You’re beautiful, New Zealand, but it’s you, not me

Having registered my New Zealand citizenship, I suspect it will cost even more now to renounce it.

Reverie is temporary. Epiphany is final. Readers may recall that in September I discovered to my shock that I am a New Zealand citizen by descent.

I was told I could pay 400 of their dollarydoos to renounce my citizenship or, for a more agreeable $NZ200, register and enjoy voting rights, with the capacity to represent my recently beloved nation in sport and other national pursuits. Just quietly, I have my eye on the NZ Scrabble championship. I’m not expecting it to be easy because, and I don’t mean to be unkind here, vowels are interchangeable in New Zealand.

Thus I headed back to the homeland to see my people, the people of New Zealand’s South Island, and spent the past week not with deja vu but in what may be called presque vu, a vague memory of visiting Queenstown and Milford Sound when I was a mere seven-year-old stripling.

I recall travelling then on what were flimsier gondolas in Queenstown, and my brother scaring the devil out of my grandmother by threatening to shake the capsule. I remember, with a child’s desire for thrills, the stretch of road known as the Devil’s Staircase. Back then the road clutching to the side of Lake Wakatipu had run north, coming up from Invercargill in my grandmother’s aptly named Austin Humbler.

Queenstown mall

My luggage was lost by the Qantas flight I had booked or had entered an existential vortex Qantas refers to euphemistically as “delayed baggage”. I found myself in one of the most expensive places in the southern hemisphere to buy clothes. I took it as a sign to reach out to my people tending to the stores in Queenstown. It turns out the locals are pretty much all fresh-faced youngsters from other parts of the world. While shopping for comfortable clothes, I tried a weak gag, asking if they kept thongs, correcting myself mid-speech to jandals, but the shoppie was from Manchester and the manager was a Melburnian and the joke died a horrible death.

I don’t remember as a seven-year-old seeing the statue of Queenstown founder William Gilbert Rees on Queenstown beach standing stoically with a sheep at his side but there it was this time. A statue that celebrates a man and his sheep is forever projecting the New Zealand bestiality stereotype to the world and to Australians in particular.

We have more sheep than they do, of course, enough for 2½ for every man, woman and child if we ever go hungry. But it is only in New Zealand that there has been general fretting over the decline in the ratio of sheep to people, down to 4.6 per capita, the lowest since records were kept, as some sort of confected crisis.

Sir William Gilbert Rees. Picture: Jack the Insider

Why worry? I mean, it’s not as if sheep will become extinct in South Island although extinctions are deeply etched into the island’s culture. One could just as easily be as dead as a moa than a dodo. The moa, a gigantic emu of sorts, wandered off the evolutionary pasture about 150 years after the Maori first arrived, largely for having large and tender drumsticks.

The moa may be gone but I came to see the takahe, a big, colourful chicken, basically, flightless and even easier to catch than the moa. The Maori in the 13th century and their colonial followers 400 years later came across these meals on very slow legs and within 1½ hours or so pronounced them delicious.

So delicious were the takahe that by the 1940s the species was considered lost but for a few sad taxidermic models in New Zealand’s museums. Geoffrey Orbell, an intrepid tramper from Invercargill, came across a breeding pair and now an intensive conservation program has brought the takahe population in the wild to a shaky 500 but growing at 8 per cent a year. In defence of New Zealand’s ancestral populations, the one I glimpsed at a wildlife park looked especially unsuited to the pace of 21st-century life. In fact it looked about 20 minutes of some nimble work away from the pierce of a rotisserie. Look, I could have gone to 15 chicken shops in Queenstown, including the Colonel’s fine fare at Queenstown, and bought myself chickens, murdered for me daily, so it’s not for me to judge.

Trundler Return. Picture: Jack the Insider

Let’s get to the obvious, quickly. New Zealand’s Fiordland is a staggeringly beautiful place, almost impossibly so in places. There were times in Milford Sound when chattering tourist groups were drawn silent by the sheer majesty of the sharp inclines and abrupt falls of mountains, almost all of them higher than Mount Kosciuszko, plunging into glaciated fjords.

But it was at a supermarket car park in Te Anau where the moment occurred. I had waited outside for my wife to grab some essentials when I spied the sign, “Trundler return”. Trundlers? What? The shopping trolley was introduced to New Zealand in 1937, two years ahead of Australia by the way. Kiwis took one look at an object that was so obviously a trolley and collectively said, “What ya git dir is a trundler.”

I showed my wife the sign and she reminded me that in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield children trundled hoops, but I was having none of it.

In Australia, a trundler is a slow-medium pace bowler whose appearance at the popping crease is reason to smash his meek offerings all over the park. That’s what trundler means.

I realised then that my New Zealand credentials were phony, an elaborate hoax had been played on me by the Kiwis to join their cult. I had been living a lie.

Having registered my New Zealand citizenship, I suspect it will cost even more now to renounce it, but my mind is made up. Trundler. I just can’t get past it.

Jack the Insider paid for his New Zealand trip and may have got $100 in compensation for Qantas misplacing his bags but hasn’t checked his bank account yet.