Posted on 31-7-2003

Loathe Thy Neighbour Australia
By: Cameron Stewart, Claire Harvey, The Australian, 26 July 2003

Kiwis are cooking up wallaby pies and calling them “dead Aussies”. They
blame us for everything from introducing feral pests to crushing their
national identity. They don’t really hate us ... do they?
On a winter morning in the New Zealand tourist town of Rotorua, puffs of
white volcanic steam drift over hot mud pools, painting a surreal backdrop
as the locals drive to work. In the
car, Chris Campbell is crackling over the airwaves from radio station Lakes
96FM.
“What’s the difference between Australians and pigs?” he asks, and then
answers, “Pigs don’t turn into Aussies when they drink.”
The DJ chortles at his own joke and warms to his topic. “I can sum up what
Kiwis think of Aussies - not much,” he says.
“Bullshit,” replies his Australian-born sidekick, Gary Watling. “Kiwis love
the Aussies, only they can’t stand it when Australia wins all the time.”
Campbell: “Aussies win because they cheat.”
Watling: “They’ve got all the World Cups.”
Campbell: “No, when they lose something Aussies won’t play it again - like
the America’s Cup. Or they’ll play sports that no-one else plays, like
Aussie Rules.”
The two men are off and running, playing New Zealand’s favourite sport:
Aussie-bashing. Soon the talkback callers are ringing in. A woman named Mary
calls to say Australian accents remind her of the sound of fingernails
scratching down a blackboard.
The night before, we had asked our dinner waiter what he thought of
Australia. He replied by silently handing us a postcard showing former
Aussie cricketer Trevor Chappell bowling his infamous underarm delivery of
1981. In the bottom corner of the card are printed the words: “Lest We
Forget.”
To the north, in Auckland, the trans-Tasman
relationship is being analysed in a less subtle way. Several hundred rabid
fans of the Auckland Warriors rugby league team are crowded into a bar at
their home ground, celebrating an upset victory over the Canberra Raiders.
The MC of the after-match party, businessman Peter Leitch, better known as
“The Mad Butcher”, pulls one of us up on stage and asks the mob what Kiwis
really think of Australians.
“BOOOOOOOOOO,” they howl in unison.
“And who do we hate most?” asks the Mad Butcher.
“AUUUSSIEEES!” the crowd replies gleefully.
Afterwards, as the fans shuffle out, a woman comes up and urges us not to
take offence at the abuse. “We always love to hate Australians,” she says.
“But in the end, you are our people . our big brother.”
It seems an odd thing to say. But then few relationships are as complex and
contradictory as the sibling ties that bind Australians and Kiwis.
Do the Kiwis really hate Australia? Scratch the surface, beneath the
stereotypes and tribal rivalry, and you will find the “West Island” occupies
a strange place in the psyche of New Zealand. The truth is Australia is both
loved and loathed on an epic scale. The Kiwis delight in laughing at us,
they thrill at beating us at sport, they loathe our accents, they think
we’re a little stupid and uncouth. But for most Kiwis, the feeling is not
real hatred (unless it’s 3am and their cricket team has just been flogged).
Rather, New Zealanders are expressing a growing irritation at Australian
arrogance, and a sense that Australia somehow poses a threat to the Kiwi
national identity. It’s not difficult to see why New Zealanders might feel a
little fragile. From business to sport to entertainment, Australia now
exerts an influence unprecedented in New Zealand’s history, a fact that
increasingly stokes a mixture of resentment and benign resignation among
many Kiwis.
Air New Zealand, one of the country’s most beloved icons, is being stalked
for takeover by a hostile Qantas. Australia’s foreign and defence policies
are becoming more hawkish, while New Zealand scales down its military forces
and refuses to get involved in conflicts such as Iraq. Australian-owned
banks and supermarkets are tightening their grip on the country. New Zealand
was dudded in the trans-Tasman deal to share hosting duties for this year’s
Rugby World Cup, which will now be staged exclusively in Australia. And as
the Kiwi cricketers choke and the All Blacks struggle, Australians can be
heard loudly celebrating each new success.
While New Zealand is a blip on Australia’s radar, Australia has become
omnipresent in New Zealand life. The New Zealand magazine North & South
observed recently that since 1983, when the two countries signed the
landmark Closer Economic Relations (CER) free trade deal, there has been “an
incremental, largely benign but absolutely unrelenting Australian takeover
which goes far beyond supermarket shelves”.
Mention Australia to New Zealanders and a complex cocktail of opinions will
spew forth. Catch one of them on a bad day and they will spit words such as
arrogant, aggressive, overachieving, brash, insensitive, uncultured, greedy
and warlike to describe Australia.
Yet at the same time Australia enjoys a reputation in New Zealand as a land
of milk and honey, where sporting gods roam, jobs are plentiful, people are
easygoing and life is good. “Generally New Zealanders see Aussies as blatant
hedonists and devotees of pubs and barbecues,” says former prime minister
David Lange. “They see Australia as a place of wide open spaces and lots of
money - a sort of California in drag. And the love-hate feelings arise from
envy. They express that envy with hostility.”
Aussie-bashing has become a serious sport, though one still played mostly in
good humour. At next month’s Bledisloe Cup rugby match in Auckland, hungry
Kiwis will be tucking into a nice hot endangered species, all smothered in
tomato sauce. Australian wallabies roaming the South Island will be shot and
encased in pastry especially for the big game. And any All Blacks fan worth
his jandals will be delighted to chew up an Aussie, according to pie
entrepreneur and part-time wallaby hunter Andrew Bolton. “They’re a pest,
pure and simple. I reckon the Bledisloe crowd will love em, eh,” says
Bolton, a sunburnt stock agent from the tiny South Island town of Waimate.
Some of the wallaby-eaters might also be wearing hats made of possum fur
from the carcasses of another endangered Aussie. In Australia, killing
either of these animals is illegal. In New Zealand, it’s an act of
patriotism, considering the rate at which they chomp through the country’s
native scrub.
At the Savoy Tearooms in Waimate, baker Graeme Pepper has been turning
Bolton’s wallabies into pies for a few months and says the punters think
it’s “a great laugh, especially when Australia is doing well in the
cricket”. Green MP Ian Ewen-Street simply says: “Virtually everything that
is a pest in New Zealand is an Aussie.”
In addition to possums and wallabies, Kiwis blame Australia for the arrival
of the feared crop-eating painted apple moth and the gum-leaf skeletonizer
moth (which threatens young eucalypt plantations). The campaign to kill the
painted apple moth has seen Auckland residents endure regular aerial
spraying, forcing some to be evacuated and placed in safe-houses. “They even
spray over children eating their school lunches,” spits anti-spray activist
Helen Wiseman-Dare, who accuses her government of overreacting to the Aussie
threat.
Others, like Colleen Ponsonby of Waimate, make their living from killing
Australian pests. Ponsonby takes tourists on possum and wallaby hunts, and
says it’s a “psychological advantage” for hunters to know they are shooting
Australians. “Wallabies are the only attraction in this stupid town,” she
says. “So the mayor [of Waimate] wanted to put up a giant statue of a
wallaby, but he had a heart attack, poor bastard, and the idea got voted out
while he was in hospital.”
She claims a restaurant on the west coast makes wallaby burgers and sells
them under the name “Dead Aussies”. Dead possums have also become big
business. Pam McKinstry, who calls herself “Possum Pam, guardian of New
Zealand conservation”, is one of many Kiwis who earn a living by turning the
furry Australians into everything from hot-water bottle covers to possum-fur
G-strings and even nipple warmers, which promise to “engulf your nipples in
luxurious natural fur”. On the North Island, a farmer called Byran
Bassett-Smith has gone one step further by turning dead possums into canned
dog food.
But when they’re not busy killing their fauna, New Zealanders are curious
about what makes Australians tick. On a foggy Tuesday morning at
Christchurch’s Canterbury University, a roomful of students in hooded tops
and combat pants are listening to Midnight Oil for clues. The students are
analysing Peter Garrett’s jerky vocals for explanations of Australian
attitudes, as part of their Australian history course. “If Ned Kelly was
king, he’d make those robbers swing,” fuzzes Garrett’s voice through the
speakers, and smirks spread across the room at the earnest Oz-rock passion
of 1983.
Dr Philippa Mein Smith delivers her lecture in a Ned Kelly T-shirt. She
wants to know why Australians worship a hoodlum, and what it says about the
nation of today. “In New Zealand, our national heroes are respectable people
with knighthoods,” Mein Smith tells the class. “I would like you to think
more about why the archetypal Australian hero is a larrikin, an outlaw,
whereas we tend to have respectable heroes like Sir Edmund Hillary.”
Mein Smith and her Aussie- born colleague, Professor Peter Hempenstall, have
just begun a three-year research project on the state of trans-Tasman
relations, with $NZ345,000 ($A300,000) in government funding. They will
produce a book and hope to set up a centre to continue the research.
Mein Smith and Hempenstall believe that two trends are developing with a
strange symmetry. On one side is the “re-emergence of Australasia as a
concept”, says Hempenstall, a Brisbane boy who heads Canterbury University’s
history department. “Australasia” was officially buried when New Zealand
rejected the idea of becoming an Australian state in 1901, but in practice,
the two countries increasingly act as a single antipodean unit, Hempenstall
says. “The divergence of policy in defence is what gains the headlines, and
the conflict in sport - but there is a hidden history of cooperation. There
are public servants in Wellington who have better access to the Australian
system than Australian politicians do.
“But at the same time there is a growing sense in New Zealand that somehow
Australia represents a potential threat to its national identity. New
Zealanders are very sensitive about aviation and defence, and the idea of
Qantas taking over Air New Zealand is very worrying for them,” he says. “Air
New Zealand is a really emotional symbol, like the All Blacks. They’re a
small nation, disconnected from the world, but they can straddle the world
with Air New Zealand.”
When John Howard visited his New Zealand counterpart, Helen Clark, in
Wellington earlier this year to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of CER, both
leaders hailed the free trade pact as a huge success. But many Kiwis are
wary of the growing number of Aussie businesses moving into New Zealand.
Four of New Zealand’s five major retail banks are Australian-owned, while
shopping malls (mostly Australian-owned also) are full of Australian
invaders like Freedom Furniture, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith and Bunnings
Warehouse. While Kiwis accept the economic advantages of this, they are also
anxious about becoming a branch office of Australia, which has long been
their largest trading partner.
Australia’s quiet colonisation of New Zealand extends well beyond business.
Turn on the television and you can watch hours of Australian shows, from
Home and Away to Neighbours, Blue Heelers and The Secret Life of Us.
The mock hatred that Kiwis express towards Australia is more bark than bite.
A recent newspaper poll suggests that New Zealanders are happy to forge even
closer ties with their larger neighbour. A poll published this year in The
New Zealand Herald showed 41 per cent of New Zealanders favoured a
relationship with Australia as close as that of European Union members, who
have adopted a common currency. New Zealand’s Finance Minister Michael
Cullen says the idea of an Australia-NZ economic community is not entirely a
dream, and while currency union is not on the agenda, he has not ruled out
such an option in the future.
Green party co-leader Rod Donald says the suggestion that New Zealand might
like to snuggle up a bit closer is “worse than arrogance, it’s ignorance”.
He says a single currency “would automatically mean the end of our Reserve
Bank and the end of New Zealand having its own monetary policy. We may as
well pack up shop altogether and give Australia control of our budget.”
Despite many Kiwis wanting closer economic relations, only 14.1 per cent
want to take the ultimate step and unite their country with Australia.
Despite their many similarities, the nations see the world through different
eyes - especially when it comes to the US alliance, defence, refugees and,
more recently, Iraq.
But mostly, Kiwis don’t want to unite with Australia because they fear their
identity would be crushed. “My dad would spin in his grave at the thought,”
says Michelle Freebairn as she gazes across fields of sheep at her central
North Island farm. “We wouldn’t have a rugby team in the World Cup.” Her
husband, Graeme, a former shearer, agrees: “How could we get our boys to
sound like you?” he asks as he stands under a nine-metre statue of a shearer
in Te Kuiti.
A trans-Tasman union is highly unlikely, says David Lange. “It would be a
death knell for any [NZ] government to venture into political union with
Australia - the tide of history washed over that prospect long ago.” Winston
Peters, controversial NZ First party leader, goes further: “There are 2000
kilometres between us and 2000 reasons why we wouldn’t go there in any way.
New Zealanders are patriotic, frankly, and they would also not be unaware of
the plight of Tasmania and Western Australia, which are completely ignored
by Canberra.”
But talk to businessmen around New Zealand and you will often hear another
view about merging with Australia. In particular, they fear that the
proposed free trade pact between Australia and the US will leave NZ
exporters out in the cold. “It wouldn’t worry me to become the seventh state
of Australia,” says Gilbert Ullrich, who runs a Hamilton-based aluminium
company. “Some people haven’t caught up with the fact that New Zealand is an
outpost of the world. In Australia you have a global economy, but we don’t
have that. We are the last stop before Antarctica.”
Bruce McCracken, manager of Ponsonby Pies, says the topic of trans-Tasman
trade often comes up at Auckland dinner parties, and debate gets heated. He
says trade ties between the two countries are skewed in Australia’s favour.
He is not allowed to export his pies across the Tasman because Australian
authorities demand that export meat be processed in a licensed export meat
plant - a move that would be too expensive for a business the size
of Ponsonby Pies. New Zealand has no such law, so Aussie pies can freely lob
into the country. Examples like this have led many Kiwis to conclude that
CER is not the level playing field that Australia claims.
Malcolm Hunt shares McCracken’s anger. Standing over a conveyor belt of
apples near Hastings on the North Island’s east coast, he says Australia is
screwing the New Zealand apple industry by banning Kiwi produce. Australia
says New Zealand apples cannot be imported because they could bring with
them a disease called fire blight, but Hunt says scientific evidence of the
risk to Australian apples is thin and the fire blight argument is just “an
easy way for Australia to keep the competition to themselves”.
“I think it [political union] needs to happen,” says Mike Tamaki, a
Harley-riding, self-made millionaire from Rotorua. “So long as we don’t get
treated like Tasmania - that would be bad, man.” Tamaki, who, along with
brother Doug created an award-winning Maori tourist village in Rotorua, says
he can’t see “any friggin’ difference at all between Kiwis and Aussies”.
Not everyone agrees. Kiwis love to swap tales about Australian character
flaws. At a corporate function held before the recent New Zealand vs England
rugby Test in Wellington, former All Black Eric Rush is warming up the
crowd. “How do you tell when you’re in a lift with a famous Aussie
sportsman?” Rush asks. “He tells you so.”
That’s the “arrogant Australian” joke. Then there are the “stupid Aussie”
jokes. In the far northern town of Russell, the ferry captain grins. “Did
you hear the one about the Pom who wanted to become an Irishman? He went to
the doctor and the doctor said, ‘Well, it’s a very delicate operation. I’ll
have to remove half your brain.’ The Pom goes, ‘Okay, I’m willing to take
the risk.’ But the doctor accidentally removes his whole brain. And you know
what the patient says? ‘No worries, mate.’”
Kiwis resent the fact that Australia sometimes forgets that New Zealand
exists. Three years ago, Kiwi student Anna Chartres shivered in the Anzac
Day darkness at Gallipoli, Turkey, among thousands of young antipodean
backpackers listening to dawn service speeches by John Howard and Helen
Clark. It should have been a celebration of shared history, but Chartres
walked away with the nasty taste of hubris in her mouth. “Frankly, people
like John Howard don’t help Australia’s reputation in New Zealand,” says
Chartres, now 20 and a student of Australian history at Canterbury
University. “The speech he gave at
that dawn service was all about Australia, all about Australia’s sacrifices.
You wouldn’t have known any New Zealanders actually fought there.
“When you’re in Australia, there’s no mention of anything that goes on in
New Zealand. We’re right next door and they don’t even glance across at us.
Knowing a bit about Australian history helps explain some of that
arrogance,” she says. “Yeah, like terra nullius,” adds another student,
Hannah Scott. “They didn’t even perceive the Aborigines as people. New
Zealand has done much better at reconciliation.”
David Lange still laughs about the flying visits that Australian politicians
would sometimes make to New Zealand. He remembers the day Bill Hayden, then
Australia’s foreign minister, decided suddenly to fly over to forewarn him
about Australia’s decision to close the Libyan embassy in Canberra. Lange
hopped on a small plane in the dead of night to rendezvous with Hayden on
the North Island. Hayden arrived, told him the news over a cup of coffee,
and flew straight back to Canberra for parliamentary question time.
There is a long tradition of colourful political exchanges across the
Tasman. In a Rotorua hotel in 1982, then prime minister Malcolm Fraser
became so exasperated with his counterpart, Robert Muldoon, that he tried to
exact a bizarre revenge. “In the room immediately below us was Sir Robert
Muldoon,” recalls Alexander Downer, then an adviser to Fraser. “And at
1.30am Malcolm Fraser took it on himself to jump on the floor in the hope
that he would wake Sir Robert from his sleep, just for the sake of it.”
Clark and Howard are also political opposites, but have managed to carve out
a working relationship. Clark is a pragmatist who knows New Zealand no
longer has the luxury of alienating Australia. But on the street, Kiwis are
less cautious about speaking their minds. They love to accuse Australia of
pinching famous New Zealanders and claiming them as their own.
Sitting in a cafe on the main street of Te Awamutu, a town best known for
producing Split Enz and Crowded House musicians Neil and Tim Finn, local
resident Dave Owen lets rip: “It’s really hard for New Zealand to get known
for anything other than sheep-shagging and when we do get something like
Split Enz, Australia comes along and steals it.” Likewise, Australia is
accused of stealing New Zealand-born stars such as Russell Crowe and Phar
Lap and then basking in their reflected glory.
But the sporting arena remains the true battlefield for Kiwis, the only
place where trans-Tasman scores can be settled properly. It is hard to
overstate the tide of misery that has washed over the Shaky Isles in the
wake of Australia’s current sporting dominance.
Tonight in Sydney, when the All Blacks take on the Wallabies in the first
game of the Bledisloe Cup rugby union series, New Zealand will come to a
halt as the nation fantasises about putting Australia back in its box. “It’s
what we live for,” says Glen Haworth as he cradles a beer in a Napier bar.
“Your sporting heroes are drug cheats who blame their mum.”
In the seaside town of Motueka on the northern tip of the South Island,
local schoolteacher and folk singer Paul Bond has written a song called As
Long As We Beat Australia. He wanted the New Zealand Rugby Union to adopt it
as their Bledisloe Cup anthem but “they’ve got no bloody sense of humour”,
he laments. “I think they thought I was taking the piss out of Kiwis as
well.” He launches into a verse: “We don’t like the Froggies to win / We
take the odd loss on the chin / And we don’t get upset about failure / As
long as we beat Australia.”
Incredible as it sounds, Kiwi sports fans still harbour a deep anger, an
outraged sense of justice, about the underarm bowling episode of 22 years
ago. “It was just the most shocking thing and the feelings about that are
just as serious now as they were then,” Bond says. “People just could not
believe such a thing could happen. It was just morally wrong.”
Another favourite target for Kiwis is the Aussie twang. “Seeedneee,” mocks a
taxi driver in New Plymouth. “Noi wurries.”
Kiwis love the stereotype of tacky Australians living in a sunburnt
suburbia, where every sentence ends in a rising inflection. That’s why the
Aussie TV comedy series Kath & Kim has been a massive hit. A troupe of
Christchurch university students spent autumn studying tapes of the spoof to
perfect their Australian accents for a stage production of Cosi, by Sydney
playwright Louis Nowra. “I guess New Zealanders tend to see themselves as
culturally superior to Australians,” admits Merrin Cavel, a member of the
Canterbury University Drama Society. “You’re rough and you’re tough and you
don’t give a stuff,” says 62-year-old Sue Nisbett as she walks her dog on a
track near Napier.
In a field near that city, forestry worker Perry Martin says his friends
love to imagine that Australia is a nation of 20 million Kaths and Kims. It
is a Kiwi fantasy, a stereotype they want to believe in the same way
Australians have fun imagining Kiwis are rural hillbillies with unnatural
affections for sheep.
Keith Meichtry has a more unusual perspective on Australians. He manages the
Waitomo Hotel, a rambling turn-of-the-century place perched on a hilltop and
reputed to be New Zealand’s most haunted house. On the stormy night we
arrive, the hotel is all but empty. The last entry in the visitors’ book,
written by Jason from Oregon, says simply: “There’s a ghost in room nine.”
After we’ve checked in, Meichtry tells us that the ghost - or stories about
it - have caused Americans and Dutch to flee the hotel. Japanese tour groups
won’t even consider staying there. But Australians, he says, are another
story. “If they saw it [the ghost], they would probably try to hit it over
the head with a piece of wood. The Aussies come here for a fight.”
But while Australia exerts greater influence over New Zealand life than ever
before, some Kiwis couldn’t care less. “Never thought about it, eh,” says a
farmer called Derrick Irwin as he leans on a shovel in the paddock of his
mountain farm. “Go for it Australia, do your thing. You haven’t hurt me, so
I won’t hurt you.”
There is no shortage of stronger opinions at Auckland’s Sky City casino, as
a crowd gathers around the big screen to watch a replay of the Warriors’
rugby league victory over Canberra earlier that day. When a Canberra player
is flattened by a brutal Warriors tackle, the crowd lets out a loud
“ooooohhh” and claps in appreciation. “He’s an Australian, take him off the
f..king field,” Warriors fan Trevor Bell laughs as medics rush to the
ironed-out Aussie.
Nearby, 82-year-old Warriors fan Edna Burnett watches the cheering crowd and
stifles a chuckle. She leans across and pauses before speaking, as if
searching for a polite way to summarise a lifetime of thought.
“I like Australians,” she says finally with a wrinkled grin. “I just don’t
like them en masse.”