NZ #16: An Australian's History of New Zealand

As I gaze across the grey waters of Lake Wakatipu, and the soggy car park in between, I think I wouldn't mind right now being in the 43°C weather of Melbourne. I'm wrong: I'd be cursing my lack of effective air conditioning; but I'm bummed out anyway at Nature's air conditioning here, of three days straight of rain.

Ten days ago I'd finished off Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand. The book has saved me from interacting with any locals to learn more about this place: I can do armchair tourism, with an in situ armchair. That may be dysfunctional—as dysfunctional as being bored in Queenstown, Adrenaline Capital Of The World. But then, if I was functional, I wouldn't be blogging while on holidays in the first place.

So what did I learn from my reading?

New Zealand in King's account has had contradictions in its history, contradictions that I don't know what to make of. It was a colony better to its indigenous people than the others; but that still made for paternalism and dismissal. It disengaged from the ANZUS alliance after the Rainbow Warrior bombing; but before that its troops had been the foremost in the British Empire's wars. It was a laboratory of progressivism, introducing universal male suffrage, women's suffrage, and the machinery of the welfare state when they were still a gleam in the eye of European social-democrats. But it was also a drab monoculture, which punished people for being different. Gays were closeted and prosecuted decades longer than elsewhere; the meagre Chinese population was still large enough to provoke White New Zealand activism; and Wellington was not a safe place to speak Norwegian.

Seriously, Norwegian. King tells the tale of a New Zealand poet as a child in the '20s, hanging on the straps with his father in a Wellington tram, and chatting in their native Norwegian. A stalwart of New Zealand monoculture goes up to the father, and punches him to the floor, yelling "Speak English, damn you!"

Norwegian, of all things. But then, Australia was hardly better in the '20s.

New Zealand is not that place any more. The controversy that greeted the new, slit-the-throat haka of the All Blacks was greeted by a local sports columnist's chortle: anything that got the Poms that riled up had to be a good thing. The Kiwis have found their anti-Pom moxie, they can pronounce statements that are positively Australianesque in their contempt of the mother country.

But it took Australia a long time to move away from the mother country, and it took New Zealand even longer. Australia at least had the leaven of convicts and the Irish, and some strands of republicanism articulated in the 1890s. It was a long national sleep after that, and through to Menzies' last cry of loyalism; but there were still spots of autonomy: the hatred engendered by the Bodyline tests in cricket; the national myth of egalitarianism and comradeship (things that were never British virtues); the realisation during World War II that Britain was not going to defend the Pacific, and Australian troops had more pressing terrain to defend than North Africa.

Not so in New Zealand. Its laboratory of progressivism bought in to egalitarianism, and the attempt to reproduce English class structure in Canterbury did not prosper. And unlike Australia, sectarianism did not take hold here, even if the Anglican church had primacy (so much so, the Maori for Anglican is Mihinare: Missionary). New Zealand elected Catholics to be Premiers far earlier than elsewhere.

But notwithstanding, the New Zealand experiment was articulated as an aspiration towards Better Britons. And in King's account, I didn't see any competing aspiration to be other-than-Britons, nor a defining date for putting together a new polity, like Australia had. The Australian Commonwealth can hoist its flag to 1901, when Federation was enacted—though in truth, Australia was not much less British afterwards than before. But in New Zealand, premiers changed into prime ministers imperceptibly in 1902: there was no landmark date as in Canada and Australia, to declare this was now a new country.

The negotiations leading up to 1901 did make their own declaration, however: New Zealand ultimately declined to join the Australian federation. Whatever New Zealand was to be, it would not be run out of Melbourne.

The United Kingdom gave New Zealand the legal grounds to be its own country with the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which granted its dominions (its white colonies) autonomy in foreign and domestic affairs, and made their parliaments the equal of London's. Australians don't commemorate 1931, and the last tie to British jurisprudence was severed only in 1986. Australia accepted the Statute, but only in 1942, when it was turning to the US for its defence. New Zealand refused to ratify the Statute until 1947. (Newfoundland became Canadian rather than be independent, in 1949.) And while the Japanese were bombing Darwin, and sending submarines to Sydney, New Zealand kept its troops in the European theatre.

From my vantage point, in a post–British Empire world, I cannot comprehend that. At all. The closest I can come is to picture New Zealand as a bright and diligent student, more prudent and more with it than its elder, loutish brother—but refusing to move out of home, even after Mum had already arranged alternate accommodation.

What figure of mid-century advertising kitsch does Australian nostalgia define itself as? Chesty Bond, the ludicrously Aryan 1930s undergarment model?

Maybe not, but it was an archetype with a certain traction. Kiwiana kitsch is never far away from the Four Square Supermarket cartoon. Perky, short, and very very 1950s.

He gets reinvented in bookstore iconography as a Maori, as a bungee jumper, as a guitarist, as any of the current manifestations of New Zealand identity. He's beloved by the iconographers of this country, despite looking nothing like Chesty Bond. In fact, he looks kinda dorky. Kinda like that bright and diligent student not moving out of home.

It speaks very well of a people when they choose Mr Four Square, instead of Chesty Bond, as the vehicle for their identities: dorks are far more interesting than larrikins. It speaks even better for that people, when they actively reinvent their vehicle, to convey how their identities have diversified. It says their identities have diversified, and that they recognise it, and that they still have an anchor or virtuous dorkiness. Chesty Bond is not so malleable.

New Zealand is not the '50s Four Square Supermarket kind of country any more, of course, and its mascot has moved out of home: he's not such a dork, any more. New Zealand's nostalgia for Kiwiana still has a much more British tinge than the equivalent Australian assertions of identity, and they're nowhere near as strident or mythologised as Australia's nationalism has become. But New Zealand is its own country: it doesn't feel like England, and it doesn't feel like Australia.

I still haven't worked out what makes it different, much more than when I was sniffing the air in Cuba St two weeks ago. I think part of the difficulty is that ultimately it's nowhere near as different from home as the UK or the US is. (Part of it too of course is my general obtuseness, and failing to actually talk to enough people.) The most I've worked out it, it's gentler and more subdued, it's quirkier and more ironic, it's more at home in the Pacific, and it's allowed the People of the Land a greater role in forming its identity.

And as Younger Sibling countries everywhere, it defines itself against the Big Lug Next Door. I've been staying in tourist traps in tourist season, and introducing myself as being from Across The Ditch apologetically, the few times I have interacted with the locals. So I haven't given myself the chance to sample those definitions first-hand. I may have a few more resources now, though, to try those definitions out with the New Zealanders I know back home.

NZ #15: Queenstown, and Haka

I was struck with awe—in fact, terror—when I pulled up at 6 PM to Queenstown, tourist haven of the South Island, to be greeted by a young man impersonating a moose in front of a moving bus.

It wasn't Janet Frame's awe at the big smoke's granite and bustle. It's an altogether more dysfunctional awe, at a town full of people younger than me, noisier than me, and drunker than me.

And that other business that twenty-year olds tend to get up to on holiday more than me; but this pretends to be a family-oriented blog. It doesn't particularly succeed at it, but I might spare you the psychosexual drama for this post anyway.

The rains took care of the élan vital of the twenty-year olds, I daresay. The party crowds were in merry mood out and about last night; but Queenstown woke up soggy enough this morning for people to keep their party indoors.

Queenstown is impossibly beautiful, even more postcard-bespoke than Akaroa: a comity of mountains and lake and trees right out of a Swiss chalet. There was gold here in the 19th century; but the area now lives on the tourist's dime alone, as the local taxi drivers assure me.

And the tourists still come, both the lowly and the high. That makes it a less Slow News Day here than you'd expect for a place this size. The current headline in the local paper: Muammar Gaddafi's son was in town New Year's Eve, and wanted to party.

The beat reporters were hot on the story, and somehow I suspect this isn't the biggest story they've had to track. They talked to the hoteliers who had to bump another booking for Gaddafi fils and his people. They talked to two of the dozen blondes sourced locally by Gaddafi fils' men to join in their festivities. ("No fat ones", the order specified.) The blondes reported that the visitors were gentlemen, their identities unknown, and they left the vistors after a couple of hours to rejoin their friends, who had not been invited to the party.

I'm not speculating about their friends' weight or hair colour.

The beat reporters got paparazzo shots of the man himself, watching performers doing a haka for him on the tarmac of Queenstown airport. A last minute whim, apparently: Gaddafi fils couldn't leave town without partaking of the local culture. Though not partaking *too* closely: as the bemused Kiwi Haka troupe told the beat reporter, they issued the traditional Pōwhiri challenge to the visitors, but did not drop the fern for the visiting headman to pick up, and prove his good intentions. The headman's security detail wasn't letting anyone get that close.

All very odd. That wasn't the deal when Abel Tasman failed to acknowledge the local tribe's challenge. And there's the whiff of something unsavoury about Maori ritual performed on demand for visiting headmen.

But New Zealand has a long tradition of that, whether the visiting headmen are from Libya or England, or tourists from Across The Ditch. No, of course it's not the same—the Treaty of Waitangi does mean something, after all. But it's convenient romanticism to say the troupes should stay virtuous and poor. The same happens Across The Ditch, when every culturally sensitive conference feels entitled to demand an Aboriginal Welcome To Country—and then are surprised the elders demand remuneration.

But of course they should: it's not like the elders had invited the conference as their guests in the first place (or the 18 million other non-indigenous inhabitants). If the visitors are willing to buy what they're offering, who's to begrudge them asking a fair price?

I don't have a wide standard of comparison for Maori cultural performers: I've only watched half an hour's worth on Maori TV, and the last three hotels I've been in don't carry Maori TV. But I went and saw Kiwi Haka perform tonight, and I was very impressed. The women's singing was excellent. (The men's doesn't have to be, because the men do more chanting and punctuating shouts.) The weapons display was instructive: if the Maori haven't already branched out into martial arts, they should.

The banter was well worked through as well. I was startled at the matter-of-fact acknowledgement of after-battle cannibalism:

"This blow separated the crown of the skull, allowing the warrior to feast on the brains. Mmm! ... But today, like everyone else, Maori prefer McDonalds and KFC."

In a roundabout way, though, it speaks to the resurgence of Maori identity. The mihinare, the missionaries, successfully made the Maori abandon that kind of warfare, and (less successfully) sought to make them abandon the rituals and weapons to go with it. Noone would joke about cannibalism fifty years ago. The Maori now don't do what they did; but neither are they ashamed of their forebears that did. And if it unsettles the tourist, so much the better.

But it was the Pōwhiri, the welcoming ritual, that transfixes. It was explained to us, but it still was alien and confounding: all in te Reo, threatening and solemn and aloof, the peace token of a fern thrown down and jabbed at for the visitor to pick up. The karanga, the call and response of women, from the two sides, only went on for a few seconds; but it too sounded like it was from another realm. Vaguely like Bulgarian polyphony.

All of it is drastically abbreviated of course: no spears were thrown past the visitors, and we did not chase the spearmen or kneel on one knee grasping our muskets, as happened of old. The singers of the karanga were not past childrearing age, as used to happen back then—because an encounter between tribes could still go awry, and old women were deemed more expendable. We didn't exchange oratory or touch noses or feast together, as actually happens to this day in the marae. It wasn't a "real" pōwhiri—of course, we'd hardly earned one.

And it's not authentic, in a narrow sense; but as I keep learning, that's not the kind of authenticity that matters. I'm not sure I got it right, but I gather the poi was traditionally the men's domain, and has become a women's dance for this kind of cultural exhibition. But if all Maoris growing up see women doing the poi, then that's what's real.

Just as they've all been told Aotearoa is the Maori name of New Zealand, and not originally a less common name for just the North Island: it's the name of the whole country now, and that's the new authenticity. The old authenticity was that the very notion of the North and the South Island being the same country was a Pakeha notion, and got a Pakeha name, Niu Tireni. But that's an historical footnote, overtaken by new circumstances, and new constructions of nationhood.

Kiwi Haka did also perform a haka—they hardly couldn't. Though not *that* haka (Ka mate, the one you all know from rugby); that haka is not welcome on the South Island, because of the devastations its composer Te Rauparaha brought to the South Island in the Musket Wars. The haka has even more layers of authenticity wrapped around it, being the most emblematic feature of Maori culture, and appropriated by the Pakeha in ways of their own.

The role of women in the haka is under contention, for example, and the historical evidence for or against is being conscripted to the debate. Tradition (in at least one construal) limited women in the haka to pūkana, dilating the eyes: glowering. But if the haka is a living tradition and not a museum piece, then it will reflect how Maori women fit into their culture now. And from what pūkana I've already seen, I don't see Maori women taking a back seat anyway.

The souvenir shop had a book that went into several of these debates on authenticities of the haka, with good humour and encyclopaedic coverage. (Wira Gardiner. 2007. Haka: A Living Tradition. 2nd ed. Auckland: Hodder Moa.) Not everyone is as sanguine about reinventions of the haka: the All Blacks are notoriously touchy about their opponents not standing at reverent attention while the team gestures they'll slit their throats.

There's a haka Gardiner missed in his survey, which Wikipedia mentions, and I'd love to see the return of: a 1903 challenge to my countrymen, from Across The Ditch.

Tena koe, Kangaroo	How do you do, Kangaroo!
Tupoto koe, Kangaroo!	You look out, Kangaroo!
Niu Tireni tenei haere nei	New Zealand is invading you
Au Au Aue a!	Woe woe woe to you!

As you'll notice, in 1903, it wasn't yet Aotearoa. But Australia has indeed been successfully invaded by New Zealanders. Including enough Maori to establish the Nga Kapa Taumata Teitei, with a competition to judge performances nationally.

They should give serious thought to that 1903 haka, I reckon.

NZ #14: Dunedin

The rains caught me at Dunedin, and I didn't walk around much. Even if the rains hadn't caught me, I wouldn't have walked around much. Dunedin is the one New Zealand city that the Lonely Planet does not include a walking tour for, and there's good reason for that. Dunedin is absurdly hilly. I had pleaded hilliness hardship for Auckland; but Dunedin is hilly enough to claim a place in the Guinness Book of Records for Baldwin St, a residential street with a 1:1.286 incline. That's 52°. What's fearsome is, Baldwin St is only first among peers: there are plenty of other residential streets next to it, with only slightly less incline. And from a safe distance at the bottom of the hill, they look like nothing so much as concrete ski slopes, with cars precariously parked on them.

I succumbed to going on a bus tour of the city: I scarcely had the option not to. The droll tour guide noted that the urban poor used to live on the bottom of the hill, and the rich on the hill inclines, with the commanding views of the city. As the bus wheezed its way up a 30° incline, I could not fathom why people would pay extra money to slide off the floor of their houses. Horses would have found those ascents even more challenging than motor vehicles did.

Cable cars didn't; but like just about everywhere else in the world, Dunedin scrapped its cable car system long ago. God speed the enthusiasts trying to bring it back: it would get use.

Inside a bus was a good place to be in Dunedin, both when the InterCity bus rocked up from Oamaru via Palmerston, and in the Town Belt of parkland around the city; because both times we got hit with hail. That's right, hail. In early January. In the *Southern* hemisphere. I have told my astonishment in Wellington at realising 42 Below vodka meant 42°S. (That's actually Marlborough's latitude; Wellington is closer to 41°S.) But Dunedin is around 46°S. During the bus tour (in *early January*), the temperature dropped to 4°C. In Winter, they get to down –5°C. And this is a coastal city.

As an Australian, whose coastal cities have never known snow, this just plain does not compute. It's like this is a different country or something.

I'd like to report on how the North European weather here turns folk into hardy Southern Men, fearless and stoic. But I'll have to take the guidebooks' word for it: I'm not interacting with the locals as much as I should be, especially not while I'm being rained out.

Dunedin is a college town: 20% of its inhabitants attend the University of Otago. This is said to give the city a liveliness and inventiveness out of proportion to a place of 110,000 people. But at least some of the students are home for the holidays, or rained out as well; so I didn't get to see that side of things. Bath St, next to the central Octagon, is meant to be the local funky café street, like Vulcan Lane and Cuba St and South of Lichfield elsewhere. Maybe it was unfair to survey Bath St on a rainy Saturday morning, but... nah. Bath St was thoroughly empty. And the time of day is no excuse.

The bus tour went past many grand houses of Dunedin's affluent past, and the sprawling grounds of the university, at least somewhat visible through the rain. But on foot, all I had access to was the immediate surrounds of the Octagon, the central square of Dunedin. (Well, OK, the central regular geometric shape of Dunedin.) The central octagon hasn't worked out how to impress the tourists, like Cathedral Sq in Christchurch has: even the Tourist Centre has moved around the corner.

But the north of the Octagon has its portion of monumental buildings. The place that was housing the Tourist Centre looks imposing enough to have been a General Post Office, but I can't confirm that from the tourist pamphlets. Next to it St Paul's Cathedral, angular and slender and striving towards heaven. And in front of them both, the testimonial of Dunedin's Scottishness, the statue of Robbie Burns, looking vaguely bored.

There's something missing to the Octagon, though. Too many of the imposing buildings of Dunedin are not there, but are spread around Moray Place, the ring around the Octagon (which is truly octagonal in layout). That includes the Town Hall, the Courthouse, and the First Church. The placement of the First Church hints that the Octagon was an afterthought—though it can't have been, as everything converges on it. Dunedin was built to be a Presbyterian city, and was designed in Presbyterian Edinburgh; but its First Presbyterian Church is not the centrepiece: it is off to one side of Moray Place. St Paul's is not Presbyterian: Scottish Dunedin is presided over by an Anglican church.

There's sure to be a rich story behind all that which I'm missing, and can't google at the moment. Thankfully, the two churches look cut from the same heavenward-striving cloth.

The crown of Dunedin, though, is not St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, at the north side of the Octagon. The crown of Dunedin faces St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, down Stuart St, on the other side of the Octagon. The crown is not the Cadbury Chocolate factory—at least, not in my estimation, although it too faces St Pauls' and Robbie Burns, and Dunedin is certainly quite chuffed to have a centre of chocolate excellence downtown.

I took the Cadbury tour, I'm embarrassed to admit. I am a chocolate snob, and while Cadbury is better than the horrors of U.S. chocolate ("Hershey's Kisses: Would you like some chocolate with your paraffin?"), it's no Lindt, and no Leonidas. The New Zealand specialties of Cadbury-coated marshmallow did nothing to change my opinion of the product. But Dunedin is credited with giving the world white chocolate. For that alone, they deserve a crown.

But the crown I have in mind—and this cannot surprise anyone who's been to Dunedin—is Dunedin Railway Station, across the road from Cadbury's. A glorious assembly of Oamaru limestone and Dunedin volcanic stone and Edinburgh granite, of Dalton tiled walls and mosaic floors and and stained glass windows, depicting the Passion of Thomas The Tank Engine. The most photographed building in the southern... something or other, the locals proclaim, and it deserves to be.

That's an instance of "the most X in the Southern Hemisphere" trope, btw, which the Lonely Planet derides. ("How do you measure such things?") It's a way for Australia or New Zealand to claim primacy in something, without looking too closely at, say, Argentina or South Africa. I hope Argentina and South Africa don't suffer from similar compulsions.

Back when Dunedin was the financial capital of New Zealand, it raised temples to commerce like Oamaru did. Its temples did not limit themselves to limestone, so they are more dour than Oamaru's—befitting a city intended as a carbon copy of Edinburgh. The money left Dunedin for Auckland in the '50s, and the main source of income for Dunedin now is the University of Otago. The tour guide approvingly mentioned that the downturn resulted in more of the temples being spared the wrecker's ball than elsewhere: there was no call to build metal and glass replacements. But some temples did get levelled; looking around the Octagon, too many of them were in the centre of town.

The Railway Station fell victim to that decline too; it narrowly missed levelling when the railways were sold off. Trains still depart the station, and they go a lot further than at Oamaru; but just as at Oamaru, they are tourist trains, not trains for freight or passengers. And the railway station now hosts art galleries, wedding receptions, and tourists with cameras. It doesn't look as forlorn as the warehouses at Oamaru harbour, but it still is not what it was.

There is a plaque at the entranceway of Dunedin Railway Station, with a sentence from Janet Frame, the novelist from Oamaru. It is her recollection, in a 1982 novel, of her arrival at the station in 1945, the first time she came to a city. She was in awe and terror of the bustle of the station—which wasn't even as busy as it got when the cargo came in.

I might have grown to like dour, wet Dunedin, and I was delighted by the station. But awe is not what I felt.

Queenstown, where I am typing these lines with my poorest internet access to date, is an altogether different matter. And a quite different kind of awe...

NZ #13: Oamaru

Oamaru is small and flat, like Nelson. But where Nelson is sunny and cheery, Oamaru is windy, with a chill that flies in out of the bowels of Antarctica. Where the tourists around Nelson are ambling hippies in broadshorts, the tourists around Oamaru wear layers of wool, and huddle.

Where Nelson looks forward, past the decline of the timber trade, to a future of winemaking and tourism, Oamaru—also looks forward, to a future of tourism, but it's a tourism that trades on its past.

Oamaru is where New Zealanders worked out how to refrigerate shipments of meat and dairy to Britain, and Oamaru boomed because of it in the 1880s. Oamaru celebrated its affluence in a binge of cream-coloured temples to capitalism, built from the limestone quarried here. It had enough limestone to spare for a couple of harbourside temples in Auckland as well.

As a proudly Victorian town, Oamaru's streets are named for rivers in England; the main drag is of course Thames St, and its gaudiest temple, easily outshining its Christian churches, is the then Bank of New South Wales: a creamier, grander version of the Parthenon. The buildings where the wealth actually was generated, at the harbour, lack the Corinthian flourishes of the Thames St buildings; but they too are proud and cream-coloured and cavernous Places of Business.

The harbour declined since, as many a harbour has; and unlike Nelson again, Oamaru is no longer a functioning port city: the harbour here closed in 1975. The harbour and its cavernous storehouses are now the Oamaru historical precinct, hosting tourists in a display of Victoriana. The building next to the restored steam railway even announces itself as Steampunk HQ. But the abandoned ironware beside it isn't gleaming enough for a steampunk novel.

And "abandoned" is what the harbour precinct looks like. Certainly at night, when the only human habitation are the two pubs, well sealed off from the empty street running past them. But even in daytime, when the artisans and period photographers and bakers and souvenir stalls take up residence in the old Places of Business, they look dwarfed and out of place. Not all the warehouses are even half-occupied by artisans and stalls; and we are not sure what some of the warehouses were originally for. The cavernous warehouses are still in truth empty and abandoned, they are no longer Places of Business.

Then again, the one warehouse that was still fulfilling its original purpose is a woolshed, and has the surprisingly familiar stench of sheep dung. That's the thing about nostalgia: the authenticity it yearns for didn't really smell as rosy.

The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame, the Lonely Planet tells me, grew up here, and mythologised the town in her books. I haven't read her books and am unlikely to, but I wonder if her mythology was haunted by the cream-coloured and emptying temples to capitalism. Possibly not: she started publishing in the '50s, and Oamaru was still a functioning port then. But even when the temples were open for business, there must have been something otherworldy about them: a serene cream stone out of place in a small windswept dairy town.

The old limestone quarry is where the cream stone came from: it too is now closed, and its red sheds serve only as the terminus of the restored Steampunk train. Just beyond it though is the visitor's centre for the other commodity Oamaru now trades in: the blue penguin colony.

What New Zealanders term blue penguins, Victorians term fairy penguins, and I've already been to a viewing of fairy penguins on Philip Island. The penguins are just as adorable here: adorable enough to persevere with, as they hesitantly clamber onto land, shake off the water from their feathers, wait to gather enough numbers, and frantically waddle to their nests, a dozen at a time.

We find them adorable, of course, because they are bipeds like us; such a colony involving arthropods would be a much harder sell to visiting tourists. Especially after sundown, in as windy a place as this, at the bottom of the globe.

Well, not quite the bottom of the globe: I'm typing this on the Devil's Galley, just past Palmerston, on the way to Dunedin. Palmerston is a small Otago town, most famous for forcing the much larger Palmerston, on the North Island, to be renamed Palmerston North. The countryside here, like on the way down from Christchurch, is dotted with sheep and cows; but the grassland and trees are more lush here, the coloured less faded. Then again, I've been either faking sleep, or blogging while on the Devil's Galley, so my impressions of the landscape cannot be trusted.

Next stop Dunedin. Where the rains finally catch up with me.

NZ #12: sɒːmɔa

I came to New Zealand not knowing much about the place, and I still don't. What I pick up, unavoidably, I refract through my Australian understanding of the world.

To that understanding, New Zealand is not Ulan Bataar or Abidjan: it's not completely foreign, and much is familiar. There are surprises, but they are scattered.

One surprise was that the Samoa tsunami was a very big deal here: it featured large in the overviews of the year's news. I'd already forgotten it had happened.

Samoan is the third most spoken language in New Zealand; in Australia, the third spot was Greek, yielding now to Arabic. The large Samoan community here, which is starting to make its mark on the New Zealand film industry, is reason enough for New Zealanders to care what happens in Samoa. But Samoa is not on the Mediterranean: it's in the Pacific, like New Zealand is.

And New Zealand seems to recognise that it is in Polynesia, in Maori land and next door to Samoan land. The British did their damnedest to transform the land into a New Britain (or, since that name was taken, a New Ulster and a New Munster): they imported mallard ducks and deer and black swans. But not all of it has stuck. Its first cities have British names and British features, reaching parody levels in Christchurch and Dunedin. But most of the towns have Maori names, and they are pronounced like they have Maori names.

Which is another noteworthy difference with Australia. If an Australian town has a name of indigenous origin, and a lot less do than in New Zealand, the name will get put through the Australian English vowel mangler. There's an outer Melbourne suburb called Yallambie, its second <a> honked and drawled the way New Zealanders like to make fun of on Australian Gladiators ads: [jəɫæ̃̃ːmbiː]. That name started out indigenous, but noone has any particular motivating to pronounce it like it is.

Not so here. The Pakeha pronounce initial [ŋ] where they have to. Listening to the weather forecast is like flicking between TV1 and Maori TV: the Maori placenames are pronounced with a respect for their source phonology unwonted in English. Especially the /a/ in long vowels and diphthongs: its a back, rounded [ɒ] that doesn't belong in New Zealand English, but does belong in New Zealand. It's the vowel of Māori and Tauranga and Aotearoa, and it's certainly not what an Australian would do with the vowel.

For what an Australian would do with the vowel, see [jəɫæ̃̃ːmbiː]. And remember, we do NOT sound like the dregs of the London sewerage system. (The business with the [æ̃̃ː] is actually a class marker in Australia, which is why it's possible to make fun of it. Not *seemly* to, but possible to.)

It's armchair sociolinguistics of the worst kind to read much into phonetic loans (or for that matter nasalised front vowels). But armchair sociolinguistics is a fun sport, and I think it means something that New Zealanders of European heritage reproduce indigenous vowels more than Australians of European heritage do. It tells you that the indigenous language hasn't been eradicated, for a start. New Zealand still hears Maori spoken by 5% of its population.

And Samoan by 3%, and that brings me back to the Samoan tsunami. In Australia, when the Samoan tsunami was mentioned, it was [səməʉən], its vowels suitably flattened for Australian consumption. Here, the newscasters use the same vowel as for Māoriː it's [sɒːmɔan], its vowels reverently replicated into English.

More reverent than Maori, which after all has its own phonology to follow, and has different things to prove. Maori has no /s/, so the country is called Hāmoa there.

Maori TV, I've got to say, has been pretty good about its language purism. There is a Maori language body to coin new words, or at least sanction phonological assimilation of English loan words, and the language used sounds like it's falling into line. The only codeswitch I've heard so far on the Maori news was consultant. This was in the piece of the fact finding mission to Hāmoa, and the consultants were the people suspected of pocketing much of the relief money for the tsunami. I can see why Maori wouldn't deign coin a native equivalent.

NZ #11: Akaroa

Akaroa, "Long Harbour", is a harbour on a crater on Banks Peninsula, 82 km from Christchurch. Captain Cook thought it was Banks Island, and that's how he named it. Ten million years ago, as the volcano rose from out the sea, he would have been right. The volcano has done its rising now, and what's left is an impossibly picturesque view from the hilltop, of grassland and holidaymakers and tongues of water against small seaside villages, in intense blues and whites and greens that are preordained for postcards.

A couple of those villages and tongues of water tell a history that could have been: Duvauchelle, Le Bons Bay, French Bay. Fifty-odd French settlers came to Akaroa in 1840, and founded a settlement there. German Bay would have told the story that German settlers came with them; but in a fit of Great War hysteria, that name was effaced from the map, and what was their bay is now Takamatua.

The French settlers would have founded a colony too, and New Munster would have become Nouveau Nantes, had the HMS Britomart not raced down from New Ulster to claim the island for Queen Victoria.

Mercifully, the North and South island are no longer called New Ulster and New Munster, although Auckland's central railway station is named for the Britomart. In appointing itself as Middle Earth, however, the South Island is reverting to an older name, in a way. The tiny Stewart Island, 35 km south of Bluff, was originally called the South Island; and Aoraki's Canoe was not the South, but the Middle Island.

I'm not going to Stewart Island this trip: the prospect of seeing kiwi birds in the wild would attract many a tourist, but I am not one of them. Instead, I'm going to see what a French-settled New Zealand Town looks like.

A lot more British settlers moved to Akaroa than French, once the French sold their land to the New Zealand Company. With that, and with seven generations elapsed, Akaroa is not terribly French anymore, except where it will help the tourist trade. The car mechanic announces his trade in French, the butcher's is Le Boucherie du Village, and the local police station calls itself a Gendarmerie. But they're not really fooling anyone. The memorial to the war dead has no time for such frivolity: it is dedicated to somberness and the anglophone Empire, and among the fifty or so dead are only a couple of French surnames. (The village now only has 660 permanent residents; the Great War had a rich harvest here.)

But the tourists are here for the French heritage, and the village will not disappoint. French flags are everywhere, and every second shop has a French title. Many visitors have a French accent. The good townsfolk don't take it terribly seriously: I doubt they have sought out French embassy funding for the annual escargot race.

Still, they're interested enough in their French history to do travels of their own. The Akaroa Mail has had a permanent enough Slow News Day that its latest issue breathlessly rereports the Metropole Hotel burning down—forty years ago. It also reports that there will be a slideshow on the 17th from a townsman's recent visit to St Helens. Where the Christchurch willow trees came from.

Akaroa is very agreeable, but I was curious if the French and German settlers left anything behind that wasn't just for the tourists. The local museum confirmed the settlement was French in 1840, and the restored cottage had furniture that came from the continent; but the museum's coverage fast-forwarded from 1840 to 1900 pretty quickly, and there was little hint of how much and how long Akaroa stayed French.

The hints around the town say, not very. There is a Catholic church, but it's St Patrick's, not Saint-Denis. There is a French and an English quarter, and the street names reflect that: Rue Lavaud turns into Beach Rd, and on the French side it probably always has been Rue Lavaud: the couple of newspaper clippings in the museum show it wasn't renamed for at least three generations. But the pubs in the French Quarter from the 1870s don't have French names: Hotel Madeira is as close to the continent as they get. Conversely, the English quarter, where the wharf is, has more than its portion of French-named shops now. Just as the distinctive East German traffic lights are now turning up in West Berlin, in fact: they've spread there now, because they're what the tourists expect to see there.

There is a Catholic cemetery in Akaroa, but the signposts are to "CoE Cemetery" and "RC and Dissenters Cemetery". That dichotomy already tells you you're in Church of England territory, which was the whole point of establishing Christchurch: not only did the Catholics get the other cemetery, but they got lumped in with the Protestants disloyal to the Church of England. That there even is a difference between Methodists and Anglicans is something most of the Anglosphere doesn't bother to remind you of any more.

There was one further hint on how quickly the French past was discarded, before the tourists came looking for it. Up the hill behind St Patrick's is the Old French Cemetery; the new Catholic And Dissenters cemetery is on the other side of the village, next to the CoE Cemetery. The trail up to the Old French cemetery is steep and windy, and barely footworn. And when you get to the top of the trail, all that's left of the Old French cemetery is a small obelisk and a flat enclosure.

The sign next to the enclosure explains what happened. In 1925, the New Zealand Government came to restore the cemetery. It found most of the headstones missing, with only a few mounds and fallen crosses hinting that French settlers were buried here. The restorers put on the obelisk the dozen names they could recover from the crosses, along with the two surviving plaques.

Ci git le corps de Le Lièvre Edouard, Agé de 35 ans, Cap^ne du navire Heva, décedé à Akaroa le 11 mai 1842. Priez pour lui.

Ici repose le corps de M^r Pierre Le Buffe Commis de la Marine age de 26 ans mort le 8 9^bre 1842 a bord de la c^te L' Allier a Akaroa. Priez pour lui.

The local community restored the ground again in 1990. (A safe enough time after the Rainbow Warrior bombing.) A holiday house is being built next door.

Michael King's History of New Zealand writes about both the Maori and the Pakeha life of the island, in separate chapters. King is defensive about the Pakeha side: he argues they had good intentions even if they did not always live up to them. He notes, with more resentment than he should be letting on, the contrast between the Maori, who can now successfully block freeways being built on their ancestral land, and the freeway about to bulldoze over the house and ashes of Frank Sargeson, one of the great Pakeha prose writers of New Zealand. (King died in 2003; I'll assume they succeeded.) There is a sense among some Pakeha, he writes—again, letting on more than he should—that the pendulum has swung too far: that the Maoris' mana and taonga and wahi tapu, their prestige and cultural treasures and sacred places, are honoured, and the Paheka's are not.

A pendulum swinging presupposes that there is a zero sum game in cultural heritage; but the only people who should be tallying credit points that way are the people building freeways. For the rest, there is enough mana to go around, and enough to claim as taonga.

Some Maori may be surprised at the claims, given the stereotypes they have developed of the Pakeha over the years: greedy, cunning, dishonouring their dead. The state of the Old French Cemetery in 1925 fit that stereotype well enough. But if the Pakeha are now asserting that they too have a heritage that matters—then maybe they have learned something from the Maori after all.

NZ #10: Christchurch

Christchurch is about the same size as Wellington, and it has its CBD precincts set out like Wellington does. It has High St to correspond to Lambton Quay for high tone shopping; the Strip on Oxford Tce to correspond to Courtney Place for eats and drinks; the South of Lichfield alleyway to correspond to Cuba St (or Auckland's Vulcan Lane) for self-conscious funkiness. Everything a little tamer here, But also, everything a little smaller than in Wellington—and a lot quirkier. (There are no bicycles riding up a wall in Cuba St. And Cuban Socialist Realism is no match for fake beer ads about Virgin Ale.)

There are reasons for all this: Christchurch has been behind the starting line in its quest for urban chic, and has had to go into overtime to catch up.

Christchurch, the guidebooks alert you, is the most English of cities in New Zealand, with New Zealand already an inordinately British place by New World standards. Christchurch was founded to bring Anglican and Yeoman order to the South Island, after the French gave up their colony an hour's drive away, in Akaroa. The South Island narrowly missed being annexed by the tribe of Marion, as the Maori termed the French—Marion du Fresne being the French explorer who was skulking around these parts, and the excuse for setting the Treaty of Waitangi in motion. And the British were anxious to stake their claim.

When Christchurch was founded in 1850, then, it was adamantly part of Victoria's Empire; and while most Victorian Empire streets are named after dignities and royalty, Christchurch's streets asseverate their imperial heritage. The East–West streets are named for the recesses of Britain's Green and Pleasant Land: Salisbury, Peterborough, Kilmore, Chester, Armagh, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford. The North–South streets are the furthest reaches of red on the globe: Barbadoes St, Madras St, Colombo St.

Montreal St. Because in 1850, Montreal had no accent aigu, and was as proudly British as... well, as Madras and Colombo were.

There is a Britishness to be seen about the place still: more monumental stone (and less wood), more statues (including a prominent Queen Victoria and a just as prominent Scott of the Antarctic), more inscriptions commemorating patriotic duty. Quid Non Pro Patria, the Remembrance Bridge bellows: What Would You Not Do For Your Country?

That's a dangerous question to have inscribed on your bridges these days:

• Is My Country meant to be where I was born and live, or literally the other side of the world? (Most New Zealanders answered the latter for the greater part of their history.)
  
• What Wouldn't I Do? How long have you got? And do we start at paternalistic colonial policies, or move straight to genocide?

I won't single out the Kiwis for this modernist blame; it's the legacy of all nationalisms, and all colonialisms. But the memorialisations of the legacy are thicker on the ground here than I've been accustomed to.

Christchurch is also British in its river. The river, inevitably, was named Avon. With Oxford Terrace and Cambridge Terrace crossing the Avon, we get incongruity such as the Oxford-on-Avon tavern, across from the Bard-on-Avon pub. But situating Oxford on the Avon is not much more incongruous to begin with than situating an Avon on Aoraki's Canoe.

Christchurch is renowned for its British architecture, and (until recently) its British monoculture. But its British river is its glory, and I spent a half hour being punted around the river, in such bliss in the January sun and park greenery, that I was hard put to walk afterwards. I wouldn't necessarily confirm or deny that it was better than sex; but it glowed.

If you go digging, of course, you'll find the river is not as British as it looks.

• The Antigua St boatsheds may have been built in 1882, but the Punt On The Avon operators are Est. 1994: the jackets may be straight out of an episode of Morse, but this is cultural reinvention, not cultural continuity from the Thames Valley.
• The punters share the river with kayakers and pedal boats from the same boatshed: the Avon is not servicing only the nostalgic slow-motion past, but also the hyperactive action-man present tourist, marking time till they go bungie jumping in Queenstown.
• The Avon is lined with weeping willows, but they aren't Ophelia's. A plaque states they were brought with the French to Akaroa—from St Helens. Christchurch may have been bellowing its Brittanicity, but its willows were commemorating Napoleon.
• The river is thick with European mallard ducks; but the native Whio ducks, smaller and quicker, persist along them, and dive for food where the mallard just hang around for the river surface's bounty.

The whio can see what's at the bottom of the Avon, after all. Just as well. They wouldn't last five minutes on Melbourne's Beautiful Brown Yarra.

The Cathedral Square also is more layered than I expected. The Cathedral itself is stately enough, although I'm surprised it didn't go more gothic. The Old Post Office (now Tourist Centre and Starbucks—is there any GPO Building that's still a going concern?) is festively Italianate. And with the open spaces of the square, the modernist cone sculpture (a ferny chalice), the fast food carts, the milling backpackers, the buskers (some amplified), and the outdoor café tables, this did not look like an English village commons. This looked like a piazza.

A piazza with a bungee jump platform for infants; but for all I know that probably happens in Italy now too. A piazza with 19th century trams as well (tourist use only); but I hear they have trams in Europe as well.

I did not have a productive time of the Christchurch tourist tram service, I must say. But I enjoyed the punting too much to permit myself to vent here about a bomb scare grounding all trams for at least two hours. It would be unseemly to start grousing about who'd bother planting a bomb in Christchurch.

Nor will I say much about Christchurch's newspaper, the Press—other than to say that the New Zealand Herald, a newspaper of four million people, seemed to suffer from permanent Slow News Day malaise—and the Press has a tenth of the catchment of the Herald.

But what matters is, you can go punting here. And floating across the Avon, I can't say I missed the lack of news at all. Why, I wasn't even itching for internet connectivity...

NZ #9: The Great New Zealand Vowel Shift

To the dull-eared outsider, antipodaeans all sound the same. Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans all sound somewhat cockney, because all the dull-eared outsider can pick up is that we drop our r's. The most dull-eared I've ever encountered is a colleague in the States, who was looking to deride my accent, and so started doing his best JFK. Right. Because Australian sounds exactly like Bostonian, and the absence of r's is the only difference between dialects of English.

To the over-sensitive insider, there is a world of difference between antipodaean dialects. And having only been exposed to one New Zealander at a time in Australia, I'm still adjusting to the fact that they really do all talk like that here.

There's gradiation of how strong the accent is on TV, although I haven't worked out the rules yet. News anchors sound close to a prestige variant; to my surprise, the prestige variant does not sound very different from General Australian. Weather readers sound more local, and ads trade in accent stereotype, as they do in Australia. Prestige sells news, folksiness sells kitchenware.

There's also the added complexity of Maori and Pacific Islander English, which sounds different again: same vowel shifts as in Pakeha English, but the back vowels more back and rounder. I haven't heard enough to tell whether this is consistently the case, and what the differences are between Maori and the other Polynesians.

So in lieu of actually working out what the social stratification is of New Zealand vowels, I will write on how they shed light on vowel change in Middle English.

English is notorious for its Great Vowel shift. A little after Chaucer, the pronunciation of the long vowels of English rotated, just after English spelling had been fixed. The spelling of long vowels used to make sense: a long <a> was a long version of a short <a>, a long <i> was a long version of a short <i>. Within a century, it all stopped making sense:

• Long <i> went from [iː] to [əi] (and eventually [ai])
  
• Long <e> or <ee> went from [eː] to [iː]
  
• <ea> usually went from [ɛː] to [eː] (and eventually [iː] as well). Sometimes it stayed put, which is why weak does not rhyme with steak
  
• Long <a> went from [aː] to [ɛː] (and eventually [ei])
  

And a similar rotation happened with back vowelsː [uː] to [əu] and eventually [au], <oo> from [oː] to [uː], <oa> from [ɔː] to [oː] and eventually [ou].

Now this is a bizarre thing to have happened; that it affected all the long vowels of English tells us that the vowels are an interconnected system, and a disruption to one vowel disrupts all the other vowels in turn.

Two causes have been proposed for this kind of development. The push model says that one vowel changing caused ambiguity with the next vowel, so the next vowel had to change in turn to avoid the ambiguity; but its shift caused ambiguity with the next vowel along, so all the vowels had to change to make way for each other. So once mate stopped being pronounced as [maːt], and started being pronounced as [mɛːt], it became ambiguous with meat. The [ɛː] vowel then had to change in turn, so meat sounded like [meːt], which was now ambiguous with meet. And so on.

That's a satisfying, logical answer: language is used for communication, ambiguity gets in the way for communication, the vowel shift deals with ambiguity.

The catch is, meet and meat now do sound the same. So it's not like that strategy paid off.

The alternate account is a pull model. Once a shift in the vowels happened, there was a gap in the vowel system, which made it more odd to learn for children. Children compensated by shifting the next vowel up to fill the gap. But this just created a new gap, and the vowels kept rotating, until the gaps in the system were filled again.

So once [iː] turned into [əi], English turned into a language without an [iː]. A language with long vowels but without a long [iː] is an odd language indeed; and children corrected that oddity by turning [eː] into [iː]. That meant that English now had an [ɛː] and an [iː] but no [eː], and so the vowels kept rotating. (English ended up without an [aː], so there's still imbalance in American English, although dropping r's fixed that elsewhere, because [aɹ] turned into [aː]. But the gap filling, like all language change, is by its nature haphazard.)

That account... is not satisfying and logical: it makes of English vowels an algebraic, typological game, and it turns children learning the language into neurotic typologists. The thing is, the shift in New Zealand vowels is its own vowel rotation—this time involving just front short vowels. And the developments in New Zealand support the pull model.

New Zealand English and its development has been thoroughly and meticulously investigated by the linguists here. So the linguists here will be able to tell you precisely when each vowel changed. Because I am not a New Zealand linguist, I will instead reconstruct the sequence based on when Australian ads started making fun of them.

You would have thought a people who some might say sounds like the dregs of the London sewerage system have no standing to deride their neighbours' accent. You'd be wrong of course, self-criticism is not the point of differentiating yourself from your neighbours, and we so do NOT sound like the dregs of the London sewerage system at all.

Ahem.

The earliest and most stereotypical vowel change was [ɪ] to [ɨ]. To the dull-eared Australian, [ɨ] sounds like [ə], "uh". Australian jokes about "uh" were already in swing by the early 1980s. "Australia Sux", the New Zealander is meant to have graffiti'd, to which the Australian daubed underneath "New Zealand Nil". (Because "sucks" is how New Zealanders are meant to pronounce "six".) And most Australian jokes still centre around this vowel change, particularly the more halfwitted variety on breakfast radio.

The change of [ɛ] to [ɪ] doesn't get as much airplay, but it was being mentioned in ads by the 1990s. The first I recollect was for the Mainland Cheese brand.

—Mainland Cheese hilps to keep you fitter.
—Fitta? As in the cheese?
—Not Feta! Fitter!

(I've just found out what Mainland means here: it was the South Island literally, when the South Island was where everything was at, and it is the South Island ironically, for the past century.)

The last change to happen, given the distribution of short front vowels in English, is [æ] to [ɛ]. The comedians Across the Ditch [= Tasman] have not yet latched on to this, and I wasn't sure the change had happened at all; but I have now got confirmation of it. First from a TV ad, extolling the "messive, messive summer sale" at Briscoes. Then a few days later at the winery, with reference to a "desh of gin". ([mɛsɨv mɛsɨv samə sɛɪl], [dɛʃ əv dʒɨn])

And the sequence means that the change wasn't motivated by ambiguity. Bid didn't change to buhd to keep out of the way of bed turning into bid. Bid changing to buhd created a gap, for bed to fill by changing into bid.

I still can't believe they all actually talk like that here though...

NZ #8: Blenheim

First, some housekeeping announcements.

• Note to the dude who stole my seat as I got back on the bus to Christchurch at Kaikoura. (a) If you were sitting there before, how come my History of New Zealand is on the seat next to you? (b) I trust you have had a satisfying holiday and in general a full life, because I will fricking murder you.
  
• Note to self: watch less action movies. A lot less, they're giving me ideas. That film Wanted last night on the Movie Channel was a thuggish mess, albeit with de rigeur impressive special effects. It's all the more annoying because vengeance scenarios are seductive—though maybe less so when the (anti-)hero is shooting his pursuers through his main adversary's head.
  Although as a mechanism to discourage tourists from stealing others' seats on the InterCity bus, it does have something to recommend it...
  
• Note to the manufacturers of "Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills: it ain't working. I am minded of a book on Cretan grammar I have somewhere, which is a fitting example sentence, begotten of the same combination of mountainous roads and long-distance bus transport that I am currently undergoing: "I hate the devil's galley, the bus (του διαόλου το κάτεργο, το λεωφορείο): every time I go on it, I end up vomiting."
  Maybe that would be a more effective mechanism of discouraging bus seat theft.
  
• Note to the visually minded readers of this blog: I am still taking pictures, though I emphatically won't be taking pictures from a moving Devil's Galley. At this rate, I will probably do photo essays when I go back, instead of on the road.

That concludes this morning's announcements.

I am on the bus from Blenheim to Christchurch; I've kept my eyes shut on the first leg, because "Sea Legs" haven't really been working. The first leg has taken me up to Kaikoura, site of whalewatching and overpriced crayfish, As it happens, that is what Kaikoura means in Maori: kai, "food", koura, "crayfish", and Ø, "overpriced". (The "overpriced" is silent.)

Blenheim is pronounced not [blɛnhaɪm], but [blɪnəm], "Blinnum". Blenheim is a small flat country town of three thousand souls, with several churches, a nice public square, five pharmacies none of which were open on Sunday January 3 to dispense "Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills, and an on-hotel restaurant, Nikau, offering quite tasty seared Nelson scallops. This makes up for me getting lost in the Nelson waterfront, trying to find Nelson scallops closer to the source.

The reason why tourists stop off at Blenheim is that it is the gateway to the Marlborough wine country of New Zealand, the land that has given the world the best Sauvignon Blancs ever quaffed. Delights of dry and refreshing amber fruitiness.

Although there has been talk of viticulture in New Zealand for a long time, wine here is fairly recent—starting in the seventies. It's also been explosive: the winery count has gone from a dozen twenty years ago to 130, and it's now 90% of arable land or thereabouts. The experts on the winery tour I snuck in on dropped the science on us as to why this is nonpareil wine country: lots of rivers but little rain, microclimates in the valley, Wellington-force winds that keep the bugs away, geologically eventful soil. Well, I just know the wine tastes good.

I didn't make it to a full-day tour, which is truly just as well: four wineries were enough to throw me into a couple of hours of stupor afterwards. For any readers who might be of the oenophile persuasion, these are the highlights:

• The Chardonnay is refermented in the bottle, which is supposed to give it a buttery taste. It truly was buttery, and I hadn't noticed that kind of thing before. Best in breed: Bouldevines Chardonnay 2006. I think they're too small a company to export.
  
• Gewürtztraminer is supposed to taste like a combination of lychee and Turkish delight. The Gewürtz I nursed in Wellington, shielding myself from gales and tumbleweeds at the hotel bar, didn't. The Gewürtzen I had here all did, although in line with the rest of what they do, the Bladen went easy on the lychee, and just did the Turkish delight.
  
• It didn't help that Bladen were the last winery I went to, but if Hamlet feared that high tragedy was caviar to the general, then you can call Bladen Beluga, and point out that I live on Ulysses S. Grant Street. Bladen wines are subtle and delicate, their flavours hinted at rather than proclaimed. This wins them awards with wine critics. With my blunt palate, all it wins them is, "WHAT'S THAT? SPEAK UP SON, I CAN'T HEAR YOU. YOU'RE A PINOT QUI?"
  
• Framingham specialise in Riesling (and in very cool cellars, both literally and figuratively). I didn't understand their Dry Riesling: its flavours clashed. But both the Classic and the Select Riesling were very good; the Select in particular was candied on entry, but clean going down, without the cloying aftertaste it seemed to presage.
  
• It helps Forrest that wine tourers are greeted by a walking encyclopaedia of viticulture, but I was taken with both their Doctor's Riesling, and their Chardonnay—the latter easier on the butter than the Bouldevines, and with more of a kick, the former unexpectedly apple-tasting.

I didn't actually seek out the Sauvignon Blancs in the tour, which are the majority of what most wineries do here. The default Marlborough Sav Blanc you see overseas is that bottled by the local behemoth, Montana (who also owns Stoneleigh); behemoth it might be, but its Sav Blanc holds up against its more boutique competitors. The Rieslings were the real surprise here. All of them went down very smoothly, more smoothly than a Riesling should by rights.

"Sea Legs" anti-motion sickness pills proclaim themselves incompatible with alcohol, though, so I need to take leave of talk of Marlborough wine, as I'm taking leave of Marlborough itself. I think I'll close my eyes again, and visualise happy thoughts.

Such as the demise of the dude who stole my seat at Kaikoura....

NZ #7: Musket Wars

Over New Year's Eve, I read the 500-odd pages of Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand. There was a hardcover edition, but I wasn't disposed to pay an extra $40 for colour illustrations and callout quotes. I'm not a visual person, and my suitcase allowance is finite. The paperback is still weighty enough, even if it doesn't have daguerreotypes.

(Hey, the Linux spellchecker knows about daguerreotypes. Impressive. If only it could deal with straight apostrophes too.)

So what did I learn about the country? A couple of things, which I'll regurgitate here in my accustomed ignorance.

I'd already read about the Musket Wars from other literature, including the claim everyone professed to be reticent in making, and everyone made anyway, as to how the Musket Wars ended. Around 1820, the northernmost Maori tribes got access to muskets. Even more crucially, they got access to potatoes, which were easier to farm and less perishable than the local sweet potatoes. So their raiding parties could besiege a fortification for months rather than weeks, with thousands rather than hundreds freed up from subsistence farming, and with gunpowder.

In the earliest stage of Maori settlement, the colonial phase, the scholars conclude the Maori tribes collaborated to tame the land, and eat up all the free protein. Once they ran out of free food, the tribes became competitive, and the rules of reciprocity and honour meant tribes could sustain grievances for decades. So when the northernmost tribes got guns and provisions, it was payback time against the tribes further south. And when those tribes further south got guns and provisions in turn, it was payback time for them—not against the northerners who'd been slaughtering them, and still had firepower—but against the tribes still further south who didn't have guns yet.

This kept going for a couple of decades, until the Brits established governorship (with different understanding from the Maori as to how far governorship went), and Christianity was introduced, and—the reticent but obvious conclusion—all the tribes had enough firepower to maintain a balance of terror against each other. Soon enough they were fighting the British anyway. (And each other, as some tribes were loyal to the British and some not.)

You might add that with a fifth of Maoridom killed, and another fifth enslaved, and the white man's diseases coming shortly behind, the Musket Wars would have run their course soon enough anyway.

All this put the tribes of the South Island at quite a disadvantage. The South Island was populated later to begin with, and got guns last: there's a reason only 5% of Maori in New Zealand now live in the South Island. Of course, Europeans have always been more eager to proclaim a tribe has died off than are the tribespeople themselves, and there are iwi who maintain cultural continuity in the South Island. But 80% of the island is just one tribe, and King has a little anecdote which illustrates what was lost: not just the people, but their stories.

Oral history of indigenous peoples preserves memory of first contact with Europeans, which after all was a pretty big deal. The people may have had to cast it into mythological context, or their own societal context, to make sense of it; but the stories did stick around. Fifty years after Captain Cook, the Maori would tell tales of the noble bearing of the visitor. First contact with the Moriori, a Maori offshoot on the Chatham Islands 800 km away, made even more of an impact: the Moriori were so shocked by the Europeans' use of gunpowder (according to King at least), they renounced warfare.

But neither was the first contact the Maori had with white people. The first contact was with Abel Tasman, a century before, at Golden Bay—not far from where I am typing these lines, in the north of South Island. We have Tasman's account of what happened, and his name for Golden Bay: Murderers' Bay. We don't have the Ngati Tumatakokiri account of what happened, because after the Musket Wars, we don't have the Ngati Tumatakokiri account of anything. There are Maori tribes here still, but they came south with the muskets.

No, the Maori were not hippy, peace-loving, in-tune-with-the-land, positive energy plaster saints out of Rousseau. Of course, being human and not plaster saints, no indigenous people are. With the possible exception of the Moriori, and their pacifism got them enslaved by the New Zealand Maori, once they came across on the White Man's ships. It also got them recast as Melanesians by 19th century anthropologists: if a people could be enslaved by the Maori without firing a shot, surely they were an earlier wave of human migration, of inferior racial stock.

Some head hunters from the Indonesian archipelago may want to take issue with that assessment. The 19th century line about the Moriori is no longer being peddled, and the Moriori are reasserting their identity; but it took almost a century to dislodge.

It would be difficult even without the Musket Wars for the Maori to feel like they were one people, and make common cause, unless external adversity forced them to. Which after all is how common identity is normally forged. The Maori had seen noone but Maori for half a millennium; they had no more cause to identify with each other than Russians do with Bolivians. All their identity, their sense of culture and obligation and making sense of the world, inhered in the tribe; to call them Maori, you might as well have called them just Human Beings. (Which, after a fashion, is exactly what "Maori" means: "common, ordinary"—not divine.)

And that's why the culturally right thing to do, whenever a Maori is named—including on Maori TV—is to adjoin their tribal affiliation.

With that, forging a common identity as Maori is an artifice of circumstance, and as such would feel pretty artificial. King's history quotes John Rangihau of Tuhoe on it (p. 366), and I find it's both infuriating, and makes all the sense in the world:

it seems to me there is no such think as Maoritanga because Maoritanga is an ill-inclusive term... I have a faint suspicion that [it] is a term coined by the Pakeha to bring all the tribes together. Because if you cannot divide and rule, then for tribal people all you can do is unite them and rule. Because then they lose everything by losing [the] tribal history and traditions that gave them their identity.

I'm reminded by this, once again, of the fate of East Sutherland Gaelic.

The only way Gaelic can survive in a modern environment is as a standardised language, a prestigious and elaborated language of schooling and media. The people actually still speaking Gaelic, such as on East Sutherland, don't speak a standard Gaelic: the only real Gaelic to them, the language of their identity and patrimony, is a dialect, which diverges from the next dialect down the road, which diverges from the dialect on the other side of the Highlands. It's nonsense for BBC Scotland to transmit in every hill and dale's dialect: that's not a feasible strategy to survive Gaelic. But by transmitting an alien version of Gaelic to the Highlands hills and dales, native to none of them and unfamiliar to all of them, the remaining speakers just feel even worse about what they do speak. A standard Gaelic is not the language of their soul.

Just as a standardised Maoritanga is not the Maoritanga a tribe can claim allegiance to. You needn't posit Pakeha malice to see why One Maoridom could be of advantage to Maori, and having the tribes work together would win them more than having them work in competition. And you needn't posit Maori orneriness to appreciate the importance of authenticity to any identity construction.

All of which is true, but there is some extratribal Maori identity in the mix now anyway, with urban Maori founding their own marae; and the Maori have made common cause in claiming their rights. And that doesn't displace the importance of tribes in establishing Maori identity; it just makes it complicated. As identity tends to be these days.

Hm. That meandered a bit. I have a lot more to learn. That doesn't get in the way of me posting though...

NZ #6: Nelson

A town of 40,000 counts as the Big Smoke around these parts. Guess I'm in rural New Zealand now.

Nelson's flat, by Wellington and Auckland standards, which makes it feel sunny and open. The Marlborough region which Nelson abuts gets the most sunshine of New Zealand—and they have the vineyards to prove it. They had some sunshine to prove it yesterday too, though once again I've been playing hide-and-seek with the rain: there'd been a downpour just before my plane landed, and the tarmac was still steaming through the coupling of aircraft wheels and morning light.

Nelson is a tourist gathering point, and at Saturday midmorning was teeming with ambling backpackers, oscillating around the Saturday market. A fair hippy quotient, with the requisite crystals and pan pipes and woodcraft, alongside the whitebait patties and cherries and bush honey-flavoured whisky. And universally ignored buskers, all of them on acoustic guitar.

Not my thing, really, but it looked like being most people there's thing.

Nelson is presided over by a cathedral, which took decades to finish as cathedrals usually do, and switched architectural styles along the way, again as cathedrals usually do. The architectural switch would happen in Europe because cathedrals took centuries; here it took decades, but it was the 20th century, when everything started happening faster. Even in New Zealand, by the '60s.

The fusion has worked out here: the slender belltower that the cathedral presents to the town centre is at odds with the squat strength of the entrance at the other side, but both are coherent where they stand.

As a hill in the middle of flatland, Church Hill was known to the Maori as Piki Mai, "climb hither". Church Hill started out as Maori fortifications, and when the Maori weren't using it, as Pakeha fortifications—Fort Arthur, garrisoned for fear of a revenge attack in 1842. There are signs beside the cathedral telling the history, but the cathedral itself sidesteps its forebears deftly with a Maori subtitle: Haere mai, Piki mai! Welcome hither, Climb hither.

To the east of the cathedral is the other tourist attraction of Nelson proper, South St. South St is a street full of 1860s workers' cottages, painstakingly maintained as private residences and B & B's. It's all wood, house after house, which as you'll have read normally gets my back up. But this manifestation at least had the benefit of neatness and affluence to it. They aren't workers' cottages any more. The tourists don't seem to have paid South St much mind: it was deserted apart from a teenager taking his radio operated car for a spin.

Nelson is a port city, its foreshore littered with containers and timber. My taxi driver informed me that lots of timber workers have lost their jobs with the recession, and the timber exporters finding it cheaper to process the timber offshore. But the port is still a place of active commerce.

The port is also a place of waterfront seafood restaurants, and I was aiming to report back on the taste of Nelson scallops. However, the tourist map I was using did no capture the complexity of streets around the port. After half an hour of walking through containers, I gave up and went back into town—one street before the road that actually led to the restaurants. This means I owe myself a scallop dinner further south.

And that's it for Nelson

NZ #5: Wellington on New Year's Eve

With the necessary preamble that this yet again is terribly disjointed—I'm not managing the grand narratives this trip that I did in England, mainly because I'm not particularly goal driven this time around in where I'm going.

So.

I beg leave to report that the one culinary establishment I was looking forward to in Wellington, as recommended by Lonely Planet—the Maori fusion establishment Kai in the City—has recently closed its doors. That is, unless the Maori fusion has extended to being 100% Thai cuisine. All that survives of Kai is a couple of letters of the sign indicating its bottle bar. The Bastille Bistro across Majoribanks St, which was to serve as my backup on Dec 30, likewise is gone, supplanted by a fish restaurant. (A little more survives of it: a huge PERNOD awning.)

I was rather looking forward to finding out what meat buried over coals tastes like. Yes, I know I'm supposed to be familiar with it through klephtiko, but I don't think I've actually ever had klephtiko. Another Greek delicacy that hasn't quite made it across to Crete.

When I realised Kai in the City is gone, I had a twinge of inauthenticity regret: the rest of my time in NZ will be on the South Island (already started as I type these lines), and with 5% of the Maori population living in Te Waka a Aoraki (Aoraki's Canoe, aka South Island), any Maori food I'd eat from now own would be just for tourists.

As if eating at a restaurant is such an authentically Maori thing to do, I realised, and went next door to a Modern New Zealand Cuisine establishment.

There were people out and about after hours in Courtney Place—the booze and youngster epicentre of Wellington, down the road from Cuba St, the coffee and hipster epicentre. This iteration, I'd been staying near Lambton Quay, the retail and high tone epicentre.

Lambton Quay is high tone enough to terminate at the seat of New Zealand Government: Old Government House (which looked too much like the Old Government House in Auckland, including the surfeit of wood); Parliament Library (a pretty neo-gothic confection); Parliament itself (built at a time when New Zealanders finally realised the innate dignity of stone); and the controversial Beehive building. Conservative fuddy-duddies did not appreciate the bold modernist vision of a round concrete-and-wire tower, antagonising the marble parapets next door. Count me with the conservative fuddy-duddies: it's arrogance, it's an eyesore, and it's dysfunctional. (As the taxi driver defending it conceded to me, a round government building does not allow hierarchical placing of corner offices; and the Civil Service cannot do without hierarchically placed offices.)

The problem with government offices precincts is, nothing much else is going on around them. There is a Backbencher Pub across the road from the parliament; and Kate Shepherd, whose lobbying made New Zealand the first country to give women the vote, is now an apartment complex—facing off the statue of Prime Minister Seddon who campaigned against it. And that's it for the government offices precinct.

The problem with high tone epicentres is, they empty out after 5 PM; and with Cuba St and Courtney Place already set up, Wellington hasn't felt the need to extend the nightlife to the retail precinct, the way Melbourne has. I made the mistake of getting stir crazy at 10 PM, New Year's Day, and wandering out for a bite. I saw nothing for the next kilometre but shuttered shop windows and tumbleweeds.

Well, maybe not literal tumbleweeds, but it was certainly windy enough for tumbleweeds to blow in from the American Southwest. Strong winds. "This is no longer cute" winds. "Now you know why they call it Wuhndy Willington" winds. "Wuthering Heights" winds.

"You're getting something from Room Service tonight" winds.

It hasn't helped that the holiday season sees many of the shops shut down even in daytime. Still, I've been lucky with the weather so far; I've been in the vicinity of rain and wind, but haven't yet had to sacrifice a daytime's exploring to it. But unless you're in the far north of the North Island, the weather so far has barely been springlike, let alone Southern Hemisphere December. I've packed shorts; I needn't have bothered, and as I head from south to more south on Aoraki's Canoe, there's no prospect of the shorts being exposed to sunlight now.

That's probably yet another result of the Weather Going Crazy, and us All Being Doomed. But it's also because New Zealand is closer to the pole. The local vodka is called 42° Below, and as I was nursing a Gewürtztraminer last night at the piano bar, huddling from the gales and tumbleweeds outside, I realised why. That's not a temperature of vodka refrigeration, and -42° vodka icicles would probably be something of a health hazard anyway. No, that 42°S Latitude. And with Melbourne at 38°S, that means I'm no longer in the equivalent of Milan, but Amsterdam. It gets cold here.

Just that smidgeon too cold for an outdoors New Year's Eve to make sense, the way it does in Sydney or Melbourne. There was a concert underway at Civic Square, and families milling about the waterfront. Some on unicycles: apparently a grand unicyclist jamboree is about to start here. But not the critical mass of people to make me tarry. At least, not north of Courtney Place, but I don't know that I was up for the wall-to-wall boozing.

Yes, yes, I greeted the New Year in a hotel room. Reading New Zealand history, no less.

And if I fell down in how I greeted the New Year, so did New Zealand TV. Movie finishes on TV2 at 11:59:50, five second countdown, Happy New 2010, roll credits for the next movie.

Now that is a cosmic error right there. TV is meant to have programming commensurate to the year change. Lame variety shows, at least. (Though TV1 was already plenty lame with their Year in Review show. Dramatic recitation of Lady Gaga lyrics is not pioneering comedy.)

I flicked around the channels to see if anyone was showing "the crackers", the obligatory New Year's televising of fireworks that happens in normal countries. The only channel that was showing the crackers? Sky News. Which is run out of Australia.

Wonder what was on Maori TV...

NZ #4: Maori TV

Maori TV has not been created for the entertainment of Visiting Whitey. Maori TV is enmeshed in the problematic history of Maori–Pakeha relations, with decades of Pakeha drumming their fingers waiting for the Maori to die off and swindling their land, even as they were congratulating themselves for having the best race relations in the Empire. And Visiting Whitey is not the target audience for the Maori TV news—as I was reminded when a Maori journalist (I think) was being interviewed about her fact finding mission to the Pacific islands in the company of the Prime Minister, and noted her annoyance at feeling like a stranger there, because the rest of the PM's entourage was Pakeha.

And because this is a painful history of a proud people of whom I know nothing (although I recognise the odd word of their language via Tok Pisin or Tetun), it is problematic and fraught for me to venture to say anything about it at all. What I'm about to say is even more problematic. But:

Herewith, you see depicted Amanda Ashton, co-host of the Maori youth program haa. Amanda Ashton is wearing a T-shirt that says "We [heart] Te Reo"—the (Maori) language.

Opoudjis [hearts] Amanda Ashton.

On what basis do I make such a deeply problematic claim? Is it because she is young and cute, and I am a sleaze and a reprobate? No doubt, no doubt; and I was dejected to find out she's already got a kid, which is more than you needed to know about me, I doubt not. Is it because she speaks Maori a mile a minute? Well, yes, that too, although Maori TV is no more there for the edification of linguists than it is for the gratification of whiteys.

But in main, I [heart] Amanda Ashton, because she mugs for the camera. Adorably. I don't know if she had me at kia ora, but she certainly had me by the time the co-host said something about driving down to Queenstown, and she mimed being behind the steering wheel. With a smirk. I surmise that kind of thing is commonplace among VJs, but I haven't actually watched a VJ for well over a decade, so it remains novel to me.

I'm seriously surprised there aren't, like, Facebook fan clubs for Amanda Ashton and all. Maybe it's because that would transgress a cultural precept, and I'm about to be visited by some very angry kinsfolk. They'll have to track me down first, but.

I'm in Maori TV withdrawal right now, because the hotel I'm currently at does not see fit to offer it. (It would get in the way of six-month old releases on the Movie Channel.) But it's fascinating viewing for me, as a Visiting Clueless Whitey, because it's showing me the bicultural tensions of the Maori today. At least, I think that's what it's showing me: most of it isn't subtitled. (It's Maori TV, btw, and not the all-Maori language Te Reo channel, which I haven't spotted yet. Maori TV proper is still something like 70% in Te Reo.)

So on the one extreme, a Maori journalist interviews a Pakeha filmmaker with an American accent on his new film short, which has nothing to do with Maoritanga; all in familiar Government TV film show English—though she does consistently throw to break in Te Reo. Maori TV is already doing what the Ethnic broadcaster SBS does in Australia: it also hosts "alternative" but non-ethnic programming, which the commercial providers won't support. SBS's ethnic audience weren't too happy about that back in the day...

I think the kids' program was also in a familiar enough genre, although that depends on whether the presenter cackling with a green wig on was meant to be a witch, a sea monster, or a punk chick from Cuba St. Like I say, no subtitles.

The News program which I mentioned in comments in a previous post isn't exactly the other extreme, but it did throw me: the intonation and cliches were cookiecutter familiar, but the tribal affiliations and proverbial wisdom were not.

The news content seemed to me to suffer from Smalltown news malaise; Cyprus news has the same problem, and if I can judge from the day before yesterday's issue of the New Zealand Herald, Pakeha New Zealand does too. It's the problem of every day being a slow news day, by BBC News standards. Local social occasions getting airtime; non-politicians being interviewed for longer than a soundbite; unconscious editorialising; no sense of the momentous.

(Bigtown news has its own malaise, of which the most prominent symptom is the soap opera treatment of politics. That's Greece, and US National News, with divergent proportions of slickness to sprawl, and of torpor to hysteria. Australian commercial news is at an unhappy medium: no portentousness, and no groundedness.)

I think I've missed watching the programming that would really have surprised me as alien to me. Not the documentaries; even if the Maoris in the docos speak in their voice in their language, they're the documentary's objects, not the subjects, so that itself is not unfamiliar. I suspect it'd be the Hunting Aotearoa show that I'd have the hardest time understanding.

Even if it is in English.

Maori TV helpfully, and inevitably, has a Teach Yourself Maori show, Tōku Reo, which was the first show I caught while channel flicking (before Amanda Ashton changed my life). I thought testing for listening comprehension through Find The English Loanword was cheating—

Akarae Pokenoe Tariki kirikiti Oamaru whutuporo Tauranga Aotearoa TiiWii

—and there were one too many talking heads cutting up the pacing, and the setup was a bit clunky. But that's a ten minute judgment from a linguist, and don't take my word for it; I'd probably comment on the Pear Stories like an American high school kid too.

OK, now I've got to explain that allusion, don't I. Around 1970, some American linguists made a silent film of a story with some kids stealing pears, showed it to speakers of various languages, and asked people to retell the story. The point was to see how various languages chain sentences together into coherent narratives. Greek was one of the languages surveyed; I think Deborah Tannen did the survey with students from a girls' school.

[Link to Youtube of the video; embedding disabled, because YouTube user Haiweongwas says so...]

And throughout the world, the people shown the film would retell the story of the children who stole the pears, and the farmer who chased after them, each after their own language's predilections. Except for the States. When you showed kids the film in the States, all they'd want to talk about afterwards was how shoddy the cinematography was.

The medium has become the message, and Pop has Eaten Itself, and we're all caught up in style over substance. That "we" probably includes a lot of Maori watching Tōku Reo. The makers of Tōku Reo however are probably doing a much better job than I'd concluded after ten minutes.

They've got podcasts, after all...

NZ #3: Auckland

A prosperous and productive New Year to my readers, and a' that.

Oh yeah, I was in Auckland, wasn't I? Hm. Scenic alright, especially from the vantage of Devonport, with its "dormant" volcanoes dotted with fortifications and cannons, waiting for Imperial Russian fleets that never turned up, and with a clear shot across to the yachts of Viaduct Harbour. You'd better hope Devonport never secedes. Before they were anti-Russian fortifications, the volcanoes were meant to have been Maori fortifications, pa; I couldn't see the evidence, but then again, I didn't quite know where to look.

Apart from fortifications and cannonwork, Devonport is self-conscious about having a village feel. There was a sniff of Brighton about it, and that the word "village" is even allowed here is another confirmation of how British New Zealand got to be. Australia never calls anything a village, unless an upmarket redevelopment is happening 1 km from the CBD.

Come to think of it, Devonport may have been a ferry-ride across the harbour, but it was still 1 km away from the CBD.

Devonport loves wood as building material. Like Auckland does, and as far as I can tell the rest of the island does. The Pakeha arrived and found the islands a cornucopia of trees, just like the Maori had found it a cornucopia of flightless protein, and they went to work harvesting. Landing in Auckland was already noticeably different from Wellington: there was a lot less forest and more grassland. Auckland suburbia also had a more incoherent mix of wood, brick (from the mid 20th century), and concrete.

But the oldest houses were wood. I do not like wood. Weatherboard has connotations of impoverishment to me, and I steer clear of it—which is a feat in Oakleigh, where people are actually putting up weatherboard in place of brick, to blend in. Wood in New Zealand is not a sign of impoverishment. Devonport adorned its affluent verandas with wood latticework, rather than wrought iron; but to my biased eyes, that looked somewhat daft. On the grounds of Auckland University, the Old Government House stands, buildt in 1858. But it looks like an overgrown woodshed. The fact that the front of it was under scaffolding being restored didn't dispel that impression. So I refused to photograph it.

Actually, I'm having trouble accessing my normal photo repository online anyway, and I'm rationing my Internet time, so you won't be any the wiser about my photos anyway. Pity, you miss out on my mad composition skillz.

Auckland CBD itself is a huddle of ill-conceived skyscrapers, punctuated by parkland and funky alleyways. I had high hopes for Aotea Square, but it too is currently a building site. Vulcan Lane is less precious about its alternativeness than Cuba St in Wellington, but it's also over a lot quicker. The Chancery precinct is agreeably snooty; but it's over even quicker. In all, I can't say Auckland grabbed me.

Other than its hilliness. That grabbed me alright. There's no need to go hiking outside of Auckland (let alone tramping, which is what the locals call it). Walking through the CBD is tramping enough; I'm halfway convinced my ears popped on the way back to the hotel.

NZ #2: Wellington (not written in Wellington)

So, I've been in Wellington for, oh, 17 hours, 11 of them in a small hotel room. I'll be back for more tomorrow, but the report so far:

Wellington as seen driving in from the airport is implausibly scenic for a capital city. Suburban houses perched among hills and forests, moving in and out of view like a Magic Eye picture; the suburban houses in odd pastel colours, subtle greens and yellows.

Cuba St is as self-consciously bohemian as I'd been told. Its buildings are agreeably—and purposefully—ramshackle; its erstwhile banks converted to restaurants. The street was named so long before 1960; there's a Panama St to match further north; but the hip cafés have profited from the name, and there's a Fidel's and an Ernesto's Café with prominent Socialist Realist iconography. One does not have to be a devotee of Reaganomics to see a problem with the cuteification of totalitarianism; then again, Ernesto Guevara had already turned into a T-shirt long before Ernesto's Café set up shop.

Coffee in Wellington is fetishised, the way it would be in a city that has emerged from culinary monoculture recently, and has something to prove. They do well to take pride in their coffee here though: it is fierce and raspy.

Cuba St is diverse enough in its culinary offerings to confirm it has something to prove. If I hadn't dined at Cuisine nouveau nouveauzélandaise (Logan–Brown, around the corner from where I was staying), the taquería was next on the list, or the Malay noodle place. Not much past the taquería could be on the list, as it turns out: it's the wrong time of year for restaurants to be open.

Wellington is a compact place: the city proper is 2km end to end. Cuba St, and its purposeful ramshackleness, is over very quickly. I got as far as Lambton Quay, and its closed department stores. (It's that time of year, and Wellington doesn't strike me as a 24/7 kind of place anyway.) I didn't see the government buildings; Thursday I guess.

But I did get to Civic Square. A bit small for a national capital, and I'm not sure I approve of the polka dots on the Wellington City Gallery building. ("Ooh, I'll postmodernly improve on an Art Deco building by piddling on it with paint, aren't I clever.") But it is (otherwise) a dignified setting for the National Library; and the National Library of New Zealand does enough wonders online to merit the dignity.

There is something non-Australian about the Cuba St streetscape (duh), but I couldn't place what constitutes it yet. The streetscape doesn't have rotated vowels, so it isn't the accent. More Polynesian and less East Asian faces on the street, but I don't think that was it either. I'll see if I can work it out in Auckland.

NZ #1: Wellington (with no mention of Wellington)

I salute you, those of my readers who have not already wiped me from their RSS feeds. A couple of months of radio silence have passed: once again Your Correspondent has fallen off the blogging bandwagon, as has happened before and may well happen again. With the benefit of paranoid introspection, I can even venture a guess as to why I'd fallen off the blogging bandwagon, after returning from New Orleans. Although, Dear Remaining Reader(s), neither of us are inebriated enough yet that I can divulge why.

Not that I can tell this side of the Intertubes, anyway.

But lapsing in blogging calls for drastic measures, to restore my voice and pedantry to the Ether. And so it is, Dear Remaining Reader(s), that I am typing these lines from Cuba St, Wellington, New Zealand.

Following the pattern that sees me find more oddity to blog about when I'm out of the country, I have just hauled myself to Aotearoa, for the next 18 days. My connectivity will be spotty: I'm already having; to rely on citywide commercial Wireless, rather than anything in my hotel, to get online. So there'll likely be less hyperlink treasure trove goodness than usual this time around in my posts.

(The wireless provider I'm resorting to is CaféNet. Of course. It *is* Wellington, after all, and Wellington deems itself to be all about coffee and Peter Jackson.)

A drastic solution to a blogging lull, perhaps, going across the Tasman Sea; and that's not quite the reason I had bought the airline tickets. What was more of a reason is, I am embarrassed to acknowledge that I know exceedingly little about the sister country next door. As is the norm for someone from an elder sibling country (US vs Canada, Germany vs Austria, Greece vs Cyprus, Brobdignag vs Liliput). To rectify that, I'm doing what Australians abroad tend to do: I'm going to entirely too many places in entirely too short a time. The itinerary, as far as I can tell right now, is:

• Wellington
  
• Auckland
  
• Wellington again
  
• Nelson
  
• Blenheim
  
• Christchurch
  
• Akaroa
  
• Oamaru
  
• Dunedin
  
• Queenstown
  
• Tourist Daytrip stuff in the vicinity of Queenstown
  
• Wellington Schon Wieder Mal

Lots of downtime in buses. Good thing I'm typing this on something portable.

And while I could spent my first blog post in New Zealand writing about the three-dimensional picturesque of the Wellington back hills, instead I'll write about what I'm typing this on.

You'll recall that I had purchased a 9″ eeePC in Heathrow in March. I didn't actually need an extra laptop, what with me already onwing a 13″ MacBook, which was plenty portable. Nor did I really live out the dream of taking my eeePC to the café or the park, and communing in agile computational portability against a backdrop of live people walking around. And the 9″ keyboard was just that little bit too small to type on comfortably anyway. At least I'd bought an ex-display model, so I hadn't broken the bank.

Persons unknown, and possibly affiliated with the security scanning of my suitcase in LAX, took care of the 9″ eeePC conundrum for me. Once back, I had no 9″ computer, and no 13″ computer. I did have a 15″ MacBook—lovely screen, can almost put two documents side by side, but just that little bit too large to whip out comfortably in public transport—and utterly impossible in planes. Which means that now there was an ecological niche around me for a Netbook after all.

I still didn't actually *need* a Netbook, as such; but in a bout of Holiday Retail Therapy on Boxing Day, I picked up an eeePC 1000H. At 10″, it confirmed what my colleague Steve found when he purchased his 10″ model: the 10″ keyboard is almost comfortable to type on. And mercifully, once more, I got to pick up an ex-display model. It still cost a smidgeon more than last time, and I still don't actually need it...

... but this one's black. I mean, that's got to count for something, surely.

It's also reimmersing me into the world of Linux. The world has changed since 2007, when the eeePC was introduced. Then, there was a serious prospect of Linux (or at least the preinstalled Xandros version of Linux suitable for children and small animals) making serious inroads on the netbook market. A year later, no computer retailer in Australia was selling anything on the eeePC but XP Home. But my household does not enrich the coffers of Redmond. And the Hackintosh on eeePC, which you get when you bit-torrent Some Guy's edit of MacOSX, cudgel into the eeePC as long as it isn't a 900, and cross your fingers, remains what it was a year ago: just like a Mac netbook, only crippled. Having to type in my wireless password each time I wake the computer from sleep really is a deal breaker.

So, I've hoisted eeebuntu onto the eeePC. Which has made my reacquaintance with the world of 1GB distros and 1GB system updates.

Short of an initial hiccup or two (as is inevitable under Linux), the installation has happened, and in all it's a pleasant surprise how much Linux can do these days. The essential software is all there, and Linux even manages to communicate to my digital camera. The applications I've ended up with are rather more opaque to me than I'm used to; I don't yet know what the division of labour is between Banshee Media Player, Rhythmbox Music Player, and gtkpod iPod Manager. And I'm not sure I'm going to feel compelled to find out. But the machine is doing what needs doing so far, and I'll be giving it the baptism of fire over the next couple of weeks.

I've managed not to post about Wellington, and I'm already in Auckland tomorrow. Must post about Maori TV soon though. The mix of classical anchorwoman cadence and tribal warrior metaphor in the sports news certainly took me aback:

"Is Britney Teei old enough to understand that she must regain her mana at the Māori Tennis Championship?!"

There was enough cultural weighting to make the Maori News feel quite alien. And that's greatly cool: alienness in this age is something to be cherished. I think I'll be spending a lot of time watching Maori TV while here.

(And is it just me, or does Maori sound unexpectedly like Japanese? Not just because of the CV syllables either. I swear that u was unrounded...)

Also nice to know Kiwis deride Australian accents on their TV, just as we deride theirs on ours. Ad for Australian Gladiators just came on (not on Maori TV). In a whiny, nasally, Dave Hughes kind of voice:

"Everything's Big in Australia! Big Muscles... Big Talk... and Big Idees!"

To explain: Australians love to deride the New Zealand backing of [ɪ] to [ɨ], immortalised as "fush and chups". Across the ditch, of course, the Australian [ɪ] sounds ridiculously fronted, as in "feesh and cheeps". (Yes, Australians sound to New Zealanders like Speedy Gonzales.) And if that's how Australians sound to New Zealanders, then it has to be idees, and not ideas...

OK, midnight NZ time. More later. Preferably not another two months later...