New Zealand : An Ark Without Noah Tests Waters of Modern World

New Zealand is about two in-flight movies from almost anywhere. It’s so far away it thinks it can live without nuclear weapons, a notion that upset the U.S. government enough to administer a severe diplomatic spanking.

That hasn’t noticeably fazed New Zealand, nor lessened the warmth with which it receives American visitors.

New Zealand is as paradoxical as its kiwis, birds that can’t fly.

It has geysers on one island, glaciers on the other.

It’s about as far from Europe as you can get. But, proportionately, its fighting men suffered more casualties in World War I and mobilized more soldiers in World War II than any other combatant but Soviet Russia.

British Roots

The roots of its dominant culture are British. And it is the largest Polynesian nation in the world.

It has only two native mammals: the long-tailed and the short-tailed bat. And it pays its way with sheep and cattle.

Its current government and portly prime minister, David Lange, have scaled down government house beyond a Ronald Reagan’s fondest dreams.

It is something of a frontier. And it has almost as many phones, television sets and cars per capita as the United States. (Today, however, the cars are more apt to be Toyotas and Mitsubishis than British Vauxhalls and Austins.)

It has been frozen out of the three-way ANZUS Treaty with Australia and the United States by Washington. But New Zealand loves America if not her nukes.

It is an isolation ward that won’t let in bird’s nest soup, lest some foreign bug get loose among the unique flora. But it lives by world trade.

Its colonizing Celts nostalgically named a town Belfast. It lies along a river named Waimakiriri by the native Maoris. Except the Maoris are not native natives. Extinct moa-eating man was. The ostrich-like moas died off, as did their eaters, many, many moons ago.

Human Kiwis think Americans have only the vaguest idea of their land or even where it is. “They think you can get here by bridge from Sydney,” says Anthony George (Aussie) Malcolm, a former Cabinet minister.

You can’t, but the Kiwis hold no grudges for being misunderstood and taken for granted by a nation which, after all, is always a day behind.

“Anti-Americanism isn’t popular in New Zealand,” says Lange. “It simply doesn’t catch on.”

New Zealand is really two laboratories, one made by nature, the other by political man. One is an ark without Noah, the other what political scientist John Roberts of the University of Victoria here calls “the first modern state,” one developed from scratch in post-industrial times.

Nature cast New Zealand’s two main islands adrift from Antarctica-Australia eons ago, too early in evolutionary childhood to have had any mammals on board besides the bats. Thus there were no predators on hand when the sheep and cows began arriving with the Europeans 150 years ago.

Because three-quarters of the flora grew nowhere else in the world, the colonists had to become master agronomists. They had time because nature put the islands a thousand miles away from any human predators. Its European settlers were liberated from precedent and free to experiment. It became a trial-and-error country.

Rabbits--imported for sport--were one error. By the 1930s, “the South Island in places looked like it was moving, there were so many of them,” says Julian Brown, director of the Quarantine Service. The country will practically go on a war footing should hoof-and-mouth disease ever break out in livestock. Garbage from ships and planes must be burned. You can come, but your pets can’t.

Because everything was new and far-flung, government became the agency of first resort. The results have been 90 years of pioneering in social welfare and several world firsts. Women got the vote in 1893 just after their sisters in Wyoming--and Pitcairn Island. Salary discrimination based on sex was outlawed in 1972.

If Kiwis have danced around the fringes of socialism, “that’s because it is an option, not doctrine,” says Roberts. “I know the deputy prime minister in this Labor government, Geoffrey Roberts. He’s taught in the States. He wouldn’t have known a Labor doctrine if it hit him. Government is interventionist here by the true definition of democracy: If something goes wrong, the government fixes it. That’s what we are. A fix-it democracy.”

Often lacking the tools, Kiwis have had to improvise. They tap melting glaciers for hydroelectricity, geyser fields for steam energy. A growing number of cars drive on natural gas, one of the few resources. Lured by the America’s Cup, Kiwis produced a near-winner this year to the shock of the yachting world and delight of a mouse that roared.

Isolated, Self-Sufficient

“We’ve become self-sufficient because we’re isolated,” says Trevor Geldard, whose home-grown company built the hull of the boat.

Kiwis bred sheep to match their mountains, made fertile the stingy volcanic soil. As fast as frequent earthquakes knock things down, Kiwis put them back up. Bishop Churchill Julius had himself winched to the top of a Christchurch cathedral in 1891 to dedicate a new steeple replacing one toppled by a tremor.

It is a gorgeous country: snowcapped alps rising through the ferns of a rain forest, moors out of Yorkshire, coasts from California, tawny hills from Montana, gardens from Kew, pines from Puget Sound, fiords from Norway.

But most of all New Zealand was going to be a little Britain, starting late so as to leave the pitfalls behind. That it wasn’t quite to be was soon apparent. The first colonists in the 1830s and 1840s planned their homes with southern exposures, forgetting that the sun below the Equator shines to the north.

They were met by the Maoris, Pacific Polynesians who had been residents for about 500 years. They had and have a strong tribal identity, were culturally advanced, politically astute, fought each other constantly and ate human flesh “when procurable,” a Maori historian wrote.

The first wave of permanent colonizers was sent from England in 1839. More than planting the Union Jack, the colonists came to create a new Utopia. They were not the downtrodden or convicts, as were Australia’s founders across the Tasman Sea. They were blue-collar types not faring well in the Industrial Revolution.

Carnage Brought Treaty

Their predecessors had brought with them the musket, which the Maoris took up as a more efficient way to settle old tribal grudges. As many as 40,000 died in the killing. Shocked by the carnage, the Maoris signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which ceded sovereignty to the British throne, granted the natives land and gave Queen Victoria sole rights to buy it. The Maoris, with justice belatedly recognized, claimed that the white man did not honor the pact. Brown-white warfare continued sporadically for about 20 years.

To the Maoris, the white man was greedy, rude, selfish and no warrior. To the white man, the brown was lazy, backward and smelled bad. Maori translates as “ordinary people.” Europeans were pakehas --”other people.” The pakehas had more guns.

The whites have increasingly become aware of Maori culture and grievances, and not just because of a soaring Maori crime rate as well as population, now about 11% of the total.

The Maori wars stopped short of extermination in part because in the new colony, imperialism and humanitarianism “marched together,” writes historian Sir Keith Sinclair. Wakefield envisioned an Anglican colony set out by the laws of God and mathematics: four sheep per acre, homes built eight to the acre on geometrical streets.

Future Was in Countryside

The early arrivals quickly saw that New Zealand’s future lay in the countryside: hilly, brown but vast. Sheep country. When the first refrigerator ship sailed for Britain on Feb. 15, 1882, with a load of frozen mutton, it was clear that New Zealand was to be Britain’s garden and paddock, an emotional tie turned economic.

Until recent times Britain was “home” to people who never would see it, who by the turn of the century were more than half natives of New Zealand. When Charles Kingsford-Smith, the Australian long-distance aviator, wanted to start an airline in New Zealand in the 1930s, he was turned down because he chose to use American rather than British planes. After World War II, New Zealand continued to ration food and fuel in an effort to send her surpluses back to a fiscally strapped “home.”

“The penal system has left an irreducible dislike for the United Kingdom in Australia,” says Roberts. “New Zealand, settled by free men, never had that resentment. There was a much greater sense of the wonders of the British raj.” To this day, Elizabeth II bears among her titles Queen of New Zealand.

Kiwis do grow lovely gardens, drive on the left, hang on cricket scores, flock to horse tracks, go gaga over rugby. But their currency is no longer the pound. It is the dollar. Japan, not “home,” is their largest trading partner.

‘Immortal Debt to U.S.’

Kiwi soldiers were summoned by Winston Churchill to defend “home” in Egypt and Libya and Italy in World War II, not themselves in the Pacific. The story goes that when a Japanese reconnaissance plane approached New Zealand, orders were not to fire on it lest the enemy discover the country had only one anti-aircraft gun.

“Any New Zealander over 60 will argue he owes an immortal debt to the United States,” says Malcolm. “They came to our defense when they didn’t have to.”

In return, Kiwi soldiers fought alongside Americans in Korea and Vietnam, a country as distant from them as it is from Europe.

Yanks they are not. On weekends the country is closed tighter than Philadelphia. Cruising the malls--they have a few--is out. They’re closed. So are many gas stations. Kiwis see more to Saturday and Sunday than buying or selling.

Middle-Class Country

“We have an extraordinary concept of egalitarianism,” Lange says. It is middle-class country where ostentation is rare. No Beverly Hills. No slums, either.

“If one of my students does well, he minimizes it to his buddies,” says Tony Bowen, a college professor in Christchurch. “They want to keep everyone level.” He calls this “Kiwi knocking” and it bothers him.

Americans play “Hail to the Chief” to their leader. Sir Robert Muldoon, Lange’s predecessor, has taken a fling on the stage and makes TV commercials for garden hoses.

“If a politician does something offbeat like that, or worse, he’s regarded rather like an erring member of a family,” says Richard Gee, a newspaper editor.

For 20 years, until recently, New Zealand had a zero unemployment rate. The joke was there were actually 32 out of work, and the prime minister knew the names of all of them.

Different Priorities

The rigors of the countryside, the imperative to export or go without, have produced, says Roberts, “a physical sort, not reflective, who prides himself on the ability to handle things, is awkward in mixed society. A good team man with a sense of mutuality, suspicious of fanaticism, nationalistic but not aggressive, hard-working but non-competitive. Being the No. 1 salesman would be a very low priority.”

“The advantage of New Zealand was that we never developed a number of New Zealands,” says Lange. “We’re at risk of that now: Auckland-Southern California, Wellington-Washington D.C., South Island-Appalachia. But we’re not isolationist. We’ve been almost messianic in our foreign involvement.”

But there are costs to living at the end of the world’s road.

“This is a good place to bring up kids,” says Simon Walker, a political consultant. “But things can be pretty boring, and so will the kids be. If you could tow New Zealand to about where the Canary Islands are, I think everybody would like to go there.”

Isolation Within Isolation

New Zealand has isolation within isolation. Over the alps on the west coast of the South Island, the scattered residents are as insular as Scottish Highlanders. One couple decided it was time to meet their “new” neighbors. After all, they’d moved in 15 years ago.

Residents of both main islands refer to themselves as the true “mainlanders.” The farther south you go, the more rural and the more conservative the country becomes. Suits and ties are de rigeur in Christchurch. Auckland is Los Angeles, laid-back.

With a warm climate and island-dotted water, Auckland has become a Sun Belt magnet. Almost a third of the population lives there: Maori migrants who have made downtown crime an after-dark problem, emigres from the Sheep Belt.

But everywhere is a refreshing civility. Kiwis may look at the same TV violence as Americans, but they also have seven times as many bookstores per capita as the United States and patronize them. They have studied the world in school because their own non-Maori culture is a very short volume. Visitors tell the Tourism Department that New Zealanders are one of the nicest things about New Zealand, which Benny Goodman of the Christchurch office says comes as something of a shock to his countrymen.

Kiwis Stand Out

The Kiwi is not an Aussie, or if he is, he’s a more genteel version. It was a noteworthy event last year when a New Zealand fan threw a toilet seat at Australian cricketer Greg Matthews. That really wasn’t cricket.

“It’s the right form in Australia to treat New Zealanders as the weakling who walks into a barroom while the Aussie is strutting about with a barrel chest and the blonde,” says Lange.

“We love the Aussies,” says Malcolm. “We think we understand them better than anybody. But we do not think they are as important as they think they are.”

The Kiwi is not a Brit, either.

“The New Zealand attitude towards Great Britain is that of a child grown up,” Malcolm continues. “We look back with some nostalgia and some pride that we’ve done well. But mother has become somewhat wizened.”

British Were Upset

When Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falklands, New Zealand dispatched a frigate to help the same day.

But a year ago the British announced “with a flourish” they wouldn’t be sending a warship to visit New Zealand because of Lange’s policy against nuclear-propelled or armed naval vessels in his waters.

“I thought, boy, we would be answering telegrams all day. We didn’t get a one,” says the prime minister.

“That’s because I always thought in terms of my father when in fact I should have thought in terms of what my kids would have thought: ‘Why would a British ship be coming to New Zealand?’ ”

Why indeed? It has been awhile since the Kiwis left the nest.