A LAND OF THOUGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 466, 28 May 1948, Page 14

A LAND OF THOUGHT

A LITTLE over a year ago John Green, the BBC’s Director of Agricultural Broadcasts, paid a lengthy visit to New Zealand. In March last he gave his impressions in a. broadcast in England which appears in the British "Listener" under the heading "A Country of Thought." We print below an abridgement of this broadcast.

Australia is a country of impulse, New Zealand by contrast is a country of thought. I felt all the time I was in New Zealand that it was a classical land: an outpost of civilisation infinitely remote, but intensely conscious of the world. Australia values her isolation and seems pleased to let her destiny follow the course her impetus dictates; New Zealand seemed puzzled and worried by leaving anything to chance. She seemed concentrated on an intellectual pattern. I spoke recently about the Australian sense of personality. I know I am running a risk of losing friends on both sides of the Tasman if I make comparisons between Australia and New Zealand. If you want to know how they feel about each other, imagine ourselves compared with France by an American critic. Brought up with an aa

insular view of our own history, we are apt to bridle when our monuments or habits are grouped as European. It all seems an insufferable piece of "Yankee" history. Well, the Australian and New Zealander feel the same about Austtalasia; they regard it as a mere convenience of geography. Although an aeroplane flies between the two countries every day, they travel in each other’s countries very seldom. They are definite and distinct nations, tied only by the sense of political responsibility in the Pacific. I thought I detected in New Zealand a certain nervousness about Australia, lest it might involve the family in a "grand mistake"; while in Australia there was just that friendly disinterestedness of the brother who has tasted some of life’s illusions, for a younger brother still rather indulged at home. . I wonder how many traducers of British Imperialism have ever read

about the founding of New Zealand. It seems almost remarkable in these days, for remember there were no minerals or groundnuts at stake. From the very start the missionaries sought to prevent the extermination and corruption of the native race which had occurred on every other continent. What is more remarkable, they were able to exert their influence at home. Why else should the British Government in 1817 have expressly excluded New Zealand from His Majesty’s Dominions, and made this position plain to prospective settlers for more than 20 years? Asa matter of fact the permanent head of the Colonial Office and his ministerial chief were both officials of the Church Missionary Society, to which at least the Church of England missionaries belonged. Both men had worked for the emancipation of slavery, and dreaded the thought of another’ boisterous colony. They opposed it resolutely until 1839, when the Government was openly defied by the newly-formed New Zealand Company. I believe the defiance is the only "bar sinister" on New Zealand’s shield, and even this was a capricious intellectual action, unlike the

simpler human motives that made Australia. There was no mild scientific curiosity in shrubs and ocean currents, nor an elementary greed for gold or acres, but the theory of one rather remarkable but uncomfortable man, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. (Uncomfortable men have been having theories in New Zealand ever since-muscular Christians, imaginative Jews, Scottish radicals, and opinionated soldiers.) But this is the real point. They have all largely been actuated (whether confessed or not) by a puritanical fear of God, which gives New Zealand much in common with Washington’s America. I thought it made New Zealanders rather awkward when they had to justify their classical reserve to the more robust opportunism of rebellious America. "A Political Sere" To a student of politics, the history of New Zealand is a most interesting study. Theories and ideas can be linked to the material changes associated with the development of virgin country. In Europe it is hard to trace the thousand springs of cultural influence that have welled up through the centuries, to join a rolling tide of progress and reform. But New Zealand, to borrow a phrase from the ecologists, was (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) a political sere only a hundred years ago. As in Britain the first phase was pastoral and her first leaders owed their fortunes to wool. The second phase was agricultural, when, following enclosure and closer settlement, the dairy and mutton farmers passed into the ascendant. The last and present phase is industrial. To understand contemporary politics in New Zealand, I must divert for a moment to explain the conservative attitude of the farmer. He is a very important person because 87 per cent. of the Dominion’s exports are primary products. He is also one of the last Free Traders on earth. Only men with unchallenged natural advantages ever are Free Traders, for the logical reason that they have no need of Protection. If nature allows you to carry one cow or six sheep to the acre, without overheads in buildings or machinery, and your product is the best of its kind in addition, you expect to purchase the cheapest and best in return, The New Zealand farmer, therefore, resents being taxed to produce goods like clothes and shoes, which he could buy better from England or America. They do not all realise that this view would entail New Zealand remaining a Pacific Denmark; some do and frankly believe it to be the right policy. It is this conflict between the grazier and the townsman which has brought so much bitterness in the last 10 years to a country otherwise favoured by time and circumstance, Social Precocity Why is New Zealand as a country politically capricious? Why is it doctrinaire about social transitions that have after all a material basis? I have already said that the foundation of the country was planned and conscientious. But this does not explain her chronic

social precocity. Neither is it the result of being in a hurry to catch up with older Powers, as might. explain Soviet Russia; nor because she was isolated and polyglot like the Middle West of America. After all, it was years ago that the Australian took to his Mechanics’ Institutes while the New Zealander had his Mutual Improvement Societies. The one was always interested in life and things, while the other already had this Platonic susceptibility for ideas. The most significant fact is that New Zealand’s reformers have never been New Zealanders. Social genius is not the cause of native political initiative, so much as the effect of being politically plastic in the hands of alien theorists. Indeed, Wakefield himself, Grey, Vogel (an immigrant from the Australian goldfields), Ballance, Mackenzie, Seddon, Henry Holland (an Australian and the archi-

tect of | contemporary socialism), and the leaders of the present Cabinet were all born out of New Zealand and mostly in Britain. They have merely found New Zealand the social laboratory in which to work, and we are only left to wonder at the ease of their successes. Some of the ‘greatest of these in chronological order are free, compulsory, secular education in 1877; women’s suffrage in 1893; industrial arbitration and a government trading bank in 1894; and since 1935 the 40-hour week and a Social Security Act that grants every Beveridge benefit. Collectively Smug To-day in New Zealand it is impossible to buy a razor blade on Saturday morning. Not only has the Government a plan of your house, but it may have one of your teeth and intestines. Broad-. casting is nationalised. The State is more than a source of social credit, and has become a capital superstructure, in architectural fabric as well as finance. An R.A.F. pilot in uniform will fly you in a government aeroplane for a handsome profit, while a sergeant checks your baggage in a government-owned railway station. The bargaining of the individual contractor has become as still as the voice of the bookmaker on the New Zealand racecourse. You may well ask: "Is the New Zealander a prig?" Individually he remains a most delightful person, but collectively I think the nation is.smug. I found some truth in the Australian warning that they would beg the question-"What do you think of our lovely country?" By spurning individual distinction they are producing a population that is statistically average. This would not matter in appearance, but in thought it can be very depressing. Kipling’s linesWho wonder mid our fern why men depart To seek the Happy Isles, has to-day a meaning the poet of Empire did not intend. The Happy (continued on next ‘page)

‘A LAND OF THOUGHT

(continued from previous page) Isles for too many New Zealanders of ability {is Britain or America. For those who are content with less laborious distinction, the State lotteries of Australia are a nearer solace. But against this do not gain the impression that the New Zealander takes advantage of his social rights. His complacency has not bred sloth or indifference. He remains courteous and willing, and in the sense that William of Wykeham, not Lord Chesterfield, believed that "manners makyth man," he has the best manners that exist on

the worlds frontiers. I remember one night in Wellington attending the House of Representatives, I. was first irritated by what I considered a portentousness unmerited by the circumstances. I suddenly recalled that the Lancashire County Council governed

an area containing more than three times as many people. The Chamber, too, was not in the English sense the jury of a nation, but more reminiscent of the Athenian market place with an added inducement to the demagogue to speak into the microphone (broadcasting parliament is another New Zealand innovation). Then suddenly the House rose in silence and Big Ben struck nine. I make no apology for my emotion. I felt ashamed of any contemptuous thoughts and had to disabuse myself of any feeling of flattery. I knew that

the loyalty which bound these people to me was not that my countrymen had proved "good cobbers" in the rough and tumble of history, but that they had also been faithful and sought right judgments. If, therefore, New Zealand is so regulated and complacent that her sons leave home, if she lacks feeling or expression to match her exquisite scenery, let us consider the positive contribution she has made to the world in a hundred years. First, I think we should rate the example of living in charity with a native people, who on

any other continent in the New World would have been exterminated, if not by force, by the arrogance of western civilisation. I regard the second achievement, ‘having produced in three wars a citizen army with the attributes we only expect of a corps d’elite — the

classic discipline of the Brigade of Guards and the individual elan of Napoleon’s Old Guard, Thirdly, if the settlers of Nelson did, as history relates, debate their educational system on the voyage out, they had their reward. In Lord Rutherford they produced possibly the greatest experimental physicist of all time. This typical New Zealand town with the charm of Barnstaple and the grandeur of Naples, can thus accept without obligation all that the atomic age may have in store for New Zealand and the Pacific.