Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Newspaper Utterances of George Bernard Shaw in New Zealand. Yes, people really
were that keen for vindication.
Other visitors were more willing to pronounce in print, including the British Liber-
al MP David Goldblatt, who wrote an intriguing and prescient little book called
Democracy at Ease: A New Zealand Profile. Goldblatt found New Zealanders a
blithe people: kind, prosperous and fond of machines.
For the bon vivant Goldblatt, the attitude towards food and drink was all too
telling. He found only 'the plain fare and even plainer fetch and carry of the normal
feeding machine of this country' and shops catering 'in the same pedestrian fash-
ion for a people never fastidious - the same again is the order of the day'.
Thus, a people with access to some of the best fresh ingredients on earth tended
to boil everything to death. A nation strewn almost its entire length with excellent
microclimates for viticulture produced only fortified plonk. Material comfort was
valued, but was a plain thing indeed.
It took New Zealanders a quarter of a century more to shuck 'the same dull
sandwiches', and embrace a national awareness - and, as Goldblatt correctly anti-
cipated, it took 'hazards and misfortunes' to spur the 'divine discontent' for
change.
But when it did happen, it really happened.
Russell Brown is a journalist and manager of the popular Public Address blog site
A Turbulent Decade
Modern Kiwi culture pivots on the 1980s. Firstly, the unquestioned primacy of rugby
union as a source of social cohesion (which rivalled the country's commitment to the two
world wars as a foundation of nation-building) was stripped away when tens of thou-
sands of New Zealanders took to the streets to protest a tour by the South African rugby
side in 1981. The protesters held that the politics of apartheid not only had a place in
sport, they trumped it. The country was starkly divided; there were riots in paradise. The
scar is still strong enough that most New Zealanders over the age of 40 will recognise the
simple phrase 'the tour' as referring to those events.
The tour protests both harnessed and nourished a political and cultural renaissance
among Maori that had already been rolling for a decade. Three years later that renais-
sance found its mark when a reforming Labour government gave statutory teeth to the
Waitangi Tribunal, an agency that has since guided a process of land return, compensa-
tion for past wrongs and interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi (the 1840 pact between
Maori and the Crown) as a living document.
