (that she is "a writer who is also a librarian" doesn't hurt). Stepping to the lectern Crighton was initially quietly spoken and somewhat reserved. Was this truly someone who "writes crime in lieu of committing it"? As her introduction suggested? The phrase "it's always the quiet ones" latterly springs to mind.
For indeed, Crighton came alive as she interrogated, deconstructed, and autopsied the myth of the Minotaur lurking in his labyrinth, inviting us to reframe this narrative as one of lesbian awakening, using inspired visual imagery for her slideshow that screamed "terminally online and unrepentant about it" (I am a fellow sufferer/foot soldier, Holly. Game recognises game.)
Her talk was peppered with deep-dives into Greek mythology as well as other literary labyrinths like those in Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - "it's like she looked into my brain and wrote it just for me" or The name of the rose by Umberto Eco. And the literary references don't stop there. The Minotaur, we are told, is depicted as a "canonically sexy bull". A creature with the head of a bull and "the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop". So... yeah.
Am I convinced that the Minotaur was intended as a metaphor for lesbian self-actualisation? No, but intent in art isn't always the most important thing about it. It's how people find sense and meaning in a story that keeps it being a story that people tell. And if the message is, as Crighton's last line suggests, "the only way out of the labyrinth is to keep going through" then that is a message or moral that is timelessly true whether you have that classic bovine head-bodybuilder physique combo, or not.
Bryce Galloway and the idiosyncrasy of zines
Galloway is the author of a new book about New Zealand zines and lectures at Massey University and the course description includes the incredible quote by him, "the idea that a student could fail this paper by making a bad zine is perverse". This speaks, I suppose, to the notion that zines are so specific to the individual making them that the creator of a zine is the expert on whether it's good or not. In a way Cabinet of Curiosities is a sort of live action zine in the sense that it's somebody presenting their very idiosyncratic view on a very niche topic and in an ephemeral way. Zines are short-run affairs to a usually small and select audience, as is the Cabinet.
Galloway takes us through a little tour of some zines he considers noteworthy, from interviews with old age pensioners, to tributes to the inventor of the photocopier before going into a little more detail about his own zine, Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, specifically the "streetwear catalogue" issue which is literally a list of items of clothing that he has found on the street and taken home with him while out biking around.
I admit to being impressed by the layout of said catalogue which describes the item of clothing, its provenance and condition, and the next stage of the journey of its life. Some items are washed and donated to opshops, some are adopted by family members or by Galloway himself. This is the level of detail I imagine you find in a Sotheby's auction catalogue but here it's being applied to random cast-offs, the least appealing clothing items possible, found wet and clinging to asphalt or hanging sadly off a tree or fence. The subtext is one of sustainability but also Galloway admits that it's not without its awkwardness, this retrieving damp clothing from the middle of the street - it's a "slightly self-conscious act".
Galloway is working on a second "streetwear" issue and admits to having found a Christchurch entry earlier that day that was so "rank" he couldn't in good conscience submit it to the hotel laundry service, so he took it to the laundromat around the corner.
I'll say what we're all thinking: I hope it wasn't underwear.
John Summers and the darkness of Barbadoes Street
John Summers is the author of Green Sea: Lost in the New Zealand Bush as well as two novels. He lives in Wellington currently but grew up in Ōtautahi, specifically Sydenham. His talk navigated a corridor in the physical landscape of Christchurch but also his personal history of it.
Summers told us about his Aunt and Uncle who lived in Redwood. His uncle Dale, he told us, had an "extraordinary gift for slang", giving as example the time that his uncle and grandfather were working on some project that involved cutting lengths of timber and his uncle describing the length of some piece as being too long by "an ant's c*ck".
Barbadoes Street served as the connecting path between his aunt and uncle's house and his childhood home in Sydenham. The journey home was always in darkness, after spending an the evening in Redwood and so Barbadoes Street, with its foreign-sounding name, and extra "e", was only ever experienced at night and had the air of danger about it.
Summers gave us some history of the street and environs including the Barbadoes Street Cemetery, "a Victorian artefact", which had "a stench" in the 1880s, and at least one tombstone marking the grave of a murdered servant that became a tourist attraction due to possible paranormal goings-on. Barbadoes Street was also in the territory of a street gang called "The Richmond Push", the home of King's Cycles (now Beat Street Café) and the Provincial Hotel. But truly it's most majestic feature would be the Catholic Basilica, which Summers said "gave me goosebumps unlike any other building I had ever seen". Would it surprise you to know that a number of holy relics were buried beneath the floor of the Basilica? Would it surprise you more to know that said relics were housed in empty coffee jars? It did me.
While a lot of what made up the childhood landscape that Summers described has gone or changed, in part due to earthquakes he's philosophical about this fact because his own recollection of these places is not as they actually were but as a part of his childhood memory - a mood, a vibe. So in a sense it can never really be gone.
Erik Kennedy and the vengeance of Orcas
Erik Kennedy is a local-via-the-US poet with a sparsely ugly website and, it turns out, an interest in the violent urges of Killer Whales.
Kennedy takes on a journey through the phenomenon of Orca that attack boats, specifically pleasure craft in the Mediterranean which has captured the imagination of non-pleasure craft-owning humans around the globe. A single Iberian pod of roughly 40 individuals is responsible for hundreds of attacks and at least 8 sinkings. Kennedy who "gets customised news alerts on the topic" informs us that this started with on older female who has the "psycho whale name" of "White Gladys" and who has passed this behaviour on to younger members of the pod. This kind of behaviour in adults is usually in response to trauma but for the juveniles it represents "play". Essentially they are treating these millionaires' vessels as "bath toys". Kennedy helpfully compares this to the human example of teens eating tide pods, should we need to contextualise youth bringing unnecessary drama into everyday life as a cross-species activity.
From there we move onto the way in which this phenomenon has acquired political meaning, as if the whales are attacking superyachts as an act of "anti-capitalist solidarity". Kennedy questions this interpretation: Have orcas developed "a Marxist theory of change"? Are they "historical materialists"? I couldn't honestly say. I have no idea what any of that means but I think the gist of it is "maybe we're projecting a tad?".
But there are people who believe in the conspiracy theory that The Orcas are Definitely Up To Something, Like, On Purpose and moreover Kennedy has chatted with such folk. And written a poem about it, naturally. He asks the brave question: Can something be a conspiracy theory if it sounds true?
But it's not just conspiracy theorists that Kennedy is getting his information from. Kennedy actually approached a researcher working in this area studying the Iberian pod and he treats us to a recording of their song, a sequence of high-pitched whistles before finishing with, "I think we all know what they mean by that".
Jo Randerson and a supermarket bag relic
Jo Randerson, author of Secret Art Powers, is the last to the mic. The founder of Barbarian Productions, and a critically acclaimed writer, performer and playwright they step up to the lectern like a bundle of energy. Rangerson's talk is broadly about change and how fast change can sometimes happen, initially using the example of the name change of Mt Egmont to Mt Taranaki. They remember people being extremely resistant to this change - 10,476 people lodged objections to the New Zealand Geographic Board about it, and the argument was that too many things would need to be changed (signage, marketing, tourist tat of every description), that it was just too expensive to do. But as we all know, change it did. As far as I recall the world didn't stop turning. There weren't masses of people suddenly unable to find the extremely large and obvious nearby mountain. Says Randerson, "change can actually happen if we put our mind to it".
Randerson compares societal change to the study of sand falling down into a pile - scientists can predict how often a slip, where a large area of sand gives way near the top, but not exactly. But one will occur with a frequency that it's roughly possible to predict. This gives Randerson hope because "nothing can get too stuck for long" and small actions (like grains of sand) keep adding up until something gives.
Randerson likes to think of Sheriff Jim Clark, a segregationist, who was responsible for violent arrests and brutal tactics deployed against civil rights campaigners in Selma, Alabama. Randerson shows us a photo of him looking very smug and wearing a small badge that says "NEVER". Randerson likes to think of him because "he was so sure, and he was so WRONG". Change happened despite him and his beliefs.
At this point Randerson pulls out a white, single use New World supermarket bag of the sort that was ubiquitous not that long ago and passes it through the audience like it's a holy relic - I scrunch it near my ear for a moment, delighted by the sense memory of this almost extinct object. These things were everywhere and now you almost never see (or hear) one. Proof positive that change is possible, or as Randerson puts if "together our grains add up to big changes".
Curious about the cabineteers?
Find works by the Cabinet writers
More WORDy goodness
- Our WORD Christchurch 2026 page: Picks of the festivals, reportage and more!
- Visit the WORD Christchurch website
- Follow WORDchch on Instagram
- Follow @WORDchch on Tik Tok
- Like WORD Christchurch on Facebook
*Hell of a way to encapsulate all of the dramatic tradition in bright yellow rubber. Well played.
Add a comment to: The Curious Five: Myth, change and ethical orcas at WORD Christchurch 2026