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. 

auckland a week ago - (east) auckland market(s)

It was a great experience to travel a longish way on foot at either end of a long (but fast) train journey, to go to what was probably the most pathetic outdoor market I’ve ever been to, with the admission that a lot of it hadn’t been set up yet by the time I got there for the 7am start. It was the Auckland Market also apparently known by some as the East Auckland Market. While I stand by the ‘pathetic’ tag though of course I have already tempered that by saying that it probably hadn’t really got its shit together at just after 7am when I was there, I will also add that it was clearly a very local operation, a lot of really nice looking fresh produce which was of no value to me (leaving Auckland in about 20 hours). One man was there in his gumboots (but it wasn’t Wal). A stallholder was explaining to him that ‘Roumanian women just never get drunk. They never do. They just don’t.’ 

 

So I knocked that whole experience on the head quickly and was lucky enough to get back to the station with minutes to spare (I mentioned that the trains were fast but of course on Sunday morning they are few and far between). 

auckland a week ago

Thursday 24/11 was a fieldwork day trying to get photos of a few things around Auckland for a forthcoming book. It was partially successful. Te Atatu, which is a peninsula suburb somewhere in the west, was further away than I remembered and harder to get to than I imagined - same old principles, one you realise where the information is, it's easy but you have to have known where to look first. I had a decent time in Auckland anyway and I am ready to say it: it's not a terrible place. 

Earlier I showed you the view from the hotel room, which is pretty nice. This is the view inside the hotel room. Actually pretty horrible. 

Myers Park

These ridiculous birds saw my verandah door open and wandered in like they owned the place. Perhaps they do.

Life.

Op Shop on a train station platform. I didn't go in, I had a train to catch (and the escalators were out of order so it was urgent). 

This motorway is one of the abominations of the southern hermisphere. 

Skyline

Symonds St Cemetery

The flats adjoining the K Road end of Myers Park

Myers Park again

auckland a week ago

Well, I would not be so jejeune as to describe the trip to Auckland as gruelling. All that happened was, we were about an hour late taking off, and so it's now 3:21 Auckland time as I write this and I'm not tired really though I have a headache and feel somewhat ticked off that my room is this massive space with a spectacular view but it's all kind of shoddy and for instance the wardrobe door is sticky on the side and the whole thing just looks like faded 80s grandeur. It's far too big for one person (a huge living area and a reasonably large bedroom, a bathroom etc) and while it does have a wardrobe for instance what it doesn't have is a place to put things like socks. No drawers, is what I'm saying. Also, for a fairly exy hotel, no snacks or bar, not that I ever drink anything from the bar fridge but... just feels weird. Maybe it's a cultural thing. Also, the guy at the desk said 'we checked your card and it was declined,' which it... couldn't have been, but if it was, they didn't email me about that or anything (and when I emailed them a few days ago to say I'd be late coming, they didn't respond). Gripe, whine, it's fine but still it sort of sucks. 

On the plane I watched the first two episodes of the show Hacks which I'd heard about and it had never really appealed to me as a concept, but the minute I started watching it I was like yes. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder both hit the ground running and have a tremendous 'y'know, we're not so different after all' chemistry which I really enjoy. I will strive to see more of this show, it's great. 

That said: I have the balcony door open, and it's raining really heavily out there, and the temperature's nicely cool, no mosquitoes here. I miss Laura, Nancy'n'Helmi and Perry but otherwise, I feel reasonably OK. 

trip to auckland 23 november-27 november (a week ago)

23 November 

 

Things were a bit fraught today even though it’s only a 4 day trip to Auckland, a flight roughly as short/long as the trip to Perth but it seems like such an extra thing, an international flight. 

Now (just after 7 pm on Wednesday 23/11) I’m waiting with a bunch of other very patient people for a plane which is late. I suppose that lateness will translate into getting to Auckland in the middle of the night. It’s weird how this situation makes you feel so kind of – there should be another word than anxious, but it probably is anxiety. 

I am sitting near the desk and listening to all the p-r-o-b-l-e-m-s which mainly seem to be people who stopped off in Melbourne en route to NZ from some other place unaware that they needed a visa to visit Australia, but possibly it’s more complicated than that. Or less.* You tell me. Also, ‘the guy’ keeps getting walkie talkie messages that catering hasn’t shown up. I don’t care. I don’t need any food I had a thai salad, so called, with tofu so hot I thought this is actually going to damage my mouth for a few days (doesn’t seem to have though). Wowie zowie. 

* Gosh, yes, even stranger than that. The guy has just been in the airport for 24 hours, he did not try to go through immigration or anything he's just been in transit. He seems to think this is not even slightly strange. 

auckland trip: the unexpurgated diary

July 2 10:50 AM Tullamarine
The grim jokes about air travel are de rigeur at the moment for obvious reasons. There should be another word than 'jokes' though as these are not funny. Anyway. I am travelling to Auckland today and that is fine. I like NZ a lot, and have enjoyed my short forays there, so I expect good times for the next few days. I barely slept last night so I am going around in a bit of a daze and could not handle the razor sharp rehearsed unimaginative repartee of a man trying to sell me a credit card (I think). Money is an issue this morning but I think I have found a way out. Bogeymen just bury themselves in the ground until the problem is over.

So here I am in Auckland Friday 3 July 2009. I woke up extremely early (even notwithstanding that Auckland is two hours ahead of Melbourne) and found myself again chuckling in a way that I cannot fully understand but must be some kind of terrible patronizing cultural superiority that I didn’t think I had in me, viz. I kept finding it terribly amusing that the sun wasn’t coming up. Yesterday I got a little hysterical (kept it under wraps but) that the flight attendant referred to the meal served on the plane as a ‘hot item’. I am pretty sure that she then went on to refer to a cold item but I am not sure. It wasn’t helping that I was watching Flight of the Conchords on the in-flight entertainment. And it was the episode where Jemaine gets an Australian girlfriend and there is a lot of discussion about whether she made fun of his accent.

I went for a walk and found nothing, well, it was too early for most things to be open so that makes sense, and then I went to an internet place and got 20 minutes of internet for a dollar but it kept translating what I wrote into Chinese, which was actually also pretty funny, since I couldn’t figure out (1) how to turn the translator off (2) that, while some way of typing or some words (?!) were not making the translator come off, I don’t know what they were, and so I would just keep rephrasing what I was typing until it didn’t translate into Chinese, which was as you can imagine pretty funny.


the hotel

Also since I had been walking for an hour and not seen any open supermarkets, and since my snazzy hotel has a small kitchenette (yes, a small kitchenette) and so on, and I decided the smart thing to do was get some groceries, I ended up going to a cod-7/11 and getting the most expensive muesli I had ever bought – even allowing for the price difference – and some soy milk which I figured if I had it for breakfast and dinner for the next two days would even out price-wise and who knows, I might even save money over the next option (which is, not eating anything at all).

Later that night – I went for a superwalk to Ponsonby which incidentally is not that rock ‘n’ roll anymore, though it was interesting to see that some small boutiquey bars were totally chockers with peeps, whereas a number of more spacious ones were pretty deserted. What’s that about? Is that SO PONSONBY…? And then I walked back to the hotel, and had a cup of tea and right now I wouldn’t mind a cup of whiskey actually, but I suppose since I am in my pyjamas that’s not going to happen to me. And I kept thinking I was going to find a supermarket and I only found one, which was not much in three hours of walking, and by that time I didn’t much care anymore anyway. As Mia said, you could walk for three hours from central Melbourne and not see a supermarket, if you walked in certain directions (for instance, if you walked towards north Richmond and down Victoria Pde/ Road, you wouldn’t find a supermarket until you got to Victoria Gardens, and that would be about a two hour walk, and you might not even realise that it was a supermarket I guess. Right? Right.) What they have lots of here though are things called superettes. That’s why I started this paragraph with the information that I went for a ‘superwalk’. Funny, yeah.

It was sunny today when I was en conference all day and the newspaper says it is going to be squally for the next week. True. See you tomorrow.

4 July or whatever – happy birthday Guy Blackman – well today was full-on conference day, and nothing particular to report about that, except it’s a pretty decent conference with a lot of variety and a lot of rigour.

Oh and finally (not that I was hoping it would, but there was some tension) it started raining heavily, so that just before the final session of the conf for today it was incredible, and all the way through the final session I was thinking, ‘I wonder if it’s still raining really heavily out there’ because I didn’t bring my raincoat, after joking about it all for weeks beforehand, because everyone seems to think my raincoat is funny because it is lurid. Well, hell. It wasn’t raining when we came out and if it does start I must say I don’t have protection, apart from some decent boots.

I am going to have a few drinks tonight and maybe go to the Wine Cellar. Yes! WINE CELLAR! In K ROAD!


These steps lead to the Wine Cellar from Myers Park, not K Road.

Next day: last night I appeared to have got seriously drunk in a very stupid way, unbecomingly. I regret it but I suppose I will live. I did vomit in the morning. I am now very into Auckland and aside from the vomiting this morning I have had a pretty good day. With two other interested parties (namely Julia and Andrew, old friends from way back) I examined Myers Park, a ‘slum clearance’ (I use the inverted commas because there have been suggestions that the term was applied rather haphazardly to the removal of a few homes, though Julia says she has since uncovered some evidence suggesting that there was a plot to rid the area of its Chinatown) scheme that resulted in the creation of a very attractive park space and the delightful Myers Kindergarten. The northern point of the park ends at a series of steps leading to an arcade, St Kevins Arcade, in which is located the WINE CELLAR! In K ROAD! Which I think I am destined never to visit, or at least, not this time around. Then we went and had a look at some 70s internal reserves in Freemans Bay which were really interesting and we even visited some friends of Julia’s who lived in the area who backed on to one such reserve. Then suddenly it was 5 o’clock and the sun was about to go down and now I am getting ready to go out with the same people for some dinner.

I have to say that while in New Zealand I have now seen two episodes of Hannah Montana and four episodes (while I was sick this morning) of Phineas and Ferb, which is very funny, though I wasn’t laughing because I was feeling so sick, but I could appreciate the skill of it, and liked it. HM is kind of annoying and the only reason I was drawn to it was that on the 8 or 9 channels available to me here, it and other things on the Disney Channel are fiction narratives, whereas practically everything else seems to be reality freakin’ tv, which is not a form I am that fond of. Anyway I now seem to have broken the tv entirely (no I haven’t, but I turned it off about twenty minutes ago and now it won’t come back on) so that’s all fine.

It rained really heavily twice today. Interesting, that.

Next day: great conversation I had with a woman I would frankly describe as elderly in a Te Atatu op shop:
She: That comes to $9, by my account. Is your account the same as mine? It wouldn’t be, probably, because I was educated in Australia.
Me: So was I.
She: Where? Victoria, probably (she said this with a little bit of disdain, she obviously had me figured out, but…) So was I.
Me: Whereabouts?
She: Warrnambool (some discussion of Warrnambool, which I told her I knew well though she brushed it off as something a Victorian would say, then on to a long discussion of how the work ran out in Warrnambool and most of the men in her family took off to South Australia, I can’t imagine when this might have been – the time when there was more work in South Australia than Western Victoria! But I suppose the 1950s? Guessing by her age.)
Me: That doesn’t explain why you’re here.
She: I married a New Zealander!

OK, so that’s not a ‘boom boom’ moment, but it’s OK for now.

It rained heavily thrice today. I forgot rain could be a nuisance. It doesn’t rain for long, but it does rain pretty heavy. Te Atatu was interesting and I went to Freeman’s Bay again. Tomorrow archives.