"Bluff'll be here forever." Heartland host Kerre McIvor (nee Woodham) heads south to the port town of Bluff for the 65th wedding anniversary of Fred and Myrtle Flutey, and visits their famous paua shell museum (after their death, the Flutey's paua collection was relocated in 2008 to Canterbury Museum). As well as taking part in the celebrations and learning the secrets of a happy marriage, Woodham talks to local fishermen, women rugby players and long time residents, including the memorable Sylvia Templeton-Warner. 

This pre-Rugby World Cup 2007 interview follows All Black fullback Mils Muliaina as he revisits the grounds of his alma mater, Southland Boys High in Invercargill (Mils is one of 21 All Blacks from Southland Boys). He talks about his family’s migration from Samoa to Invercargill, and heads south to Bluff to score some oysters with the film crew. Muliaina also talks about finding out via the six o’clock news that he was in the All Blacks, recalls the game he remembers most fondly, and discusses his fondness for rolling his rrrs.

Manapōuri hydroelectric power station is New Zealand’s largest. This 1970 NFU film — made for the Electricity Department — follows workers clearing a path for power through epic Fiordland mountains and rainforest, building roads and power pylons, and stringing a cable along the “hard and dirty” 30 miles to the aluminium smelter at Bluff. Sixteen men were killed constructing ‘the line’ before power was first generated in 1969. At the same time the scheme generated mass protests (the ‘Save Manapōuri’ campaign) at the proposal to raise Lake Manapōuri's level.

This TVNZ show explores 90s grand designs, and the people who live in them. This episode from the fourth season sees Dave Cull quizzing husband and wife architect team Colin and Lindy Leuschke on the challenges of designing their Parnell home, and checks out a pimped up house trailer inspired by technology show Beyond 2000. Jude Dobson visits a Kiwiana classic: Fred and Myrtle Flutey's Bluff paua shell home; and Jim Hickey meets a Remuera reproduction antique importer. The opening titles are a showcase of computer graphics from the era.

Host Marcus Lush called this 2009 series a "love letter" to the characters and stories of the south. In this first episode he sleeps over on Dog Island (where he learns a lighthouse doesn’t have curved beds). Then it’s down to Stewart Island to join "Robin’s teepee cult" and meet Mason Bay whānau, and back to the Aucklander's adopted hometown of Bluff to chat with artistic beachcombers. South continued JAM TV’s winning collaboration with Lush (Off the Rails, ICE). At the 2010 Qantas Awards, the series collected gongs for best presenter and for director Melanie Rakena.

In 1866 the General Grant sank off the remote subantarctic Auckland Islands, with 2576 ounces of gold on board. In 2000 two kina divers and a one-legged tractor driver headed south on a quixotic quest for the buried treasure. The unlikely lads reckon they know where the booty is (despite it eluding 15+ previous search efforts). Their mission turns out to be rugged, illegal, and possibly clueless (as their homespun theories are tested), but that doesn't deter the spirit of the adventurers. First time filmmaker Samuel Richards came along for the fool's gold ride.

Robin Morrison's photographic work was popular and accessible - he affectionately presented New Zealanders to themselves. The 1981 publication of The South Island of New Zealand from the Road cemented his reputation for this kind of work, when it featured ordinary New Zealanders in the environments they'd created. This documentary, however, explores Morrison's earlier work - the gritty Bastion Point and Springbok tour series, and the projects that documented communities on the brink of change.

This fourth episode of Captain’s Log sees host Peter Elliott journeying around the bottom of the South Island, tracing the end of James Cook’s first journey around New Zealand. The precarious Otago Harbour is navigated in an oil tanker, before a much smaller boat takes Elliott around the bottom of Stewart Island to Fiordland, where his captain Lance Shaw describes major conservation efforts in the area. A trip up the treacherous West Coast in a concrete carrier is cause for nerves, then a sail aboard Spirit of New Zealand offers a chance to reflect on the journey.

Marcus Lush goes "right up the guts" of the North Island from Wairarapa to Gisborne in this episode of his award-winning telly romance with NZ's railways. He meets railcar restorers and recounts the murders by rail porter Rowland Edwards in 1884. Particular praise is reserved for the "spectacular and beautiful" Napier to Gisborne line (now mothballed) with its viaducts at Mohaka and Kopuawhara. The latter is on the site of a flash flood that killed 21 workers in 1938 and it inspires an idiosyncratic Lush demonstration of NZ's then 10 worst disasters.

The iconic all-things-rural show is the longest running programme on New Zealand television. With its typical patient observational style (that allows stories of people and the land to gently unfold) it’s an unlikely broadcasting star, but New Zealanders continue, after 50 plus years, to tune in. Amongst the bucolic tales of farming, fishing and forestry, there are high country musters, floods, organic brewing, falconry, tobacco farming, as well as a fencing wire-playing farmer-musician, a radio-controlled dog, and Fred Dagg and the Trevs.