The Land of the Jingo

I have railed on before about the fact that Australians find it really easy to adopt Kiwi success stories as their own. For a while during these recent Olympics, Australian papers were reporting Australasian gold medals including ours in their number, as their haul was so meagre.

But, try to get Aussies to accept that we make good tomato sauce, grow better apples and potatoes in New Zilland which is wet and green than they do in Oz which is dry and brown and hellfire and brimstone are unleashed.

Just this week our papers reported how the Potatoheads in Oz were trying to block the import of Kiwi spuds for making chips. In a moment of remarkable ingenuity they invented a potato blight called Zebra chip disease.

According to the expert the chip disease affects their taste and appearance. I expect next we will have Chip Awards and a Chip Marketing Board

To get their message across the potato heads released an animated video of eminent Aussie politicos playing Space Invaders against New Zealand potatoes.

Thankfully nobody from Potato New Zealand was available for comment. And a search for Potato NZ proved fruitless.

So even if we wanted to, we weren't able to stoop to our own low in the ongoing battle to get our dear friends on the West Island to just man up and try and sell their stuff on its own merits like any regular person should.

In the end, if our chips taste bad and our apples turn out mushy we reckon peoples' wallets will pay attention to their mouths. But should they wish to continue to thwart our pathetic efforts to get a little business back from them what say we take back all the other things they took - our newspapers, our banks, our fashion industry, our racehorses, our rugby coaches (that'll make em happy) and our bands. And leave them to be devoured by their own jingoes (with chips).

The man from the bank

This is a piece I wrote a year or so ago the day after New Zilland won a place in World Cup Football

Defying our usual stupor we began this week with a song in our hearts and a spring in our step. Normally this state would be reserved for a stylish rugby win or a generous tax reduction – both occurring alongside appearances of Halley’s comet in frequency. (Actually we get used to stylish rugby wins in between world cups for they are not so infrequent.)

But this past week’s upliftment was delivered by way of the beautiful game – soccer. Now New Zilland and soccer is a bit like Jews and sailing. The last famous sailor in Judaism was Noah and I suspect that boat wasn’t quick around the buoys. Jackie Mason says about Jews and boats is that the only thing they want to know is “how many it sleeps”. It never goes out the harbour…but sleeps 16.

In New Zilland we play rugby and we frighten the living bejeezus out of everyone we play. But soccer is another story. We tend to get beaten at the last hurdle by teams from unknown islands where the crowds still wear bones through their noses like a seething mass of Generation Z. 

But win our way into the world cup we did. It wasn’t  a particularly glamorous affair and it is not as if Bahrain was some remarkably talented soccer playing nation.

The hero of the day to the baying of a great multitude was a goalkeeper who is now the darling of our media because he saved a penalty and because he looks like and is really a bank clerk with a baby.

In the interminable aftermath of TV coverage about every living moment before during and after the game my favourite scene was the clerk returning to work at the local bank on Monday morning.

It is the stuff of dreams.

So now we have to steel ourselves for the embarrassment of sending a team to Africa to play against Brazil and Russia. Steel ourselves to try and avoid terrible defeats the like of which we were subjected to when we once ventured to deep dark Africa to fight against the boers.

The thing that makes New Zilland so endearing, is the fact that we are at heart, amateursl. 

Our Prime Minister was brought up in run down state housing and a run-down state school seems to approach his role as amateur might. He is as likely to confess to not having an answer and not making the right choice as quickly as most politicians would find a way to claim godly powers.

Our criminals are gifted amateurs as witnessed by a pair of thieves who were caught recently loading their car with blocks of cheese. They were chased for some distance before being apprehended and during that journey were seen to be throwing the large chunks out of the windows.

The police sergeant announced to the public that the cheese would be recognizable from its grittiness. Amateurs all.

It is in the idea of amateurism that I find most solace as a parent, a husband and a person. For I think that it just may be that in life we are all better off as amateurs. For then we have no reason to pretend that we have infallible capacity or capability.

As a young child I was brought up to believe somehow that my father’s infallibility was godly. And as a consequence argument and debate was futile.  One day at a rugby match, my mum, father and I were unhappily seated next  two very inebriated behemoths of species Afrikaner. In their inebriated state they seemed to be only two notches up the evolutionary scale from Australopithecus. With extraodinary extended stomachs and limited sensibility they pawed in friendly fashion at my mum.

My expectation was that my father somehow would simply summon a thunderbolt to summarily turn them to ashes but this did not eventuate. WE simply got up and slunk our way home before the game had ended. It was devastating. But in a way it shone a light for me. For in that moment I discovered that the world was not really under some form of divine control and certainly not within the all-powerful hands of my father.

Had I only known this then I might have forgiven him. But it did allow me to make sure that my children were given the great gift of a bullshit radar from an early age. A radar that would allow them to question, even interminably and irritatingly, every so-called fact or assertion I or others might make. The gift I gave them was the capacity to recognise my fallibility.

For from that moment on, every achievement is a splendid one that comes without expectation. It’s like going back to work as a clerk in a bank, the day after you won your way into the world cup.

Small town cops

Cromwell is a small town at the head of a beautiful lake at the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand. You may be unaware of this but South Islanders call this the Mainland. Then again they call Australia the West Island.

And Cromwell might well not be there had they not shifted it a few meters up lake a few years ago as our Electricity company built a downstream dam which miscalculated somewhat and what once had been a small town became a pleasure seeker’s boating paradise.

 Yesterday in Cromwell a somewhat unusual event occurred.

Now let’s be clear here. It is not unusual to witness the hard working, gruff and uncompromising South Island bloke epitomized as a “good, keen man” who characterises this half gallon, quarter acre pavlova paradise driving his ute into town. In his torn driz-a-bone coat, battered cockie hat and in his obligatory gumboots, he’ll always be seen with his faithful sheep dog barking happily into the wind.

 In case you are wondering whether this might all be some made up form of romanticism, let me assure you that on a Saturday night, in prime time, TV One in New Zealand (our main viewing channel) devotes a full hour to show called Country Calendar, in which men whistle incongruous tunes whilst dogs bark at sheep. Not much else seems to happen in this riveting hour-long spectacular. And if that weren’t convincing enough proof for you that this is truly God’s own country, it is not uncommon for our half time spectacular at major sports events to consist of men throwing gumboots at a barrel in the middle of the field. The winner gets them in.

 Back in Cromwell however, our partially drowned town life is lived at a more leisurely pace.

The town is best known for a wharf side village of small stone huts now turned into jam and pickle bottlers run by local women in the town with much time on their hands.

So for a story to emerge from that sleepy hollow that really does get the journalists into gear is an entirely remarkable event and it is especially so when the good keen man’s dog, rather than the good keen man himself drives the ute into town and straight into and through the local café.

 “Dog drives car into café” you will agree is a catchy headline.

Wilco, a staffordshire ridgeback cross, was sitting by himself in his owner's ute when he pushed down the column gear change about 5.30pm yesterday.

The vehicle rolled forward 15 metres before crashing into the front bifold doors of the rather jauntily titled Fusee Rouge cafe.

Senior Constable John Chambers said it was lucky the vehicle was travelling slowly.

The unusual incident was a reminder not to leave the keys in the ignition, he said.

Now you might come away from this story thinking how wonderful it is that we have dogs that not only understand the complexities of a ute’s gearshift, or marvel at the ingenuity of a dog that might not only notice the keys in the ignition but have the dexterity to turn them appropriately.

Or else you can just smile gently at the fact that throughout New Zealand, people do happily get out of their cars and go in for a quick chat and a coffee comfortable in the knowledge that leaving one’s keys in the ignition only constitutes an invitation to inventive dogs.