Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 restaurants
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 clos-
ing 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 counterculture, even be-
fore imported countercultures took root from the 1960s.
There were also developments in cultural nationalism, beginning in the 1930s but really
flowering from the 1970s. Writers, artists and film-makers were by no means the only
people who 'came out' in that era.
