America they escape from monogamy by adultery; in New Zealand they escape by segregation, hence their parties. These typically fall into two camps: an unbeleaguered garrison of women and the men clustering in the kitchen to keep supply lines short. This enables men to talk about ephemera like sport, cars and sex and women to talk about homes and children. Their concerns are always the more basic and practical.
The New Zealand marriage is the transfer of the embattled sexual relationship from car seat to candlewick. The system isn’t likely to change. Co-education doesn’t undermine the set-up for it makes the Purdah Principle informal rather than formal. Even emancipation will work against women unless it is total and complete. For a woman going out to work means letting go of the tiller and surrendering real power for a dull job and a low wage. Even the extra income only boosts the man’s spending power since the Kiwi-hen is constitutionally incapable of spending money.
As for UNO it can only flourish when removed from the battleground and Big Neighbour. Visiting sailors, pop groups and American forces in war and what passes for peace are all outside the integration machinery so they find our sex life like our welfare state: rough and ready but free.
Still, I don’t want to seem too critical. The New Zealand woman is the most attractive in the world. She’s the best housekeeper and she brings up the cleanest children in conditions so antiseptic Dr Barnard would be proud to operate in them. She may prefer Alison Holst style to Graham Kerr but her cooking is certain to win your heart. It was after all Dr Barnard who remarked that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And even if she weren’t quite as good as I’m painting her I’d never dare tell you. She might break my arm.
SEVEN DAYS SHALT THOU LABOUR: The Games Kiwis Play
NEW ZEALAND is a land without leisure. What you call leisure time, Kiwis know as a period of maximum exertion. Outside working hours this is an ant hill (as distinct from Cashmere, the aunt hill) of effort. Inside working hours they recover. Maximum ingenuity has to be exercised in spreading out formal ‘work’ and reducing its strain to conserve energy for the ordeal ahead. The moralist may complain about lazy and slipshod workers. No one heeds him. The forty-hour week is a necessary recovery period for the other 128. Unlike the Germans and Japanese, New Zealanders have a sense of priorities. If they work hard it must be for themselves.
Leisure is so exhausting because there is nothing to do. Other countries have leisure and entertainment industries. Bowling alleys, drive-in brothels, theatres, clubs and other institutions cater for every taste from blackcurrant cordial to geisha. Everything is done for them, so the workers can gallop back to their factories relaxed, refreshed and entertained.
In New Zealand it’s different. Show biz hardly exists outside of a few itinerant pop groups, the Rev. Bob Lowe and that popular group, Dr Geering and the Presbyterian General Assembly. Visits from overseas artists like LBJ are few and expensive. By the time they get there they’re not at their best after an exhausting trip. Lord Reith, a titled undertaker who believed that television was a branch of the embalming industry, still wanders NZBC corridors, giving people what is good for them rather than what they want. As for night life, cities, while beautifully planned, are so well laid out that you wonder how long they’ve been dead. A search for the liveliest spot in town usually ends up at the YMCA As for discotheques, in the world of the with-it they stand without, though a few daring entrepreneurs have converted their milkbars into psychodelicatessens. Ten o’clock closing has hardly made the pubs social centres; in mixed bars you have to ask for an estimate before you drink.
Restaurants are poor by overseas standards. When Graham Kerr talked of ‘New Zealand, Land of Food’, pies may have entered his mind but he was probably thinking of sandwiches. This is their basic food as well as the foundation of their way of life. Before the sandwich all men are equal. It sustains more people more cheaply to the ton than any known nutrient, even Asia’s rice. It allows Kiwis to spend their money on essentials—such as cars and slimming cures. Schoolgirls stoke up on it into unlovely monsters beyond the help of power net Lycra or Maiden form bra. The menfolk are de-energised by the cloying pap. Citizens only eat out when they’ve got sandwiches. Otherwise it’s too expensive. With a night out costing as much as a gnome for the garden there’s really no choice. After a day of indigestion the meal is forgotten. A gnome is forever.
The Kiwis entertain themselves. Leisure begins at home. In the day they entertain there with coffee, at night with beer, and if the furniture needs renewing they give a party, pronounced with a ‘d’ to distinguish it from the less important political version. Whatever the social class of the host, parties are all eatathons and drinkathons. If it’s a student do, keep your half-G up your jumper. If everyone is wearing suits it might be a mistake to paw your host’s wife too soon. If it’s your party insure against damage, though remember third party rates are high. Attempting to ingratiate myself with my students, I gave occasional parties while my house lasted. At the penultimate party the bed legs were broken off by the weight of couples dancing on it (this was, after all, New Zealand). At my final party, a fellow lecturer was pushed through the livingroom window and a gatecrasher locked himself in the lavatory for four hours, with disastrous consequences for the lawn.
If you are at a loose end ring a taxi firm and ask them to drive you where the action’s thickest. Or follow people home from the pub and sidle in with them. Or join the other cars prowling the streets looking for signs of life. You won’t be welcome but it would infringe traditional hospitality rituals to throw you out before you actually collapse vomiting on the carpet. After all, the party is the great Kiwi contribution to social betterment. One of the great literary classics is called Government By Party.
The home is the focus of the nation’s life. Other countries go out for entertainment—Englishmen to sit in pubs, Ulstermen to murder each other in the streets. Kiwi homes are so much bigger, better and more beautiful, veritable people’s palaces, that the occupants don’t want to leave. The homes are also so expensive they can’t afford to. The home is the venue for their most popular forms of entertainment: television, gardening and peering out of the window. It’s also a hobby you inhabit, and so exhausting that no New Zealander ever calls his house ‘Mon Repos’.
Americans flee the noisy cities to the quiet of suburbia. If you want weekend peace you must go to town. The suburbs are a cacophony of power drills, motor mowers, hammers, carpet and child beating and revving cars, all punctuated by the screams of amateur roof menders falling to their deaths. A New Zealand house begins life as a 1,000-square-foot wood or brick box, sitting in a sea of mud and rubble rather like Passchendaele. Within months the garden is a condensed and improved version of Versailles, likely to turn Capability Brown green with envy. Hand-manicured lawns get more care and attention than the owner’s hair. Vegetable gardens carry a crop large enough to feed the entire Vietcong for decades.
The house’s turn comes next. First a decoration, then an extension and enlargement, then an extension and enlargement to the extensions and enlargements. Once the major work is done, maintenance, redecoration and the addition of the occasional bedroom or ballroom keep things going until it’s time to move on and begin over again. The Englishman’s home is his castle. It’s the New Zealander’s mistress.
All this he does himself. In countries where work is highly specialised, do-it-yourself is a kind of escape from specialisation of labour, a return to craftsman traditions. The man who spends his life on a car conveyor belt tightening, or in Britain half-tightening, the fourth fender junction bolt can recapture the joy of being a jack of all trades. In New Zealand work isn’t specialised. The only division of labour is the relationship between