It’s been 10 years of big ideas in bars, as the University of Auckland’s Raising the Bar lecture event rounds out its first decade.
This year they are marking the milestone with 20 top academics at 10 inner-city bars and a range of topics stretching from Disney music to heart surgery to Ancient Greece to the inimitable Kiwi accent.
Newsroom interviewed four of the speakers to find out what punters can expect on Tuesday August 25.
The talks are free, but spaces are limited and registration is essential.
Visit www.rtbevent.com/auckland to register your place now.
Sounding JAFA: young Aucklanders impacting the Kiwi accent with Dr Brooke Ross
7.30pm at Freeman & Grey
Freeman & Grey down on Ponsonby Road will be the site of a talk tackling one of those age-old questions: why do we talk like we do? Any Kiwi who’s been overseas and faced the indignity of being lampooned for their shortened vowel sounds would be well-served to learn why it is that they talk like they do. And while we’re all aware of the ‘fush and chups’ stereotype of the New Zealand accent at large and the rhotic word endings of Southlanders which have been immortalised by Gore-based vox pops on the news, not so many people could put their finger on what the Auckland accent is.
Dr Brooke Ross has the answers – she’s been looking into the origins of the New Zealand accent, and particularly what life in our biggest city is doing to our vowel sounds. Research overseas shows us that accent change begins in the big city and spreads outwards. Ross points to London, where a new form of English has sprung from the melting pot known as Multicultural London English. But the Auckland equivalent has been relatively overlooked by linguists.
“Around 40 percent of Aucklanders were born overseas, and it appears young people in Auckland adjust the way they speak to reflect that,” Ross said. The Kiwi accent has sometimes verged on impenetrable for outsiders, but its modern evolution might be an unconscious attempt to solve that problem.
Does that mean losing those beautiful ‘pen’ and ‘deck’ vowels that raise eyebrows overseas? Come along and find out from Dr Ross.
You should come to my talk if … “you’ve noticed the way young people are speaking and want to know how it’s changing”.
The most surprising thing about my topic is … “how Auckland has been so completely ignored in the history of looking at New Zealand English, even though over half the country live north of Rotorua – and even though it’s the most linguistically diverse region in the country.”
Mending broken hearts with the technology revolution with Professor Julian Paton
6pm at Wharfside
Professor Julian Paton is no stranger to theatricality – his last Raising the Bar talk saw him “stripping off” and a musical performance from his daughter – and this time will be no different. He’s got dancers waiting in the wings and promises to make heart health real for his audience by having his own heart on display, as well as giving them a chance to participate and come away understanding a little more about the beating in their chests.
Underpinning all the theatrics is some life-changing work.
Paton is part of a team working on a world-first bionic pacemaker that can react naturally to the breathing rhythm of the patient causing the heart rate to vary (a sign of good health), rather than just provide a standard metronome-style beat, which is not normal for the heart.
Then there’s the living tissue heart valves he’s working on to try to improve the lives of kids with rheumatic heart disease, who at present have to get bovine valves that wear out or titanium valves that don’t grow and have to be replaced repeatedly throughout life, which means extensive life-threatening traumatic surgery.
He says it’s crucial research for New Zealand, which is the leading developed country in the world for rheumatic heart disease prevalence in children. That’s something he puts down mostly to sub-standard housing: “When I came here from England, I was shocked at the lack of central heating in houses in Auckland.”
The lack of heating and insulation means those windows stay shut in cold, damp conditions, breeding streptococcal bugs which give us those pesky mid-winter sore throats. But then sometimes the autoimmune response of our bodies trying to fight those bugs ends up attacking the heart valve – hence poor housing conditions leading to childhood heart disease in some Kiwi kids.
Some have to get those valves replaced four or five times in their life, and 40 percent of them don’t make it to 20. Paton said his growing valve could mean the end of that appalling statistic.
So come along down to the Viaduct on that Tuesday if you’ve ever wondered how you fix a broken heart.
You should come to my talk if … ” you want to be thoroughly entertained and then go away having learned something really interesting about your own heart”.
The most surprising thing about my topic is … “this bionic pacemaker we have invented may be the answer to reversing heart failure and prolonging life, and the whole idea was Mother Nature’s”.
Lessons from the ancient Greeks for today’s global world with Dr Alex McAuley
7.30pm at Norma Taps
The recent release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has put Ancient Greece in the public imagination in a way it hasn’t been since the brief sword-and-sandal revival of the early 2000s which kicked off with Gladiator and lurched its way through dwindling box office numbers to films like Troy and Alexander.
Alex McAuley knows just how these kind of films can spark the imagination and draw young minds into wanting to understand the ancient world – it was Gladiator that did it for him. Now he’s a scholar who specialises in the world of Hellenistic Greece, the period between 320BC and 30BC when a post-Alexander the Great world was brought together under the unity of a common language and culture, rather than the fist of empire.
He’s speaking at Norma Taps and will be taking his audience through four examples of times when cultures met in those centuries at the end of the BCs, and in particular how those moments remain important today.
“This was a time when if you spoke Greek you could travel across the known world and do business,” he said. “It’s kind of like the fact that if you speak English and wear jeans and a shirt you can get by today.”
The Hellenistic period provides a mirror of sorts through which we can understand our own fragmented but more-connected-than-ever age.
“The main two words to summarise are ‘It’s complicated’,” he said.
And in those complications could lie answers to the challenges of our own day, as international conflicts loom large and cultural alliances are tested.
McAuley said the people of his period of study were united in part by the myth of Alexander and a shared tongue and culture rather than empire – and it was this that allowed the world to seem smaller than ever as faster lines of communication opened up from the Western Mediterranean far into Asia.
New lines of communication seem to open up for us every day in 2026, and if there’s some history we can learn from, it’s probably worth listening to.
You should come to my talk if … “you want to learn about other people and what happens when people from different parts of the world come into contact through the lens of history and sociology”.
The most surprising thing about my topic is … “that there were Greeks in Afghanistan! They had a lot of contact with the Indian sub-continent.”
Grubs in the pubs: adding insects to the global menu with Dr Neil Birrell
6pm at The Brewers Co-operative
Creepy-crawlies might just be the future of food. That’s an area of interest for entomologist Neil Birrell, who has been looking at the place where the environmental benefits of more insects in the diet butts up against the instinctual disgust many Kiwis might have at the idea of chowing down on silkworm larvae and locusts.
But although it might seem exotic to many, Birrell says insects have been food for a lot longer than it’s been recommended by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, who have suggested insect-farming could replace the high carbon emissions and land and water use seen in more mammalian or avian livestock.
But although there are gains to be found in a future with bugs on the menu, the hurdle of public distaste is high.
Birrell has done research assessing people’s reaction to different insect foodstuffs, and found while New Zealanders have a positive association with the likes of cricket flour (“innovative”) and huhu grubs (“tastes like peanut butter”), responses were more negative to silkworm larvae or beetles that are enjoyed frequently in other countries.
He points out dishes such as the European cockchafer soup, which sees a kind of scarab beetle that can decimate crops instead gathered and fried in butter once their wings and legs have been removed. “It supposedly tastes a bit like a crab bisque,” he said.
Birrell has walked the walk when it comes to entomophagy, too.
“My all-time favourite thing I’ve tried were cicada nymphs in Japan, which taste like little edamame beans,” he said.
Another worth mentioning was a whole giant hornet where he had to be careful to eat around the stinger. “It had a really gamey, beefy flavour, I suspect because it’s a predator that eats other insects.
Birrell has white whales in the bug-eating world that he’s yet to try out – chief among these is casu martzu, which is a delicacy in Sardinia and involved letting flies lay eggs in cheese which was then eaten while swarming with maggots.
But don’t worry, there will be no worm-infested cheese at Auckland’s Brewer’s Co-operative, so come along to find out why you should be introducing a bit more bug into your diet. (It is unclear whether the pub will be introducing anything entomological to complement their vast array of beer options for the evening.)
You should come to my talk if … “you are curious about different foods and flavours – foodies would be one way to put it”.
The most surprising thing about my topic is … “the fact that Nicolas Cage summarised my topic in an offhand comment to Entertainment Weekly while promoting the movie Renfield, just as I was writing up my thesis!”
Cage, who had previously munched on insect-kind for the 1988 film Vampire’s Kiss, said: “If we could get over our phobia of eating insects you could solve world starvation … It’s high protein, no fat, extreme nutrients, and they’re just abundant, they’re everywhere. But, no, we’re not going to do that!”
