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.
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;