Who’s Your Daddy, NZ?
A recent trip to Aotearoa, Australia’s sister country, made it pretty damn clear who Mum’s favourite child is.
Australia got the genes for width, brownness and more sun than you could poke a charred, desiccated stick husk at, not to mention an inheritance of kangaroos, koalas and kookaburras. Most fauna here though is so cranky from the heat, it’ll kill you in a heartbeat.
In NZ, the main source of danger is yourself, normally from sudden, unexpected changes in altitude. There’s a lot of geography crammed into little Aotearoa, which, even without its propensity to shift around willy nilly, challenges the adrenaline-fuelled to find the quickest way to traverse its extremities. This doesn’t always end well. The other notable danger discovered, albeit a fiscal one, was the entrepreneurial taxi industry, whose representatives could teach narco drug lords a thing or two about turning a profit.
While New Zealand’s land mass looks small, if some Thor-like character decided to hammer all the hills flat, it’d end up the size of Russia, but without the bad attitude. Australia would find itself bumped up against India like some miscued intercontinental snooker ball, and Auckland would have Tahiti amongst its offshore attractions, making the bloody JAFAs even more smug.
When touring NZ, the only thing that’s more amazing than the view from the top of a terrifyingly winding and motion-sickness-inducing hillside road is the view from the peak of the next alarmingly twisty, vertiginous, tarmacked goat track. The odometer may say you’ve travelled 27 kms, even though, as the crow flies, it’s barely a couple of wing flaps. It’s a geographical anomaly that, in much of NZ, you can drive at 80km/h all morning, only to find you’ve advanced about 5km and had three changes of underwear by lunchtime.
It means that building a home here requires a different mindset. There are only about six flat blocks of land (sections in the local parlance) in the whole country, three if you discount those in the craters of more-or-less extinct volcanoes. In building terms then, you might as well go the whole condor and nest as high up, and as precariously as you can. The views will be amazing, if short-lived, thanks to earthquakes, climate-change-induced landslips, or builders economising on steel struts by popping in a bit of balsa.
If Sherpas ever get bored of dragging an interminable stream of westerners who think they’re the Sir Edmund Hilary of the accounts department up the easy bit of Everest in a kindergarten crocodile, there are building jobs for them in NZ. An exchange program would be a win-win. Engineers installing cable cars for houses built on sheer Wellington cliff-faces could do sterling work in the Himalayas, saving wear and tear on the local yak population.
New Zealand has become a haven for foodies, with ‘meh’ catering only found on planes, trains and ferries. You could put this down to the limited space for food prep, the lack of fresh ingredients, or customers' inability to take one look at what was served up to the person ahead of them and go next door instead.
Minced beef on toast is a Kiwi classic that strangely never crossed the ditch, despite its potential as a hangover remedy. It’s really just a deconstructed Big Mac with gravy where the limp lettuce leaf would be, so represents a culinary step up. The Kiwis love a good scone too, probably more out of pragmatism than an abiding connection with the mother country. What other food can be breakfast one day, and its remnants pocketed as a handy concealed weapon the next?
Australia and NZ have always been close, in that vicious-sibling-rivals way, where one would pull the chair out from under the other, if they could get away with it without ANZUS sending them to their room. It starts harmlessly enough, with one ‘borrowing’ the other’s celebrities, like Keith Urban or a couple of Finns, and not putting them back where they found them. Then somebody leaves Russell Crowe under a bed to go off, and no one’s prepared to take responsibility. Next thing you know, there are intergenerational pavlova-based food fights, and Australia sends in the Vegemite. Unfortunately, the Geneva Convention has no statutes against yeast-by-product-based warfare.
They’re sister countries, not perhaps through choice but by being remote western outposts at what one Aussie Prime Minister eloquently described as ‘the arse end of the world.’ Maybe they were playing up in the back seat of the car, and Mum followed through on her threat to kick them out and make them walk home. They just don’t look that much alike and have very different personalities. Perhaps it’s time to send soil samples to Ancestry.com.
