Meetings are held at the Te Awa Lifecare Woolshed, 1866 Cambridge Road, Cambridge, from 10am for 10.30 until 12.00 noon on the second Tuesday of each month.
Tuesday July 14th, 2026 - Jared Savage - Underworld: The evolution of organised crime in NZ. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE VENUE IS AT BRIDGES CHURCH
Jared Savage is an award-winning investigative journalist with the New Zealand Herald, where he has reported on crime and justice for more than two decades. Twice named best reporter in the country, he is the author of the bestselling books Gangland, Gangster’s Paradise, and most recently Underworld: The New Era of Gangs in New Zealand (2025).
Drawing on years of frontline reporting, Savage traces how organised crime in New Zealand has evolved from the motorcycle gangs of the 1970s and 80s into a sophisticated, globalised criminal industry. What began as locally rooted groups shaped by social and economic marginalisation has shifted into a highly profitable, transnational enterprise fuelled by methamphetamine, international deportee networks, and direct links to overseas syndicates.
In this talk, he explores the rise of the so-called “new era” gangs, the scale of modern drug imports, the increased firepower and technological sophistication of criminal groups, and the wider social consequences for New Zealand communities. It is a story of how crime adapted faster than many expected, and how the country now finds itself confronting a far more connected and commercially driven underworld.
Tuesday August 11th, 2026 - Dr Rajesh Nair - Head of Department Cardiology - Waikato Hospital - AI and Your Doctor: How Technology is Changing the Way Medicine is Practised
Dr Rajesh Nair is a practising Cardiologist and health service leader who has worked across New Zealand and Australia, including several years leading the regional cardiology service at Waikato Hospital.
He holds an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management (UNSW) and is the founder of Briefly, a healthcare technology company using artificial intelligence to help doctors and patients.
In this talk, Raj will explore how AI is beginning to change the way doctors work — from clinical decision-making to how your medical letters are written — and what it means for patients. He'll share insights from the frontline of both medicine and technology, and offer a grounded perspective on what's hype, what's real, and what's coming next.
Tuesday August 25th, 2026 - - JOINT PARTNERSHIP HISTORY LECTURE -Dr James Goodrich - Odontology and a Marine: The Battle of Tarawa
Dr James (Jimbo) Goodrich is an active forensic odontologist in Cambridge, with more than 25 years experience in the field.
He attended the Christchurch Earthquake, Mosque Shootings, and Whakaari White Island Volcano disaster victim identification efforts, as well as more routine individual identification work for the police.
He has presented internationally on his work with Drs Corinne D'Anjou and David Senn with identification of marines from the Battle of Tarawa in 1941, among other things.
Jim is a Fellow of several organisations, including the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and is a past president of the New Zealand Society of Forensic Odontology.
Jim is one of the few members of the New Zealand Society of Forensic Odontology to have been fully credentialed in Bitemarks, and his current interests are in the field of the ethical considerations around using dental age estimation to threshold adulthood.
Tuesday September 8th, 2026 - Helen Hughes - Sanctuary Mountain: Rescuing New Zealand at Scale
You've probably been to Maungatautari, or driven past it thinking you know what it is. Helen Hughes will show you what you've been missing.
Behind that predator-proof fence is the world's largest ecosanctuary, home to 3,000 kiwi and the kākāpō whose booming call echoed across the mainland for the first time in over a century.
But this isn't a nature documentary.
It's a story about what it actually takes to rescue endangered species at scale: the operational challenges, the innovations that work, and the very real proof that we can fix what we thought was broken.
Helen will take you inside both the vision and the machinery that makes it real.
You'll understand not just why Sanctuary Mountain exists, but how and why it matters to all of us.
Tuesday October 13th, 2026 - Dr Vincent O'Malley - Defining Conflict - The New Zealand Wars
Dr Vincent O’Malley FRHistS FRSNZ is a Wellington writer and historian who has authored many bestselling and acclaimed works on New Zealand history, including The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 (2016) and The New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (2019).
In 2022 his book Voices from the New Zealand Wars/He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB) won the general non-fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
In the same year he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-Fiction. In 2023 he received the Humanities Aronui Medal for research or innovative work of outstanding merit in the humanities.
He was the J.D. Stout Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in 2014 and was awarded the Mary Boyd prize from the New Zealand Historical Association for the best article on any aspect of New Zealand history published over the previous two years in 2017.
In 2023 he was a semi-finalist for Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year. In 2025 he was named as a recipient of Victoria University of Wellington’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
Tuesday October 27th, 2026 - - JOINT PARTNERSHIP HISTORY LECTURE -Rod Smith - From Galway to the Waikato Land War - A peerage family's connections
Rod Smith, family history researcher and writer, presents “Galway to the Waikato Land Wars - A Peerage Family’s Connections”.
Rod is a retired public servant, and former newspaper journalist and probation officer. His career included time crewing a cargo freighter, work in an English youth conference centre, and service in the Justice Department, Parliament, the Ministry of Defence, the Forest Service, and the Accident Compensation Corporation.
An avid family historian for over 35 years he has researched in depth his wife’s connections to landed Irish families, publishing his findings in two books – Guinness Down Under: the famous brew and the family come to Australia and New Zealand (2017) and Clancarty: the high times and humble of a noble Irish Family (2024). While researching Clancarty he discovered reports of the family’s involvement in the Waikato Land War of 1863-64 and a revealing speech given by the 3rd Earl of Clancarty in the House of Lords in 1864 on the subject of New Zealand race relations. Rod’s presentation will explore the events of 1863-64 and the several connections between the Earls of Clancarty and New Zealand.
Tuesday November 10th, 2026 - Dame Fiona Kidman - Telling Stories
About me: Fiona Kidman is a novelist, short story writer, poet and memoirist. Her original occupation was as a librarian. In the early 1960s she began to write journalism , radio drama and, later, television drama, Her first novel ‘A Breed of Women’, published in 1979 caused controversy but she continued to write in the face of some opposition. Her 2018 novel This Mortal Boy won the Jann Medlicott Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. Her work is translated into several languages. She has been awarded a damehood for services to literature and is a Chevalier des Artes et Lettres by the French government, and has also been awarded the French Legion of Honour. Currently, she is a Patron of the Randell Cottage Writers Trust, also The Long Hall, The New Zealand Poetry Society, and of the Refugee and Migrants Trust.
My most recent book is The Midnight Plane: Selected and New Poems (pub. Otago University Press 2025)
Tuesday December 8th, 2026 - Vladimir Pacheco - My journey
Vladimir spoke to U3A Cambridge in 2025 and by popular demand, he is returning to share more information about his journey and his life (a topic that he doesn't really talk about in public, but does in 1:1 conversations).
Vladimir Pacheco is currently Associate Professor at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research interests include socio-economic impacts and governance of non-renewable resource extraction in the Arctic, Latin America and the South Pacific. Previous to this position Vladimir held senior roles in Australia with the Foundation for Development Cooperation, the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining and consulting firm WorleyParsons.
His latest publication is a chapter in a book titled “Ideology, Post-ideology and Anti-Ideology in Latin America” published by Bloomsbury Academic.