Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Better Britons?
British visitors have long found NZ hauntingly familiar. This is not simply a matter of the
British and Irish origin of most Pakeha. It also stems from the tightening of NZ links with
Britain from 1882, when refrigerated cargoes of food were first shipped to London. By the
1930s, giant ships carried frozen meat, cheese and butter, as well as wool, on regular voy-
ages taking about five weeks one way. The NZ economy adapted to the feeding of London,
and cultural links were also enhanced. NZ children studied British history and literature,
not their own. NZ's leading scientists and writers, such as Ernest Rutherford and Katherine
Mansfield, gravitated to Britain. This tight relationship has been described as 'recolonial',
but it is a mistake to see NZ as an exploited colony. Average living standards in NZ were
normally better than in Britain, as were the welfare and lower-level education systems.
New Zealanders had access to British markets and culture, and they contributed their share
to the latter as equals. The list of 'British' writers, academics, scientists, military leaders,
publishers and the like who were actually New Zealanders is long. Indeed, New Zealan-
ders, especially in war and sport, sometimes saw themselves as a superior version of the
British - the Better Britons of the south. The NZ-London relationship was rather like that
of the American Midwest and New York.
To find out more about the New Zealand Wars, visit
www.newzealandwars.co.nz
.
'Recolonial' NZ prided itself, with some justice, on its affluence, equality and social har-
mony. But it was also conformist, even puritanical. Until the 1950s, it was technically illeg-
al for farmers to allow their cattle to mate in fields fronting public roads, for moral reasons.
The 1953 American movie,
The Wild One,
was banned until 1977. Sunday newspapers
were illegal until 1969, and full Sunday trading was not allowed until 1989. Licensed res-
taurants hardly existed in 1960, nor did supermarkets or TV. Notoriously, from 1917 to
1967, pubs were obliged to shut at 6pm. Yet the puritanical society of Better Britons was
never the whole story. Opposition to Sunday trading stemmed, not so much from belief in
the sanctity of the Sabbath, but from the belief that workers should have weekends too. Six
o'clock closing was a standing joke in rural areas, notably the marvellously idiosyncratic
region of the South Island's West Coast. There was always something of a Kiwi countercul-
ture, even before imported countercultures took root from the 1960s.
