Isn't She Lovely?

The DUNEDIN (1876-1882) was the first ship to successfully transport a cargo of frozen meat from New Zealand to the UK. She departed February 1882 and arrived in London 98 days later.She was a full sailing ship originally made for carrying 400 passengers.

Frozen meat and dairy exports from New Zealand to Britain from then on formed the backbone of New Zealand's economy until Britain entered the EEC (European Economic Community) in 1974. New Zealand's produce was then excluded.

Farmers were being urged to diversify from sheep and dairy for several years prior to the British move but it is not easy to change well established farming practices. The farming families knew nothing other than sheep and cows. Plus there was the cost. It isn't easy to convert 400 acres into a vineyard. But most of all there is the weather. Practically all of New Zealand's arable land is coastal with the concomitant changeable and cold weather. Fruit and vegetables grow prolifically only inland. There is also a small but thriving wine industry in the areas protected from the salty winds. Very little other than sheep and cows will grow south of Christchurch. It is just too cold!

One thing New Zealand does have is a multi-million dollar fishing industry. Include salmon and mussel and oyster farms in that. Nevertheless, most of the fish go off-shore, and New Zealanders pay export prices for seafood. We have no home market.

Those who think investment of humans and capital in technology would be the path for New Zealand to follow need to live here for a year or two. About two percent of the population is capable of innovation, with another ten percent capable of working with it.

After 1970 many dairy farmers went out of dairying and into sheep, counting on the wool clip, but here we are nearly forty years later with huge dairy herds everywhere again. Some herds are 800-900 cows. (One milking is just finished and it is time to start another.) Milk in New Zealand is more expensive than petrol.

However, all things seem to even out over time and we now have Exxon and a couple of other international oil companies preparing to explore the Great South Basin where it is thought there could be the largest offshore oil field in the world. The poverty stricken south of the South Island may yet give this little country riches. This will be an exciting experience for the oil men working in the new oil fields if stories of experienced fishermen are true. They say they sail home in front of huge following seas - they fill themselves full of beer and marijuana, and are still too frightened to look behind them. They are never sure if the next giant wave will swamp them. Every family in the fishing community of Bluff has lost a family member by drowning.

The one single thing which prevents New Zealand from being anything other than what it is, is the geographical distance from other countries. We are so isolated, and this shows particularly in economics and culture. As a people we have grown in on ourselves, without fresh ideas or new blood. I remember my seafaring husband saying to me many years ago when I thought of going teaching at Pitcairn Island. "Don't do it!" he said, aghast. "The shipping company has given us orders not to sail within a certain distance of the island. If we do, the people there launch all sorts of little boats and row out to make contact. They are desperate to speak with anybody new. They go crazy with loneliness."

The Early Settlers

New Zealand has had European settlement only for the past 150 years. There were Europeans here before that but they were transients - sealers and whalers predominantly. The Maori race has been in New Zealand probably as early as the 10th or as late as the 13th century. It is thought they came from South East Asia because the Maori language has similarities with Japanese. They never moved out of the stone age. Life for them in pre-European times was nasty, brutal and short. They practised cannibalism, probably to enhance a diet which was based on fish, birds, and the kumara (a type of sweet potato). Inter-tribal warfare was constant. A man was old at 50 if he managed to escape being clubbed to death by marauding tribes. Although some Maoris look back on pre-European times as some sort of idyllic existence, it wasn't. Far from it. I studied pre-European Maori history at University and they lived on the brink of extinction all the time - usually from each other. They were all the same people, but they had divided themselves into tribes and fought each other. There had been another race in new Zealand before the Maoris arrived. They were called Morioris but the Maoris ate most of them.

When the Europeans began arriving they found a land which looked not unlike Britain, from whence most of them came, and thinly populated with stone age people. I myself had a grandfather from Cavan, in Ireland, a grandfather from Berwick in Scotland, a great-grandmother from England, and another great-grandmother from Scotland - I don't know where. So I am sort of a third generation New Zealander. The settlers came by sailing ship and although there were many ships wrecked with tragic loss of life all around New Zealand's coastline, these wrecks were the exception. Hundreds of sailing ships arrived and departed New Zealand's shores each year, year after year. Many of the ships made regular voyages for years, bringing their quotas of British families to settle in this faraway land. When the settlers disembarked at their port of arrival, they then set out for their final destination, often by bullock train. New Zealand still has the little settlements on each main road, each one separated by the distance it took a bullock train to travel in one day.

My Scottish grandfather arrived in port of Dunedin with his widowed mother and his brother. Both young men (20 and 22) had been given grants of land to take up. William (my paternal grandfather) went to Winton. I know very little about how he set about building a house, buying stock, farm implements, and how he lived generally in the early days. He died when I was only three years of age so I never got to ask him. I do know that he married the daughter of a neighbour and she died after delivering six children, (I suspect from a miscarriage that turned to a haemorrhage) so he went back to the same neighbour and got another of his daughters (my grandmother) who had another six children to him. The odd thing is that the first family was two girls and four boys and so was the second family. My maternal grandparents had eleven children. All grandparents children married and had children and at one count I had 42 aunts and uncles and heaven knows how many cousins.

All my grandparents worked hard. They were working class and expected to do nothing else. But now the odd details creep in. All grandparents and my parents were staunchly Labour (left-wing) voters but ferociously in favour of private property. All had left Britain to get away from a system where they could never advance financially or own property, but all were staunch monarchists. Standing for the National Anthem (God Save the Queen), saluting the flag, and fighting for King and Country was a given, even though they lived 13,000 miles away from the home country for which they were prepared to lay down their lives. Up until 1970, when Britain dumped New Zealand in favour of the Common Market, all New Zealanders were the same. They loved a country they had left and would never return to, or a country they would never see or live in. When I was a child and went to the pictures (as we call the movies here) God Save the King (later God Save the Queen) was played before the pictures started and EVERYONE stood. When I started school the Union Jack was raised on the flagpole each morning. New Zealand was a little England. The early settlers left their homeland and crossed the sea and brought their homeland with them - every last little bit of it - except the class system. That, they left behind and that, they refused to see erected again in their new country. Egalitarianism was the new cry - everybody equal! There were to be no Lords and Ladies and Dukes and Duchesses owning vast tracts of land and being landlords to the peasants. There was to be no forelock pulling, no bowing before inbred and chinless aristrocrats, no workhouse, no enclosures, and there was to be enfranchisement (of the men at first) which meant all had a say in the building of the new country.

There was to be free education, free public libraries, and free health care. Those things which were not to be had back home these free men and women were going to build for themselves. And they did. There was to be a minimum quarter acre section for each home so the men could keep a garden to grow fresh vegetables for their rosy cheeked children. And they did. There were to be playgrounds for the children, ante-natal care for mothers-to-be, and a full fourteen days in hospital when the first child was delivered. Infant mortality was the lowest in the world. Life was good. People who mattered came to visit New Zealand from all around the world, to view for themselves this little land where everyone had everything. Up until 1969 New Zealand had world class roads, safe bridges, cheap electricity, practically no crime rate worth mentioning, very little disease (the TB hospitals had not been used for years), a reasonably good education system, an excellent health system and full employment. The Government employed one in every five people and the jobs were until 65, then retirement on a Government pension. Santa came every year, the church bells rang on Sunday, and it seemed the good life would go on forever. Then Britain joined the Common Market, the EU as it is now known, and little New Zealand had to begin searching for new markets for her sheepmeat, wool and dairy products. And the new markets were tough.

An Investigation of Political Ideologies

I have tried to be, for most of my adult life, responsible and well balanced, and I have taken seriously my privilege of living in a democratic society. I vote whenever a vote is called for and to the best of my ability, I vote for what I see as the public good. I have never been called upon to serve as a juror but I can assure you that if I was, I would be the most conscientious juror on the bench. I am an assiduous record keeper. My personal accounts are impeccable and I never get into debt. I do not practise civil disobedience. If the sign says not to walk on the grass, I walk on the footpath. I put my groceries into an environmentally safe re-usable bag. I have never sullied my mind by watching pornography or wanton violence. I am polite and quiet and well behaved. I have never taken drugs. I have never been in jail, or a court of law for that matter either. I have been a good girl.

I was not well-educated at school but I went to university when I was older and got a Bachelor's degree in English. I then went to Teacher Training College and got a Diploma in Secondary Teaching. I have always been a great reader (one is never alone when one has a good book) and I married and have a batch of daughters.

However, as the Greeks said an unexamined life was not worth living, I have decided at this late stage to do some examining, to see whether my exemplary record of obedience and yea-saying is going to reward me with a crown of virtue - or even a pat on the back - from those authorities who have made all the rules for me to follow.

To do this examining has meant quite a lot of peripheral reading because when I dipped into the meanings of words like 'democracy' and 'public good' and 'civil disobedience' - not to mention the host of other words which appeared to be connected to these terms - I found that I had actually fallen into an area called 'Philosophy' and I wasn't sure at all if I should be there. Not only was it called philosophy, but there were sub-terms called 'ethics' and 'morals' and 'logic' and I thought 'Oh boy! Why weren't we taught things like this at school, when my brain was young and fresh and absorbent?'

At school we spent ages studying the feudal agricultural system in medieval England and nothing, it now seems, about the world we actually lived in. In my defense, I thought I knew what was going on for most of my life, but now it appears I missed practically everything. I wasn't even a cog in the machine. I think I was a very insignificant spare part stored away somewhere just in case. Of course I can blame quite a lot of my ignorance on the fact that it is common here in New Zealand, the Land of the Long White Shroud. Nobody really knows anything.

Let me re-phrase that. They used to know nothing, and then the internet came along!

There are certain salient facts you need to know about New Zealand before I can really get down to the task of sorting out political ideologies in my mind.

1. New Zealand is not a Pacific island with hula dancing women and an idyllic lifestyle. It is three islands in the edge of the Southern Ocean, which is COLD.

2. New Zealand is the windiest place in the world and Wellington is the windiest place in New Zealand. When I say wind, I mean at best a cold, uncomfortable, stiff breeze and at worst gale force winds when you just stay at home.

3. New Zealand has 4 million people but until 1990 it had 3 million people, two thirds of which lived in the top half of the North Island. Of the 1 million people who lived in the South Island, one third of these lived in Christchurch. Things haven't changed much since 1990. One can travel for miles here on marvellous country roads without seeing another car.

4. New Zealand is a primary producer - beef, dairy products, (for some reason milk here is dearer than petrol) sheepmeat and fruit. It is in competition with all other countries who produce such goods but is much further away. Nobody really wants New Zealand goods. There is also something about transport costs here which I must look into.

5. It is said that we have a Labour (cf Socialist) government here in New Zealand. I can remember many successive National (cf Republican or Conservative) governments which were absolutely no different to what we have now. Even now, National agrees with Labour on most issues and votes along with them.

6. New Zealand's favourite building materials are corrugated iron and number 8 wire. I kid you not.

7. Last but not least, (as I must finish this post and get on to the next one which begins to specifically detail the rise and why of political ideologies in New Zealand) a little story dating back to 1967.

I was staying in Wellington with Andrew and Marie Rogers. Andrew was 40, an ex merchant seaman with one eye (lost the other in a fight) who had been around the block more than once. He grew up in the Gorbals in Glasgow, at the time one of the roughest places in Scotland. Food was short, jobs were scarce, living conditions were harsh, and education was a luxury. Andrew liked New Zealand and decided to stay here, married Marie, and had been working for two or three years as a chef. One day Andrew said to me "You know Jude, there is something wrong with this country. I don't know what it is. People have everything - telephones, washing machines, schools with sports fields, playgrounds for children, good health care, everything is free - but there is something terribly wrong here and I can't work out what it is. The Gorbals was a terrible place to live but I would almost rather be back there than here. People in the Gorbals seemed to be happier and better people."

I had not been out of New Zealand at that time but when I did begin to travel I saw what Andrew meant. The odd thing is, things are even worse now than they were in 1967. This fact requires investigation as well.

Please bear with me anyone who reads this blog. I am trying to work things out for myself and I may make statements which, as I progress, I have to refute or re-phrase. I intend analysing different political ideologies ONLY in connection with New Zealand, as then I can give a first-hand (albeit personal) opinion. Let's see then, how it goes aye?