August & September Seminars

#2616 Chopin: the man, the musician and his music

Speaker Stephen Lewis

Date Saturday 8th August 2026 10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

Stephen Lewis has several music diplomas for piano and worked as a private piano tutor for many years in the Kāpiti/Mana areas. As a teen he was a finalist in a national concerto competition. For many years he was a member of an adult music performers’ group based in Waikanae and he has enjoyed regular accompanying and playing opportunities. The music of Chopin has been and continues to be a special interest for Stephen in the world of classical music.

In this seminar, Stephen will profile the Polish composer’s life in a broader European context and his influences and legacy. He will explore the expressive style Chopin uses in works for the solo piano. Stephen will be able to briefly illustrate listening points of interest using the piano on the stage as well as a digital piano. The Preludes of Chopin; a set of pieces Stephen has been exploring recently, will be of particular focus in this presentation.

#2617The Miocene St Bathans Fauna & Wildlife in NZ’s Subantarctic Islands

Speaker Alan Tennyson

Date Saturday 22nd August 2026  10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

Alan Tennyson has been a Vertebrate Curator at Te Papa specialising in birds and fossils, since 1996. Prior to this he worked in DOC’s Threatened Species Unit and was a marine campaigner for Forest and Bird. His work is focussed on seabird conservation, bird taxonomy and the origin and history of NZ’s fauna. His seabird work has taken him from Vanuatu to Antarctica. Recently he has been busy describing ancient fossils, including giant penguins from 60-million-year-old rocks and a great diversity of animals from a 15-million-year-old lake in Central Otago.

In the first session, the Miocene St Bathans Fauna, Alan will discuss the unique insight into the animals that lived in NZ about 15 million years ago gained from a study of deposits from this Central Otago region. They help us understand the history and origins of the fauna. In the second session, the wildlife of NZ’s Subantarctic Islands, Alan will relate some stories from his time on the islands and discuss some of the changes that have occurred because of pest eradication programmes. These islands are remote and windswept and have suffered from many human impacts, such as sealing and the introduction of predators, including cats and rats.

#2618 Hardship & Hope

Speaker Rebecca Macfie

Date Saturday 29th August 2026 10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

Rebecca Macfie studied history and journalism before beginning her journalism career in 1988 at The Press. She is an award-winning journalist and author of Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and Why 29 Men Died and Helen Kelly: Her Life. In addition to 11 years as a senior writer with The Listener, she has written for major NZ newspapers and magazines including National Business Review, North & South, and newsroom.co.nz. In 2024 she was the JD Stout Research Fellow at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Te Herenga Waka VUW. Here she worked on a project to explore poverty in Aotearoa, the first phase of which was published as a major series in The Listener.

Rebecca will talk about this project and two books that resulted from it: her book Hardship & Hope: Stories of resistance in the fight against poverty in Aotearoa and, as one of the editors of Pukekore: Poverty by Design, which originated from a 2024 conference hosted by the Stout Research Centre. They challenge us to rethink how we understand and address poverty in NZ. In Rebecca's own words; “I’ve learned that behind every data point recording deprivation is a story of talent and skill and productivity that’s being oppressed by constant scarcity, constant stress, and the powerlessness of being forced to engage with a harsh, judgmental state for survival.”

#2619 W.M. Thackeray (1811-1863): his life and context

Speaker Heidi Thomson

Date Saturday 12th September 2026  10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

Dr Heidi Thomson is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Te Herenga Waka VUW, where she taught from 1990 until 2021. She was born and educated in Belgium and studied as a Fulbright Student in the US. Her research focuses primarily on topics in British Romanticism. For more information about Heidi’s research see https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9698-9313

Born in India in 1811, Thackeray spent a predictably unhappy childhood at English boarding schools. He spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge, leaving without a degree, and then studied law at the Middle Temple, before abandoning that as well. From a young age he travelled extensively. After coming into his inheritance at the age of 21, he gambled most of his money away but started ‘writing for his life’ after his marriage. The defining traumatic event of his life was the mental illness of his wife, triggered by the birth of their third child. An ‘uneasy Victorian’ he depicted ‘the ordinary treacheries of conventional society’ in a self-deprecating, reflexive style. In his prolific journalism Thackeray ironically exposes the folly of middle-class respectability and the hypocrisy of aristocratic superiority. Thackeray died in London in December 1863. Heidi’s aim is to inspire us to read some of Thackeray’s novels.

#2620 Why you should read Vanity Fair (1847-1848)

Speaker Heidi Thomson

Date Saturday 19th September 2026  10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

In this seminar, Heidi will discuss Thackeray’s most famous novel, Vanity Fair. Loosely structured around the lives of two female characters, adventurous Becky Sharp and timid Amelia Sedley, Vanity Fair provides us with a panorama of English society at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Published originally in 19 instalments, Vanity Fair was published in one volume in 1848 with the subtitle, ‘A Novel without a Hero’. In many ways Vanity Fair was a new kind of novel: reluctant to impose any moral, unwilling to let anyone off the hook, mindful that even the most sympathetic characters have weaknesses, less interested in actions than in the displays of character development. Above all, it’s a hilariously funny book, and its dark humour about greed and hypocrisy is remarkably relevant today. You will benefit most from this seminar if you have read Vanity Fair (freely available on Project Gutenberg), but it is not necessary to have done so to enjoy the seminar.