new zealand

Spending time in NZ for the first time in about ten years last week made me think the thoughts I'd thought for some time, that if Australia and NZ became one country, I don't know how much NZ would benefit but Australia definitely would. It's a far superior country to this one and it's been a little crucible of concentrated, smart, perhaps a little smug but maybe that's ok, cultural consciousness for a long time. I really like it there and it's kind of a shame that we Australians can't grab more glamour by association from it than we already do. 

NZ is quite a bit like WA in its dependence on the east coast of Australia to funnel its base culture which it receives sometimes resentfully but more commonly resignedly, the weird thing in WA being that the east coast is the same country but it barely even acknowledges the west, whereas NZ is an entirely different country but still has to hang off Australia's big cities in all kinds of ways, and when I say it 'has to', I mean just for lame mass culture rubbish that no-one really needs. NZ television is riddled (for instance) with trashorama reality tv shows from Australia. No-one should have to put up with that kind of lame, sad secondhand cultural output as their main cultural diet and it's sad that there is that aspect to NZ. 

Of course it's the anomalies that stand out. So the record and book shops are full of things you wouldn't see in Australian record and book shops. The record shops give every sense that NZ in the 60s-70s had a real propensity to receive (as ballast probably) the crapped out commercial detritus of the US record industry. The book shops are more classy in a sense but in another sense just a lot of English books, by which I mean, from England. I don't know enough about NZ to know from whence all of this derives. 

What I do know is this - this year I have written a lot about Finland, and in the last few weeks quite a bit about NZ, and no-one from Finland or NZ ever reads this blog (at least, if they do it's not from their home country). I mean that's kind of funny and cool, really. 

I really need to go back to NZ sometime, and get to know it better. I am very fond of it. It's naturally beautiful as well as intrinsically civilised in a way the country isn't. More classy and I think cleverer. That might have something to do with its comparatively (and I say comparatively - definitely not perfect) reasonable attitude to its indigenous people, which Australia seems chronically unable to manage.