Austin Mitchell - The Pavlova Omnibus

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 Contents Cover Title Page The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise BY AUSTIN MITCHELL 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

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.