13.01 Hamilton: Beyond the Edge

A week ago today Jean and I arrived in New Zealand. The New Zealand Airline flight from San Francisco (SFO) to Auckland (AKL) lasted just about 13 hours. The flight arrived in Auckland about 5:30, as a sliver of saffron appeared on the eastern horizon. The great circle distance between SFO and AKL is just over 10,500 km (6528 miles). By way of comparison, the flight time between London and Singapore (transiting the breadth of Eurasia) covers about 200 more miles but reportedly takes less time. Except perhaps for the last few minutes coming into Auckland, the transit from San Francisco is entirely over water. New Zealand, you might say, is at the edge of the world. In some ways — in three ways, perhaps — it’s beyond the edge.

Firstly, all too often New Zealand seems to be beyond the cartographic remembrance of the rest of the world. As a case in point, I recently received a world map from a very reputable Christian organization that keeps tabs on the levels of persecution of Christians throughout the world. Almost needless to say, New Zealand is bereft of persecution. But it isn’t bereft of land. Yet New Zealand failed to show up on the otherwise complete map of the world. I could cite other instances, but I’ll restrict myself to but one more, an excellent introduction to Kiwidom: Sue Butler’s  Culture Smart! New Zealand. A nice map of New Zealand appears facing the table of contents but in the innards of the book a map depicting the Pacific hemisphere of the world omits New Zealand. Despite these bleak omissions, New Zealand Airlines Flight No. 7 safely found the ground at AKL a week ago.

Secondly, the cartographic omissions might be somewhat more forgivable were New Zealand some sort of cultural black hole, which never has and never will have anything to contribute to the rest of the world. New Zealand isn’t a black hole and on the whole I suppose the rest of the world would acknowledge that. But given the country’s geographic remoteness, perhaps at least some Kiwis have felt a need to go beyond the edge. When they do they happen then to receive the world’s attention. Perhaps the most famous Kiwi of this kind has been Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to ascend Mt Everest. But there have been plenty of other Kiwi pioneers, and I don’t mean just people like Katherine Mansfield or Kiri Te Kanawa or Russell Crowe, known cultural icons. 

When I think of cultural edginess (or beyond) I like to think not only of music, film, sports, and whatever constitutes Culture with a capital ‘C’. I like to think of the even more basic cultures of agriculture and commerce and the like. And in that lower-case-‘c’ culture, I can’t help but remember the New Zealand farmers who a generation ago developed and baptized the Chinese gooseberry, giving it the name ‘kiwifruit’, thereby opening doors and pocket books to purchasing a fruit from faraway New Zealand. Kiwifruit is now grown in the USA but the NZ/USA fruit flow continues (and there’s a countervailing USA/NZ fruit flow, perhaps a topic for another blog). At Oshkosh’s Festival Supermarket the fresh fruit and vegetables displays always note the country of origin. Even though I can understand the present sustainability of the economics, it still astounds me that in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, I could purchase reasonably priced and tasty apples that came all the way from New Zealand. Let me just say Kiwis have cultural gumption that’s beyond the edge, as it were. And that’s why we have the likes of mountain-climbing Kiwis and mile-stretching kiwifruit.

Thirdly, New Zealand is beyond the edge biologically. It was beyond the edge before humans ever set foot on the land. New Zealand is the last territory on earth settled by humans. The Maori reportedly arrived in New Zealand between 1250 and 1300 AD. Before their arrival there were no mammals in New Zealand except for three species of bats and except for seals along the coast. The absence of mammals accounts for the presence of ground-foraging birds indigenous to New Zealand. The extant five species of kiwi are all that remain of the ground-foragers kingdom of another era. As for New Zealand flora… reportedly 80 percent of the plant species of the country are endemic. An endemic species is a species unique to a territory, in this case New Zealand. They are found nowhere else in the world. I’m no botanist but I can tell you a great many trees are unlike any I’ve seen elsewhere. Many of them look primeval, but perhaps most primeval are the tree ferns (Tree ferns can be as tall as 65 feet) that look as if they’d be good food for a browsing brontosaurus. Just as a charming but flightless bird — the kiwi — has become the demonym for anyone from New Zealand, a fern leaf is a constant symbol of the New Zealand nation. Hence, the biological edginess of this beautiful land has become well established in the culture of New Zealand. The biosphere is always the ground of culture. That might not always be apparent but it’s readily apparent in New Zealand. That’s part of the Kiwikiwi charm.

New Zealand is a fascinating place but I’ll have more to say from Beyond the Edge in my next post (a week hence), when I consider the possibilities of going, as I would like to think, Beyond the Bar. And with a little bit of luck I’ll go beyond mere words to graphics, too. Until then and in any event…

Warm regards,

Tim (& Jean)

P.S. 24 December 2016. For a vivid example of New Zealand 'falling off the edge' see this Daily Mail Australia report of a Government of New Zealand web page that depicts a world map bereft of New Zealand. Beyond-the-edge omissions committed by others are also shown in the Daily Mail Australia report.