When I started this blog, I wanted to do my first blog on spirituality and culture and maybe that'll come or maybe it will forever be my 'next' blog. Instead i did a blog on spirituality because i felt like I'd need to have some definition around that first. So this blog I thought I'd do focus on the cultural strand of that initial thought, there have also been three things lately that have all brought me to think of New Zealand culture.
I was chatting with an American friend Rich Goodhart about the popular music we grew up with on the radio through the 60's & 70's and he told of wonderful experiences of hearing this great popular music come over the radio, great Beatles songs, Doors etc and I thought of the terrible pap that came over the radio waves in New Zealand. The next thing was the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton making critical comments about New Zealand culture and politics and the media frenzy that ensued. The last thing was John Cleese and Eric Idle talking about doing a tour of New Zealand in the 60's and what a truly strange and dreadful place they found it.
I have slowly built some interest in my family ancestry, my great great grandfather Thomas Bevan wrote a memoir Reminiscence of an Old Colonist which I found fascinating and there is plenty to be fascinated by in the relatively short human history of this country, but what had happened by the late 1950's and early 1960's that it had become such a cultural desert? It seems like there was a very strong inclination to conformity and due to distances and media isolation New Zealand was a cultural backwater.
Novels, poems, plays, movies and music are all our spiritual food. In New Zealand we always seem to be on the cusp of or to have just found our cultural identity. In music there were those 50's & 60's rocker: Ray Columbus, Max Merrit, The La de Da's, The Avengers, The Fourmyula et al. The Seventies and 80's Split Enz, Dragon, Space Waltz, The Herbs, Dave Dobbyn, Netherworld Dancing Toys, Flying Nun bands were greeted with great delight in the acclamation that the New Zealand scene had coming of age. Eric idle spoke of the amazing change that swept through the UK with the coming of the Beatles and the stuffiness that they swept aside almost over night. But to me New Zealand music generally didn't have that kind of cultural penetration, certainly not the Flying Nun bands. Split Enz's True Colours going to number one and keeping Pink Floyd's The Wall out of the number one spot to me was a more significant National Cultural event, that I suspect the Enz were only able to achieve by being based overseas.
Personally I'm Ok with the fact that we can feel a warm sense of nostalgic cultural identity when we hear well known tracks from the "Nature's Best" compilations on our radio, although I still think that sense of being on the cusp of gaining a cultural identity is still there, I don't think Lorde will break us through. When I want some New Zealand music I tend to turn to the various permutations of the Finn brothers or My greatest hits CD of Daphne Walker, my favourite artists are not Kiwis, why is that? Do I have cultural cringe? or is it that New Zealand is just always going to be a small part of the greater cultural landscape?
Having art that inspires your internal life recognised in the national cultural life I think makes the individual feel a connection between the inner life and the more external shared cultural life. I didn't really have that sense not connecting with the cultural fodder leaking from New Zealand Radios as I was growing up.
Elanor Catton has caused a bit of a stir by talking of cultural and political issues in New Zealand saying:
"At the moment, New Zealand, like Australia and Canada, (are dominated by) these neo-liberal, profit-obsessed, very shallow, very money-hungry politicians who do not care about culture.
They care about short-term gains. They would destroy the planet in order to be able to have the life they want."
I might come at this slightly differently but in essence I agree with what she is saying to me the reaction seems to speak more loudly than her words, you can get a taste of it in this New Zealand Herald article:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11394346
Gordon Campbell also wrote about it here:
http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2015/01/29/gordon-campbell-on-the-eleanor-catton-rumpus/
I admit I haven't read Eleanor's novel, I think this controversy will inspire me to do so. I probably read less New Zealand literature than I listen to our music, I read quite a bit of Frame and Ronald Hugh Morrison and other odds and ends. Eleanor I think expresses most people's opinions of New Zealand literature:
"I, for example, grew up just having a strange belief that New Zealand writers were automatically less great than writers from Britain and America, for example. Because we were some colonial backwater ..."
I think the last two New Zealand books I read were Tim Hanna's books on Kim Newcombe and John Britton both amazing practitioners in the art of motorcycle design and construction for racing. They were to me steeped in New Zealand culture. I have a brother who does amazing feats of engineering in his garage and that image of the garage problem solver holds an incredible romance for me. It's kind of funny because I'm not at all a petrol head and don't even drive. (Yeah we need to get off oil and move to electricity, go Tesla Motors!)
Maybe as Kiwi's we just need to become comfortable with always being perched on the brink of cultural discovery.
