Are New Zealanders Too Serious?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 946, 27 September 1957, Page 5

Are New Zealanders Too Serious?

O New Zealanders take life too seriously? Should we spend less time keeping our gardens tidy and mere time sitting in them, idly, in the sun? Do our womenfolk waste valuable time in forms of thrift that belong to the pioneering days? These are some of the questions raised by Eileen Saunders, of Christchurch, in a controversial series of radio talks in which she compares life in New Zealand with life in Britain. Under the title There and Back Again, they will be heard from YA and YZ stations at 9.15 p.m. on Thursdays, starting on October 3. They are also to be broadcast from YC Stations, starting from 3YC soon. An Englishwoman who came to New Zealand in 1949 and six years later returned to England for just over a year -she is now back in this countryEileen Saunders trained as a sociologist. As listeners who have heard her before will know, however, she is no mere academic, but can look at life through the eyes of a housewife and an ordinary intelligent citizen. Right at the start of her new series of talks she raises the question whether the migrant is to be pitied as one who lives for ever between two worlds, "balancing precariously what he has lost against what he has gained .. . loath to leave the present life that he has built and yet feeling increasingly the pull of the past." New Zealanders, she decides, make extraordinarily good immigrants, They settle down, in Britain in particular, with a joyous forgetfulness, and apart from an odd, sentimental thought for the Southern Alps or some other favourite spot, are happy to be expatriates. forever. For Englishmen, on the other hand, home is still there to return to. "Perhaps it’s because an Englishman’s roots go deeper. One of the things that has struck me most forcibly in New Zealand is how slight is the bond between New Zealanders and their land." Re

This is one of the controversial assertions Mrs Saunders makes. Another is that New Zealanders deceive , themselves when they say that New Zealand is a country without class distinctions. In fact, she says, there’s a deference for English ranks and titles that’s almost religious. "Within New Zealand the divisions are there, despite what any-

one will admit. The trouble is that nobody knows quite what to admit. . There is a mystic entity of the Best People, but who they are, heaven or they themselves alone know." As for class divisions in Britain, Mrs Saunders found indications that they won’t work out quite as the theorists think they ought to, But she did find, for example,

that pleasures which were once the ex. clusive privilege of certain classes are open far wider. The roads are literally jammed with cars, with the dock labourer probably driving a better one than the university professor-"if indeed the latter can afford one at all"; and the train to the south of France and the steamer to Capri are crowded with typists and clerks. The average Englishwoman is very well, if not very admirably dressed, and appearances are now, as they never were before, deceptive. But many New Zealdnders will be most interested--and even perhaps a little upset-by what Mrs Saunders has to say on the question whether "the good lite" is most fully lived in Britain or New Zealand. Pointing out that New Zealand was colonised at a time when evangelical respectability was at its height in England, she says that a stern attitude to life was needed for breaking in a new country; but because this attitude was successful it has remained as an uneasy conscience in many New Zealanders, particularly women. So a man who neglects his. garden is almost in the same class as one. who beats his wife, and we play ball games not "for fun" but to train character, encourage team spirit and subdue self. The Englishman, on the other hand, accepts the view that the cultivation of harmless enjoyments is not in itself the road to ruin, and that life lived grimly is not necessarily more virtuous. In her last talk Mrs Saunders tells what the rebellious generation of the °30s-the young men who grew hot about the Spanish civil war and fought the Second World War-are doing; discusses the "angry young men" and finds them no more angry than any others have been; touches on the revival of interest in religion as "the modern protest"; and ends with a note on the cloud of international tension that hangs over England -so heavily that during the Hungarian and Suez crises she found people more depressed than in the worst days of the war. ee