The Good Life
What’s become of the half-gallon, quarteracre pavlova paradise? Sadly, the halfgallon has become a less romantic 2.3 litres, the family quarter-acre section has shrunk by half and is a rental, and there’s been a hostile takeover of our pav by Australia. Paradise has been lost – and so, too, last week, was the Englishman who coined that vivid, indelible phrase.
Austin Mitchell, a straight-talking Yorkshireman by birth and inclination, and a British Labour MP for 38 years, lived here during the 1960s. He wasn’t a New Zealander for long, probably never was a New Zealander, but his gimlet eye missed nothing. He left us a book, The HalfGallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise, to tell us what he thought of us.
I finally read it this week – lockdown has its uses – and I am inclined to think that few have better skewered the Kiwi character.
The book’s conceit is that he’s writing letters to an Englishman called Keith, who is moving to New Zealand. It’s no kindly comedy. As the publisher sheepishly notes, “as for a gentle tilt at our way of life – well, that’s not the Mitchell way”.
Much of Pavlova Paradise is of its time, but it was a best seller for a reason, and its boisterous, contrary observations are still recognisable. “Auckland,” Mitchell writes, “is a self-sufficient universe, labouring under the delusion the rest of New Zealand doesn’t exist”, a city “of self-made men who worship their creator”.
DIYers made the suburbs “a cacophony” of power drills, mowers, hammers and revving cars. “If you want weekend peace, you must go to town.”
Kiwis, he thought, had an ambiguous view of their own expatriates. “When their countrymen go [overseas] and stay, they’re half resentful, half proud. If they go and come back, they’re half relieved, half suspicious, doubting whether anyone faced with a choice between money and New Zealand would choose New Zealand.”
He thought the real “New Zild” was found in small towns, places nurturing the values of warmth and friendli
“The only thing wrong with New Zealand was the number of people asking how I like New Zealand.”
ness “and an endless interest in personal trivia”. Indeed, it was best to think of the whole country as a small town “with the trimmings of a nation state”.
And then there were our insecurities. “The only thing wrong with New Zealand was the number of people asking how I like New Zealand.”
Some things never change. The day Mitchell died, the day we woke up to being locked down again, I came across a story on the RNZ website with the headline, “International media focus on NZ going into lockdown ‘over one Covid case’”.
The story, such as it was, was a summary of how various outfits, such as CNN and the BBC, were reporting our lightning move into level four. The reports were surprised at the suddenness and severity of the lockdown given the single case, and pointed to the country’s low vaccination rate. The New York Times said we’d flocked to supermarkets to stock up, “leaving toilet paper aisles bare, in scenes reminiscent of the earliest days of the pandemic”.
Now, a sensible person might wonder, why is RNZ telling me this? Who gives a flying fig what they’re saying about us?
Well, the Team of Five Million does, and Mitchell would know exactly why: Covid-19 was suddenly making us look bad to the rest of the world.
There we’d been, happily “punching above our weight” by being Covid-free, “putting New Zealand on the map” by eliminating the virus, cheerfully and smugly showing the rest of the world how it should be done. We were paradise.
Now, the Washington Post was calling us Henny Penny, and the New York Times was insinuating we’re a bit thick, and possibly scatological, for bulk-buying bog rolls. It was as if someone was asked if they liked New Zealand, and they’d given a firm “No”.
That RNZ story is no one-off. Whenever the country makes an appearance in foreign media, these articles appear because our media know we will read them.
The half-gallon, quarter-acre pavlova paradise might be long gone. But you have to wonder whether the New Zealand that Mitchell found way back when – the one that can’t escape caring how others see us – will ever go away. l