opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

As I gaze across the grey waters of Lake Wakatipu, and the soggy car park in between, I think I wouldn’t mind right now being in the 43°C weather of Melbourne. I’m wrong: I’d be cursing my lack of effective air conditioning; but I’m bummed out anyway at Nature’s air conditioning here, of three days straight of rain.

Ten days ago I’d finished off Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand. The book has saved me from interacting with any locals to learn more about this place: I can do armchair tourism, with an in situ armchair. That may be dysfunctional—as dysfunctional as being bored in Queenstown, Adrenaline Capital Of The World. But then, if I was functional, I wouldn’t be blogging while on holidays in the first place.

So what did I learn from my reading?

New Zealand in King’s account has had contradictions in its history, contradictions that I don’t know what to make of. It was a colony better to its indigenous people than the others; but that still made for paternalism and dismissal. It disengaged from the ANZUS alliance after the Rainbow Warrior bombing; but before that its troops had been the foremost in the British Empire’s wars. It was a laboratory of progressivism, introducing universal male suffrage, women’s suffrage, and the machinery of the welfare state when they were still a gleam in the eye of European social-democrats. But it was also a drab monoculture, which punished people for being different. Gays were closeted and prosecuted decades longer than elsewhere; the meagre Chinese population was still large enough to provoke White New Zealand activism; and Wellington was not a safe place to speak Norwegian.

Seriously, Norwegian. King tells the tale of a New Zealand poet as a child in the ’20s, hanging on the straps with his father in a Wellington tram, and chatting in their native Norwegian. A stalwart of New Zealand monoculture goes up to the father, and punches him to the floor, yelling “Speak English, damn you!”

Norwegian, of all things. But then, Australia was hardly better in the ’20s.

New Zealand is not that place any more. The controversy that greeted the new, slit-the-throat haka of the All Blacks was greeted by a local sports columnist’s chortle: anything that got the Poms that riled up had to be a good thing. The Kiwis have found their anti-Pom moxie, they can pronounce statements that are positively Australianesque in their contempt of the mother country.

But it took Australia a long time to move away from the mother country, and it took New Zealand even longer. Australia at least had the leaven of convicts and the Irish, and some strands of republicanism articulated in the 1890s. It was a long national sleep after that, and through to Menzies’ last cry of loyalism; but there were still spots of autonomy: the hatred engendered by the Bodyline tests in cricket; the national myth of egalitarianism and comradeship (things that were never British virtues); the realisation during World War II that Britain was not going to defend the Pacific, and Australian troops had more pressing terrain to defend than North Africa.

Not so in New Zealand. Its laboratory of progressivism bought in to egalitarianism, and the attempt to reproduce English class structure in Canterbury did not prosper. And unlike Australia, sectarianism did not take hold here, even if the Anglican church had primacy (so much so, the Maori for Anglican is Mihinare: Missionary). New Zealand elected Catholics to be Premiers far earlier than elsewhere.

But notwithstanding, the New Zealand experiment was articulated as an aspiration towards Better Britons. And in King’s account, I didn’t see any competing aspiration to be other-than-Britons, nor a defining date for putting together a new polity, like Australia had. The Australian Commonwealth can hoist its flag to 1901, when Federation was enacted—though in truth, Australia was not much less British afterwards than before. But in New Zealand, premiers changed into prime ministers imperceptibly in 1902: there was no landmark date as in Canada and Australia, to declare this was now a new country.

The negotiations leading up to 1901 did make their own declaration, however: New Zealand ultimately declined to join the Australian federation. Whatever New Zealand was to be, it would not be run out of Melbourne.

The United Kingdom gave New Zealand the legal grounds to be its own country with the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which granted its dominions (its white colonies) autonomy in foreign and domestic affairs, and made their parliaments the equal of London’s. Australians don’t commemorate 1931, and the last tie to British jurisprudence was severed only in 1986. Australia accepted the Statute, but only in 1942, when it was turning to the US for its defence. New Zealand refused to ratify the Statute until 1947. (Newfoundland became Canadian rather than be independent, in 1949.) And while the Japanese were bombing Darwin, and sending submarines to Sydney, New Zealand kept its troops in the European theatre.

From my vantage point, in a post–British Empire world, I cannot comprehend that. At all. The closest I can come is to picture New Zealand as a bright and diligent student, more prudent and more with it than its elder, loutish brother—but refusing to move out of home, even after Mum had already arranged alternate accommodation.

What figure of mid-century advertising kitsch does Australian nostalgia define itself as? Chesty Bond, the ludicrously Aryan 1930s undergarment model?

Maybe not, but it was an archetype with a certain traction. Kiwiana kitsch is never far away from the Four Square Supermarket cartoon. Perky, short, and very very 1950s.

He gets reinvented in bookstore iconography as a Maori, as a bungee jumper, as a guitarist, as any of the current manifestations of New Zealand identity. He’s beloved by the iconographers of this country, despite looking nothing like Chesty Bond. In fact, he looks kinda dorky. Kinda like that bright and diligent student not moving out of home.

It speaks very well of a people when they choose Mr Four Square, instead of Chesty Bond, as the vehicle for their identities: dorks are far more interesting than larrikins. It speaks even better for that people, when they actively reinvent their vehicle, to convey how their identities have diversified. It says their identities have diversified, and that they recognise it, and that they still have an anchor or virtuous dorkiness. Chesty Bond is not so malleable.

New Zealand is not the ’50s Four Square Supermarket kind of country any more, of course, and its mascot has moved out of home: he’s not such a dork, any more. New Zealand’s nostalgia for Kiwiana still has a much more British tinge than the equivalent Australian assertions of identity, and they’re nowhere near as strident or mythologised as Australia’s nationalism has become. But New Zealand is its own country: it doesn’t feel like England, and it doesn’t feel like Australia.

I still haven’t worked out what makes it different, much more than when I was sniffing the air in Cuba St two weeks ago. I think part of the difficulty is that ultimately it’s nowhere near as different from home as the UK or the US is. (Part of it too of course is my general obtuseness, and failing to actually talk to enough people.) The most I’ve worked out it, it’s gentler and more subdued, it’s quirkier and more ironic, it’s more at home in the Pacific, and it’s allowed the People of the Land a greater role in forming its identity.

And as Younger Sibling countries everywhere, it defines itself against the Big Lug Next Door. I’ve been staying in tourist traps in tourist season, and introducing myself as being from Across The Ditch apologetically, the few times I have interacted with the locals. So I haven’t given myself the chance to sample those definitions first-hand. I may have a few more resources now, though, to try those definitions out with the New Zealanders I know back home.

I was struck with awe—in fact, terror—when I pulled up at 6 PM to Queenstown, tourist haven of the South Island, to be greeted by a young man impersonating a moose in front of a moving bus.

It wasn’t Janet Frame’s awe at the big smoke’s granite and bustle. It’s an altogether more dysfunctional awe, at a town full of people younger than me, noisier than me, and drunker than me.

And that other business that twenty-year olds tend to get up to on holiday more than me; but this pretends to be a family-oriented blog. It doesn’t particularly succeed at it, but I might spare you the psychosexual drama for this post anyway.

The rains took care of the élan vital of the twenty-year olds, I daresay. The party crowds were in merry mood out and about last night; but Queenstown woke up soggy enough this morning for people to keep their party indoors.

Queenstown is impossibly beautiful, even more postcard-bespoke than Akaroa: a comity of mountains and lake and trees right out of a Swiss chalet. There was gold here in the 19th century; but the area now lives on the tourist’s dime alone, as the local taxi drivers assure me.

And the tourists still come, both the lowly and the high. That makes it a less Slow News Day here than you’d expect for a place this size. The current headline in the local paper: Muammar Gaddafi’s son was in town New Year’s Eve, and wanted to party.

The beat reporters were hot on the story, and somehow I suspect this isn’t the biggest story they’ve had to track. They talked to the hoteliers who had to bump another booking for Gaddafi fils and his people. They talked to two of the dozen blondes sourced locally by Gaddafi fils‘ men to join in their festivities. (“No fat ones”, the order specified.) The blondes reported that the visitors were gentlemen, their identities unknown, and they left the vistors after a couple of hours to rejoin their friends, who had not been invited to the party.

I’m not speculating about their friends’ weight or hair colour.

The beat reporters got paparazzo shots of the man himself, watching performers doing a haka for him on the tarmac of Queenstown airport. A last minute whim, apparently: Gaddafi fils couldn’t leave town without partaking of the local culture. Though not partaking *too* closely: as the bemused Kiwi Haka troupe told the beat reporter, they issued the traditional Pōwhiri challenge to the visitors, but did not drop the fern for the visiting headman to pick up, and prove his good intentions. The headman’s security detail wasn’t letting anyone get that close.

All very odd. That wasn’t the deal when Abel Tasman failed to acknowledge the local tribe’s challenge. And there’s the whiff of something unsavoury about Maori ritual performed on demand for visiting headmen.

But New Zealand has a long tradition of that, whether the visiting headmen are from Libya or England, or tourists from Across The Ditch. No, of course it’s not the same—the Treaty of Waitangi does mean something, after all. But it’s convenient romanticism to say the troupes should stay virtuous and poor. The same happens Across The Ditch, when every culturally sensitive conference feels entitled to demand an Aboriginal Welcome To Country—and then are surprised the elders demand remuneration.

But of course they should: it’s not like the elders had invited the conference as their guests in the first place (or the 18 million other non-indigenous inhabitants). If the visitors are willing to buy what they’re offering, who’s to begrudge them asking a fair price?

I don’t have a wide standard of comparison for Maori cultural performers: I’ve only watched half an hour’s worth on Maori TV, and the last three hotels I’ve been in don’t carry Maori TV. But I went and saw Kiwi Haka perform tonight, and I was very impressed. The women’s singing was excellent. (The men’s doesn’t have to be, because the men do more chanting and punctuating shouts.) The weapons display was instructive: if the Maori haven’t already branched out into martial arts, they should.

The banter was well worked through as well. I was startled at the matter-of-fact acknowledgement of after-battle cannibalism:

“This blow separated the crown of the skull, allowing the warrior to feast on the brains. Mmm! … But today, like everyone else, Maori prefer McDonalds and KFC.”

In a roundabout way, though, it speaks to the resurgence of Maori identity. The mihinare, the missionaries, successfully made the Maori abandon that kind of warfare, and (less successfully) sought to make them abandon the rituals and weapons to go with it. Noone would joke about cannibalism fifty years ago. The Maori now don’t do what they did; but neither are they ashamed of their forebears that did. And if it unsettles the tourist, so much the better.

But it was the Pōwhiri, the welcoming ritual, that transfixes. It was explained to us, but it still was alien and confounding: all in te Reo, threatening and solemn and aloof, the peace token of a fern thrown down and jabbed at for the visitor to pick up. The karanga, the call and response of women, from the two sides, only went on for a few seconds; but it too sounded like it was from another realm. Vaguely like Bulgarian polyphony.

All of it is drastically abbreviated of course: no spears were thrown past the visitors, and we did not chase the spearmen or kneel on one knee grasping our muskets, as happened of old. The singers of the karanga were not past childrearing age, as used to happen back then—because an encounter between tribes could still go awry, and old women were deemed more expendable. We didn’t exchange oratory or touch noses or feast together, as actually happens to this day in the marae. It wasn’t a “real” pōwhiri—of course, we’d hardly earned one.

And it’s not authentic, in a narrow sense; but as I keep learning, that’s not the kind of authenticity that matters. I’m not sure I got it right, but I gather the poi was traditionally the men’s domain, and has become a women’s dance for this kind of cultural exhibition. But if all Maoris growing up see women doing the poi, then that’s what’s real.

Just as they’ve all been told Aotearoa is the Maori name of New Zealand, and not originally a less common name for just the North Island: it’s the name of the whole country now, and that’s the new authenticity. The old authenticity was that the very notion of the North and the South Island being the same country was a Pakeha notion, and got a Pakeha name, Niu Tireni. But that’s an historical footnote, overtaken by new circumstances, and new constructions of nationhood.

Kiwi Haka did also perform a haka—they hardly couldn’t. Though not *that* haka (Ka mate, the one you all know from rugby); that haka is not welcome on the South Island, because of the devastations its composer Te Rauparaha brought to the South Island in the Musket Wars. The haka has even more layers of authenticity wrapped around it, being the most emblematic feature of Maori culture, and appropriated by the Pakeha in ways of their own.

The role of women in the haka is under contention, for example, and the historical evidence for or against is being conscripted to the debate. Tradition (in at least one construal) limited women in the haka to pūkana, dilating the eyes: glowering. But if the haka is a living tradition and not a museum piece, then it will reflect how Maori women fit into their culture now. And from what pūkana I’ve already seen, I don’t see Maori women taking a back seat anyway.

The souvenir shop had a book that went into several of these debates on authenticities of the haka, with good humour and encyclopaedic coverage. (Wira Gardiner. 2007. Haka: A Living Tradition. 2nd ed. Auckland: Hodder Moa.) Not everyone is as sanguine about reinventions of the haka: the All Blacks are notoriously touchy about their opponents not standing at reverent attention while the team gestures they’ll slit their throats.

There’s a haka Gardiner missed in his survey, which Wikipedia mentions, and I’d love to see the return of: a 1903 challenge to my countrymen, from Across The Ditch.

Tena koe, Kangaroo	How do you do, Kangaroo!
Tupoto koe, Kangaroo!	You look out, Kangaroo!
Niu Tireni tenei haere nei	New Zealand is invading you
Au Au Aue a!	Woe woe woe to you!

As you’ll notice, in 1903, it wasn’t yet Aotearoa. But Australia has indeed been successfully invaded by New Zealanders. Including enough Maori to establish the Nga Kapa Taumata Teitei, with a competition to judge performances nationally.

They should give serious thought to that 1903 haka, I reckon.

The rains caught me at Dunedin, and I didn’t walk around much. Even if the rains hadn’t caught me, I wouldn’t have walked around much. Dunedin is the one New Zealand city that the Lonely Planet does not include a walking tour for, and there’s good reason for that. Dunedin is absurdly hilly. I had pleaded hilliness hardship for Auckland; but Dunedin is hilly enough to claim a place in the Guinness Book of Records for Baldwin St, a residential street with a 1:1.286 incline. That’s 52°. What’s fearsome is, Baldwin St is only first among peers: there are plenty of other residential streets next to it, with only slightly less incline. And from a safe distance at the bottom of the hill, they look like nothing so much as concrete ski slopes, with cars precariously parked on them.

I succumbed to going on a bus tour of the city: I scarcely had the option not to. The droll tour guide noted that the urban poor used to live on the bottom of the hill, and the rich on the hill inclines, with the commanding views of the city. As the bus wheezed its way up a 30° incline, I could not fathom why people would pay extra money to slide off the floor of their houses. Horses would have found those ascents even more challenging than motor vehicles did.

Cable cars didn’t; but like just about everywhere else in the world, Dunedin scrapped its cable car system long ago. God speed the enthusiasts trying to bring it back: it would get use.

Inside a bus was a good place to be in Dunedin, both when the InterCity bus rocked up from Oamaru via Palmerston, and in the Town Belt of parkland around the city; because both times we got hit with hail. That’s right, hail. In early January. In the *Southern* hemisphere. I have told my astonishment in Wellington at realising 42 Below vodka meant 42°S. (That’s actually Marlborough’s latitude; Wellington is closer to 41°S.) But Dunedin is around 46°S. During the bus tour (in *early January*), the temperature dropped to 4°C. In Winter, they get to down –5°C. And this is a coastal city.

As an Australian, whose coastal cities have never known snow, this just plain does not compute. It’s like this is a different country or something.

I’d like to report on how the North European weather here turns folk into hardy Southern Men, fearless and stoic. But I’ll have to take the guidebooks’ word for it: I’m not interacting with the locals as much as I should be, especially not while I’m being rained out.

Dunedin is a college town: 20% of its inhabitants attend the University of Otago. This is said to give the city a liveliness and inventiveness out of proportion to a place of 110,000 people. But at least some of the students are home for the holidays, or rained out as well; so I didn’t get to see that side of things. Bath St, next to the central Octagon, is meant to be the local funky café street, like Vulcan Lane and Cuba St and South of Lichfield elsewhere. Maybe it was unfair to survey Bath St on a rainy Saturday morning, but… nah. Bath St was thoroughly empty. And the time of day is no excuse.

The bus tour went past many grand houses of Dunedin’s affluent past, and the sprawling grounds of the university, at least somewhat visible through the rain. But on foot, all I had access to was the immediate surrounds of the Octagon, the central square of Dunedin. (Well, OK, the central regular geometric shape of Dunedin.) The central octagon hasn’t worked out how to impress the tourists, like Cathedral Sq in Christchurch has: even the Tourist Centre has moved around the corner.

But the north of the Octagon has its portion of monumental buildings. The place that was housing the Tourist Centre looks imposing enough to have been a General Post Office, but I can’t confirm that from the tourist pamphlets. Next to it St Paul’s Cathedral, angular and slender and striving towards heaven. And in front of them both, the testimonial of Dunedin’s Scottishness, the statue of Robbie Burns, looking vaguely bored.

There’s something missing to the Octagon, though. Too many of the imposing buildings of Dunedin are not there, but are spread around Moray Place, the ring around the Octagon (which is truly octagonal in layout). That includes the Town Hall, the Courthouse, and the First Church. The placement of the First Church hints that the Octagon was an afterthought—though it can’t have been, as everything converges on it. Dunedin was built to be a Presbyterian city, and was designed in Presbyterian Edinburgh; but its First Presbyterian Church is not the centrepiece: it is off to one side of Moray Place. St Paul’s is not Presbyterian: Scottish Dunedin is presided over by an Anglican church.

There’s sure to be a rich story behind all that which I’m missing, and can’t google at the moment. Thankfully, the two churches look cut from the same heavenward-striving cloth.

The crown of Dunedin, though, is not St Pauls’ and Robbie Burns, at the north side of the Octagon. The crown of Dunedin faces St Pauls’ and Robbie Burns, down Stuart St, on the other side of the Octagon. The crown is not the Cadbury Chocolate factory—at least, not in my estimation, although it too faces St Pauls’ and Robbie Burns, and Dunedin is certainly quite chuffed to have a centre of chocolate excellence downtown.

I took the Cadbury tour, I’m embarrassed to admit. I am a chocolate snob, and while Cadbury is better than the horrors of U.S. chocolate (“Hershey’s Kisses: Would you like some chocolate with your paraffin?”), it’s no Lindt, and no Leonidas. The New Zealand specialties of Cadbury-coated marshmallow did nothing to change my opinion of the product. But Dunedin is credited with giving the world white chocolate. For that alone, they deserve a crown.

But the crown I have in mind—and this cannot surprise anyone who’s been to Dunedin—is Dunedin Railway Station, across the road from Cadbury’s. A glorious assembly of Oamaru limestone and Dunedin volcanic stone and Edinburgh granite, of Dalton tiled walls and mosaic floors and and stained glass windows, depicting the Passion of Thomas The Tank Engine. The most photographed building in the southern… something or other, the locals proclaim, and it deserves to be.

That’s an instance of “the most X in the Southern Hemisphere” trope, btw, which the Lonely Planet derides. (“How do you measure such things?”) It’s a way for Australia or New Zealand to claim primacy in something, without looking too closely at, say, Argentina or South Africa. I hope Argentina and South Africa don’t suffer from similar compulsions.

Back when Dunedin was the financial capital of New Zealand, it raised temples to commerce like Oamaru did. Its temples did not limit themselves to limestone, so they are more dour than Oamaru’s—befitting a city intended as a carbon copy of Edinburgh. The money left Dunedin for Auckland in the ’50s, and the main source of income for Dunedin now is the University of Otago. The tour guide approvingly mentioned that the downturn resulted in more of the temples being spared the wrecker’s ball than elsewhere: there was no call to build metal and glass replacements. But some temples did get levelled; looking around the Octagon, too many of them were in the centre of town.

The Railway Station fell victim to that decline too; it narrowly missed levelling when the railways were sold off. Trains still depart the station, and they go a lot further than at Oamaru; but just as at Oamaru, they are tourist trains, not trains for freight or passengers. And the railway station now hosts art galleries, wedding receptions, and tourists with cameras. It doesn’t look as forlorn as the warehouses at Oamaru harbour, but it still is not what it was.

There is a plaque at the entranceway of Dunedin Railway Station, with a sentence from Janet Frame, the novelist from Oamaru. It is her recollection, in a 1982 novel, of her arrival at the station in 1945, the first time she came to a city. She was in awe and terror of the bustle of the station—which wasn’t even as busy as it got when the cargo came in.

I might have grown to like dour, wet Dunedin, and I was delighted by the station. But awe is not what I felt.

Queenstown, where I am typing these lines with my poorest internet access to date, is an altogether different matter. And a quite different kind of awe…