The letter M is for mis-step
The Gore District Council must be wishing it had applied the Sesame Street test to its suggested welcome sign for Mataura. How’s about just a big letter M, the council suggested? The juvenile watchers of the educational TV series would know what to do with that idea. They would promptly be asking themselves what begins with M.
Mataura! How straightforward is that?
Not so much, it turns out. This turns out to have been one of those occasions where the famous KISS advice – Keep it Simple Stupid – wasn’t to be relied upon.
Other things start with M too.
If you had to predict a problem you might start with McDonald’s.
The giant corporation has a giant M as its welcoming sign, the ubiquitous golden arches. But then, the council was thinking red and black, not yellow, and with a markedly different font so the distinction would surely be sufficient.
M for methamphetamine? Of course nobody would countenance branding a town thus and in any case – try explaining this to Cookie Monster – meth generally gets abbreviated to P.
However, as soon as the M idea was floated, commentators seized upon the presence of the Mongrel Mob – the very outfit with whom Gore district mayor Tracy Hicks had met to try to address the issue of methamphetamine in the community.
This, as the council’s chief executive Steve Parry hastened to explain, was a connection that the council had never made.
The idea had been to place large metal letters at the entrance to Gore, Mataura, Mandeville, Pukerau and Waikaka it, welcoming motorists to the respective towns.
The M sign is now off the agenda. If this has occasioned any hurt feelings among the ranks of the Mongrel Mob, they haven’t let on.
The good people of Mataura, meanwhile, have been forming a firm view on what else they don’t want in the way of branding. Right up there is the GDC’s Rural City Living logo.
Just what would constitute a good, striking visual image for the visitor is a question worth dwelling upon, and you better believe that the Gore council will now be fully motivated to think before it speaks out again.
Nowadays, these branding matters can be multi-media, let’s not forget.
The planned new statue of Alex Lithgow in Invercargill is to play a bit of his famous Invercargill march.
Which leads us to suggest that when it comes to Mataura, surely a musical accompaniment for any favoured image could be uncontroversially agreed upon.
The two front-runners, surely, would be Brendon Fairbairn’s bagpipe work The Mataura Kilties March to Glory, or the late Jon Gadsby’s rewrite of the Merle Haggard’s Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee, repurposed as Proud to be a Scourer from Mataura.
You’d be doing better than us if you can lay hands on the full lyrics but if memory serves:
And I’m proud to be a scourer from Mataura Place where life is good and livin’s free
A bloke can wear his singlet in the lounge bar Singing God Defend New Zealand . .. and DB
‘‘This turns out to have been one of those occasions where the famous KISS advice – Keep it Simple Stupid – wasn’t to be relied upon.’’