WHO ARE WE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 124, 7 November 1941, Page 11

WHO ARE WE?

NEW ZEALAND NOW. By Oliver Duff. Centennial Survey published by the Department of Internal Affairs, Printed by Whitcombe and Tombs. (Reviewed for " The Listener" by

F. L.

COMBS

ATITUDE 45 degrees South would perhaps be the author’s. sub-title for New Zealand Now had he chosen one. Note that this parallel, like the author, himself, is closer to Otago than to Cook Strait. What has this latitude with its damp, restless airs, its due share of sunlight, and the crumpled surface of our two islands, produced in the way of a human stock? Our author epitomises us as a solid people with strong appetites who play well, perhaps too well, but who, since climate permits it and circumstances require it, work all the year round. We hold by rule and regulation and no misdemeanant however passionate can hope by invoking the unwritten law to get away with his trespass. We distrust » intellect and prefer the leadership of people of sound sense to that of those of academic ability. We like to confer but do not take counsel of extremists. It is typical of us that a left government like that of Labour is guided by its right wing. We are not vivacious, and the puritan tradition still has a strong hold on us. Our radio is the most cautious ip the world. We are unexcitable, and instead of being intrigued by the unexpected, distrust it. We lack the raciness, the exuberance of humour, of the Australians. Perhaps, though Mr. Duff does not say so, We are a trifle stodgy. Like the discoverer of our islands we are notable for solid parts rather than for airs and graces. * * % N the whole this is not so bad. We ~ have -stamina; we are dependable. Flaming righteousness and crusading zeal may be lacking, but on the other hand we are not liable to go far wrong, Yet one detects an undercurrent of impatience in the mind of a would-be-de-lineator of our national type. How is he to evoke a portrait of us if we will not evince ourselves? He says (using the first person since he is one of us): "Season in and season out we go on with our work, not talkers or chatterers, and not unqualified admirers of those who are. If we are a little dumb, a little lacking in grace and poise, may not the answer be Latitude forty-five South?" And elsewhere he speaks of journeying for months on a harbour ferry, and wondering which of his two hundred fellow passengers really represented New Zealand. Would not a " dinkum Aussie" not only have revealed but pronounced himself during a single trip? It would seem that, though admirable raw material of a nation, we need a leaven, and Mr,

Duff, the possessor of a style both vigorous and terse, pummels and pounds this material in the hope of getting it to rise. * Ea * VV HAT is the reason for this failure of the overdue typical New Zealander to emerge from the matrix of his surroundings and his history? Both are out of the common, Our Maori Wars and our booms and slumps, our breezy hills and our well-watered paddocks, ought to have made a/peculiar people of us. Per-

haps, morally and mentally, we have been too docile, evén too servile; have adjusted both our doing and our thinking to the meridian of Greenwich instead of every hour reminding ourselves that we are its antipodes. To this reviewer his fellow New Zealanders seem to be intelligent materialists. Their state socialism is one hundred per cent. material. They would agree point-blank with T. B. Macaulay that good is good to eat and good to wear. They even prefer pudding to praise. It is therefore curious to find a first-rate writer and an able thinker questing conscientiously after the spiritual values he feels must lie at the root of things. These perhaps will come when, like Wordsworth’s dalesmen neighbours, we have a "consciousness that the land we till has for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of the same name and blood." So far with land almost a cash-over-the-counter commodity, we have few place associations to enrich us with a sense of the continuity of things. Destiny for us is not born of an irrevocable past, but is begotten of the blunders and mischances of an unfortunate mortgage or a bad year for dairy produce. Has any country shorter perspectives? Is there one more wrapped up in the things of the present, more devoid of those rememberings and imaginings that .more than anything go to make the soul of a people? Even a 45 degree South Calvinism finds it difficult to affirm things eternal in a land where all plans are prepared and all estimates given by the broad light of common day. * * * "T HERE is a stubbornness of purpose "" behind Mr. Duff’s discussion of New Zealand Now. Given a tough subject he tackles it from the most difficult angle. We are fairly well used to a summing up of our country in terms of cheese, wool, overseas indebtedness, and the progress of our public works. To our author New Zealand Now means New Zealanders Now, and to cast up the account of the mind and character of a nation is a far harder task than any attempted by statisticians. It is all to the good that the book should be such agreeable reading, that its style should be so fresh and pungent, and its turn of thought arresting and quite often provoking. A second and a third perusal will not be a mere labour and duty. Then it will become clearer that one tenacious and straight forward thinker, determined to probe to the heart of the matter, has succeeded in getting a likeness of us that grows on one the more its features are studied,