New Zealand - 2006 and 2007

Since we appear to currently be doing a Kiwi theme in here, do I dare put up the two letters I wrote about my two recent visits to New Zealand, only one year apart?

At the risk of alienating the entire country, why the heck not! Chris Patten says the world needs more Constructive Troublemaking! Let's see if I can find them:

LAND OF THE KIWIS
2006

Keith and me and a pohutukawa tree!
The national flower of New Zealand.

New Zealand is beautiful. That's really all you can say about it. And moreso now than I've ever known it to be in the past.

Sure, as a country it's always been chocolate for the eyes. All clear skies and fresh-smelling air and beautiful views and gorgeous towns and cities and, out in the countryside, even the weeds are exquisite and every hill and tree etc etc seems so exactly in the right place it's like the whole country has been created by the greatest landscape designer who ever existed.

Beauty? We all know that's a given about the Kiwi landscape, but, gosh, I was astonished to discover that some time in the last seven years - since my previous visit - the people have somehow turned beautiful as well.

And I don't mean just physically either, although it was gob-smacking to see how this land of Maoris on one hand and ginger-haired, freckled "plumpies" on the other has morphed into this sublimely beautiful bunch of olive-skinned, golden-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, beautifully proportioned near-giants, with even the teenage girls being over six feet tall. Honestly, just about every young person looks so close to the Hellenic ideal it's like NZ has magically evolved into a Utopia full of young gods and goddesses. Just exquisite!

But, but, but, they haven't just become physically beautiful, they seem to have become beautiful spiritually and emotionally as well.

You know that, despite marrying one, I've always secretly kinda disliked Kiwis as a people because, in addition to being moral, decent and upright, they were so downright YUCK - in Fiji we call them "The Macawa" meaning "they all have a stick up the bum" - but this visit I didn't see a single example of their old passive-aggressive, rigidly-conservative, self-righteous, knee-jerk nastiness! Whoosh! All gone!

Don't know why I was so utterly amazed by this since I was told about it a year ago. My sister Jane said, after she visited NZ last year after an absence of five years, how much everyone had changed for the better and decided it had to be because of the success of "Lord of the Rings". I think she could be right, but when I tried to put my finger on what felt different about them I decided it was that they've lost their subconscious anger.

In the past it was like they all had a giant inferiority complex and felt trapped in some primitive - albeit beautiful and prosperous - land at the bottom of the world where nothing ever happened
apart from an occasional earthquake. Now it seems like enough of them have travelled in the rest of the world to realise what they have down there is singulary special and gorgeous and so worth cherishing and, as a result, they've actually become happy!

Example of how they've changed? While we were staying with Keith's brother Paul and his wife Lois for the Easter weekend (they have a gorgeous rural property on the edge of a Marine Wildlife Reserve outside a small country town called Leigh) ...

The Marine Reserve near Leigh

... Paul's gorgeous 26 year old son Reuben brought his girlfriend Melissa around to meet us. Before she arrived, I was told Melissa had grown up in Leigh and was a full-on, typical country-girl and I kinda inwardly groaned and didn't really want to meet her, expecting ... well, you know what I was expecting!

Anyway, she turns up while Lois and I are watching that feature film a bunch of Tibetans made last year which was being shown on Maori television. It was unexpectedly a truly great film and I didn't really feel like interrupting my viewing to talk "small-town Kiwi-isms" with some total stranger so I stayed where I was! But then she walks through the door into the TV room and my jaw drops. I doubt I've ever seen someone so genuinely and stunningly beautiful. She's all golden-haired Hellenic perfection and, on top of being total super-model material - six foot tall and beautifully proportioned with a perfect figure and everything exactly symmetrical - she's got the face of an angel!

OK, it probably says something about me that, although I was impressed with how she looked, I didn't expect there was much more to her than that so barely said more than hello ... but then
she notices what we're watching and says "I've heard of thus (bit of a Kiwi-accent going there) fulm. Mind uf I witch ut wuth you." and she plonks herself down on the sofa and she's so instantly comfortable to be around I think "I like you enormously already." and then a short while later Lois says "Tibetans don't look Chinese. What race are they?" and Melissa says "DNA tests show they're the same people as the Khymer of Northern Thailand." and I'm gob-smacked and think "I love you. I love you."

And after a few more brief, intelligent and well-informed comments like that, I'm thinking "My god, Reuben's got himself one of the Mitford Sisters!" and I actually genuinely want to know her, so after the film is over we go into the back courtyard and drink wine and have a real conversation with lots of laughs and intelligent observations on her part and it turns out she's back-packed all around the world and actually SAW what she was seeing and is so charming and well-read and perceptive and funny and NICE I was just swept away by every single thing about her.

And what really got to me about her was here she is, totally a Mitford Sister and world-class in every possible way, yet she was JUST A TYPICAL "NOTHING-SPECIAL" KIWI SMALL-TOWN COUNTRY GIRL!!! It doesn't seem right, does it, but apparently they're all like that these days!

So there you have it! The Land of the Long White Cloud in a nutshell! All I can add is that, as well as having turned into a nation of Mitfords, they're developing into a nation of artists.

Keith, Joyce and Kiwi Art!
A rural pottery.

Love that red against the blue and green!

EVERYONE does art - painting, pottery, crafts, mosiacs, sculpture, everything - and dammit if they're all not doing it WELL! Even in little out-of-the-way galleries in the small towns I saw nothing that wasn't wonderful.

Me at Womble's Place.
He's a Recycle Artist!

In fact, everything I saw was sublime. Like I said at the beginning of this, New Zealand is just BEAUTIFUL! All we have to do now is figure out how on earth are they doing it and, you know, spread it all out into the rest of the world!

LAND OF THE PUKEKOS
2007

Pukeko

Pukeko? These days the people formerly known as Kiwis are forever going on about how they don’t like being called Kiwis anymore, and how they find the whole concept of being named after a bird – especially such a tacky one as a kiwi – offensive!

But everywhere you look you see images of the Pukeko – a rather attractive black and electric-blue, red-beaked and red-legged swamp bittern – so it’s clearly taken the semiological place formerly held by the kiwi, and so, despite claiming they no longer want to be named after a bird, it’s clear there’s just been a change of focus … so therefore and thus we’ve decided to now call them all Pukekos!

Pukeko Art!

Well, the first thing we noticed in Pukeko-land, after only one year since our last visit, is the strange and complete disappearance of the Valkyries. Not a single gorgeous giant golden goddess anywhere in sight. The gorgeous guys were also nowhere to be seen. Our theory is that a talent scout from Ford Modeling Agency swung by and took the lot and, cruelly and with malice aforethought, replaced them with masses of ugly obese people.

My god, the amount of obesity! Everywhere! It definitely wasn’t like that a year ago so what on earth has happened!?

OK, yes, some of it can be explained by all the global-warming refugees from the Pacific – NZ has kindly taken in all the Polynesians whose islands have gone underwater in the past two years (but these ones are so much fatter even than they were in their own islands so they’re obviously all in mourning for their lost lands and have been comfort-eating up the whazoo) but there are zillions of massive wobbly non-Islanders as well.

The only explanation is that New Zealand heard there was a global Obesity Epidemic and didn’t want to be left out! Or else it was that damned talent scout replacing all the beautiful people with every ugly person they could find on the back streets of America.

The next most obvious thing is that the amazing artists have vanished as well. We excitedly visited lots of galleries, desperate to see what the astonishingly talented folk had got up to since our last visit, only to discover masses of sincerely bad tacky-ickies. We saw nothing worth looking at. (Heaps of paintings and sculptures of pukekos however!) Again, we attributed it to those parasitic talent scouts!

And then there were the changes to the landscape. Despite how you’d think it would be impossible to mess up a land as gorgeous as New Zealand, it’s clear a lot of highly determined messer-uppers have given it their best shot.

You know how I’ve always said that the thing that most astonished me about NZ was that everything always seemed to be in exactly the right place? Mmm-hmmm! Not so much anymore. I felt so sorry for Tom Cruise. He was holidaying there with Bill Gates (we saw them kite surfing on Omaha Beach) ...

Omaha Beach

... and since it was clear Gates was there as Cruise’s guest, the most likely explanation is that Tom expected NZ to be just like he last saw it – when he was making “The Last Samurai” – and had praised it up to the skies to Bill … and they both got there to find it just isn’t like that anymore! So many eyesores!

Look, I don’t want to blame the Pacific Island refugees (the poor darlings have enough problems to go on with) nor do I want to blame it all on the vast influx of Asian migrants either … but, but, but!!! … I must say that the usual best thing about migrants and refugees is that they’re usually so poor when they first arrive they don’t have a chance to build until they’ve been there a long while and have thus absorbed the culture of the new place, but these New Asians are rich as Croeses – NZ has a new policy of giving citizenship to Asian millionaires - and so are splashing money around and building lots and lots of shopping malls and new suburbs and other ghastly stuff from the moment they first arrive … and they really have no idea! Sincerely, no idea at all! Yuck, yuck, icky-yuck!

And they’re not hiring local either! They’re bringing in their workers from India and Mainland China … but, since I don’t want to turn this into an anti-immigration tirade, I have to add it was so nice to be able to get a cheap massage and manicure and it was glorious to be able to find places open over Christmas, so let’s just say it wasn’t all bad! Although … mmmm! … it wasn’t as clean as it used to be either!

Keith didn’t mind the changes and saw it as exciting progress – he’s talking about returning to live in NZ when this latest HK contract is up - but Jane and I had lots of horrifed whispered conversations about it all. Her verdict is that, when she visited four years ago, immediately after Lord of the Rings came out, she was so sad that she’d left because it was all so vibrant and alive and exciting, and now she’s just so relieved she didn’t pack up and leave Oz because she desperately hates what the place has become!

So maybe that’s the explanation for this new obesity epidemic: it isn’t just the Polynesian refugees who are mourning for their lost land!

Mmmm-hmmm! What I wouldn’t give to see the return of the Kiwi!