Our almost adult Kiwi identity
What does it mean to be a New Zealander? The Pa¯keha¯ settler story seems foundational. But the evolution of our national identity has a more complex history, as John McCrone recounts.
If New Zealand were a person, would that someone be aged about 23? Finally getting going on life as an adult, developing an authentic sense of self and cultural identity? We sort of know what defines a Kiwi. That familiar roll-call of values. Ingenious, fair, modest, earthy, informal.
Surely we are still all of those? Yet our recent history feels a bit more confused.
We thought we knew who we were becoming a few years back – the 1980’s identity of anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, pro anything green and socially progressive.
However that time of strident idealism blurred just as fast into the next few decades of economic going-for-it. Trade treaties, deregulation, a general neo-liberal clearing of the decks for action.
Having started out as a last gasp of empire, a tiny scrap of nationhood barely clinging on to the world map, now we were supposed to be the clever little country poised on the edge of future.
And if a fully grown-up national identity was forming, that seemed scuppered by last year’s abortive flag referendum.
It should have been a defining moment. Yet we couldn’t quite let go an umbilical connection to the Union Jack, or even the shared Anzac Southern Cross.
However New Zealand has been going a few generations now. It has lived through a number of big changes. Something ought to be emerging as its mature, bicultural and post-colonial sense of self.
So let’s take the historical route – consider how each period of our short history has left some indelible stamp on our collective character – and see if a sharper picture emerges.
Step 1: Take a baby settler The Ma¯ ori were already here of course. Aotearoa wasn’t a blank slate. Something already counted as authentically Kiwi.
However year dot for New Zealand as a nation was the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – the official start of a Pa¯ keha¯ project of creating one last colony at the bottom end of the Earth.
Historians like Jock Phillips and James Belich have told the story of how settler values laid the basis of the Kiwi psyche.
In 1840, New Zealand was inhabited by about 100,000 Maori and 2000 non-Ma¯ ori. The Pa¯ keha¯ were a sprinkling of visiting sealers, whalers and missionaries. Then the boats arrived.
Britain in the early 1800s had a bulging population. Industrialisation and the enclosure of the commons were forcing people into the towns.
To promote Aotearoa as a new colony, the New Zealand Company was formed to sell a certain civilised dream.
There would be a class of landowners – investors who could buy a 40 hectare block of farmland, with another 2ha as a town base.
Then the workforce to support that would be attracted with promises of a free ship’s passage for ‘‘mechanics, gardeners and agricultural labourers’’.
This genteel vision was soon in need of a bail-out by the British government, but it set the tone. It was certainly a contrast to the rough and ready disorder of convict Australia.
And so by the 1870s, with sheep farming followed by a goldrush, the Pa¯ keha¯ settler population had swollen to quarter of a million.
Phillips, editor of the Te Ara New Zealand Encyclopedia, makes the point that the earliest migrants represented a fairly specific slice of Britain.
Two-thirds came from the agricultural south of England – Kent down to Cornwall. Those from towards Cornwall in particular were independentminded, part of the non-conformist ‘‘Celtic fringe’’.
Another quarter were Scots from the countryside around Glasgow and Edinburgh.
By trade, a third were farm workers, another two-fifths were the ‘‘mechanics’’ – builders, blacksmiths, coopers, and others with a practical craft.
So they weren’t a cross-section of what England had to offer, but rural people with good skills.
It is tempting to say that right there everything about Kiwis seems explained and leave it at that. The grounded, informal, community-minded and clever Number 8 fencing wire mentality.
For example, it looks to account for why New Zealand women have been characterised as ‘‘a bit hard’’.
A departing French ambassador once scandalised by saying Kiwi girls dressed like soldiers – all backpacks and clumping boots. The frontier roots show in a practical dress code.
Likewise Kiwi maleness has been defined by a lack of ‘‘feminine softness’’. Or at least that is the chord Tui beer ads have tried to pluck.
‘‘I wrote you this poem. (Yeah right.)’’ ‘‘Hope I get a man-bag for
Having started out as a last gasp of empire, a tiny scrap of nationhood barely clinging on to the world map, now we were supposed to be the clever little country poised on the edge of future.
Father’s day. (Yeah right.)’’
The rugged pioneer backstory also explains why New Zealanders seem to mix a love of nature with a readiness to burn or bulldoze any obstacle that gets in the way of primary production.
Some of our nationally ingrained contradictions start to add up. However a settler beginning was only a first step. History soon left its further imprints.
Step 2: Mix in some settler government
Talking of contradictions, another puzzle about our national identity is how we seem to be both pragmatic and idealistic in equal measure.
Jill Caldwell of Auckland market researcher Windshift, who specialises in New Zealand’s tribal make-up, agrees.
She says the country appears founded on a fierce settler sense of ‘‘it’s my property, I’ll do what I bloody well like’’ parochialism, yet has a history of the most sweeping and progressive social reforms.
Anti-smacking bills, gay
marriage, votes for women, health and safety regulation, quota-based fishing, ACC and MMP – New Zealand continually seems to want to be in the vanguard of whatever is fair, right and principled.
It is not a bad thing. But it feels unusual, Caldwell says.
Political scientists make the case that our adoption of a highly centralised form of government has something to do with it.
After the first explosive act of colonisation, New Zealand had to work out how best to run the country. And where Australia went for the distributed power of a federation of states, we opted for tight central control.
Wellington was created as the administrative capital, remote from the main centres of population. The provinces were kept on a strict financial leash.
The conditions were right for national-level thinking on both economic and social issues – major infrastructure programmes in terms of rail, roads and dams, and later, state housing and strong health and education systems.
So on the ground, Kiwis might be rough frontier types. But from on high, especially in a country with such a tiny and dispersed population, it was easy to push through whatever looked ‘‘best practice’’ policy.
Caldwell says it is a constant tension. In her research she divides New Zealanders into eight tribes. And these two strands of our character are best represented by the tribes of Grey Lynn and Balclutha.
Grey Lynn are the public service intellectuals who value ideas more than things. Welleducated, highly principled, socially aware.
But Balclutha is the heartland definition of Kiwi. Staunch, downto-earth, conservative folk from the provinces.
When the settler pragmatism and principled idealism are in balance, that sounds a good recipe, Caldwell says.
Step 3: Feeling the tug of the apron strings
Former Victoria University historian James Belich, now professor of imperial history at Oxford University and author of books like Paradise Reforged, picks out another important shaper of the national character from the late 1800s.
Belich calls it ‘‘re-colonisation’’. Against expectations, he says, New Zealand began to tighten its connections back to England as the mother country.
It was an economic response. The invention of refrigerated midships meant we became effectively a town-supply district of London. And this had a marked social effect.
‘‘Optimism, dynamism, and diversity diminished, but so did poverty, inequality, and insecurity.’’
Belich notes how this caused a turning away from Australia. Between the 1920s and 1960s, less than 5 per cent of our exports crossed the Tasman.
So psychologically, we were recolonised. Even though living on the opposite side of the world, still newcomers in someone else’s land, mentally we saw ourselves as close to the English centres of privilege and sophistication.
The actual physical distance just sparked a cultural cringe competitiveness – a determination to be the best representative of this Englishness, whether in sport, science, art, soldiering or literature.
Belich notes that over 50 Kiwis have been international professional opera singers. Punching above our weight became a national motto.
‘‘Re-colonisation made New Zealand act as if it was even smaller and more close knit than it was,’’ writes Belich. It became a corset, holding the national character in.
Step 4: Marvel at the egalitarian results
So settlerdom was the confused infancy. Then came the strong parental hand. We were growing up as a tidily-governed South Pacific extension to the home counties.
And the results seemed pretty good. The half gallon, quarter acre, pavlova paradise.
World wars and great depressions made for a troubling backdrop. Yet what shaped the national mindset were the many good things New Zealand appeared to have for free.
The story of the acclimatisation societies is one example of how a definite attitude became entrenched in the Kiwi psyche.
The early Pa¯ keha¯ settlers found Aotearoa to be rather a barren wildness, sadly lacking in large animals and deserving in ‘‘improvement’’.
Soon enough, deer, pheasants, geese, trout and every other kind of familiar game species was being imported and released by enthusiastic acclimatisation groups.
It got extreme. Moose, squirrels, llama, chipmunks and kangaroo were tried to see what might stick.
Dunedin harbour had a fish hatchery in the 1900s, seeking to establish Northern Hemisphere species like lobster and herring.
Eventually New Zealand was so over-run by invasive species that they threatened farm production. The Government had to put a bounty on their control.
But it meant Kiwis grew up with the idea of living in a country made for hunting and fishing.
In the old country, game was largely the preserve of managed private estates. New Zealand was instead the egalitarian paradise where a weekend tramp was a wander through a larder, equipped with gun or rod.
Victoria University associate professor Kate Hunter, a writer on our hunting history, says you can see it continuing to inform so much of what Kiwis view as right about life.
For Australians, the bush is harsh and unforgiving, full of dangers. But for Kiwis, nature feels literally a walk in the park.
‘‘New Zealanders feel very close to the natural world and all the things you can harvest from it.’’
Think about Pa¯ keha¯ reactions to Treaty issues. When it comes to kai-gathering values, there is plenty in common. Eels, cray, snapper and shellfish are part of a shared recreational heritage.
But restrictions on access – like the foreshore debate, or the farmer who blocks the gate to a stream – become travesties of natural justice for any ‘‘proper Kiwi’’.
Step 5: Catch a lucky economic wave Continuing to dig for the folk memories still shaping contemporary attitudes, the prosperous 1950s left its lingering mark.
Through that decade and into the 1960s, the economic winds blew in New Zealand’s favour. The country became rich on the back of sheep.
The high point was the Korean War when the Allies’ fear of a long winter campaign, and a shortage of wool for soldier’s clothing, sent fleece prices rocketing.
But as economists like Brian Easton chart, New Zealand became the ‘‘Switzerland of the South’’ for long enough for it to seem like another part of our natural order.
In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, we maintained a steady top five spot in the world economic league table from 1950 to 1962.
Switzerland in 1960 was actually 23 per cent lower on that income mark. Even Australia had reason to envy our economic leadership.
A flush New Zealand was enjoying its baby boom and had the cash to polish off its nationbuilding ambitions. This is when the state was rolling out the new suburbs, hospitals and schools, as well as pushing hard with the bridge building, highway sealing and hydrodams.
And doesn’t this lucky time still figure in our definition of being a Kiwi?
It seems to explain why we think we are a rich little country – deserving of top-drawer facilities and infrastructure – when the reality is we have dropped way down the OECD list of nations in terms of per person productivity.
The nation’s household debt stands at a record $250 billion, or 168 per cent of income. Yet financially, optimism remains our middle name.
Step 6: Getting chucked out of the house Moving swiftly on, we get to the
1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
No need to dwell too much on these decades as for many they count as living memory. But in terms of our collective age, New Zealand was a teenager starting to enter a harsher adult world.
Our cosy relation with the United Kingdom broke when in
1973 it went for the better deal of the European Common Market.
A wool price shock in the late
1960s, then an oil price shock in the mid-1970s, exposed the narrow base of the New Zealand economy. Loosing a biggest customer really began to take a toll.
New Zealand Institute economist Eric Crampton says a protectionist Muldoon government delayed the reckoning as long as possible.
New Zealand had a good thing going. Re-colonisation paid for a well-engineered little welfare society. But an institutional sclerosis had developed.
‘‘You set up a good system and it all makes sense. But – even wellintentioned – bits creep in that ossify the structure, making it more rigid, expensive, and difficult to change.’’
As Belich notes, the pioneer spirit had become somewhat suppressed. There was a strong element of pettifoggery, conservative prohibition and nanny state interventionism that had become part of Kiwi culture.
Crampton says New Zealand then responded with its period of creative destruction. In a way that a centralised government and history of principled thinking made possible, we really went for a deregulated, neo-liberal reorganisation.
The ride might have been rougher than it needed to be. But it seems also somewhat a return to core values, Crampton says.
A large part of the national selfimage is built on the notions of being enterprising, adaptable, honest and fair.
Coming from Canada, Crampton says he is struck by the Kiwi can-do attitude – the fundamental belief that everyone has the right to have a go so long as they are not hurting anyone else.
And while the facts say that New Zealand is no longer an economic Switzerland, it still has a strong social system, along with the informality, the freedom, that makes it feel a lucky country.
Step 7: Becoming all grown up
And so now we are aged about 23. Been through enough history. Ready to come into our own in some authentic way.
A cautionary question is whether there really is such a thing as a national character. Social research says at some level, there just isn’t. We have to be careful what we are talking about.
Humans are humans. We are all drawn from the same general gene pool. So any country is going to represent the full range of possible personalities.
But then the commonalities of a social history and social organisation are influences. They do shape a story of how we are meant to be.
Two researchers from the US Institutes of Health, Robert McCrae and Antonio Terracciano, led an international study comparing nearly 50 nations on the ‘‘Big Five’’ personality test.
From Belgium to Peru, people were sampled on the dimensions of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
What was fascinating is the research did find differences in scores on these traits, demonstrating the effect of cultural expectations. But on top of that, countries could get it wrong in knowing what these differences would be.
Indonesians and Japanese believed they were neurotic, however actually rated in the middle of the pack for the 49 countries.
Argentinians described themselves as being disagreeable, the grumps of South America, yet their score said they were more agreeable than average.
The Brits thought of themselves as reserved, but scored among the highest for extroversion.
Canadians and Americans felt they were unalike, then emerged almost identical in being classed as a generally agreeable, excitement-seeking and disciplined people.
And Kiwis? We turned out unusual in being one of the few countries with an accurate selfassessment. Our scores were what we would have predicted based on our own national stereotypes.
Perhaps being a small and young nation, we talk about what might make us distinctive a lot more?
Then how we rated was as being among the most extrovert and most open, combined with being fairly agreeable, averagely neurotic, and not especially conscientious. Pretty much identical to Australia overall.
The research continues. Auckland University has set up a 20-year longitudinal survey, the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, to keep track of how our national mindset is evolving.
Co-leader, psychology lecturer Danny Osborne, says the data is still being collated, but the early evidence suggests we are becoming less sexist, less racist, more serious about environmental issues. Thus no great shocks to report as yet.
So it all sort of makes sense. People are people. Every country is going to reflect that normal diversity. Plenty of Kiwis are introverted and conscientious.
But a shared history, a shared geographic and economic context, is also going to gradually leave an imprint. And looking at our history, we can see that coming through in many little ways.
More broadly, a clearer Ma¯ oriness is beginning to be expressed as the dominating Pa¯ keha¯ links to England and Australia recede. And a multicultural Asian-ness is to be expected as we become more closely connected to our new Pacific trading partners.
We are about 23, not quite all grown up. Yet definitely old enough as a nation to feel that at least we now have a real past to call our own.