Kitabı oku: «The Pavlova Omnibus»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

First Letter: Welcome

Second Letter: Dramatis Personae: A Cast of Three Million

Third Letter: Stupendous, Fantastic, Beautiful New Zealand

Fourth Letter: Education: The Making of the Resident

Fifth Letter: The Kiwi Science of Politics

Sixth Letter: Sex or the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly

Seventh Letter: Seven Days Shalt Thou Labour: The Games Kiwis Play

Eighth Letter: The Kiwi Sniggers: A Brief Guide to New Zealand Humour

Ninth Letter: The Medium is the Tedium

Tenth Letter: The Kulture of the Kiwi Bird

Eleventh Letter: Overseasia

Twelfth Letter: Processed Pom

FIRST LETTER

WELCOME

Dear Keith,

Good luck in God’s Own Country. He probably wasn’t able to welcome you in person. The Wellington Airport Authority was no doubt a satisfactory stand-in. If he had been there, he’d say the same as I do: you’re a lucky man.

It’s a wonderful country. Not quite paradise—the Labour Party hasn’t been in that long—but probably the best country in the world. Certainly the best in the Southern Hemisphere. Having made this deference to New Zealand sales, I must in all honesty warn you. It’s a funny country. The natives have their own tribal customs and ceremonies. They also have their own susceptibilities. If an Englishman like yourself didn’t find them different to the folks back home in all sorts of endearing little ways the natives couldn’t bear it. Different means better. Let your indulgent smile turn into a laugh—once imply that certain things are better handled in Britain and you’ll get the ritual excommunication: ‘If you don’t like it why don’t you go home?’ Ignorance of the lore is no excuse.

As a country New Zealand has one major preoccupation: New Zealand. The rest of the world ignores it, so it compensates by more and more frantic navel exercises of national belly-button studying. Later you’ll be able to exploit this endearing insecurity for gain, like the other Englishmen there. At the moment you might not know how to handle it. You’ll have met the first manifestation of obsession already, having been asked a thousand times how you like the country; two thousand times if you’ve already left the airport tarmac. This is not designed to elicit information. It is a request for reassurance, encouragement, admiration and all the other things assisted immigrants are brought in to provide.

Above all don’t try to be funny: a psychiatrist might as well heap filthy jokes on patients anxious about impotence. An illustration. When I arrived in New Zealand, the first words of my kindly boss were a warning not to be critical when asked how I liked New Zealand (henceforth referred to as question number one). A reporter arrived for the routine interview with all new university staff (this being Otago, where there is little else to fill the papers). I, being young and anxious to build a reputation as the David Frost of academe, answered question number one by saying that the lavatorial graffiti was at least more literate than in Britain (although cruder). The only thing wrong with New Zealand, I added, was the number of people asking how I liked New Zealand. There duly appeared a photograph of a leering sex maniac almost certainly arrived in Dunedin to form the Otago branch of White Slavers’ International. This headed an article which hinted in scarcely veiled fashion that I had come to New Zealand because of my inability to get a job in Britain. This was, of course, true of all university staff arrivals. It had never before been made explicit, for this was before Mr Muldoon.

You must make the proper replies. An American matron might get away with saying ‘it’s cute’. An Englishman’s response is, ‘It’s a great improvement on where I’ve just come from.’ This will be either Fiji or Australia, but no one will realise. You could also try, ‘Well, it’s a great place to bring up children.’ This does not commit you to any view and has the added advantage of hinting that you will take early steps to make yourself normal (that’s to say as miserable as the rest) by producing progeny. If you’re still single and the predatory New Zealand girls returning home on your plane have not managed to get their claws into you, then this answer gives a subtle indication that you are suitably ashamed of your unnatural single status and are on the look-out for a decent New Zealand girl (i.e. any).

You walk a delicate tightrope, avoiding culture shock without frightening the natives. There is no one to advise you. The great sociological-anthropological machine of the American universities hasn’t yet processed New Zealand, boiling it all down to a book full of tables, every generalisation significant statistically. Nor have the experts who package a country and distil its essence into a few hundred pages, or even a generalisation, plasticised New Zealand. John Gunther didn’t add New Zealand to his volumes on the USA, USSR and the other major powers, and his successor went home after two days. Margaret Mead never lived with the natives in their tin-roofed huts. Raymond Postgate never sampled the Rose Cafe on Lambton Quay, to confer three stars on its Egg on Toast and none on its Egon Ronay. The authors of See the World on Five Dollars a Day managed only a quarter of an hour in New Zealand after the last General Wage Order. Googie Withers went back to Australia after a week’s visit, complaining that she had no idea what New Zealand was like. It had been shut.

Foreigners are too taciturn, the natives too verbose. They have their gurus, though they can only afford one in each field. You could always consult Don Clarke on aesthetics, Ralph Love on poetry, Tom Skinner on etiquette or Charles Brasch on rugby. This would take too long, and pontificating for the NZBC makes heavy demands on their time.

Similarly you would never be able to wade through the books about New Zealand. Production of books about the country is the major local industry, after plastic tikis. Books about New Zealand In Colour provided the original impetus for the Japanese economic miracle. New Zealand presses pour out books on New Zealand, if they aren’t lucky enough to get the Labour Party raffle ticket account. To mention New Zealand in a book title is a guarantee of massive sales.

The main purpose of all these books is therapeutic, not diagnostic. They are the literary branch of the vast local reassurance industry. They portray New Zealand as the best place in the world, its people as the greatest blokes. Every characteristic from boozing to boorishness has to be catalogued as both endearing and admirable. Look at the abridged version of the New Zealand Encyclopaedia, also known as From N to Z, and you’ll see what I mean. It bears as little relation to life in New Zealand as that section of the London telephone directory masquerading under the same title, though it’s not quite as funny.

If New Zealand were as the New Zealanders see it, it would be a tourist Mecca. Every international airport from Auckland to Wanganui would throng with jumbo jets coming on trunk routes to bring American tourists to view the native customs. The Hopé Indians can stage their ghost dance at the drop of a traveller’s cheque. New Zealand should restore its sacred customs for the same consideration. The mystic invocations at the rugby club ‘down-trow’ would be almost drowned by the whirr of movie cameras. The rich linguistic legacy of the election rituals would draw thousands. Coaches would tour vivid re-enactments of the six o’clock swill, staged by Richard Campion and choreographed after extensive interviews with survivors. Portrayals of native courting habits in the back of reconstructed heaps in the dunes would be an attraction. All a dream. The tourists are a trickle not a flood.

New Zealand is not so much a country, more a way of life. It’s up to me to instruct you in the faith you’re about to be received into. Since you can’t have the benefit of growing up in it, learn it by heart. Kiwi in seven days if you memorise the handy phrases and do the exercises. It would be a mistake to acclimatise more quickly. Immigrants are expected to be ‘different’ (literally translated ‘peculiar’), to smell slightly and have insanitary habits. If they don’t, then the natives might get disorientated, begin to doubt their own superiority and feel there’s nothing left to live for. So make all sorts of little endearing mistakes. When going to social functions make your wife take a plate. Every immigrant will assure you that his wife did this in response to the ‘ladies a plate’ instruction, though readers of Groupie might think the injunction scandalous. Talk as if hogget was a pig or an English sociologist. No one will notice the difference. Eat your fish and chips with the paper open right out instead of tearing off the corner like the natives do. This custom is more than an admission that the fish are so pathetically small that it’s the only way to keep them warm; it is also a badge of national identity. Deliberate minor mistakes will give you something to talk about in later years and keep the New Zealanders happy. Yet don’t keep up the pretence too long. You have to conform and soon. Read on quickly. The period of grace won’t last long.

SECOND LETTER

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: A Cast of Three Million

IF THE KIWI has one fault it’s modesty. He never blows his own trumpet. It will take a couple of minutes and at least half a dozen beers before you get him to admit that New Zealand is the most honest, decent, intelligent and cleanest of nations. Almost too good for this world, which may be why New Zealanders live so far away from it. Like Clark Kent they efface themselves until wrongs are to be righted. Then with the magic cry of ‘Conscription’ they change into the khaki insignia of Super Kiwi, set the world to rights and come back to their island fastness. An unsuspecting world is left thinking Monty won North Africa and Lieutenant Calley made Vietnam safe for democracy. The Kiwi owns up only to Crete and Gallipoli, to save others from embarrassment.

New Zealanders are not perfect, theirs is a young country. The Ancient Greeks had a head start but the gap is being narrowed every day. If Kiwis stop to wonder why Divine Providence which treated the rest of the world so ill did so well by them, they would probably put it down to national eugenics, breeding from a good stock carefully shielded from any base or coloured genes, even blue ones. Truth is more prosaic. New Zealand is what it is because it has been conditioned by isolation, by the need to make the best of what it has not got, and by smallness. And the greatest of these is smallness.

The population is maintained at a rough balance of one man equivalent to twenty-three ewe equivalents, or people to sheep—but then what’s in a name, as Engelbert Humperdinck would say. This balance makes the humans better off, with the average bloke earning $2,235 at the 1966 census, the average sheep only $6. Unfortunately it upsets a combined chorus of politicians and sex maniacs who want the people to catch up on the sheep by populating or perishing, conveniently forgetting that the strain of reaching the first ten million could produce both eventualities. Yet a population of only three million, scattered over 104,000 square miles, is responsible for most of the national characteristics. God who made them tiny, make them tinier yet.

Small population means an intimate society. You’ll soon begin to think that all New Zealanders know each other or even that they are all interrelated, thanks to some mysterious process of national incest. No one can arrive in a town where he doesn’t have a relative, a friend, or at worst a common acquaintance of his maiden aunt’s. As soon as the weather is out of the way conversations have limitless, or rather three million, prospects for mutual name swapping. The only way you can join in is by memorising a phone book.

A small country is unspecialised. Skills only become complex and compartmentalised in larger countries. British workmen arriving there are baffled to find that they can’t just exercise their traditional skill of screwing on the doorbell—they have to help build the house as well. A uniquely irrelevant British education system trained me to know everything about one British political party from 1815 to 1830, and nothing about anything else. I arrived in New Zealand to find myself lecturing on the whole rich tableau of history from mastodons to Muldoon. Even mastering this wasn’t enough to make the Kiwi grade. Unlike my academic colleagues, I wasn’t able to mend cars, build houses and play rugby—I still had nothing to talk about in the staff commonroom.

Unfortunately because specialists are so thin on the ground New Zealanders become suspicious of them. The all-rounder is preferred. Every year the country’s part-owners pop in from the international pawnbrokers at the IMF to inspect their pledge. Their dire warnings are always disregarded. After all, not one of them has handled a tool, even a screwdriver. In 1967 I did a television documentary attempting to analyse the Kiwi character. The audience was so shocked by my inability to put putty on a window that the brilliance of the argument was completely lost. Lack of practical skills is a form of personal inadequacy: as a perceptive correspondent in the Woman’s Weekly once pointed out, ‘protesters don’t knit socks’. This adoration of the practical even influences the government hierarchy. In America the State Department carries the prestige, in Britain the Treasury. New Zealand esteems only the Ministry of Works whose minister can proclaim, ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!’ to quote P. B. Allen, the Departmental Demosthenes pleading for a change of name to the Ministry of Good Works.

New Zealand owes much of its national character to the smallness of the population. A mass society is hierarchical and fragmented; a small one is uniform. Mass societies generalise into categories and classes; New Zealand deals in individuals, being small enough to particularise. Mass societies are preoccupied by abstractions and ideas: freedom, class, tyrannny, oppression. The Kiwi personalised society looks at people and their motives. If someone was declaiming about freedom and private enterprise an Englishman would listen. A New Zealander would quickly reduce it all to ‘He’s saying that because his father drank’ or, if acquaintance is more distant, ‘What’s in it for him?’ Continental workers strike against Gaullism, British against trade union legislation. The Kiwis’ nearest approach to a political strike is against increased beer prices.^[*] Instead of discussing ideas or grouping people into abstractions such as classes they prefer to gossip about individuals. Their national literature, like their conversation and women’s magazines, is dominated by the ‘funny thing that happened to me’ approach. A Briton would define someone by reference to some category, usually exact social position. The Kiwi does so by reference to his personal characteristics, usually his precise degree of ‘good or bad blokiness’.

The same smallness also makes New Zealand a uniform, egalitarian society. Of course other factors help. There’s no natural diversity. There are twenty-two breeds of sheep here but the humans mostly come from the same stock, are nearly all the same colour, have no deep social divisions and all go to the same schools. Minorities are too small to stand out. There is a small Chinese population but you’ll have to hunt them out in the yellow pages, under G or L. Even the nine per cent who happen to be Maori don’t break the uniformity. They usually segregate themselves in the countryside, in the plastic pas of Rotorua, or in the poorer areas of the cities where no one sees them, though all claim to hear. Only a few young militants have shown any great desire to be exclusive or militant. Most are brown New Zealanders with larger families and different family customs. Their traditional leaders make Uncle Tom look like Eldridge Cleaver.

In any case New Zealand needs the Maori. He is the national fig leaf. The academics can study him, the artists pinch his motifs, and the liberals sympathise with him, even if he doesn’t appear to understand what they are talking about. More important, as long as he’s there a stretch of white suburbia whose attitudes are evocative of a Rhodesia without Africans can pose as multi-racial, racially tolerant and other nice things. The whole process is quite painless. The Maoris are just a large enough proportion to make the rest feel virtuous and not large enough to inconvenience them, unless they happen to live next door which none of those who talk about the Maoris ever do. The concession of equality is nicely self-interested. As long as the Maori has only equal rights and equal treatment, poverty and lack of education will make him incapable of competing effectively. No Maoris, no poor.

Even differences of wealth aren’t really a source of diversity.^[**] New Zealanders don’t mind having the doctor in his castle, the patient at his gate, for financial equality is not enshrined in the Kiwi Pantheon. Because doctors are better unionised than wharfies they naturally deserve more: $7,000 a year more on average. Raising sheep is clearly more important than raising children so it’s better paid. Producing beer is more praiseworthy than guzzling it, an act which demands only a reckless courage and a dulled sensitivity. Property also makes perfect. With rocketing values since the war farmers have clearly done well, even if things have got so tough now that some have been compelled to drive Jaguars over four years old. The owners of scrubby gullies near Auckland do even better. The most profitable crop to plant is still septic tanks.

The difference of wealth doesn’t make a class system, because the country is so small. Concentration makes classes. In mass societies the like gather together, developing their own life styles, uniforms, newspapers and magazines, languages. Here Remuera and Fendalton look like a scruffy social hodgepodge compared with uni-class areas in London. The social groups are too scattered to congeal into classes. The British upper class has Fortnum and Masons to themselves. New Zealanders must forage in the Four Square. A New Zealand Tatler and Bystander could survive only by descending to photos of ‘a happy family group exchanging blows at No. 34 State House Road, Grey Lynn’. Think of Vogue, New Zealand. After three thin years it had done features on the upper class (all four of them). Loath to turn to features on fashion among Wattie’s cannery workers, it closed down. No one noticed.

This scatter factor prevents any like group gathering together for mutual encouragement and support. The only real Kiwi subculture is the seasonal subculture of students, which is why no one can stand them. In a North Island city a lone Trotskyite deviationist would like to test-drive a revolution with friends and bring his kids up in a commune. Instead the kids go to the local primary, his wife absorbs the Weltanschauung of the local newspaper and he has no one to talk to. In mass societies you know a few people deeply. Friends are picked on the basis of like backgrounds and attitudes. The Kiwi acquaintance is wide, not deep. They are all thrown together and they’ve got to get on together, so their skill is at keeping acquaintance as pleasant as it is shallow. To go deeper might tap well-springs of irreconcilable differences. Talk to the neighbour about the rose bed or the wife and you needn’t worry whether he’s a Maoist revolutionary, an ex-member of the Hungarian Iron Guard or one of the children from the Hutt Valley scandal of 1954, now grown prematurely old and doddery.

In this way the people manage to conceal what little diversity there is. They do so so well that they become positively anxious about diversity, if it ever crops up. A small society is an intimate one. Big Neighbour is always watching you. Keep him happy. Conform. Socially it is not advisable to get out of line or demonstrate any pretension, even were this possible in a society where money buys only a bigger car and a swimming pool, not a different accent, a uniform or an indefinable thing called ‘style’. Pretension is, in any case, difficult where everyone knows you; ‘he may be Director of the Reserve Bank, but I remember him picking his nose on the way to school’. For the same reason it is impossible for them to have any folk heroes. Americans may revere Washington and Britons venerate Churchill. New Zealanders would be too obsessed by the fact that the one fiddled his expenses and the other drank too much to respect their achievement. So the Monarch has to live overseas. Kiwis have tried to establish local substitutes; people in Timaru used to defer to a man they believed to be an illegitimate son of Edward VII; people in Stewart Island to an alleged granddaughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Both places soon restored their allegiance to the House of Windsor. If they in turn ever implemented the threat of more frequent royal visits, the Kiwis would transfer again—to Emperor Hirohito.

In a small country everyone knows if feet of clay exist. If they don’t New Zealanders will invent them. Kiwis have a deep egalitarian drive, summed up in the law ‘Thou shalt not get up thyself’. This is a difficult feat anatomically but one we see going on all the time, and anyone suspected of it faces severe retribution. In Britain the mail of people exposed on television consists of pleas for help, sexual advances and requests to be cured of the King’s Evil. Mine in New Zealand was small and more likely to consist of anonymous vituperation, accusations of communist or fascist leanings (depending on what day of the week it was), and suggestions to return to Britain. Baron Charles Philip Hippolytus de Thierry, self-styled ‘Sovereign Chief of New Zealand’, ended his sovereignty giving piano lessons in Auckland. Rumour has it that one of New Zealand’s baronets used to serve behind a bar, where patrons were invited to ‘Drink Bellamy’s Beer, Served by a Peer’.

Kirk’s Law of Social Gravity states that the higher you go the more they will try to pull you down. If you are in an élite position you must disguise the fact in two ways. The first is to look as vacuous, illiterate and normal as the rest of the populace. A startled British High Commissioner once observed Sir Keith Holyoake ‘declaring with pride that he was no intellectual, he was not well educated, he had left school when he was fourteen and had never been near a university’. The High Commissioner, of course, failed to realise that all this made Sir Keith peculiarly well fitted to be Prime Minister, just as a familiar array of qualifications admirably fits Mr Kirk for the same job. No New Zealand Prime Minister this century (with two exceptions) has been near a university, unless to slip in by the back door to collect an honorary degree under plain cover. Few politicians have verged on the literary. There is no tradition of political alibiography; few even dare to leave letters for a historian to do his job of transferring bones from one graveyard to another. The second disguise is to eschew the prerogatives of office. Ministers’ rooms must be open to every passing lunatic. Even the Prime Minister can’t afford to ignore the Tapanui Women’s Division. Peter Fraser used to show that running the war effort wasn’t making him big-headed by popping out to inspect leaky roofs on state houses. Keith Holyoake was ever ready to find suitcases lost by indignant railway travellers. When I told this story to a French television crew they incredulously tested it by ringing the Prime Minister from their hotel room, film and tapes rolling. Anticlimax. A maid answered. Mr Holyoake was out. Could he ring them back? Our élite must behave in this fashion, not because they want to, but because otherwise they are certain to be accused of ‘Uphimselfism’.

With socialists, equality is a matter of political principle, until they reach power, when it’s a question of amnesia. In New Zealand it is a simple fact of group conformity. It is negative not positive. Its basis is a widespread feeling that if we can’t all have something, no one should. Exceptions are made only for no-remittance cars and leprosy.

This is the country of ‘the right thing’. When interviewers confront citizens in the street with microphones they are so anxious to say it that they all say the same thing. Give them a norm and they’ll conform to it, unless its next name is Kirk. The process implies no belief in the norm, simply a considerate desire to avoid embarrassing others or discomforting themselves. Kiwis are virtuous; surveys of church attendances indicate that about a third go regularly, half once a month or more. They are also better ministered, at one per 500 adherents, than they are doctored. Yet all this is not through any yearning for salvation—they’ve got that already. It’s a necessary indication of respectability. Kiwis are honest and law abiding not because they are moral; their approach to the Ten Commandments is like a student to his exam paper—only four to be attempted. Rather they don’t want to step out of line. ‘Thou shalt not be seen to’ is more important than the actual ‘Thou shalt not’.

Big Neighbour is always watching but his ability to enforce his whim comes from the others’ guilt feelings, not his power. The cold-blooded and insensitive can do anything, simply by wearing a suit, attending the Jaycees and carting a prayer book round on Sunday, provided their orgies, drug parties and Red Book readings are kept behind closed doors.

Big Neighbour has positive sanctions only when two conditions are fulfilled. The act must be known. It must make people feel threatened. Then rumours will circulate, accusations will be launched in Truth, the telephone will make odd noises, ministers will announce in Parliament that you attended a meeting of the USSR Friendship Society eighteen years ago. Friends and acquaintances will sidle up to assure you they ‘don’t believe a word of it’ before dashing off to sudden, urgent appointments. The Great New Zealand Clobbering Machine will have trundled into action.

More normally there is a tolerant intolerance simply because of the intimacy. You can hardly be rude to someone you see every day, however many anonymous letters you might write to the press about him. And if intimacy is intolerant, it is also warm and friendly. This is the friendliest country in the world, a characteristic it is not advisable to question if you value your teeth. Everyone knows the story of General Freyberg driving through the New Zealand lines in the desert with a British general. ‘Not much saluting is there,’ says the highly pipped Pom. ‘Ah yes, but if you wave they’ll wave back.’

To make life even more pleasant New Zealand has one of the highest standards of living in the world: second in the car ownership league, fourth in telephones, third in washing machines, second in beer consumption at twenty-five gallons per fuddled capita, and first in tons of soap and number of showers per person. Many of the cars should be in motor museums, the phones don’t have subscriber trunk dialling, the washing machines are prediluvian tubs, the beer is tasteless, and the soap is carbolic. It hardly matters. Wellbeing is more evenly shared here than anywhere else.

This has been achieved with unpromising raw materials. New Zealanders don’t work like Germans, organise like Japanese, or compete like Americans. All they have is a practical flair. The country is too far from anywhere to be natural suppliers and too small to provide a worthwhile market for anyone else. It is too tiny to forge its own destinies and is subject to fluctuations beyond its control with massive internal political repercussions. But for this vulnerability the Continuous Ministry would still be in power (if this isn’t in fact the case). The land has few minerals, just a certain amount of natural beauty waiting to be built on or flooded, and an ability to grow grass. The standard of living depends on the animals unimaginative enough to eat grass and on the world’s willingness to eat them, though if the scientists have anything to do with it, they’ll eat the wool, too, eventually. These are the only valuable exports, although in the past few years the nation has begun to develop a new line which can be expanded in emergency—the export of the limited range of fine quality, locally produced people. Well made New Zealand. And how pleasant the manufacturing process.

Casual observers, after that two-day stay which qualifies them as experts, often assume that the scale of New Zealand’s achievement in the face of the inherent difficulties is the result of a deliberate pursuit of socialism. They call New Zealand the Land of the Long Pink Cloud, or Shroud depending on viewpoint. In fact it’s all been done by accident. People settled there not to build a perfect society, but just to improve their lot. Since they came mainly from working and lower middleclass backgrounds their concept of what they wanted to achieve was the life-style of the groups immediately above them in Britain, the middle class. The goals were modest. (They have continued to think small.) And the methods were practical and workmanlike. There was no ideological plan—they just tinkered as they went along, reducing this little universe to order by organising and regulating it. Then they set out to cut it off from the rest of the world as far as possible. Both methods helped shape the national character.

One of the greatest Kiwi skills is organising bureaucracies. Give them a problem and they’ll set up a committee, or an organisation. They provide welfare through voluntary organisations, with mums forming play-group committees, parents forming PTAs, Bads organising Rotaryisseries or Lion Packs (each desperately occupied in the despairing task of finding any poor and underprivileged to be charitable to). This is the welfare society. Above it hovers the greatest voluntary organisation of all, the State, which is seen as the community in action, rather than the remote abstraction it is elsewhere. The community wants a high and uniform standard of living. The State will provide it with two clever tricks. Full employment eliminates both poverty and the fear of being out of work and endows the people with their casual independence. Family allowances, state housing and welfare benefits also help to provide a level below which it is difficult to fall, a much simpler approach to welfare than President Nixon’s policy of making it illegal to be poor, or the proposal by other American right-wingers to use nuclear weapons in the war on poverty.

Bureaucracy and regulation aren’t enough. The New Zealander also has to live. If economic forces were free to operate, New Zealand would be three farms manned by a skeleton staff. The rest of the people would have to evacuate and leave the country to its rightful owners, Federated Farmers, with just enough others to service their Jaguars. Since there are three million New Zealanders, not just the 100,000 which economic logic would dictate, they have taken the protective measure of building a fence of tariffs and licences round the economy so that a pampered industry can develop.

This careful insulation has annoying consequences. Rabid sectional jealousies develop. Farmers exhibit acute pastoral paranoia when they see the rest of the populace lounging round demanding high wages at the expense of the only productive section (the sheep and the cows). Similarly, employers are bitter at workers who don’t put in longer hours churning out items the market is too small to take. And farmers, employers, workers all combine into a chorus of grumbling about the welfare state, regulations, controls, restrictions and the result of the 3.30.

So vociferous is the chorus you might assume the country is on the brink of civil war or armed uprising. Indeed, large numbers of French arms salesmen went out there after the Biafra war, thinking to find their next potential customer. Also grumbling is a major political sport. Prizes are allocated for it; small ones like a post office or a new school for the short burst, big ones like protection or subsidies for a really sustained effort. The current grumbling league table puts doctors first in both volume and prizes, farmers second. University staffs are now moving up fast, having quickly mastered the art. Geographically it is only fair that Auckland should grow fastest. Its inhabitants have the loudest mouths for grumbling.

The second consequence is that private enterprise is more private than enterprising. It is inefficient. It carries on production in 9,000 small factories where a few big ones producing economically might be more sensible. Industry is expensive; television sets cost twice as much as Japanese imports, though bigger screens may be needed for larger people.

Yet the role of business isn’t to produce cheaply, or efficiently, but to wangle concessions from the government. The most enterprising entrepreneur is he who gets the most support: grants, import licences, or protection. These are the key to profit, not production. Nevertheless the country does export some manufactured goods; in 1969 it even sent $17 worth of musical instruments to Cambodia.

Most of the manufactured exports are potential not real. Entrepreneur and ex-car salesman Ken Slabb wants to exploit the local market for left-handed corkscrews. The market is limited and small-scale production and an inordinate rate of profit will make his product eighty-four times more expensive than imports. The solution is to claim that his main aim is to export millions of left-handed corkscrews every year. With supporting evidence from Ken’s great-uncle and an ex-girlfriend in Australia, poetic submissions are then heard by the Tariff, Development and Upholstery Council, where, despite opposition from the Glove, Mitten and Boottee Trade Association, the council agrees to exclude all left-handed corkscrews to give him a chance to establish himself. Within ten years the price of left-handed corkscrews has gone up 184 times, though sales have trebled because most of those used break on impact with a cork. Ken Slabb has made a fortune and retired to an island in the Bay of Islands, selling out to a British firm of corkscrew manufacturers who used to supply the market before he intervened. The exports have failed to materialise because of unfair trade practices on the part of the Australians and the unexpectedly heavy wage demands of the New Zealand worker. The alternative ending to this story is that prices increase only 180 times and the manufacturer goes bankrupt.

This may horrify you. Visiting IMF teams have been so numbed by it that they have been unable to say anything for months but the name ‘Bill Sutch’ repeated interminably. In fact, of course, New Zealand can live comfortably only by standing orthodox economics on its head. To understand the economic system you have to abandon what you’ve been brought up to regard as sense. Agricultural exports provide enough for all to live on. Kiwis could spend their time blowing bubbles or reading back numbers of Playboy were it not for some deep-seated puritan instinct which conditions them to want to work. So jobs have to be provided. Industry exists not to make things but to make work. The most efficient industry is the one which uses its labour most inefficiently; wharfies make their greatest contribution when seagulling; smokos do more for the economy than shift working. All the jokes about wharfies, like the one who complained to his foreman that a tortoise had been following him round all day, or the aerial photo of Wellington wharves which was ruined because a wharfie moved—all these miss the point. Work is like muck, no good unless its well spread.

Being practical men, New Zealanders are concerned not with hypothetical questions such as would Adam Smith, or even Robert McNamara, approve of our economy, but does it work? It does. The people have jobs, a good standard of living, a car and a lovely home each. Who could ask for more. They are not even concerned with the problem of whether the system could work better. Good enough is better than hypothetical perfection. Anyway the system works so well and has made the inhabitants so contented that they are the world’s most stable, and probably most conservative society.

Seriously, New Zealand is the best place in the world to live. It is called God’s Own Country. Modern theologians may argue whether God is dead. The rest of the world must pose him a lot of problems. Yet if the strain does get too much then he’ll not die. He’ll retire here.

*. See Fishopanhauser and Smith, ‘Conflict Theory and Beer Prices in a Southland Town’. A Ph.D. thesis assessing the relevance of Action Theory to empirical political analysis, including an attempt to establish a basis for determining the relationship between individual behaviour and system attributes. Based on in-depth interviews with 250 drunks.

**. See H. Sheisenhauser and Les Cumberland, ‘Status Attribution, Self Assigned Social Grouping, Inverse Social Mobility with Cognitive Dissidence and the Incidence of Plaster Ducks on Walls’. An exploratory survey based on 2.8 million random interviews with a stratified sample of New Zealanders. Condensed five-volume summary of results shortly available.

THIRD LETTER

STUPENDOUS, FANTASTIC, BEAUTIFUL NEW ZEALAND

(In Black and White)

DON’T THINK of New Zealand as a nation. It is an accidental collection of places whose inhabitants happen to live in much the same fashion and talk the same language; not so much a nation as more a way of life. How tenuous the connections are I realised on decimalisation day. A woman in a Christchurch shop announced that she wasn’t going to bother with this decimalisation rubbish. They were moving to Invercargill next week. Dunedinites think of Auckland as another country. Aucklanders advise South-bound trippers to take enough overcoats and hot-water bottles for the South Pole. Interisland ferry sailings generate as much emotion as a world cruise. It’s as though an umbilical was being severed. At both ends.

New Zealand is a collection of communities, not the metropolitan country you know. In France, Paris sets the tone and controls a centralised machinery of administration. In Japan, Tokyo dominates business and houses a substantial part of the population. In Britain, London dominates; television and newspapers originate there, the social whirl centres there and career ladders end there. New Zealand is different. There is not one main centre but four, and even together they contain only about a third of the population. They are also far apart and very jealous of each other. Even if they could develop collective pretensions they are all jealously watched by a league of little sisters. Oamaru and Invercargill won’t stand for much from Dunedin except bad television programmes; Palmerston North keeps a close eye on Wellington. In any case the eighteen biggest urban areas contain just over half the population. All the other places have claims of their own, too.

In Britain everywhere outside London carries the stigma of being provincial. New Zealanders work on the assumption that all places are equal, though the growth of Auckland may have opened up the possibility that some are more equal than others. Life has a local focus. Different places view different television programmes, look at different newspapers and listen to different radio programmes. To be a Timaruvian means as much as to be a New Zealander. The only reason that travellers identify themselves overseas as New Zealanders is because no one seems to have heard of Waipukurau or Totaranui. Of course they draw together as a nation for the occasional catharsis—an All Black victory, a royal tour. Then they fall back into competing localities. This competition is all the more vigorous because it is one of the few notes of diversity in a uniform community.

Farmers live in the same kind of boxes as the rest; the boxes just happen to be in the middle of fields. Social habits are the same everywhere, though some have a longer drive to the pub. Nearly everybody looks out on the same jungle of tottering telegraph poles and tangled wires; there could be sewerage pipes to look at, too, if governments had been able to devise a safe method of stringing them among all the other dangling paraphernalia. New Zealanders are all campers on a lovely landscape and the main element of difference in their lives is the accident of which camp site they happen to have picked. Wherever it is, you must remember one basic rule: the place where you are now is the best in New Zealand, its people the friendliest, its streets the cleanest, its flower beds the prettiest. Everyone else is out to do it down. You must defend it to the last mixed metaphor against all criticism, however justified.

This state of affairs exists because every place is competing against every other. Parliament may go through routine motions of party debate but it only comes alive when it gets down to the real issues—the quality of the pies in the railway refreshment room at Clinton … whether Gisborne has got its fair share of Golden Kiwi grants as well as its more than fair share of everything else … would a chain and a twelve-pound ball encourage the doctor to stay in Hokianga … should the Christchurch City Council be allowed to plant concrete in Hagley Park. MPs aren’t a national élite, they are local delegates, there to voice local demands.

Cabinets are similar. Indeed the requirements of geographical spread is the only conceivable explanation of the presence of some ministers, particularly ones from Dunedin. Cabinet decides the really important priorities. If Wanganui gets the eighteenth veterinary school, will the fourth college of chiropractors satisfy Hastings? If Auckland is to have a container port as well as an international airport, what can be done to conciliate Reefton’s claim, short of rebuilding it on the coast? Perhaps a notional container port? For years governments have been praying for the ultimate dreams of localism, the garden shed university, the vertical take-off plane which can land anywhere and give everywhere an airport. Shortsightedly they have failed to realise that both would merely unleash even more bitter arguments by fragmenting parochialism into long wrangles over whose shed is to be used, whether the airport should go into the front garden or the back, who is to have the lemonade concession.

The parochial fight spills over everywhere. Imagine the fate of television directors exposed to constant demands to do a programme on Backblocksville, and then, if they do so, to constant threats ranging from pre-frontal lobotomy to castration because they didn’t show the floral clock in the gardens. People connected with the old TV ‘Compass’ programme are still doing thirty-mile detours round Alexandra because a 1965 programme omitted to mention that it was the most beautiful town in New Zealand. Still, perhaps that’s easier than the thirty-mile detour round everywhere else which would have been necessary if they had.

Imagine, too, the torments of royal tour itinerary planners, and the scandal which would have been produced if the private comment of one Governor-General that Oamaru and Timaru were like Tweedledum and Tweedledee had got out. Local government reform is impossible in a country where every place with more than a hundred people has to be a city, everywhere with more than five a borough, leaving to all the others the incentive to reproduce quickly. Local government is a system of dignity not function, conferring status on places and an elective honours list on the locally prominent. At 10,000 councillors and board members there are more per capita magna than anywhere else. In the smaller centres talk to everyone you meet as if he were the mayor. If you’re wrong he’ll certainly be on the council, unless you talk to yourself. The whole mistake of local government reformers has been to swim against the tide by trying to create bigger units and make mayoral chains lighter on the rates. A policy of ‘Every man his own mayor’ would be better.

Conversation has to make due deference to locality. Much of it is the routine exchange of stereotypes, decking out the petty struggle between localities in the trappings of romance. Everyone in Dunedin wears a kilt. Everyone in Nelson has one eye. So here’s a basic introduction which might help you to a better understanding, even if it does place me under the unfortunate obligation of mentioning every hamlet. The ultimate New Zealand book, and the best loved, is the Electoral Roll. The plot may be dull but everyone gets a mention.

Precedence among New Zealand cities goes to Auckland, believed by many, over a half a million in fact, to be the Queen City. Yet Auckland also has a large heterosexual population, even if there are some who believe that a pretty girl is like a malady. The city began as the sweepings of Sydney. Even now it has many of the characteristics of an Australia for beginners.

Auckland falls between two stools—too big for the rest of New Zealand, too small to provide a genuinely big city existence. It is essentially a main street surrounded by thirty square miles of rectangular boxes, covering as great an area as London to far less purpose. Yet size is still the key to Auckland. It confers pretensions: the morning paper modestly takes the name of the whole country, wealth seems easier to come by and is certainly more flamboyant. This is a city of self-made men who worship their creator. Its Joneses are more difficult to keep up with. One can only be thankful that Auckland isn’t actually the capital. With this further dignity its inhabitants would be insufferable. Even now the snowball processes of growth make Auckland almost unbearable, as well as threatening to shatter the precarious federal balance that is New Zealand.

Size also means that Auckland is a self-sufficient universe, labouring under the delusion that the rest of New Zealand doesn’t exist and hence immersed in its own struggles and conflicts. Its academic squabbles are more bitter: anyone from the university can be kept going for hours just by mentioning his colleagues; a putting, in of pennies which produces a constant stream of denunciation. The city’s local government disputes are more intense. Its MPs hate each other too much to work together. Even the weather is undependable and extreme. One TV meteorologist had to move south because the weather didn’t agree with him.

Auckland is a collection of suburbs masquerading as a city. Wellington is a city centre without suburbs. They are all thoughtfully hidden away round in Rongotai, over the hills in Kelburn, or in the isolation ward of the Hutt Valley and its satellites such as Wainuiomata (or Nappy Valley as the locals have it). The suburbs are all several traffic jams away from the ultimate traffic jam in the centre. Wellington was designed as a capital city, but unfortunately its site wasn’t. The curving streets seem to mark the place the tide washed the surveyors’ pegs to. Even the Hutt Valley motorway can’t obviate the fact that if God had intended Wellington for traffic he would have put it in Petone. So the motorway simply speeds traffic more quickly to the central jam.

If the steep hills clustering round the harbour make Wellington a little inconvenient for all but Sherpas, they also make it beautiful. Man’s attempts to ruin the scene by building in the monolithic style of the Maginot Line have hardly spoiled a view which must make it the world’s most pleasant capital city. As a capital it has the institutions of government, administration and diplomacy all concentrated in the central area. Auckland has the pretension and the glory, Wellington the power. It lacks the colour, for Wellington is a public servants’ town, a place to which the able and ambitious in the service must ultimately go. This makes for guarded conversation after the Rabelaisian overtones of Auckland, drab dress, but a more vigorous cultural life and schools whose children have the highest average I.Q. outside Midwitch. The tone is lowered only by the unfortunate fact that for half of the year Parliament meets, M.Ps pour in every Tuesday, and with them the attendant circus of delegations, representations and the ritual passing of begging bowls.

Still Wellington should be a truly beautiful city, if they ever finish building it. There is always the danger of earthquake but probably this is a slightly less appalling threat than that posed by the Ministry of Works. In any case Wellington could quickly and easily be given complete protection against nuclear attack from the air. All they have to do is paint a huge arrow on the roof of the Vogel Building with the simple legend, ‘To Auckland’.

Further south, Christchurch, City of the Plain, though more perceptively described as the swamp city. Christchurch likes to think of itself as an English city. This is partly because of the gardens and the presence of the Avon meandering through in its half-hearted search for the sea. It is also because of institutions such as the Cathedral, the private schools, the Press and the Medbury Hamburger Bar. In fact its town plan of straight lines leading nowhere and its flat, drab appearance both combine to make it more like a wild west town built in stone. John Wayne would almost certainly have hired it as a set for his westerns had the municipality been able to devise some way of joining the parking meters together to form hitching rails.

Christchurch is really English only in its social segregation. The ability to sprawl in any direction has allowed segregation by suburb in a way that the hilly sites and the jostling mixtures of Wellington and Dunedin have not permitted. Professionals work in Hereford Street making fortunes and they live in Cashmere or Fendalton (where the camel hair coat went to die). The remaining suburbs are nicely graded. Any estate agent will guide you to the appropriate one once you’ve told how much you can afford to pay over what you can afford to pay. If he suggests Sydenham or New Brighton you should start thinking of a new job. The latter has a run-down atmosphere and gawping icecream-eating crowds doing their Saturday shopping. It also houses more cranks to the acre than any other part of the country.

With this social segregation, its insularity and introspection and the general stodginess of the little interlocking group who rule the city, Christchurch must be the least pleasant of the main centres. Yet I’m tolerant enough to believe that other people may think differently. Perhaps the real symbol of Christchurch is the railway station, pretentious and monolithic, yet with only about half a dozen trains a day that go anywhere beyond Christchurch suburbs, and only the Southerner that really goes at all. This train provides the best view of Christchurch.

Dunedin, the semi-sunkissed city, is symbolised by its long uncompleted Anglican cathedral: impressive in conception, solid in execution yet incomplete and left standing half finished for decades. The little town that Santa Claus forgot sits near the bottom of the South Island and of every growth table. Outwardly pretending that the wolf at the door is a lucky black cat it is really characterised by a militant inferiority complex. Or rather its official organs and leaders are. The mass of the population don’t care, finding it a pleasant place to live and so much less expensive than real life.

None of the conventional images of Dunedin are true. It is a university town only in the sense that the university bulks large in a city where it is the only expanding industry. The real relationship is symbolised by the moat round the Scottish Baronial Gothic. Scottishness means only that the import-restricted haggis puts in an occasional appearance and an occasional poet produces third-degree Burns. It is Presbyterian only in that the reverberating echoes of a small centre enforce conformity. Even so it manages an enviable reputation for provision of whatever favours sailors favour. It still gets more than its fair share of Truth reports, even since the demise of the Quarter Latin, Maclaggan Street. Psychologically and weatherwise Dunedin is a city of myths. Still it has more memories and fatter history books than anywhere else. These are some comfort to a city living in reduced circumstances with the feeling that life is passing it by.

By Seath’s Law, parochialism varies in inverse ratio to size. Auckland and Christchurch are big enough to be confident and know they’ll grow, whatever governments decide or pressure groups urge. Dunedin has to be more clamorous in the hope that hysteria will rectify the obstacles an inconsiderate nature has placed in the path of development.

The jostling second division of thirteen smaller centres ranging from Hamilton and Palmerston North down to Gisborne and Whangarei need to be more vocal still. Lacking main centre status they clamour for the outward and visible signs of city stature—a university, a new airport, a Government Life building, a railway, a piecart. Insecurity is heightened by the unconscious realisation that no matter how they grow they’re all irredeemably towns not cities. Links with hinterlands are stronger, urban identity weaker, life rawer and culture more consciously created. The intellectual élite of teachers, administrators and professional men are all consciously in exile, anxiously tilling the cultural desert around them. After-dinner speakers are hard to attract because it is customary to say something nice about the town they are speaking in. University staff are easier because they get mileage. In my days as an itinerant academic jukebox, visits to Invercargill, Nelson or Palmerston North gave me an insight into how St Augustine must have felt, so assiduously did the intellectuals present hang on to my words. Initially I put it down to the brilliance of the lecture. Later I realised that there wasn’t much else for the four of them to do.

Secondary centres are in the unhappy position of not being big enough to have the compensations of real cities, yet not being small enough to have the quiet contentment of the real focus of New Zealand life: the small towns. Through these runs the great dividing line between the urban and the rural. The smaller the place the greater the importance of rural values, the more local services depend on the farmer, and the more his income determines the cash flow into the community. The more, too, that rural values and attitudes predominate.

There are regional differences. There is the slowly awakening Northland; the declining glories of the West Coast where men are larger than life and twice as tipsy and the New Zealand myths crawl away to die. At the other extreme are the gentry pretensions of Hawke’s Bay and North Canterbury. Cow areas differ from sheep, not as Oliver Duff thought because sheep make gentlemen and cows unmake them, but because sheep make money, $1,000 per farmer more than cows. Cows not only provide lower average churnings, they also demand more attention from the ‘moaners on the mudflats’. The sheep farmer has more leisure, a different life style. Fruit and tobacco areas are different again: heavy demands for seasonal labour make Nelson and Hawke’s Bay agricultural factories at certain times of the year. Small holdings and subdivision make parts of the Maori east coast more of a rural slum.

Whatever the regional differences, the pattern of life is similar in all the small centres: intimate communities in which everyone knows everyone else and their business even better. They are warm and friendly, tolerant of human frailty (like the odd wife with a black eye, the occasional pregnant daughter), though prepared to talk about it endlessly afterwards. They are family communities, middle-aged in values and attitudes. The young move on for jobs and education. The outsider assumes there is nothing to do in these one-horse towns—in fact there is everything. Voluntary activity runs all, from church groups to those high points of the year, the races and the A. and P. shows. The farmers till the land, their wives cultivate the wilderness of leisure.

These small towns are the real New Zealand, nurturing the values of warmth and friendliness and an endless interest in personal trivia. They set the tone for the whole nation. The attitudes, perspectives, institutions are those of the small town writ large. Parliament is the small town forum, the national equivalent of pub exchanges. The friendly neighbourhood security service under Brigadier Keystone also plays an allotted role, although it couldn’t find a communist plot if it were stood on Lenin’s grave. Its number is in the phone book so that you can always ring up and turn in your friends for fun and profit. Like the village Nosy Parker its job is to gather information. It is an institutional Big Neighbour.

Even the New Zealander’s reaction to the nuisance of dissent is the same as the small town threatened with something out of the ordinary. The New Zealand Clobbering Machine is the national equivalent of small town community pressures. The things people are least happy about, political parties, class conflict, organised protest and dissent—these are just the things which don’t exist in the small town so the folk can neither understand nor accept them.

So think of New Zealand as a small town with the trimmings of a nation state. Seriously though, you must admit that this small town tone makes for a friendly personal atmosphere as distinct from the impersonal anonymity you’ve left behind. And if you don’t like it, keep quiet. You might be run out of town—on Air New Zealand.