It is an interesting fact that accents, like the dogs that pet owners choose, somehow reflect both the psyche and in the case of dogs, the physique of their owners. Australians are a sharp, brash, loud people. Pubs in Australia sound like swarms of wasps ready to pounce. The way Australians use the letter ?i? is sharp and cuts to the very quick.
The sensation is not dissimilar to the polio injections we were subjected to, when we were very young. For some reason back then there was either a broadly based decision taken by parents that kids needed some form of traumatic experience that would last them a lifetime or alternately there must have been a huge overstock of vetinerary injections left over from some great pestilence.
My mother used to indulge in the most elaborate lies to get us to go for these injections and equally to go to the dentist. Dentist?s rooms back then looked like elaborate torture chambers. I may be imagining it but the dentists used to have to peddle crazily to get the drill to rotate. Then there were hydraulic wires that ran all the way up the wall, across the ceiling and only ten into your mouth.
Actually my mother only had one lie which she used constantly but we, like fish, were easily succumbed. Her lie consisted of announcing that we were going to Ansteys for tea.
Like all towns back then we were blessed with Cinemas that saw themselves as the last bastion of a great empire and Department stores that imagined themselves to be the very cornerstone of culture. At least in their tearooms they did. Ladies not only donned silly hats for the occasion of a visit, but in a touch of laissez faire theatrics, they wore gloves as if somehow they had magically transformed into Japanese drivers. It is a puzzle why Japanese women drivers need gloves. It certainly has no positive effect on their capacity to drive especially at speeds above 10km and hour. The waiters in these hallowed places were dressed, as if this was some sort of travelling circus that had recently left Timbuktu with a train of camels, in starched white uniforms, red sashes and a fez always worn at a dapper angle.
When the evil Dr Doom Verwoerd was mercifully put down by a portly Greek greengrocer turned assassin, we were neatly ensconced at Ansteys on a Wednesday afternoon tea with scones and jam. For the life of me I could not understand why one of these waiters in his jolly Fez didn?t dance a little jig as he announced the death of the evil Doctor. Instead a little tear was shed. I think somehow the Fez was more than décor. Rather it seemed perhaps that it might serve the role of chains.
South African and New Zealand accents differ distinctly from that of Australians.
They are both flat and blunt objects that avoid the melodies of the rising inclinator that makes Ozzie girls so quizzical.
The clichés around the New Zealand accent are extremely boring and doomed to constant repetition which seems to amuse Australians but rarely anyone else.
Say ?Fiiish and chiiips? they will intone and New Zillanders will oblige with the naturally sardonic ?fush and chups?. South Africans say ?Mulk? ? New Zealanders tend to do the same making that wonderful health giving elixir sound excruciatingly akin to wound exudate.
For thos who have not noticed it?s not a typo ? it?s only the ex South Africans who call it New Zeeeland.
True blue Kiwis seem to have a well-trodden short cut for the name of the country and if, like the ancient mariners who miraculously found this place in the middle of an endless ocean, you had blinked, you would have missed it.
But perhaps the thing not so well known about this small country which is so very, very far away from the world , is quite how far away it is.
NZ has embraced women. Yes, we all have but NZ did this early on. The vote was given to women here before any other country. We have had and still do have our High court dominated by women judges. Perhaps there is simply a savings drive on with those powdered wigs.
And though you might not have believed it at the time for hearing her, our last Prime Minister was a woman.
Our voting system makes cricket?s Duckworth Lewis formula look positively pedestrian. The person who wins doesn?t really. And it is only after the elections are long forgotten that scientists emerge for dark rooms to announce the lucky bunch who will go off to parliament. Its called Mixed Member Participation ? and it leads to every minority being represented. George Beyer who became Georgina is one of our more memorable MPs. More recently we elected a Sikh named Bakshi and within weeks, he was, indeed under investigation for taking bribes.
Actually, come to think of it, sometimes people really do look like their dogs and often they are perfectly appropriately named for the jobs they do. A sex therapist here goes by the unfortunate surname of Lush and I think Usain would have known from day one what his future would entail.
Whilst other countries debate whether to burn their gay populations at the stake, ours are getting married at a merry clip. Our Minister of Education was recently married amid much pomp and circumstance. (Pomp in this instance is clearly the English use of the word although you might choose to use it liberally).
And then you get down to the big one. Most of our indigenous population, even though they did at one time have a significant appetite for one another, most survived and today thrive. Unlike Australia, their children weren?t taken away for civilizing, an act of monumental uncivility.
New Zealand have found a way of rewarding its indigenous people for being here for the last 1000 years or so by paying them lump sums for property they lost at today?s rates. In other words every time property goes up in value, they earn a little more. And then, though radio waves weren?t known about during that 1000 years, we gave them the air too. And the sea, and the sea bed. In fact the sea bed we?ve done a bit of arguing over although there doesn?t seem much demand amongst new settlers for prime sea bed property.
In passing Aussies do have a penchant for some pretty oxymoronic and plainly moronic moments ? my personal favourite is that after Harold Holt, a short term Prime Minister went on a swim that did not require a towel, by way of a memorial to him, the Melbourne Public Swimming Pool was named the Harold Holt Memorial Pools.
It may well be that New Zealand is generally known for the fact that Mordor is on the South Island and everybody borrows our country side for chocolate box covers. What isn?t known is the fact that the worst and hardest job in New Zealand is that of the journalist.
On my first day here, I was forced to pull my car over to the side of the road for the risk of smashing into a wall in fits of laughter when the first item covered on the news was to do with a boy that had been stung by wasps.
Had I known that this was somehow a veiled reference to our strained relationship with Australia perhaps I may not have found it so humorous. Actually the relationship with Australia isn?t that strained. In a long continuing tradition that started with the convicts going there and the wardes coming here, anything worthwhile spawned in New Zealand is immediately claimed as Australian. This includes the pavlova (an iced sugar meringue which we take very seriously at least until the Aussies took it). Russel Crowe, cousin of Martin got snapped up but we think that increased the IQ of both countries, our rugby players and coaches are snapped up (happily it hasn?t helped) and in great ignominy that even snatched a famous horse and stuffed it. It was dead at the time.
They didn?t take our penchant for women. They didn?t and haven?t done much to compensate their indigenous people other than by giving them easy access to fire-water, a trick they might have learnt on reservations in the South Dakota hills. The only John Howard to say sorry to them was a comic character from New Zealand, a man who made Fred Dagg, the archetypal New Zillender in a role in which he was fortuitously called John Howard. A Dagg by the way is that bit of dung that sheep are unable to get rid of at that follows them around for life in a most tormenting way.
We have born in a place at a time that will have left its own dagg for which we shall always have to find an explanation, carry with us as a burden for simply being born white and privileged, and one hopes, for which we all will find, in our own small ways, a way to say sorry