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Queenstown Airport is doubling as an art gallery for the next few months. Natalya Doudell’s artwork titled ‘Unitiy’, will hang in the baggage claim area and is currently for sale through Wanaka Fine Art Gallery. If it’s sold while on display in the airport, a portion of the price will be donated to a local charity.

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi me Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Waewae, Ngaati Wairangi, Waitaha, Kaati Mamoe) is an artist, writer, and researcher. Their practice that explores overlaps and tensions between Indigenous and European knowledge systems, threading both together to weave new meanings and ways of sharing. Hana works across a variety of media including textiles, raranga (weaving), ceramics, painting, performance, film, and sculpture.

One of Queenstown’s most prominent, long-time resource management lawyers, Graeme Todd arrived in Queenstown for just one year as a 22-year-old, fresh out of Otago University Law School. He’s still practising here 40-plus years later after witnessing many landmark decisions.

As a youngster growing up in Frankton during the 1960s, Paul Wilson enjoyed the life of Riley – summers were hot and winters were big, skating on ice, fishing, biking, and roaming the hillsides.

Abbas Nazari, a former Afghan refugee who fled the Taliban in 2001, will do a small tour of Queenstown and Wanaka in early November to tell his story and talk about his book, After the Tampa. The book is an autobiographical memoir about Abbas’ family’s journey from Afghanistan to New Zealand and was written during the 2020 lockdown.

Wesley John Fourie is an emerging artist whose work explores the sensual and the tactile. Their questioning of sexuality, nature, love, and loss, often manifests as large-scale soft sculptures. Textiles have long been a vehicle for storytelling but have recently had something of a renaissance in contemporary art. These thread-based ways of making offer powerful political and emotional associations, in Fourie’s practice they also offer direct relation to land forms through scale and to their creator through an intensity of making.

While the housing market is slowing due to inflation and interest rates, money continues to flow through Queenstown Lakes’ commercial and industrial property sector. And the annual 2022-23 Colliers Otago Market Review and Outlook shows it’s not just downtown that’s shaking off the pandemic blues.

Shane Manners Wood’s uniquely local lavender has enhanced everything from five-star restaurant brûlée to upmarket gin, while also soothing cuts, burns and stings, and calming the soul.

Goldfields Jewellers is something of an institution in Queenstown. It’s celebrating its 21st anniversary under the ownership of long-term locals Trond and Anna Johansson, the only Queenstown CBD retail store and onsite workshop with a working jeweller.

Despite closed borders the Queenstown Lakes film industry has still had a pretty strong year and there’s a positive vibe amid hopes of even better times to come.

Winter Pride director Marty King is always happy to pick up the phone and speak to a journalist. And his openness is paying dividends for what is the largest LGBTTQI+ festival in the Southern Hemisphere.

He’s believed to be Queenstown’s longest serving downtown restaurateur clocking up more than 30 years, and Graham McCarthy has certainly proved his Christchurch lawyer wrong.

Jennifer Belmont might just have the most rewarding job in Queenstown Lakes. As founding trustee and CEO of the Wakatipu Community Foundation, she’s at the centre of an organism that helps people help others, creating a snowball effect in New Zealand’s ski resort tourism capital.

It’s a crazy time to be alive. Paradigm-shifting, some might say. And so we gather, as a community, to navigate our way to a better future. The Wao Summit is a six day festival in the Southern Lakes dedicated to creating long term social and environmental change, and it’s back this October. Run by sustainability non-profit Wao Aotearoa, the summit is in its fifth year and gathering momentum.

Staffing remains the number one priority for Queenstown business with demand above pre-Covid levels. The latest JobFix data report shows there were 3,226 jobs advertised in the July-September quarter.

Owner of iconic local business Stitch N Time for the past seven years, Kate’s planning to close her sewing machine case and open up a new chapter of her life somewhere outside of Queenstown.

A 60s baby, growing up in Levin in the Horowhenua, Kate Pirovano reckons she was the family ‘sports edition’, arriving well after two brothers. “I was horse crazy, a bit of a tomboy so Mum sent me to boarding school in New Plymouth for two years to teach me how to be a lady,” grins Kate.

At 24, Sheila Morris was an accomplished young Christchurch nursing sister on her way to Auckland to join famous cardiothoracic surgeon Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes.