The Stickler Weekly 132 Solution

While Australia has been solving cryptics for just about as long as anywhere else in the world, we have never really embraced them to the extent that we would say they are part of our culture. Say “have you done the crossword today?” to an English person and they will automatically take that as a reference to a cryptic crossword. It’s not so here. Our crossword history reveals a story of imports and very few crossword heroes. Lack of newspaper publications means not many opportunities for local setters although Fairfax has been faithful in their support of Australian cryptic crosswords. We setters are few, and the same goes for our counterparts in New Zealand. Their crossword history mirrors ours, with just a handful of NZ setters flying the flag at home. A few years ago I met two NZ setters in Wellington, David and Rex, and they kindly showed my wife and I around the city for a day. Rex writes the weekly Kropotkin crossword in the New Zealand Herald (help can be found here), and David writes a weekly cryptic for the NZ Listener (worked answers can be found here). It was David’s treatment of the solution, that includes a specific layout and cryptic comment, that inspired the equivalent on my website. Apart from those two, Jim Greenfield sets cryptics that appear in NZ papers, Barbara Brown sets a weekly cryptic for the Christchurch daily The Press (blog here), and Maya sets for various websites (see his puzzles here).
I can’t talk about NZ setters without mentioning yet another one who lives in Wellington, Paul Henderson, but he’s special because he’s not a Kiwi, but an Englishman living and working in NZ. He sets crosswords for The Independent (London) under the pseudonyms Phi and Beelzebub, for the Daily Telegraph (London) under the pseudonym Kcit, and anonymously for The Times (London) amongst many other outlets. More details can be found here. As far as I know, he doesn’t write crosswords for any NZ publications.
It’s tough going for Oz and NZ setters, and it’s only going to get harder as outlets shrink and the internet reduces the number of crosswords needed to service the solvers, but we plug away, not for the money, but to try and bring a home-grown flavour to a market flooded with foreign influences.