The Pavlova Omnibus

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’.