Delivering misrelated participles

In posting this comment on the crap grammar of public discourse, I join a large number of like-minded complainants.  This little rant was prompted by reports in this morning's news of 'golden handcuffs' payments of £300,000 each to three British Rail senior managers. Apart from the sense of grievance evoked by the size of this payment in order to retain their already well paid services, and to prevent their defection to the massively overpaid private sector, I was struck by the words of a BR spokesman as reported in the Telegraph.

“ Recognising the huge importance of what this company needs to deliver - better train punctuality, reduced cost and expanding the railway to relieve congestion - retention payments for three key people were made to see through the delivery of our plans."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/10195658/Rail-executives-to-pocket-900000-to-stay-in-jobs.html

This is a classic example of contemporary corporate language, in which agency is avoided, management jargon terms like 'deliver' and 'delivery' are liberally used, and readers are left as confused as they are outraged.

'Recognising' is the participle which has been delivered in this particular sentence.  Participles crave a subject.  But if we scan along the sentence, skipping over the desirable things that are to be 'delivered', we come to 'retention payments'. 'Payments', retention or otherwise, cannot logically be the subject of 'recognise', which requires a sentient subject, such as 'the Board' or even 'we'. (The extent to which either of these could be considered sentient in this context is another matter.)  

The avoidance of agency is augmented by the use of the passive voice: payments 'were made'.  The use of the passive is, of course, a classic way to avoid attributing agency -- and responsibility, with its twin, accountability.   So, the reader is left none the wiser as to who was responsible for a decision to pay these three 'key people' £300k 'retention payments' -- or as would be less politely termed, 'bungs'.

I doubt that the spokesman would recognize a misrelated participle; indeed, there is evidence that he doesn't. Whether Mr Gove's determination to teach grammar will lead to a generation of correct participle use is to be doubted.  There is no evidence that being taught grammar actually improves the quality of writing.

Sixty years ago, George Orwell proposed six rules for writing, all of which have been flouted by this BR spokesman.  None of Orwell's rules mention correct grammar, nor is he concerned with literary use of language, because, as he says, what he is concerned with is 'merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing and preventing thought'.  Unfortunately, the use of language both to conceal and prevent thought is as widely practised today as it evidently was in Orwell's time, and his advice remains as pertinent today as it did then.

SATIS

Earlier this month, The Economist published an obituary of Marc Rich, who had died at the age of 78.  Who he?  He was aptly named: he was 'king of commodities' and had, during a life 'walking on the blade', at the very sharpest edge of trading in metals, mineral and oil, accumulating a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion, citizenships (Spanish, Swiss and Israeli) and criminal charges (racketeering and trading with the enemy).  He showered Israeli good causes with donations and help, and  somewhat controversially, was pardoned by outgoing President Clinton in 2001, thus regaining entree to the USA.   Clearly, a man of huge ability and 'feline charm', he accumulated much wealth and membership of a network of the very rich and very powerful (King of Spain, ex-head of Mossad).

This obituary set me pondering on the question, When is enough enough?   On a daily basis, the media carry reports of what to many people would be considered excesses. The Guardian of Tuesday 16 July reported the 'UK way ahead in EU's list of bankers paid €1m-plus' -- 2,436 City staff on seven figures, compared with the EU as a whole total of 739.   Meanwhile, from time to time the Euro Lottery reaches  unimaginable and grotesque jackpots in excess of £100 million, while that stylish catalogue of conspicuous consumption,  the FT's 'How to Spend It' magazine,  provides a window onto the life style possibilities of the 1%.  And now we learn that the heir to the throne's royal estate appears to be gaming the tax system in what looks like a similar way to that played by pilloried firms like Google, Amazon and Starbucks -- only unlike them, medieval precedents and royal privilege are invoked. Finally, the utilities firms are criticized for paying excessively generous dividends to their shareholders.

At the same time, the various charities to which we donate are constantly hectoring us with requests for additional contributions.  It's a sad reflection in the world's state of affairs that for charities, whether national or international, enough is never enough.

We seem to live in a world in which dissatisfaction seems to be the default state. For the kind of City staff for whom 7-figure pay is the norm,  or for the Marc Rich of this world, income is a success and status marker in a size matters ranking.  Shareholders in firms like the utilities, which are virtual monopolies, are being showered with largesse at the expense of investment.  It's difficult not to feel that the old slogan, 'Greed is Good' in the newly deregulated world of the late C20th has now become the guiding principle of early C21st society.

It could be -- and will be -- argued that it is  thanks to dissatisfaction that homo sapiens has moved from being a hunter gatherer to a city dweller in a hugely complex global culture, rich with possibilities.  And it was Marc Rich's dissatisfaction with the level of rewards as a trader at Phillip Brothers that led him to achieve such a massive fortune through a buccaneering career as king of commodities.  But he is now in a grave in Israel.  Homo sapiens' exploitation of the planet's resources entails a huge threat to sustainability.  How much damage and exploitation has to be done before we are truly satisfied? When is enough enough?

PART SEVEN: REFLECTIONS

 This visit ‘home’ had been undertaken almost spontaneously, and had been intended to be both a trip down memory lane as well as an opportunity to see some parts of my native country which I had never visited – thus the time spent in Marlborough.  It was also to be a voyage of discovery and rediscovery which might reveal things about NZ and about myself.  The visit to Te Papa introduced a significant theme: identity.  What I was exploring and discovering was, in part, New Zealand’s contemporary identity, and what, as an expatriate kiwi, is my own.  How has one contributed to the other?

I think the first thing that struck me was less the lansdcape, significant though that is, than the built environment because, of course, there are buildings everywhere, some dating back to the Victorian and Edwardian eras,  many from the interwar years, and some from recent times. Some have been cherished and preserved, others have been repurposed, some abandoned, some gussied up in a style which would have puzzled the original builders, others wrecked by natural forces like the Christchurch earthquake.   The built environment is layered, with a rich patina, and I came to realize that it provided a kind of visual metaphor for the country and the changes which have occurred over half a century, while the reflections of some provided a counterpart to the distortions and misunderstandings of my own view of my birthplace.  The buildings that I recognized from childhood provided an anchor, taking me back to a period when I simply took such structures for granted.  Some, which I had been unaware of, a lifetime later take on a new significance. Art deco has acquired meaning in adulthood, and it is part of a small area of knowledge and experience acquired since leaving NZ.  

Other parts of the built environment also took on new significance.  The settlement and history of NZ can't be separated from the construction of roads, railways and bridges, harbours and wharves, the country’s infrastructure.  My railway journeys took me through landscape which offered a huge challenge to the railway and civil engineers.  With imagination, grit and a hard working labour force, they pushed the railways through and helped to knit together parts of the young nation.  Today, those railways are not so much a means of transport as a vehicle for leisure, representing yet another change since my departure. 

Finally, there’s the landscape itself.  In its pristine state, as when Abel Tasman navigated its coast in the C17th, the landscape of NZ must have been quite spectacular, though alien, being largely covered in dense forest.  There was an exotic bird life.  There were no vermin or snakes.   Although Maori had made some impact on the landscape and its fauna – they had driven the huge moa to extinction, for instance – when the first European settlers arrived, vast areas of the country were more or less as nature had made them.  Within a couple of generations of European settlement, huge tracts of forest had been cleared and replaced by pasture, and with this clearance came a decline in the native bird population.   Today, much of the landscape, as in Canberbury and the Manwatu,  is completely man made, and even in such isolated places as the Marlborough Sounds, there are huge areas in which the native forest and its bird life have been obliterated to be replaced by pasture or pine forests.

Now NZ has woken up to the environmental effects of these man-made changes, and what was formerly a resource to be plundered is now a damaged landscape to be restored or unspoiled forest to be carefully maintained in its pristine state.   Restoration trumps exploitation. For instance, Kapiti Island, which gives its name to the Kapiti Coast, is a strictly managed wild life reserve, and there are other islands which are being used as refuges to encourage the breeding of indigenous bird life. 

Restoration has also been applied to the land and resources of the Maori.  The most conspicuous form of restoration applies to the language. Fifty years ago, the Maori language (Te Reo) was not widely spoken and was little known.  My school, FAHS, sported a Maori motto, "Kia Toa Kia Ngakaunui” ("Have Courage, Desire Greatly"), a local substitute for the usual Latin moto.  There was also a constant reminder of the language in the countless Maori place names. However, their pronunciation was heavily anglicized and little of the music of  Te Reo survived its encounter with the pakeha tongue.  A truly massive change has taken place.  Te Reo is now widely taught in schools, many more people speak it, it has a highly visible place in public life and literature – my NZ passport is in two languages, English and Maori – and there are two Maori TV channels.  Most significantly,  great care is now taken in pronouncing Maori accurately and authentically, so the TV weather forecast presenters for instance, who necessarily have a whole range of Maori place names to articulate, do so as to the manner born.

The changing status of the Maori language has for some time been accompanied by a growing Maori assertiveness and what some would consider to be the overdue restoration of long denied rights and benefits deriving from the misappropriation of Maori land. Since the 1990s, governments have worked at restoration of use and ownership rights, though the so-called Waitangi process (after the treaty of 1840) has not been without controversy, particularly among  some of the pakeha population.   Likewise, the acquisition of significant sums by tribes and tribal groups hasn't always led to intra or even intertribal harmony. Even so, the so-called Waitangi process has attended to long-standing Maori grievances and attempted to put right injustices.   This represents a truly huge and desirable change since the 1960s.

So, Maori are secure in their own homeland and can look forward to a prosperous future. Or can they?  Some things don't change, and the socio-economic status of Maori hasn't changed so drastically as to move the majority into the property owning,  fully employed middle class.  I heard a radio interview with an MP regarding a controversial development in his constituency, North Auckland, which could bring employment to a region much in need of it. He pointed out that there was very high unemployment among Maori youth, a situation repeated on the East Coast where there is also a high Maori population.  Both areas are predominantly rural, with limited economic opportunities other than farming. So, despite their higher status and their significant contribution to NZ identity, the plight of Maori still remains problematic.  Like some of those old buildings, this unfortunate aspect of  NZ life lingers on.

There is likely to be another issue which will arise, as far as Maori are concerned, deriving from the considerable increase in immigration, especially from Asia.  It is projected that 250,000 Asian immigrants will arrive between 2006 and 2026, while even today, 23% of  New Zealanders were born overseas. (Cf 13% in the UK where immigration has become a significant political issue, at its worst verging on xenophobia).) Evidently most of New Zealand's  23% live in the Auckland region.  Although Maori are by a large margin a minority in their own country, the arrival of new immigrants further dilutes their proportion of the population,  so it is not difficult to see that migration could be a source of contention not only among the majority pakeha population, but also among indigenous Maori.  

Such immigration can and will have an effect on NZ identity, but in ways that it is difficult to predict.  I've already commented on the orientation of NZ towards the Pacific and Asia apparent in the displays at Te Papa.  How meaningful and acceptable this orientation will be to newcomers from beyond Asia, such as the Turkish waiter in the Devonport restaurant, is open to conjecture.   What contributions to the cultural mix will such newcomers make?  How accepting will they be of the specifically Maori seats in parliament? And how in turn will immigrants’ aspirations, attitudes and values affect NZ identity?

As my visit and the many changes in population and material culture demonstrated, for all its isolation in the South Pacific, NZ is fully integrated into the globalization which links the rest of the world through flows of goods, information, ideas and people. The original European settlement of the country represents an earlier phase of globalization,  when colonialism by such powers as GB brought a form of globalization in which the flow of power and ideas was distinctly asymmetrical, and remained so for many generations. With the expansion of settlement and livestock farming, NZ became a pioneer in the shipping of chilled and frozen meat and dairy products to the Mother Country and thousands of young NZ men heeded the call for troops to defend its interests, beginning with the Boer War in 1900.  This truly significant involvement in global conflict is commemorated in the ubiquitous war memorials, such as those found in Feilding, Palmerston and Auckland, and, in an invisible form in the demographic impact brought about by the deaths and disablement of a significant percentage of the most economically active male age cohort during the 20^th century.

Attitudes to the Home Country (aka UK), though largely favourable and carefully maintained by regular royal visits, inevitably began to change in the latter part of the C20th. Especially significant in this change was the entry of Britain into the EU because, while NZ could still continue to export to what had been its prime market, new markets for its products would have to be found to compensate for the reduction in exports to the UK.  Happily for NZ, a vast and rising market was available in a region of the world which till then had provided a relatively limited outlet for NZ produce: Asia and the Middle East.  Where trade goes, people and ideas also go, and with the striking economic development of such countries as China, Malaysia, Singapore and India (not to forget the leader, Japan), NZ’s focus has been literally reoriented. 

The integration of NZ into the globalized world has also been strengthened by the Kiwi diaspora.  Nearly half a million NZ born people live abroad, of whom around 360,000 live in Australia, including children of my two cousins and my hosts in Paramata.  Such a diaspora involves travel and the flow of people and ideas across the globe.  This is augmented by the flow of British and American TV and films onto Kiwi screens, including, with the cinema career of Peter Jackson, an important burgeoning of production skills and a wave of tourism in and to NZ – or Middle Earth. 

His films are a global phenomenon, but represent a European, even English Home Counties fantasy world.  The real world of NZ seemed to me to be somewhat unrepresented on NZ TV, in which all channels are commercial, and in which so many programmes were imports.  For once I could begin to understand the French obsession with protecting their cinema industry. Even more striking was the fact that Sky TV as seen in NZ is actually based in Australia, so the majority of the news items appeared to be Australian, and the space devoted to actual NZ news seemed to be comparable to the ten minutes allocated to ‘the news where you are’ on the BBC news in the UK.  In the UK, however,  ‘where we are’ is just a county, so this portioning out of space on the national news is understandable. But NZ is a whole country!  I suppose with such a small population, Aotearoa simply doesn't generate enough news for Aussie Sky. 

Alone among the unrepresentative sample of TV programmes that I saw, only two were made in NZ. The first was a crime series set in Auckland, with New Zealander Sam Neale playing the role of a police inspector trying to protect his team from the dysfunctional ambitions of his superior,  who was more concerned with getting ‘headlines in tomorrow’s Herald’ than with the just resolution of a current case, which appeared to involve a Polynesian family and the building of trust between the police team and the family in an attempt to achieve a satisfactory outcome rather than headline news. 

The other programme was one which presented a really important part of NZ society and culture to the Kiwi audience: the ANZ Young Farmer of the Year Grand Final.  Even here, globalization wasn’t far from the scene as one of the finalists had worked for a time under Gordon Ramsey, so that in addition to his many skills as a livestock farmer, he was able to rustle up a gourmet dinner.   This bit of reality TV, while drawing on a format developed elsewhere, presented an authentic slice of NZ to the nation’s viewers, reinforcing a central part of the national identity, that of the down-to-earth, multi-skilled give-anything-a-go laconic male Kiwi (there not being, evidently, any female young farmer finalists this year).  The finalists also served to challenge the stereotype of the Kiwi farmer immortalized in Fred Dagg from Taihape (New Zealand’s self-styled Gumboot Capital), a comedy character created by satirist John Clarke in the mid 1970s.

What I have come to realize, reflecting on this visit, is that identity, whether national or individual, is a continual process, a work in progress,  and not a fixed product (politicians obsessed with nationality quizzes please note).  Like the country itself, identity is continually constructed and bits of the old are left behind or are repurposed, while the new is introduced and maybe with some discomfort or irritation and adaptation is integrated, and an altered configuration/identity emerges. As NZ has evolved as a country and as a nation, its identity has been influenced and subtly altered with each generation and each wave of immigration. Fortunately, some of the old attitudes and behaviours have, like many of the old buildings, been retained in up to date guise, and some less desirable ones become largely extinct, if not entirely, as the anti-Semitic comment of the Christchurch taxi driver revealed.   Even so, Kiwis remain open, friendly, helpful , hospitable, unpretentious,  and critical of anyone who pulls rank or uses their position to gain advantage – as the unwise Mr Gilmore discovered.  Aotearoa is still a homely, comfortable place, despite the overlay of globalized sophistication.

When I left NZ in 1963, quite obviously I didn't leave my NZ identity behind like a discarded garment.  I took it with me, and since then, as with the country I had left, that identity has been a work in progress, subject to many influences and incorporating quite a few changes. What this visit made me appreciate is the basis of that identity: like the Marlborough sauvignon blanc, made and bottled in New Zealand/Aotearoa, but matured elsewhere.

On my last evening in Wellington, I arrived back at the Paramata railway station and started heading towards the 200 steps up to Derek and Rosemary’s house overlooking an inlet. As I looked out over the familiar Porirua Harbour towards the Ngatitoa Domain, which during the day provides a pleasant though unremarkable vista, I realized that in the fading light the scene had taken on an unfamiliar,  almost magical quality.  I whipped out my mobile and snapped the clouds, the evening sunlight, the reflections and the water,  capturing images that mirror the impact and memories of my visit --  some vivid, some permanent, some distorted, some as fleeting as the quietly magical scene before me.

Haere ra Aotearoa!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/

PART SIX: WAIHEKE ISLAND

Rangitoto is one of the many islands in the Hauraki gulf, and among these, Waiheke is one to which Auckland has expanded.  Fifty years ago, this was the kind of place where alternative life stylers lived or where city dwellers would have a batch – a simple, informal beach house.  Very few people living on Waiheke would have worked in Auckland city.  Since then,  Waiheke has evolved and there are now about two thousand people who commute daily to the CBD, a small wine industry has developed, and the simple batches of old are no more, most of them having been bought and demolished to make way for smart  -- or, to use a common Kiwi term, ‘flash’ -- holiday homes.  The most luxurious and most perfectly sited are worth very serious money – multiples of millions of dollars – and aren’t necessarily owned by wealthy Kiwis.   So, the character of this delightful island is changing and instead of a place where alternative life stylers can hang out, it has become a venue for well paid city workers and the very well heeled absentee owner.

To get to Waihekei, I took one of the regular ferries, joining people who, like me, were visiting the island for the day, together with a few residents returning from the city.  Although it was early winter, the day was warm, there was a balmy breeze, and the sun was shining.  The journey takes around 45 minutes on one of the ferries run by Fullers, who also run the Waiheke bus services and provide conducted tours of the island and the vineyards, a neat bit of commercial synergy.   The voyage provides a good view of the CBD and harbour area, as well as a perfect view of Rangitoto, a long extinct volcanic island which has true iconic status in Auckland.   Matiatia, the modest harbour where the ferry docks,  is overlooked by one of the multi million dollar houses. Also unexpectedly present on the wharf was a staff member who happened to be a Sikh. Auckland's multi-ethnicism has extended to Waiheke Island.  

The population expansion wasn't particularly obvious at the beaches -- it was 'winter' despite what, by UK standards, could pass for a summer's day. There were few people wandering along the deserted beach at Onetangi bay, where I left the tour bus and stopped for lunch at a smartly casual seaside café, which offered a sophisticatedly informal menu, a good range of wines, and a table from which to enjoy the view and the comings and goings of fellow customers. All the incredients for the good life were present, including some very smart holiday houses in which to enjoy it.

By now,  my visit to Aotearoa was coming to an end.  On my last evening, I took the ferry to Devonport,  a short trip across the harbour from the CBD .  At the restaurant where I dined I was greeted by a continental European hostess, waited on by a Turk, and ate food prepared by Korean and Philipino chefs, working to a menu designed by the absent French head chef.  The waiter, who had been in NZ for ten years, said that he liked Auckland because everyone minds their own business and you can live your own life: live and let live.  This seemed to be an encouraging view of my home country, and as I waited for the ferry back to the CBD,  I took in the night time view of the city, reflected in the harbour, and engaged in a few reflections of my own, the subject of my final blog, Reflections.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/

PART FIVE: AUCKLAND

So began four days in the city where I spent four years as a student and two as a bus driver before leaving for Fiji and eventually the world beyond the Pacific.  It soon became clear that Auckland’s diversity was exactly as described in the Northern Explorer commentary, beginning with a hotel lobby full of young women and a few young men in evening dress as part of a graduation event.  All of them were Chinese.   The two receptionists were continental Europeans.  The two staff who served me at the nearby restaurant where I ate dinner were European and Indian.  This pattern of ethnic diversity was to repeat itself over and over again during my stay.

Similarly, the architectural vandalism which had occurred in Wellington was repeated in Auckland, where Queen Street in particular had fallen into a very depressed state, with souvenir shops near the station and anchor department stores, like Milne & Choice, now departed, as was the adjacent Bank of New Zealand. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions, notably the splendid new Art Gallery  (Toi o Tāmaki ) which combines an existing building in the French chateau style with a glass and wood structure in the 21^st century manner, providing views into Albert Park, beyond which is my alma mater.  Less appealing is a slim block of flats on Waterloo Quadrant, opposite the university campus, which replaces the building where I lived. Rising like an obscene gesture, this tower is out of scale with the surrounding buildings, which are similar to the one that was demolished to make room for the pointing finger.  The adjacent surviving buildings include – surprise, surprise – an art deco style block of flats. Our flat overlooked the rear of this block, not unlike the set up in Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window,  and our small balcony had a fine view of the harbour where one morning we watched the brand new liner, Oriana, sail up the harbour to the dock at the foot of Queen Street, as cruise liners continue to do to this day.

Other forms of vandalism had taken place nearby.  The NZ Dairy Marketing Board, a very powerful body in a country with such a large dairy industry, pretentiously and somewhat opaquely renamed itself Fonterra,  while also constructing a high status high rise block fronted by the gutted remains of the former Grand Hotel where, occasionally, we would visit to have a posh drink in the lounge.  I chatted with the friendly security guard, who told me that the new building was leaking so badly that it would have to be emptied while repairs were made. I felt that this was due punishment for the pretentiousness and architectural vandalism of the Fonterra grandees. 

Fortunately, a few other architecturally interesting buildings in the same area have been preserved, even if changed in function.  Just around the corner from Fonterra Tower is the unique building which, in its heigh day, housed the radio station, 1YA.  It is now in posession of the university, to whom it was given by a member of the Meyer family, whose long association wih the civic life of Auckland is commemorated in several such places.

One of my contemporaries at university was a member of the Meyer family, and we attended lectures in the various buildings which then made up the city centre campus. One of these included a splendid house, one of a line of repurposed high status houses opposite the main campus on Princes Street.  Several of these are now the premises of New Zealand’s best English language school, Languages International (LI), which I visited to learn about the current state of the industry from Darren Conway, who is chair of English NZ, the ARELS equivalent. . The meeting had been arranged by one of his colleagues, Craig Thaine, who also showed me around the very well equipped school, before we adjourned to one of the high rise office buildings overshadowing 1YA. Commendably, the ground floor, which is decorated and furnished like the lobby of a  swish hotel, is open to the public, and a coffee bar-cum-bistro  provided a very pleasant venue.  I learned that the NZ industry has been suffering from a quite serious decline in volume, not even a quality operation like Languages International being immune.  As to the regulation of the industry, this appeared to fall between several government agencies, with predictable results. Apparently, regulations governing part-time employment benefitted university students (and universities recruitment), while disadvantaging students attending a language school like LI.  English NZ wasn't very happy about this situation. 

The growth of an ELT industry in NZ, and the adaptation of fine houses to a language school, weren’t envisaged when I lived round the corner from LI, and when I mentioned to the friendly Frontera security guard that I had driven buses for a couple of years, he recommended a visit to MOTAT (the Museum of Transport and Technology) where I would certainly find on display one of the Daimler buses that I had driven.  So, I took a bus out to Western Springs, on Great North Road passing a line of car show rooms dedicated to the sale of distinctly up market brands, Audi, Porsche and Bentley, replacing the Daimler car show room which had been on the same location in the 1960s. Daimler as a brand has long since been extinct, and today the well heeled buyer heads for the showrooms of the German super brands, which include British Bentley,  now part of the VW group. 

When I was a bus driver in Auckland, a significant percentage of my fellow drivers were Maori, with a few Polynesian islanders. We weren't actually 'drivers', but were called ‘bus operators’ because we issued the tickets and cashed up at the end of the shift.  Although being a bus operator involved shift and weekend work, it was a good job, there was a strict dress code, and navigating a large, powerful vehicle along Auckland’s roads was in many ways a little boy’s dream come true.  Today there is still an even more ethnically mixed driving force, which now includes Asians as well as Polynesians. Even more importantly, it also includes women, because one of the most significant developments in NZ since the 1960s has been changes in gender roles and the opening up of a wide range of jobs to women – including those of PM, Helen Clark, over three successive terms from 1999 to 2008,  and Anglican bishop, its first female bishop, Penny Jamieson, being consecrated in 1990.   

I took the tram – a green W2 Melbourne class as it happens -- to the Sir Keith Park Memorial Aviation Collection, which is dominated by a huge Lancaster bomber and a replica of the statue of Sir Keith which stands in London.  Park applied a measure of Kiwi practicality and pragmatism to the somewhat hidebound direction of the RAF at a critical time: the Battle of Britain.  Although acknowledged in the war histories, it was only recently, thanks to a campaign, that Park has been honoured with a statue in the country he served so significantly.  

MOTAT deals with the technology – railways, cars, tractors, aircraft – which are integral to the development of NZ as a modern country and economy.   In this respect, it provides a valuable and necessary corrective to the galleries of Te Papa,  which display sparce evidence of the European/pakeha presence and contribution to the shaping of the NZ identity.  

I continued exploring areas where I had lived as a student.  Parnell was one of them.  This is one of the oldest suburbs, being settled in 1841.  In my time the two sides of Parnell Road were entirely different, one being very down at heel, with many houses in multiple occupancy, the other, with the harbour views and the Parnell Rose Garden, being distinctly well heeled. It is also where the Anglican cathedral is located. The buildings on the ‘wrong’ side of the road have now been extensively gussied up and repurposed, mostly as cafes and restaurants. The general tone of the area can be judged from the cars parked along the street in the flickr photo: a Mini, a BMW X5 and a Porsche 911.  Further up the street an oddly named example of the Asian influence on Kiwi eating habits, the BBQ Resturant Sushi,  was just opening for business, maybe for Sunday brunch?

The BBQ Sushi restaurant is in a new building, but most of the old parades of shops remain much as remembered, including one containing a launderette which could just possibly be the same one I took my laundry to.   It had been run by a Hungarian family who would have come to NZ as refugees.  They were clearly bourgeois, and the matriach who presided over the launderette gave the impression that this was not how she had planned to spend her mature years. From time to time her son,  who obviously had other business interests eleswhere, would appear and they would conduct what sounded like vituperative arguments in highly expressive Hungarian.

As one of the oldest central suburbs, Parnell still has houses from the 19^th Century, of which the one in the flickr photograph is a fine example.  In fact, it is virtually an archetypical house of those to be found, in varying sizes and degrees of splendour, throughout NZ and Australia.  The central front door opening onto a verandah, and the hipped roof, traditionally of corrugated iron, are typical features, and are often mimicked, though with less success, in some modern houses.

I moved from the shops to the ‘correct’ side of the road to find the block of flats where I had lived for a year.  While exploring, I discovered an unexpected architectural gem, a pair of art deco houses which must have been built by a very avant garde builder in the 1930s, when the preferred style of house was  (and still largely is) as shown in the photograph of a bourgeois house from the 1930s. 

Both styles are in danger of being replaced by higher density three story town houses. Auckland has always been a widely dispersed city, houses having large plots (up to a quarter of an acre) and suburban life being the preferred norm.  However, such expansion can't go on forever. It looks as if the city suffers from a piecemeal approach to transport infrastructure, there being only one harbour bridge, for instance,  no tunnels under the harbour as in Sydney and no urban rail services to the northern suburbs as in Wellington. As a result, the practicable limits of expansion are being reached, for which the recently created Auckland Council is proposing a solution. 

In 2010,  the functions of the existing regional council and the region's seven previous city and district councils were merged into one "super council" or "super city" governed by a mayor. The Auckland Council is the largest such body in Australasia, with a $3 billion annual budget, $29 billion of assets, and approximately 8,000 staff. One of those staff is a CEO who, when appointed,  was to receive a salary of $675,000 and an incentive bonus of $67,500. This costly appointment was just one of many contentious issues which seem to have plagued the Auckland Council, and while I was there the latest controversy had hit the media: a Council proposal to encourage the building of 3 storey town houses as in-fill.   It sounded as if a strong NIMBY movement was in the process of working up a head of steam. Just near the art deco gems on St Stephen’s Avenue were examples, albeit upmarket ones, of what could become the norm in the suburban landscape of the future.

From a contemplation of the architectual future of Auckland’s suburbs, I moved on to the Domain, having first bought some tucker at Pandora,  a Panetteria, an exotic form of baker’s shop in another parade of Parnell shops which had benefitted from the paint brush. They are opposite the Anglican cathedral, a sort of ecclesiastical architectural layer cake, starting with 19th century Victorian gothic in timber and moving through a brick layer to 20^th century Kiwi gothic.   

On the Domain, I found a seat, opened my tucker bag, and was immediately visited by a spruce white sea gull and a bevvy of little brown birds.  Indigenous New Zealand birds are not common in a city like Auckland, and I realized that the little brown visitors were not natives. They were sparrows.  This feisty little flock are the antipodean relatives of a species rarely seen in the UK nowadays.  The British sparrow has immigrant relatives thriving in NZ where they have gone native.  Having fed myself and the rapidly expanding flock of gulls and sparrows, I walked up to the Museum and gazed out over the war memorial, which is a replica of the Lutyens one in Whitehall, and the city and the harbour.   A group of adult skateborders were using the nearby paving as a rink, and a young family approached, making their way to the museum.  Without the skateborders, this and the view of the profile of Rangitoto, was a scene pretty well unchanged from fifty years ago.  

My next stop was Waiheke, now virtually an off shore suburb of Auckland.  

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PART FOUR: ‘PALMY’ & FEILDING

I had left my travel plans open for getting to Palmerston North (or ‘Palmy’ as it seems to have become), intending to rent a car to meander north before joining the Northern Explorer  on Friday.  My attempts to rent a car in Wellington proved fruitless, so I travelled by coach from Porirua, one of the Kapiti Coast suburbs near where I was staying.  Long distance coach travel wasn't so common 50 years ago, trains being more popular for a journey from Wellington to Palmy. Today there is an extensive coach network providing a cheap substitute for the largely defunct inter-city rail network.  The coach was bound for Wanganui, with a 30 minute comfort stop at Palmy, where I disembarked and took a taxi to my motel.  In the course of conversation with the driver – Casper II was his call name – I asked about buses to Feilding, explaining that I wanted to visit because I had gone to high school there.  Casper offered to take me there and back for $45.00, so I took up his reasonable offer, and off to Feilding we went.

In fact, the distance to Feilding isn't that great, being only 20km, although 50 years or more ago, a trip to Palmy was a major excursion reserved for serious shopping. In those days, the speed limit was 50 mph, and when a neighbour who took delivery of a Ford Consul, the first truly new post-war British Ford, he was pleased to report that it ‘cruises very nicely at 45 mph’.  Casper didn't break any speed limits in the Toyota Camry en route to Feilding, where we arrived during the lunch hour.  Unfortunately, the usual providers of fast food are well established in Feilding, but an unexpected choice presented itself as we drove into the town centre: a sushi shop!  Not even Henley-on-Thames offers a such a choice.

The remarkable thing about ‘Friendly Feilding’ is that it is, well, unremarkable. The town takes its name from Colonel William Feilding, rather than the Maori name, Aorangi. He was a son of the seventh Earl of Denbigh. Col. Feilding (thus, presumably, the deviant spelling) was a director of the Emigrants and Colonists Aid Corporation Limited and on a visit to New Zealand, he  negotiated the purchase of a 100,000 acre (400 km²) block of land from the Wellington provincial government in 1871. The first British settlers arrived on 22 January 1874 to begin farming on what had been called the Manchester Block. Like Canterbury, this area of the Manawatu was opened up as part of a scheme to replicate Britain on the other side of the world. Settlers were selected from among ‘respectable’ applications, and they were expected to be industrious and hard working.  Importantly, like all of New Zealand’s settlers, they came voluntarily.

Industriousness and fortitude were certainly needed, but after a slightly wobbly start, the settlement of the Manchester block and the development of Feilding proceeded apace. Indeed, it’s quite salutary to realize that when we went to live near Feilding in the 1950s, the farms on the Manchester block and the town itself had come into existence only three generations previously. The town evolved to service the farming hinterland, and it boasts the largest stock yards in the southern hemisphere, as well as branches of national chains such as Paperplus (a kind of Paperchase + Waterstones), Postie Plus (clothing) and a branch of that eponymous and ubiquitous roaster and purveyor of coffee, Robert Harris.   

In my adolescence, ‘going to town’ meant going to Feilding, and with the shops open on Friday night, this was the time when many people from the district went shopping.  Most of the premises, and a few of the businesses from that era, still exist in a town centre in which most of the buildings date from the early part of the 20^th Century.   Like Blenheim in Marlborough, Feilding is disposed around a central square containing a clock tower, a war memorial – and an immaculately maintained public loo not, however, in art deco style. On one corner of Manchester square is the Feilding hotel whose origins date back to the earliest days of settlement.  If the lamp standards and the modern cars were to be removed, and only the red MGB GT left in place, this is a scene which could have been photographed when I went to school in Feilding. 

It seems that a lot of thought and effort has gone into the beautification of Feilding’s CBD, and the town has won the annual New Zealand's Most Beautiful Town award 14 times.  There is no question that Feilding is a prosperous and pleasant town, now with a population of around 14,000 (fifty years ago, it was about half that) and much civic pride is in evidence, as well as a politically conservative outlook, the MP being a member of the National (i.e.,  Conservative) Party.   The paint brush has also been active, and some rather non Edwardian colour schemes have been applied the town’s Edwardian buildings, although there is a discretely styled two-story block built in 1992 in the Edwardian style replacing the original Darragh’s hardware store, where one of the Darragh daughters, a fellow pupil at the high school, would serve on Friday nights. Darraghs appear to continue their hardware business as a Mitre franchise – a nationwide B&Q equivalent --  on a trading estate beyond the centre of town.  

Unfortunately, the freedom allowed to the choice of colour schemes has also been extended to the fascias of the verandas which are a virtually universal feature of NZ and Australian towns, providing shelter from rain and sun as a kind of open air precursor to the now ubiquitous shopping mall.  Whereas in the conservation area of Henley’s town centre there are strict constraints on shop signage, there seems to be no such limitation in NZ or Australia, and I found the effect visually discordant and hectoring. In the past I've felt that many of the local council’s signage decisions in Henley have verged on the petty, but now having seen the effect of a signage free-for-all in, of all places, Friendly Feilding and even Sunny Nelson, I’ve come round to the council’s way of thinking.

Before leaving Feilding, I needed to visit my old high school, so Casper, with me navigating from memory, directed the Camry to what was formerly known as Feilding Agricultural High School (FAHS).  The inclusion of ‘agricultural’ in its name was a deliberate decision by the founders, who felt that agricultural education was, in the NZ context, both important and, at the time, under valued.  By the time I attended the school in the 1950s, FAHS was pretty much a regular high school, albeit with a significant agriculture stream, serving pupils from the Feilding district and even far beyond. Unusually, it had a boarding wing for boys only,  farmers’ sons in the Ag classes who came from beyond the local catchment.  (Posh farmers in the Feilding district sent their sons to Wanganui Collegiate and daughters to ‘Dio’, Diocesan School for Girls).

Today, apparently after much debate, ‘agricultural’ has been dropped from the name, mostly it would seem as a marketing ploy because the school recruits international students, for whom the term may have associations with the peasantry. Some of these international students stay in the boarding accommodation previously occupied by the farmers’ sons.  There are plenty of other changes, most notably in the governance of the school,  in which the school council operated by the students for the students is responsible for the allocation of funds for the various clubs. According to the rather scrappy school website, FAHS (as it still remains) was the first school in the country to set up such a council.   Its existence also helps explain why the school library (where, for a year I was librarian) is now the council chamber.  I forgot to ask whether and where the school library is now to be found.

There have been other even more significant changes on the sports field.  In the 1950s, rugby was the only game; ‘football’ meant rugby.  Today the school also has four soccer pitches.  This would certainly not have been envisaged by the First Fifteen of 1953, whose photograph I checked out in the old ‘A Block’, and whose current whereabouts I briefly pondered on.   I've never maintained contact with any of my contemporaries, none of whom went to Auckland university, and I've never been able to attend any of the reunions which used to be such a feature of the FAHS calendar. Ultimately, this is probably because FAHS occupies a much less significant place in my life than does Auckland university.

Having completed this brief trip down part of memory lane, I returned to Palmy where I was to spend the night before catching the Northern Explorer, the train to Auckland.  Like Feilding, Palmy is built around a square with a clock tower and war memorial.  Unhappily, at some point last century, the city council built a brutal new council building which abuts into the square, disrupting what, fortunately, remains a pleasant civic space, despite this bit of architectural vandalism.  There are, however,  other threats to the low rise scale of the city, with several multi storey buildings hovering on the perimeter of the Square as if waiting to land and complete despoliation begun by the benighted council. 

Some of the Edwardian buildings on the Square have been repurposed, a notable example being the old DIC department store, now the city library.  Unlike the intrusive council HQ, this is a sound innovation, ensuring that, at least as long as there is funding and use for a library, the building has a secure future. 

Palmy’s credentials as a cultural site were burnished in the old days when travelling theatre companies, such as that run by Jane Campion’s parents, would perform at the local theatre. I recall going in a school party to see a performance by the New Zealand Players theatre group. of Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palmy.  Above all, Palmy was, and still is, a place for serious shopping.  Then the DIC was the town’s main department store, and it’s there that we bought an extremely robust tandem push chair for our toddler twins when on a visit from Fiji to my parents, by now retired in Feilding.   Mindful of the needs of lady visitors to the town, during the 30s, the town council had provided a discrete and practical art deco addition to the Square’s facilities: the Ladies Rest. It is still present, serving its original function.

Palmy has been referred to as the Croydon of NZ, but it’s difficult to see in what ways they resemble each other.  Like Croydon, Palmy does have a university, Massey, which has considerably expanded from its origins as a training ground for agriculturalists and veterinarians to a regular university which now has a campus in Albany, a northern suburb of Auckland.   Massey has been very assertive in recruiting international students and in setting up partnership arrangements overseas, some of these ventures being less than successful.   Even so, for Palmy the presence of an international student body has had an effect on expanding the range of eating places, although for my evening meal I opted for Bella’s, a very smart restaurant near the DIC, where I ate one of the best meals of my trip.   The restaurant is around the corner from what might be called Fashion Alley, a street containing some up market frock shops for the well heeled and fashion conscious women of Palmy. In this respect, Palmy has something in common with Henley-on-Thames, where there is a plethora of similar shops.

The next morning, as arranged, Casper arrived on time to take me to the railway station.  Whereas most existing old station buildings have been retained, even if they are now largely unused,  the original one in Palmy had been replaced, probably some time in the 70s, by a completely undistinguished ‘modern’ structure which now, in its largely abandoned state, has not aged at all gracefully.  I was disconcerted to find no sign of life, and it was only when I got to the platform, that, reassuringly, there was any sign of action.  Here I joined a small cluster of mostly middle aged to elderly people who, like me, were waiting for the Northern Explorer. There being no station staff to hand, we attached destination labels to our luggage ourselves, and waited for the train to arrive.  When it did, the train manager, who I later learned was from Sir Lanka,  supervised the loading of correctly labelled luggage into the luggage van.  This is a vestige from times past, when all heavy luggage was put into what was then called the guard’s van.  This sensible practice avoids having to haul heavy luggage onto the train and finding a space to stow it.

In those far off days, the only train service between Wellington and Auckland was the so-called Limited Express, or ‘Limited’, which travelled over night. Passengers sat upright on hard seats, although pillows could be hired to provide a smidgen of comfort, and while there was no catering on the train, at intervals, it would stop at remote stations, such as Taumaranui, for refreshments.  The catering staff would have lined up cups of strong tea and that staple of kiwi food, the meat pie, would be available, almost as hot as the tea.  At the next station stop, the used crockery would be collected and removed.  It was a well organized system, and the whole experience, little did one realize it then, was a good preparation for long haul economy class travel decades later. 

The Northern Explorer, like its South Island counterparts, provides de luxe travel, though the journey is longer than those on the southern routes.  This is largely owing to the constraints on railway engineering imposed by the country’s topography, one outcome of which is the Raurimu Spiral,  which the Institute of Professional Engineers (NZ) has designated as a significant Engineering heritage site. This piece of engineering heritage lay ahead of us as we set off from Palmy across the Manawatu plain, before having a short unscheduled stop at the deserted Feilding railway station, where evidence of the town’s beautification efforts was clearly visible, together with a truly surreal sight: superannuated carriages of the Gatwick Express on a siding.

This now largely abandoned station is the same one at which the royal train stopped in 1953 when the Queen alighted onto a specially constructed platform to be greeted by the mayor of Feilding, who happened to be ‘our’ English teacher, Mr MacLure, aka ‘Caesar’.  Meanwhile,  a large gathering of citizens, including hundreds of school children, waved flags and gave vent to expressions of loyalty.  Having met the town dignitaries, the Queen and her party got back on the train, which then continued on its journey north.  The whole event lasted about ten minutes.  Feilding could feel very pleased with itself: it had been a stop on the royal itinerary. 

The Queen would, of course, have been passing through or stopping at railway stations and towns specially spruced up for her visit (paint sales must have spiked before her visit).  What neither she nor the rest of the country could foresee on that journey was a catastrophe which occurred shortly after her northern rail journey, on the evening of 24^th December, when the Whangaehu River bridge collapsed beneath the Auckland bound Limited Express, with the loss of 151 lives.  The collapse of a temphra dam holding back the crater lake of nearby active volcano Mt Ruapehu created a lahar – a mudflow of slurry, rocky debris and water – which destroyed part of the bridge minutes before the train started to cross it.  The tragedy had a truly profound effect on the country, and the Queen specially mentioned the disaster in her Christmas Day speech given from Auckland.  The bridge was eventually replaced and a special warning system installed to prevent a repetition of the tragedy, a similar lahar in 2007 demonstrating the effectiveness of the new bridge and the warning system, reassuring for those of us now retracing the tracks of that ill-fated Limited Express.

The town of Feilding which the Northern Explorer was now leaving is on the edge of gentle hills into which the railway line travels, passing through startlingly green pastoral landscape, before skirting along and above the Rangitikei River,  which in this area flows through a series of gorges which provide one of the country’s most thrilling white-water rafting trips.  After Taihape, “New Zealand’s one and only Gumboot City”, the track moves into the central plateau, which is largely tussock country, unsuited to farming.  In that part of the journey,  Mount Ruapehu was  fitfully visible through clouds, and then the train moved into timber country, large areas of the central North Island having been planted with pine trees as a timber crop.  From there,  the train continued  north through the Waikato, prime dairying country, and by now into the fading winter sunlight.  Eventually in darkness the train reached the southern suburbs of Auckland, when the informative recorded commentary informed us that it is one of the world’s most ethnically and nationally diverse cities, a useful advance organizer for travellers expecting a totally Anglo-Saxon city.  Nearly ten hours after leaving Palmy,  I arrived in Auckland, the journey ending in the splendid new underground station constructed under the now repurposed Auckland post office at the foot of Queen Street, on the edge of the harbour,  and a short walk from my hotel. 

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PART THREE: WELLINGTON

The former ‘Pride of Cherbourg’ carried me through the Sounds, across Cook Straight to Wellington, my birth place where, thanks to a three hour ferry delay, I arrived in the evening to be met by old friend from Fiji days, Derek Robinson, who, with his wife, Rosemary, lives in Paramata, a dormitory suburb north of the city on the Kapiti Coast.   Fifty years ago the places along this coast were starting to make the transition from beach villages to dormitory suburbs. Now their expansion into full scale suburban townships is complete, and every work day thousands of Kapiti Coast dwellers make their way to and from the CBD in the excellent electrified train service which now runs as far as Waikanae, about sixty kms north of the city. 

The next day, Sunday, I followed their example, when I set out on a balmy late autumn/early winter day to explore the docks development and the Te Papa museum in Wellington.   In my childhood, the dock area was strictly functional and not  a place for recreation.  Since then, much of it has been converted into a promenade, buildings have been repurposed, rebuilt or newly constructed, and on a sunny Sunday it is an attraction for genteel strolling, cycling, skating, roller blading, or just sitting and watching the passing scene from one of the many bars and restaurants. 

One of the main atractions is the Te Papa (‘Our Place’) museum, established by act of Parliament in 1992, and bringing together the holdings of several national museums and galleries.  The main building, designed by a NZ architectural practice, cost $NZ300 million when it was opened in 1998, and Te Papa attracts over a million visits a year.  I had been encouraged to join in the enthusiasm aroused by this splendid enterprise, and, indeed, it is impossible not to be impressed by the scope and scale ot its exhibits, and the variety of ways of engaging visitors.   However, I was disappointed with the premises, which seemed to consist of an incoherent set of structures, while after several hours visiting the extensive range of galleries, I was left with a slightly uneasy feeling: what was the hidden ideology? 

A couple of days later I met Bernie Kernot, a now retired academic who was a fellow student at Auckland University, where we studied anthropology in the late 50s-early 60s.  When I expressed my puzzlement over Te Papa, he confirmed his own, saying that it seemed  to represent a post modern supermarket approach to museums, visitors picking and mixing ideas as they wished.  He questioned the absence of an authoritative guide to content implied by such an approach.  I said that the underlying theme that I took from the Te Papa supermarket was that of identity, particularly the identity of NZ as a Pacific island nation, and although the presence and influence of the ethnic European – or pakeha – population was acknowledged, the emphasis seemed to be less on their contribution to the development, way of life and identity of the nation than on that of Maori, other Pacific islanders and Asians.  In what sense is the museum truly ‘our place’ when the presence of the majority population appeared to be so under represented?

To be fair, a temporary exhibition on level six did represent a small slice of the material culture of the pakeha in the form of a collection of British and European ceramics, metalwork and glassware assembled between 1990 and 1965 by Wellingtonian,  Walter Cook.  With a keen eye for design and provenance, Cook built up his collection locally, and the exhibition explained the role of several Wellington shops, among them the now defunct James Smiths department store, in introducing new styles to the Wellington consumer.  Outraged by Thatcherite government policy in the early 1990s,  Walter Cook gave his collection to the museum for the benefit of future generations, and in its modest way, this exhibition seemed to me to contribute to filling a significant gap on the shelves of the Te Papa supermarket. 

The theme of identity, so prevelant in Te Papa, continued in the cityscape itself where it became entwined with that of memory and recall.  We are, in no small part, what we remember, and my earliest memories are of Wellington, where I lived until the age of ten.   My visits to the city during this brief stay became a kind of quest to identify the buildings which would have been present during my childhood.  This little project had been sparked off when I first arrived at Wellington station that Sunday morning.  It was obvious from the railways in the South Island that, notwithstanding the de luxe tourist trains, there had been under investment in the rail system, so I was prepared to find the splendid Wellington railway station in a state of neglect or even, like Grand Central Station in New York, destroyed. Fortunately, quite the reverse seemed to be true: it was clearly a cherished and much used terminus, containing a very smart supermarket for the benefit of commuters which, with a change of logo from NW to M&S, could have been mistaken for a branch Simply Food.  

Outside, the statue of Gandhi still strides towards the future, while across the road, the art deco Hotel Waterloo, now repurposed as a backpackers hostel, had been given a slap up coat of paint highlighting its art deco features.  And with the hotel’s style I had discovered a theme: art deco.   As a child, I was unaware of the significance of this dash of modernity in some of Welllington’s buildings, but as I now moved around the city identifying places familiar from my childhood, I realized that many of these buildings were art deco, a style which, like the Victorian, had been eclipsed in the early post-war period, but which is now sought after.   In NZ, the city of Napier has cornered the art deco market, and is a place of pilgrimage for art deco enthusiasts. However, as become obvious, Wellington has a considerable share of art deco architecture and maybe some enterprising individual will devise an art deco trail of the city.

For the time being, native son film director Peter Jackson,  who was born and raised on the Kapiti Coast, has set a lead by refurbishing the Roxy cinema in the otherwise unremarkable suburb of Miramar, where the Weta Workshop of ‘Lord of the Rings’ fame is also located.  In fact, as I was to discover when meeting Bernie for lunch at the Brooklyn cinema where I used to go to Saturday matinees as a kid, another art deco cinema is now, like the Roxy, enjoying a new lease of  life, if not in quite the technicolour splendour to be found in its Miramar counterpart. 

Wellington is built on a major geological fault, and until relatively recently, there was a height ceiling on buildings,  so that none of the ones that I could identify from my childhood stand at more than six to eight floors, which was then considered ‘high’.   This limit is now being flouted big time, with the CBD, which is largely located on reclaimed land, now being dominated by high rise office blocks and apartments, including a very dreary structure near the railway station, for which Victoria University should be ashamed.  While the wisdom of such development in an earthquake zone can be questioned, what is even  more questionable is the aesthetic effect.  Formerly a low rise city with a some architectural unity, Wellington has now become an urban place more or less like those found anywhere else, while the older buildings, mostly repainted and repurposed,  now cower under or are reflected in a jungle of high rise towers.  Furthermore, whereas in the past, there was some sense of propriety in the scale, style and relationship of buildings, today anything goes, and the cityscape is now an incoherent muddle consisting of mostly conventional and mediocre new high rise buildings and older structures repurposed or awkwardly incorporated into a new one . Even a building whose form might match its status and function may instead express the fanciful ideas of the architect and client, as is the case with the Supreme Court building, to be seen in the background of the new graduates in a later photograh. This low rise structure is enclosed in a curious cage, which, who knows, may be an architectural metaphor for the intricacies of legal process. Whatever the intention, form doth not reflect function. 

Sometimes an existing building is preserved, either as a shell to front a new one, or it is retained unchanged while a new high rise is added to it.  The Kirkcaldy and Staines (‘Kirkcaldies’) deparment store, the country’s oldest, being in business since 1863, is one such example.  In earlier times, some of Walter Roberts’ Te Papa collection may have passed across its counters to their original owners, probably one of the Kelburn ladies in hats and gloves who were among Kirkaldies clientele . 

Following a recommendation by my hosts, I spent part of one morning doing a tour of the Parliament buildings, where I was one of a small group making up the first tour of the day: a middle aged couple from Auckland, a couple from China, and another couple originally from Mongolia but now citizens of Australia.  As it happened, it had not proved possible to ignore NZ politics from virtually the moment of my arrival in the country because, for the first week or so of my visit,  the news was dominated by what passed for a political scandal.  Aaron Gilmore,  a National Party MP from a South Island constituency,  had, it was reported, pulled rank as well as insulted a waiter by calling him a dickhead when a guest and in his cups at the Hamner Springs hotel.  As always with such scandals, various versions of the incident were reported and mulled over, while the hapless MP (who does seem to have been a bit of a prat) was ruthlessly pursued by the persistent representatives of the media as he attempted to go about his job as MP.  Eventually, he fell on his sword.  For a visitor from the UK there were some strking parallels with the ‘Plebgate’ incident. 

Given the nature of NZ politics and the voting system, a ruling party is often dependent on garnering support from minority parties to form a government or to pass legislation, so the loss of an MP while a bill is in progress through the house can be quite serious.  At the time, the government was attempting to pass contentious legislation which would confirm or even extend the government’s powers of surveillance, so even a minor scandal and the loss of an MP were unwanted by and uncomfortable for the smooth talking PM and his cabinet, whose other priority was passing a budget. 

New Zealand has a unicameral parliament which, since 1996 has been based on Mixed-member Proportional Representation (MMP). Seventy MPs are elected directly in electorate seats and the remainder are filled by ‘ list’ MPs based on each party's share of the party vote, making a total of 120 MPs (population 2010 4.3 million). For comparison, there are 650 MPs in the UK parliament (population 2010 61.9 million).  Not surprisingly, the debating chamber is quite intimate compared with the one at Westminster, and actually visiting it put into context the widely viewed final reading of the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill (otherwise known as Same Sex Marriage) in April of this year, when people in the crowded public gallery above and around the chamber burst into Pokarekare Ana , a traditional NZ love song, on the confirmation of the vote, while a woman MP sporting spectacular millinery distributed bouquets to the MPs associated with the sponsorship and passing of the legislation.  Although NZ isn't the first country to pass such legislation, it has always been in the vanguard of political innovation, to which the Electoral Act of 1893 is a testament. It made NZ the first country in the world to give women the vote, although it was to be another century before one would become PM. 

New Zealand’s 20^th century adoption of MMP meant that when, in the 2010 UK election, the outcome led to setting up a coalition government, there were hasty visits to New Zealand by, among others, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary and highest official in the British civil service, in order to find out how coalition government worked in another Westminster system.  Our tour guide was pleased when I mentioned this, although he wouldn't concede that New Zealand’s three year parliamentary term was too brief: ‘we can get rid of them if we don't like them’ was his response. Maybe, but I couldn't help but wonder what the dual effects of MMP and such a short parliamentary term might have on the way the country is governed.

On leaving the parliamentary complex, I ran into lots of young people in caps and gowns waiting to attend their graduation ceremony in the building opposite – reputedly the largest wooden building in the Southern hemisphere.  New university graduates, not a few of them Asian, and their parents seemed to be everywhere over the next few days.  Education is a big industry in NZ, and while students have been recruited from Asia for generations, they have been recruited in very significant numbers over the past decade or so.  Some of them don't return home, but remain in NZ, adding to the Asianization of the country’s population, as would also be discovered in my next stop: Palmerston North

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PART TWO: PICTON, NELSON & THE WAIRAU VALLEY

The next day I had another early start to catch the last run for the season of the Christchurch to Picton train, using identical rolling stock to the TransAlpine, and even the same train manager, who reconized me from the previous day’s trip.   This route is less scenic than the TransAlpine, meandering its way up the coast to the port of Picton in Marlborough.   The ferry service between Wellington and Picton is more or less the equivalent of a Channel crossing, albeit across a stretch of water – the Cook Straight – which can become pretty rough, while the passage through the Sounds provides a scenic spectacle which the cross Channel route can't match.

Picton is the jumping off point for the Marlborough Sounds, an impressive landscape of steep hills and flooded valleys.   There are numerous walking routes across the hills and between sounds, with varying types of accommodation from the Spartan to the sybaritic.  Like Greymouth, Picton is working hard at attracting and entertaining tourists, and there is a little local museum as well as an aquarium and a maritime museum which preserves the hull of the 19^th Century ‘Edwin Fox’, ‘the ninth oldest ship in the world’,  ‘the world’s last surviving East Indiaman’ and ‘the oldest surviving ship that brought immigrants to NZ’.  Picton was also, in earlier times, a whaling port, though fortunately the hunting of cetacea for oil and bone has been abandoned in favour of hunting them as entertainment for tourists, providing a new economic basis for the former whaling port, Kaikoura,  at which the train stops, between Picton and  Christchurch.

Besides many memorabilia from the now defunct dairying and whaling industries, the museum also displays a selection of photographs of mixed race families, since some of the early whalers married into local Maori families of standing, alliances which must have had commercial benefits.  From the Victorian sepia photographs the serious faces of members of the Love, Aldridge and Norton families confront the 21^st century visitor.  Very likely their descendants still live in Picton, as do those of the Perano dynasty, one of the major whaling families, whose name now appears on new four storey flats and retail space at Picton’s harbour.  I was told that the founding ancestor was probably from Brittany,  and that the spelling of the family’s name had been simplified. The histories of the these two sets of whaling families seemed very neatly to epitomise the kinds of alliances, adjustments and ethnic mingling which are an integral part of the evolution of the Kiwi identity.   

In Marlborough, there are two main sounds: Charlotte, on which Picton is located, and Pelorus, reached from Havelock, where scientist Lord Rutherford was born and raised.  There is a certain amount of parochial rivalry between the two sounds, Kent, the manager of the motel where I stayed, being a staunch Picton-Queen Charlotte Sound man, who pointed out that whereas much of the forest in Pelorus is ‘secondary bush’, in Queen Charlotte it was your authentic primary forest.  In fact, the hills in both sounds were extensively plundered in the past for timber or were cleared, which even involved engineering temporary railways, to make pasture for sheep and cattle. Considerable areas were subsequently replanted with pine trees which, when mature, are clear felled, leaving denuded hills. Increasingly, many such areas are now not being replanted with pine seedlings so as to encourage the regrowth of native bush.  The process of restoration goes through several stages, starting with the growth of manuka scrub, then tree ferns, which provide shelter for the subsequent growth of seedlings of the larger trees that make up native forest or bush, now regarded as a precious resource to be conserved rather than exploited, while alien growth, such as pine and willow, is now being poisoned.  The dying pine trees become an autumn coloured feature of the landscape before transforming to bleached dead skeletons.  

Sheep and dairy farming in the Sounds is no longer really viable, although there are still a few working sheep stations reached via the regular mail boat runs that are also a popular tourist attraction.  Instead, a new industry has been spawned, quite literally: fish farming. The most significant in the Sounds is mussel farming, an environmentally more acceptable form of fish farming than salmon farming, which involves a lot of environmentally undesirable inputs and polluting outputs.  Most of the green lip NZ mussels exported worldwide will have their origins in the Marlborough Sounds, where they grow on ropes suspended from long lines of buoys.

Having explored some of the Sounds, and not being prepared or, thanks to a gout episode,  able to think of doing any tramping, I rented a car and did a day trip to Nelson, renowned for its sunny climate.  On the day of my visit, Nelson lived up to its reputation and it struck me as a very genial place,  where I was able to get a good lunch  in a restaurant in what could be thought of as the fashion quarter, a recently built pedestrianized square lined with smart clothes shops,  with a farmers’ market in the square itself.  Nearby a gingko tree framed a fine stone faced art deco building, now a restaurant. 

Unfortunately, the high street in Nelson hasn't escaped the signage free-for-all that has spread like a blight across both NZ and Australia.  A number of the national chains that were doing business fifty years ago are still to be found, among them Hannahs, the Clarkes equivalent, and originally established by the maternal great grandfather of film director Jane Campion, whose parents founded and ran the New Zealand Players theatre group. The current Hannahs shop on Nelson’s high street can't be missed. 

 Nor can the store in Havelock be overlooked.  I felt that the unmissable picture of a tuatara lizard, a unique reptile survivor from the days of the dinosaurs, represented something approaching folk art, as compared with the hackneyed corporate images to be found on the Hannahs store and elsewhere.

The return journey to Picton in the late afternoon and autumn/early winter countryside was to be a preview of the attractions which awaited my relocation to Blenheim and the Wairau Valley, heartland of the Marlborough wine industry.  Although I've visited wine country in France, this was the first time I’d been in a vine growing region in late autumn when the foliage provides a spectacular display before it falls.  

Whereas Picton is highly dependent on summer tourism,  so that in May the town has a distinctly out of season feel, Blenheim and the Wairau valley are much less dependent on seasonal tourism, even though the production of wine is a seasonal activity. Furthermore, they are part of an economy in which most of the value is added where the wine is actually made and bottled, the one variable over which there is no control being the weather.   Fortunately, the 2013 crop was good and the vintage likely to be excellent. One wine maker, reported in the local Friday Sun of May 10th, described it as follows: “In terms of Sauvignon Blanc, we normally take 22-26 days to harvest all our fruit. This year we did it in 16. It all seemed to ripen at once. It was intense and we broke records in terms of intake, so yes it was rushed – but it is very satisfying in terms of the fruit flavours we have got.”  A more sceptical view of the rushed harvest was that the growers were unwilling to pay holiday rates during the public holiday which coincided with the ripening of the crop. As a result, post holiday picking had to be rushed to get the grapes in before they spoiled. 

The Wairau Valley, formerly devoted to sheep farming, is now dominated by vineyards, and livestock farmers happily discover the financial benefits of leasing their pastures to one of the fifty wine producers.   Although the employment offered in the vineyards is largely seasonal and is not well paid, the bouquet discernible in the Wairau valley is less that of wine than that of money, since the corporate world is quick to sniff out a profitable sector for investment. The big players, such as Cloudy Bay, Brancott and Wither Hills, have set up very smart premises complete with sophisticated restaurants, and commensurate prices,  so that a tour of the cellar doors can be not just a truly sybaritic experience, but quite a costly one as well if tasting is augmented by fine dining.  None of this could have been predicted fifty years ago, when NZ was totally unknown on the global wine scene. 

A 100km drive up the Wairau valley to the Nelson Lakes area showed why Marlborough has achieved the status of the New Zealand's  major wine producing region.  Thousands of acres of vines cover the valley for many kilometres, until at a critical altitude, grape cultivation ceases. Evidently it is the bulk wine which is sourced from these grapes, and I was soon to learn of the distinction between grape growers who supply grapes to the wine makers, and proprietary vineyards whose grapes are made into the wines bearing the name of the vineyard.  Indeed, there was more to the subtleties of the wine industry than could be grasped by a short term visitor like me, who was in fact more fascinated by the photographic opportunities of the landscape than the niceties of the product.   In any case, like many UK visitors, I was disappointed to find that even on its native turf, the splendid sauvignon blanc is pretty well the same price as it is on the shelves at Waitrose. Even so, I didn't overlook opportunities for consuming examples of Marlborough's best known product, and I particularly recommend  Cloudy Bay's Te Koko sauvingon blanc, which, despite being made from a quite different grape, has the slightly smokey character of Pouilly-Fuisse. 

Blenheim and its surroundings are not just devoted to the sybaritic, however.  Mortification of the flesh is also on offer. The day I left coincided with the annual 20km run/walk which was testament to the importance of physical activity in the NZ way of life. This kind of event is evidently widespread, a similar challenge being promoted in Palmerston North,  which I visited a week later.  Although obesity and health problems resulting from a modern way of life and diet exist in NZ,  by and large this is isn't  a country for the indolent,  there being no lack of opportunities and reasons for being physically active, as the tramping, running, climbing and cycling activities of my cousins and their families demonstrated.

Fortunately, the next stage in my journey didn’t involve strenuous physical activity, but a quiet sea voyage through the Sounds, across Cook Straight, to  Wellington, capital city and where I first entered the world. 

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