The half-gallon quarter-acre Pavlova paradise

166 Pages·2013·7.25 MB·English

by  Mitchell

The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova
Paradise
BY AUSTIN MITCHELL
Contents
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
Postscript: Teach Yourself New Zild
About the Author
Also by Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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.