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(In Black and White)

DON’T THINK of New Zealand as a nation. It is an accidental collection of places whose inhabitants happen to live in much the same fashion and talk the same language; not so much a nation as more a way of life. How tenuous the connections are I realised on decimalisation day. A woman in a Christchurch shop announced that she wasn’t going to bother with this decimalisation rubbish. They were moving to Invercargill next week. Dunedinites think of Auckland as another country. Aucklanders advise South-bound trippers to take enough overcoats and hot-water bottles for the South Pole. Interisland ferry sailings generate as much emotion as a world cruise. It’s as though an umbilical was being severed. At both ends.

New Zealand is a collection of communities, not the metropolitan country you know. In France, Paris sets the tone and controls a centralised machinery of administration. In Japan, Tokyo dominates business and houses a substantial part of the population. In Britain, London dominates; television and newspapers originate there, the social whirl centres there and career ladders end there. New Zealand is different. There is not one main centre but four, and even together they contain only about a third of the population. They are also far apart and very jealous of each other. Even if they could develop collective pretensions they are all jealously watched by a league of little sisters. Oamaru and Invercargill won’t stand for much from Dunedin except bad television programmes; Palmerston North keeps a close eye on Wellington. In any case the eighteen biggest urban areas contain just over half the population. All the other places have claims of their own, too.

In Britain everywhere outside London carries the stigma of being provincial. New Zealanders work on the assumption that all places are equal, though the growth of Auckland may have opened up the possibility that some are more equal than others. Life has a local focus. Different places view different television programmes, look at different newspapers and listen to different radio programmes. To be a Timaruvian means as much as to be a New Zealander. The only reason that travellers identify themselves overseas as New Zealanders is because no one seems to have heard of Waipukurau or Totaranui. Of course they draw together as a nation for the occasional catharsis—an All Black victory, a royal tour. Then they fall back into competing localities. This competition is all the more vigorous because it is one of the few notes of diversity in a uniform community.

Farmers live in the same kind of boxes as the rest; the boxes just happen to be in the middle of fields. Social habits are the same everywhere, though some have a longer drive to the pub. Nearly everybody looks out on the same jungle of tottering telegraph poles and tangled wires; there could be sewerage pipes to look at, too, if governments had been able to devise a safe method of stringing them among all the other dangling paraphernalia. New Zealanders are all campers on a lovely landscape and the main element of difference in their lives is the accident of which camp site they happen to have picked. Wherever it is, you must remember one basic rule: the place where you are now is the best in New Zealand, its people the friendliest, its streets the cleanest, its flower beds the prettiest. Everyone else is out to do it down. You must defend it to the last mixed metaphor against all criticism, however justified.

This state of affairs exists because every place is competing against every other. Parliament may go through routine motions of party debate but it only comes alive when it gets down to the real issues—the quality of the pies in the railway refreshment room at Clinton … whether Gisborne has got its fair share of Golden Kiwi grants as well as its more than fair share of everything else … would a chain and a twelve-pound ball encourage the doctor to stay in Hokianga … should the Christchurch City Council be allowed to plant concrete in Hagley Park. MPs aren’t a national élite, they are local delegates, there to voice local demands.

Cabinets are similar. Indeed the requirements of geographical spread is the only conceivable explanation of the presence of some ministers, particularly ones from Dunedin. Cabinet decides the really important priorities. If Wanganui gets the eighteenth veterinary school, will the fourth college of chiropractors satisfy Hastings? If Auckland is to have a container port as well as an international airport, what can be done to conciliate Reefton’s claim, short of rebuilding it on the coast? Perhaps a notional container port? For years governments have been praying for the ultimate dreams of localism, the garden shed university, the vertical take-off plane which can land anywhere and give everywhere an airport. Shortsightedly they have failed to realise that both would merely unleash even more bitter arguments by fragmenting parochialism into long wrangles over whose shed is to be used, whether the airport should go into the front garden or the back, who is to have the lemonade concession.

The parochial fight spills over everywhere. Imagine the fate of television directors exposed to constant demands to do a programme on Backblocksville, and then, if they do so, to constant threats ranging from pre-frontal lobotomy to castration because they didn’t show the floral clock in the gardens. People connected with the old TV ‘Compass’ programme are still doing thirty-mile detours round Alexandra because a 1965 programme omitted to mention that it was the most beautiful town in New Zealand. Still, perhaps that’s easier than the thirty-mile detour round everywhere else which would have been necessary if they had.

Imagine, too, the torments of royal tour itinerary planners, and the scandal which would have been produced if the private comment of one Governor-General that Oamaru and Timaru were like Tweedledum and Tweedledee had got out. Local government reform is impossible in a country where every place with more than a hundred people has to be a city, everywhere with more than five a borough, leaving to all the others the incentive to reproduce quickly. Local government is a system of dignity not function, conferring status on places and an elective honours list on the locally prominent. At 10,000 councillors and board members there are more per capita magna than anywhere else. In the smaller centres talk to everyone you meet as if he were the mayor. If you’re wrong he’ll certainly be on the council, unless you talk to yourself. The whole mistake of local government reformers has been to swim against the tide by trying to create bigger units and make mayoral chains lighter on the rates. A policy of ‘Every man his own mayor’ would be better.

Conversation has to make due deference to locality. Much of it is the routine exchange of stereotypes, decking out the petty struggle between localities in the trappings of romance. Everyone in Dunedin wears a kilt. Everyone in Nelson has one eye. So here’s a basic introduction which might help you to a better understanding, even if it does place me under the unfortunate obligation of mentioning every hamlet. The ultimate New Zealand book, and the best loved, is the Electoral Roll. The plot may be dull but everyone gets a mention.

Precedence among New Zealand cities goes to Auckland, believed by many, over a half a million in fact, to be the Queen City. Yet Auckland also has a large heterosexual population, even if there are some who believe that a pretty girl is like a malady. The city began as the sweepings of Sydney. Even now it has many of the characteristics of an Australia for beginners.

Auckland falls between two stools—too big for the rest of New Zealand, too small to provide a genuinely big city existence. It is essentially a main street surrounded by thirty square miles of rectangular boxes, covering as great an area as London to far less purpose. Yet size is still the key to Auckland. It confers pretensions: the morning paper modestly takes the name of the whole country, wealth seems easier to come by and is certainly more flamboyant. This is a city of self-made men who worship their creator. Its Joneses are more difficult to keep up with. One can only be thankful that Auckland isn’t actually the capital. With this further dignity its inhabitants would be insufferable. Even now the snowball processes of growth make Auckland almost unbearable, as well as threatening to shatter the precarious federal balance that is New Zealand.

Size also means that Auckland is a self-sufficient universe, labouring under the delusion that the rest of New Zealand doesn’t exist and hence immersed in its own struggles and conflicts. Its academic squabbles are more bitter: anyone from the university can be kept going for hours just by mentioning his colleagues; a putting, in of pennies which produces a constant stream of denunciation. The city’s local government disputes are more intense. Its MPs hate each other too much to work together. Even the weather is undependable and extreme. One TV meteorologist had to move south because the weather didn’t agree with him.

Auckland is a collection of suburbs masquerading as a city. Wellington is a city centre without suburbs. They are all thoughtfully hidden away round in Rongotai, over the hills in Kelburn, or in the isolation ward of the Hutt Valley and its satellites such as Wainuiomata (or Nappy Valley as the locals have it). The suburbs are all several traffic jams away from the ultimate traffic jam in the centre. Wellington was designed as a capital city, but unfortunately its site wasn’t. The curving streets seem to mark the place the tide washed the surveyors’ pegs to. Even the Hutt Valley motorway can’t obviate the fact that if God had intended Wellington for traffic he would have put it in Petone. So the motorway simply speeds traffic more quickly to the central jam.

If the steep hills clustering round the harbour make Wellington a little inconvenient for all but Sherpas, they also make it beautiful. Man’s attempts to ruin the scene by building in the monolithic style of the Maginot Line have hardly spoiled a view which must make it the world’s most pleasant capital city. As a capital it has the institutions of government, administration and diplomacy all concentrated in the central area. Auckland has the pretension and the glory, Wellington the power. It lacks the colour, for Wellington is a public servants’ town, a place to which the able and ambitious in the service must ultimately go. This makes for guarded conversation after the Rabelaisian overtones of Auckland, drab dress, but a more vigorous cultural life and schools whose children have the highest average I.Q. outside Midwitch. The tone is lowered only by the unfortunate fact that for half of the year Parliament meets, M.Ps pour in every Tuesday, and with them the attendant circus of delegations, representations and the ritual passing of begging bowls.

Still Wellington should be a truly beautiful city, if they ever finish building it. There is always the danger of earthquake but probably this is a slightly less appalling threat than that posed by the Ministry of Works. In any case Wellington could quickly and easily be given complete protection against nuclear attack from the air. All they have to do is paint a huge arrow on the roof of the Vogel Building with the simple legend, ‘To Auckland’.

Further south, Christchurch, City of the Plain, though more perceptively described as the swamp city. Christchurch likes to think of itself as an English city. This is partly because of the gardens and the presence of the Avon meandering through in its half-hearted search for the sea. It is also because of institutions such as the Cathedral, the private schools, the Press and the Medbury Hamburger Bar. In fact its town plan of straight lines leading nowhere and its flat, drab appearance both combine to make it more like a wild west town built in stone. John Wayne would almost certainly have hired it as a set for his westerns had the municipality been able to devise some way of joining the parking meters together to form hitching rails.

Christchurch is really English only in its social segregation. The ability to sprawl in any direction has allowed segregation by suburb in a way that the hilly sites and the jostling mixtures of Wellington and Dunedin have not permitted. Professionals work in Hereford Street making fortunes and they live in Cashmere or Fendalton (where the camel hair coat went to die). The remaining suburbs are nicely graded. Any estate agent will guide you to the appropriate one once you’ve told how much you can afford to pay over what you can afford to pay. If he suggests Sydenham or New Brighton you should start thinking of a new job. The latter has a run-down atmosphere and gawping icecream-eating crowds doing their Saturday shopping. It also houses more cranks to the acre than any other part of the country.

With this social segregation, its insularity and introspection and the general stodginess of the little interlocking group who rule the city, Christchurch must be the least pleasant of the main centres. Yet I’m tolerant enough to believe that other people may think differently. Perhaps the real symbol of Christchurch is the railway station, pretentious and monolithic, yet with only about half a dozen trains a day that go anywhere beyond Christchurch suburbs, and only the Southerner that really goes at all. This train provides the best view of Christchurch.

Dunedin, the semi-sunkissed city, is symbolised by its long uncompleted Anglican cathedral: impressive in conception, solid in execution yet incomplete and left standing half finished for decades. The little town that Santa Claus forgot sits near the bottom of the South Island and of every growth table. Outwardly pretending that the wolf at the door is a lucky black cat it is really characterised by a militant inferiority complex. Or rather its official organs and leaders are. The mass of the population don’t care, finding it a pleasant place to live and so much less expensive than real life.

None of the conventional images of Dunedin are true. It is a university town only in the sense that the university bulks large in a city where it is the only expanding industry. The real relationship is symbolised by the moat round the Scottish Baronial Gothic. Scottishness means only that the import-restricted haggis puts in an occasional appearance and an occasional poet produces third-degree Burns. It is Presbyterian only in that the reverberating echoes of a small centre enforce conformity. Even so it manages an enviable reputation for provision of whatever favours sailors favour. It still gets more than its fair share of Truth reports, even since the demise of the Quarter Latin, Maclaggan Street. Psychologically and weatherwise Dunedin is a city of myths. Still it has more memories and fatter history books than anywhere else. These are some comfort to a city living in reduced circumstances with the feeling that life is passing it by.

By Seath’s Law, parochialism varies in inverse ratio to size. Auckland and Christchurch are big enough to be confident and know they’ll grow, whatever governments decide or pressure groups urge. Dunedin has to be more clamorous in the hope that hysteria will rectify the obstacles an inconsiderate nature has placed in the path of development.

The jostling second division of thirteen smaller centres ranging from Hamilton and Palmerston North down to Gisborne and Whangarei need to be more vocal still. Lacking main centre status they clamour for the outward and visible signs of city stature—a university, a new airport, a Government Life building, a railway, a piecart. Insecurity is heightened by the unconscious realisation that no matter how they grow they’re all irredeemably towns not cities. Links with hinterlands are stronger, urban identity weaker, life rawer and culture more consciously created. The intellectual élite of teachers, administrators and professional men are all consciously in exile, anxiously tilling the cultural desert around them. After-dinner speakers are hard to attract because it is customary to say something nice about the town they are speaking in. University staff are easier because they get mileage. In my days as an itinerant academic jukebox, visits to Invercargill, Nelson or Palmerston North gave me an insight into how St Augustine must have felt, so assiduously did the intellectuals present hang on to my words. Initially I put it down to the brilliance of the lecture. Later I realised that there wasn’t much else for the four of them to do.

Secondary centres are in the unhappy position of not being big enough to have the compensations of real cities, yet not being small enough to have the quiet contentment of the real focus of New Zealand life: the small towns. Through these runs the great dividing line between the urban and the rural. The smaller the place the greater the importance of rural values, the more local services depend on the farmer, and the more his income determines the cash flow into the community. The more, too, that rural values and attitudes predominate.

There are regional differences. There is the slowly awakening Northland; the declining glories of the West Coast where men are larger than life and twice as tipsy and the New Zealand myths crawl away to die. At the other extreme are the gentry pretensions of Hawke’s Bay and North Canterbury. Cow areas differ from sheep, not as Oliver Duff thought because sheep make gentlemen and cows unmake them, but because sheep make money, $1,000 per farmer more than cows. Cows not only provide lower average churnings, they also demand more attention from the ‘moaners on the mudflats’. The sheep farmer has more leisure, a different life style. Fruit and tobacco areas are different again: heavy demands for seasonal labour make Nelson and Hawke’s Bay agricultural factories at certain times of the year. Small holdings and subdivision make parts of the Maori east coast more of a rural slum.

Whatever the regional differences, the pattern of life is similar in all the small centres: intimate communities in which everyone knows everyone else and their business even better. They are warm and friendly, tolerant of human frailty (like the odd wife with a black eye, the occasional pregnant daughter), though prepared to talk about it endlessly afterwards. They are family communities, middle-aged in values and attitudes. The young move on for jobs and education. The outsider assumes there is nothing to do in these one-horse towns—in fact there is everything. Voluntary activity runs all, from church groups to those high points of the year, the races and the A. and P. shows. The farmers till the land, their wives cultivate the wilderness of leisure.

These small towns are the real New Zealand, nurturing the values of warmth and friendliness and an endless interest in personal trivia. They set the tone for the whole nation. The attitudes, perspectives, institutions are those of the small town writ large. Parliament is the small town forum, the national equivalent of pub exchanges. The friendly neighbourhood security service under Brigadier Keystone also plays an allotted role, although it couldn’t find a communist plot if it were stood on Lenin’s grave. Its number is in the phone book so that you can always ring up and turn in your friends for fun and profit. Like the village Nosy Parker its job is to gather information. It is an institutional Big Neighbour.

Even the New Zealander’s reaction to the nuisance of dissent is the same as the small town threatened with something out of the ordinary. The New Zealand Clobbering Machine is the national equivalent of small town community pressures. The things people are least happy about, political parties, class conflict, organised protest and dissent—these are just the things which don’t exist in the small town so the folk can neither understand nor accept them.

So think of New Zealand as a small town with the trimmings of a nation state. Seriously though, you must admit that this small town tone makes for a friendly personal atmosphere as distinct from the impersonal anonymity you’ve left behind. And if you don’t like it, keep quiet. You might be run out of town—on Air New Zealand.