WHAT IS IT ABOUT NEW ZEALAND?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 507, 11 March 1949, Page 10

WHAT IS IT ABOUT NEW ZEALAND?

(Extracts from a Radio Talk from 4YA by

RENATE

REX

ANY New Zealanders have the funny habit of asking everybody who comes to this country: "Do you like New Zealand?" And more often than not they bitterly resent . the criticism that is poured forth in reply. Visitors to these shores just as bitterly resent that the New Zealanders seem not to want to learn from their criticisms.

Now, I don’t think the New Zealander actually believes that his country is above criticism. Nor do I think the criticism of New Zealand by outsiders is meant destructively only. Rather it arises from a certain disappointment that this country-so tremendously favoured by nature with scenic beauty and good climate, with productive soil and rich water-supplies-that this country inhabited by a people endowed not only with great physical strength, but with great intelligence, is not more akin to their dreams of paradise. Whether they admit it or not, many of them expect that life here will be less riddled with the problems that beset the old countries and that it will therefore be a better life, and that the people and their institutions will also be better and purer and of a higher standard altogether. And then they frequently discover that, although some problems of the old world do not exist here, there are others. And that New Zealanders have their faults no less than human beings everywhere. Of course, most people will not admit to themselves, or to others, that they were silly to expect such things; that if they had indulged a little less in wishful thinking and done a bit more reading about New Zealand they could have saved themselves a great deal of disappointment. Instead they add to the initial mistake another one and begin to blame New Zealand for the lack of those things they were accustomed to at home and which they miss'out here. And so they find it hard to settle down to the fact that "letters are delivered at the

gate and not at the door," that "the University Colleges of New Zealand are not Oxford or Cambridge," that "Nelson isn’t Bournemouth," that "there are no servants for hire, that "there is no nightlife,’ that "shops are closed on Saturdays," and so on. Reality and the Dream Now, I have called these criticisms a mistake. It is unfair to expect that a handful of people can go out into the wilderness and carve out of sheer rock and forest a life for themselves and their _ children-and at the same time present us with a culture of cathedrals, paintings, creative writing, indigenous music and so on, which it has taken Europe hundreds, even thousands, of years to achieve. Of course it would be lovely to be able to transplant the achievements of the old world into the new without their abuses. But then all that is dreaming. And it seems to me that, generally speaking, the New Zealander resents these criticisms and Utopian expectations on the part of new arrivals because he is first and foremost a realist. He objects to being expected to have celestial wings growing out of his pullover, and he objects to being told all the things he hasn’t got. When he asks: "Do you like New Zealand?" he thinks of quite a different New Zealand from that which the, middle-class European is apt to see or expects to see on arrival. Everybody who comes out here probably knows that this country’s economy is based on primary products, wool, meat, butter, and cheese; that farming is extensive and not intensive as in Europe; and that a country roughly as big as Great Britain carries just over one and a half million people in contrast to Britain’s fortyeight millions. But what these facts mean in terms of the life lived out here; the social institutions based on them; and the cultural pattern developed from them, can be understood only in the course of years of residence. Among those who» take up residence here it is probably easiest to be happy for those who are in quest of the simpler material satisfactions of life and . for those who look for a country with plenty of air, sun, and good food for their children. And a great majority of New Zealanders came out here in the first place for these very reasons, and in most cases they have not been disappointed. In material prosperity and its fair distribution New Zealand is probably second to no other country in the world. Intellectyals There is, however, a group of people among the new settlers-whether they come from Great Britain or the Contin-ent-who are what we might call for simplicity’s sake the intellectuals. Is it true, as has sometimes been suggested, that the artist, the scholar, and, in general, the lover of books and of the things of the mind. cannot be happy here; that a "cultural desert," a "life of exile" awaits him hére? No doubt the difficulties of this latter group are very real. The problem of finance for the creative artist; the lack of original source-material for the scholar of (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) European culture; the intellectual loneliness of the thinker and philosopher; and in general the lack of response to, and interest in, the efforts of the intellectual on the part of the Community are the most obvious difficulties. Yet all this has been overcome by some of them, and they, too, have attained to a happiness no less intense, I think, than that of those who came in quest of material things alone. What is the secret of their happiness? The secret can easily be found if the phenomenal importance of one aspect of the history of New Zealand’s settlement is clearly recognised. And that is, that from the beginning the waves of pioneers and subsequent immigrants were accompanied by members of that group whom a moment ago we agreed to call intellectuals-the preachers, teachers, missionaries, social reformers, and visionaries. In some cases they came because their home countries did not give them that religious and political freedom which they desired; and in other cases they were urged on merely because they had a visiqn of the good life. In any case there were from the beginning. among, the New Zealanders those who had come to help in building new culture in the southern hemisphere. Naturally the development, of the material side of life out here has taken most energy so far. Cultural development went along with it all the time, but so much is to be done yet. The reason, I think, why intellectuals with an open mind can partake of happiness, whatever their difficulties, is their recognition of the tremendous possibilities of building for the future in New Zealand. And here the newcomer can join forces with the men and women of the past who blazed the trail; and take a place beside the present builders of New Zealand. The decisive thing about New Zealand is the tremendous stimulus it presents to people with a vision. _ There is so much to be explored, created, and developed in the arts, in social life, in education, within New Zealand. But not only the possibilities of development within New Zealand are a

vital source of happiness; this country’s geographical position in the Pacific is a stimulus of great interest to which even the New Zealander himself only begins to wake up. The Pacific is after all one of those critical regions in the world where East and West meet and mingle -whether they want to or not. "It is a zone of friction in which vastly different cultures collide. And the issues on which men divide-race, religion, nationality, living-standards and so onseem to outweigh those on which they can unite." It is really the Asian peoples who are our neighbours and whom to know and understand better will repay us in the future. The outlook which regards this country, as Professor Lipson says, "as a fragment of the British isles which, by some oversight of the Creator, was put on the wrong side of the globe" is beginning to disappear slowly. However, New Zealand is not only a country of the future. It is here all around us. I think nothing embarrasses New Zealanders so much as praise of their democratic way of life. I suppose one must have gone through the experience of life in another kind of political organisation, such as the mill of Hitlerism, in order not to take the democratic way of life quite so much for granted. And when I say "democratic way of life’ IT do not mean this in a purely technical-political sense. Democracy, in that sense, you have, for instance, in Britain too. I rather wish to give the word a wider meaning in which it is true to say that New Zealand Society is a classless society in which the fences, by which snobbery and privilege cut themselves off from the rest of the community, are, if not entirely razed to the ground, at least so low that people can talk across them without much embarrassment on either side. And if somebody jumps across them there is not much rgising of eyebrows, for there is hardly a family in New Zealand whose members do not live on both sides of the fence. Or shall I rather say on both sides of what the men from the older countries still think of as a fence where in fact the New Zealand sees nothing of the kind.