Editorial
Hue and cry
by Pamela Stirling
What is a New Zealander? Don Brash may be hard put to define it, but there is one simple test. A New Zealander is someone, of any birth, who at certain significant moments releases a salty, protein-rich fluid from the lachrymal apparatus through the puncta, or holes, of the eyelid.
What it means, mate, is they cry.
Shedding emotional tears is not something we as a nation encourage. Crying in public is generally seen as only called for when you’re voted off the island. But there have been times – Helen Clark at Waitangi, Doug Graham over Treaty settlements and last week Fiona McDonald on NZ Idol – when we have beheld such responses. It’s telling that many are in the context of Maori interaction. Would Fiona McDonald have cried if Celine Dion herself had sung as movingly as Camillia on Idol?
What’s even more revealing is a study by a professor of clinical psychology in the Netherlands who recently reported to a conference at the Freud Museum in London that Dutch undergraduate volunteers don’t cry at the same things that we do. They were tested on whether the film Once Were Warriors elicits tears. Three-quarters of those tested didn’t cry at all. The researchers thought the movie “not touching enough”.
Not touching enough? A child let down by his parents who never arrive for the long-promised visit? A child who kills herself after being raped? Maybe it’s true that Europe cried itself dry after two world wars; perhaps there are no tears left. But there are few New Zealanders who have seen that film and not cried for their country.
It’s not just despair that elicits tears. Australians cried when Cathy Freeman carried the Australian flag on her victory lap of honour during the Sydney Olympics. Jonah Lomu with his soft-spoken courage and dignity at sports awards makes us stand in his honour and salute, while we experience strange spasms of the respiratory and truncal muscles and convulsively inhale air.
Somehow we need those experiences. New Zealanders seek out Anzac Day services in ever-growing numbers – last year visitors to the Anzac memorials in Gallipoli numbered more than 20,000. Young men who would no more answer the call to arms than pause in the middle of a game of Command and Conquer stand on the beaches of Gallipoli at dawn with tears streaming.
More than one third of all New Zealand men of military age experienced the hell of the battlefields of World War I. Historian O E Burton eloquently testifies that “somewhere between the bloody ridge of Chunuk Bair in August 1915 and the black swamp of Passchendaele in October 1917, New Zealand quite defiantly found individuality and nationality”.
But not unity. This summer it is our own country that feels like foreign territory; so many Pakeha suddenly awakening to a sense of being as landlocked as a European principality by Maori claims of entitlement to the entire foreshore; so many Maori grieving for ancestral rights. All of us homesick for the land we believe we have earned through toil and tears.
Crying, of course, is no guarantee of sincerity. Rousseau cried copiously over the sentiments of his idealised Social Contract and yet put all five of his children into orphanages without naming them. Clinton cried suspiciously often. Oliver North, in the Contragate hearings, started a trend to turning tears to advantage.
But the emotion that marks a true New Zealander is genuine enough. Who can hear “Now Is the Hour” without a wave of sentiment? Or “Pokare Kare Ana”? Or Tim Finn’s haunting “Parihaka”? I have been completely undone by the Mutton Birds’ “Anchor Me” on a lonely London day.
And now in cinemas the world over is “To the West”, the soaring Lord of the Rings tribute to Cameron Duncan. Cameron was the extraordinary young New Zealand film-maker who died long before he could achieve his dream of a movie about Hone Heke. To hear Cameron, of Maori and Pakeha blood, talk of being the new generation of New Zealanders – the “remix” generation – was to be moved to have something stuck in one’s eye for a considerable time. The emotional impact of Keisha Castle-Hughes’s acting does the same thing.
We can tear ourselves apart. Or sniffle and sob together. But we stand together on one thing: no one else will ever understand being here the way we do.
