Matariki

Matariki is the Maori name for the Pleiades, a small cluster of stars whose pre-dawn rising in midwinter marks the turn of the year. The observance faded through much of the twentieth century and was revived from the 1990s onwards, and since 2022 it has been a public holiday, the first in the country's calendar drawn from te ao Maori. The date moves with the lunar calendar and falls on a Friday in June or July. The shape of it is remembrance, gathering and food: hautapu ceremonies before dawn where the names of those who died in the past year are spoken, shared meals, kite flying and city light installations. Some iwi mark Puanga instead.

What you actually see

• Dawn hautapu - the pre-dawn ceremony held at marae, hilltops and public sites.
• The cluster itself - a faint knot of stars low in the northeast before sunrise, easier through binoculars.
• City programmes - museum events, light installations and concerts through the holiday week.
• Kite flying - manu tukutuku flown as part of the season, a practice revived alongside it.

When to go

The holiday falls on a Friday in late June or July, with events clustered across that week and the following weekend. Dawn ceremonies start well before sunrise, which in midwinter means around seven and close to freezing inland. Check the year's date early, because flights, buses and accommodation all move with a long weekend.

Honest expectations

Midwinter here is cold, dark and often wet, and a dawn ceremony in horizontal rain asks something of you. The public holiday closes shops and some attractions, and transport runs to a holiday timetable. Parts of the city programming lean commercial, with branding on things that were never branded before. The cluster itself is small and unimpressive without someone pointing it out.

Nearby

Museums in every main city run Matariki programmes, and the Mackenzie Basin gives the darkest sky to look for the cluster from.