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My connection with New Zealand started well before I understood that the Australian suburb where I attended primary school, Waitara, was named after a place of historical significance in New Zealand and is in fact a Maori word that means mountain stream (according to Wikipedia).
It existed earlier than my teenage crush on the new wave
stylings of bands such as Split Enz and Mi-sex. Went beyond a devotion to
big-hitting Lance Cairns and Sir Richard Hadlee's defiant underdogs in the
exciting early 80’s new form of day/night cricket (despite their beige strip).
Outlived the fully fabricated Kiwi persona I adopted when forced to change high
schools and impress new friends. (Sydney obviously wasn't as exotic as
Auckland back then.) And was present an eon prior to meeting and marrying my
Christchurch-born husband with his outdoorsy good looks and English
enunciations.
Somehow it seems inherent, seminal even, which may be closer
to fact than fiction. It is well recorded in family folklore that my great
grandmother, being a lively lass and one of 26 siblings (yes you read
correctly), ran away at age 16, to avoid the drudgery of life as a dairy maid
that had killed her own mother (never mind the child rearing) with the first
handsome man to ride by on horseback. This swarthy gentleman was rumoured to
have travelled from across the ditch. A New Zealander, a Kiwi, a cad! A subliminal connection to the land of the long white cloud? Perhaps. A growing love affair with Aotearoa?
Definitely.
I've only visited New Zealand’s south island twice, once in early
2011 a matter of days before the earthquake that levelled Christchurch’s CBD
and forever changed that genteel city’s heart, and again in April this year to
revel in the autumnal splendour of Queenstown and surrounds. But what strikes me
about the country and its people is the down to earth, no bullshit genuineness
of the place. Like Aussies, Kiwis call a spade a spade but there is something
else, a quiet confidence and sense of place seemingly absorbed from the land
itself: the wild rivers, mountains, forests and beaches. And then there is that
rugby team. Both annoyingly and admirably, Kiwis are a hardy bunch of parochial
over-achievers.
This is an excerpt from my travel diary on that first trip:
“I feel like I'm trespassing on this island’s grief –
welcomed open-heartedly by a people still reeling from the tragedy of the Pike
River mine disaster and a destructive series of earthquakes and after-shocks
that threatened to flatten NZ’s garden city. But nowhere have we found the
depressed or down-trodden, in fact the opposite. The mood is buoyant if not the
economy.
As we batten down the
hatches and prepare to be lashed by the tail end of tropical cyclones Vania and
Zelia which combine with a low in the Tasman to produce a storm system/rain event
that will see 90km winds and over 100ml of rain dumped on the top of the south
island I am quietly confident that we too will weather the storm.”
