Feature
The Colony Strikes Back
by Nick Smith
Selling Kiwi culture to the mother country.
If you had to choose just one recent event to illustrate to the British where New Zealand’s changing culture is at, it would have to be the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s performance at the BBC Proms this year. At that most English of musical extravaganzas, our orchestra played Douglas Lilburn’s third symphony. But to launch proceedings there was a kapa haka group, the Manaia Maori Performing Arts Company, whose performance culminated in hongi between performers and conductor James Judd. Or “rubbing noses”, as Arts Council England executive director Kim Evans called it.
She was entranced. “[The reaction] might have been, a few decades ago, ‘Oh, how amusing.” Instead, the audience responded positively, raising the question: ‘What would be the equivalent exchange of culture in this country?’ And I don’t think we have anything quite as formal as that, and we have so many different cultures.”
The extent to which New Zealand culture is imbued with Maori culture is beginning to be understood – and appreciated. There is even a kind of reverse colonialism going on.
Take Andy Lewis, a real Welsh boyo. It is disconcerting to have a Welshman correct a New Zealander’s Maori pronunciation. But that’s what he does, while talking about the success of Maori wine company Tohu and its parent company Wakatu.
As Tohu’s UK and European general manager, Lewis has been extensively trained in tikanga Maori, an experience he enjoyed. “I got very involved and I feel very much part of the family.”
Another of its wines, Awatere, is pitched at the medium-price market. So, how do you teach supermarket wine sellers to correctly pronounce Awatere? “I just tell them, ‘You know Coronation Street? Vera Duckworth? Whose son is ow’a-Terry.’”
That the British and the international community have a sense of New Zealand culture is important, especially to business. If overseas customers have a real sense of place and culture, it makes our stuff easier to sell.
Artists need to export to survive, every bit as much as farmers. And right now in Britain there are many New Zealanders doing very, very well. Take this list of recent or upcoming events:
* Film distributors plan to spend one of the biggest promotional budgets for a New Zealand film outside Lord of the Rings for the UK release of The World’s Fastest Indian. Kiwi comedy horror Black Sheep was bought sight unseen by Icon Film Distribution, and Working Title is pushing Polynesian heart-warmer No 2, hoping for another Whale Rider.
* In music, indie label Full Time Hobby has signed Auckland band the Checks to a five-album deal. Next month, Fat Freddy’s Drop return in triumph for a UK and European tour to build further on their extraordinary success in England. Fresh from his NZSO collaboration, Nathan Haines is recording another album for UK label Chillifunk.
* At the British Museum, artist Glenn Jowitt has just opened a major exhibition of his photography, examining Pacific Island culture in New Zealand and the islands. The Arts Council England is funding Pasifika Styles, showcasing more than a dozen Polynesian artists and craftspeople, mainly New Zealanders, at Cambridge University. Contemporary artist Francis Upritchard is participating at the prestigious art fair Frieze.
* Fashion designers Little Brother (Murray Crane’s label) and Adrian Hailwood are joining Karen Walker and Mala Brajkovic at Soho-based boutique and fashion agency Antipodium, established by New Zealand-born Ashe Peacock.
* The Royal New Zealand Ballet picked up a prestigious British dance critics’ award and was a double-finalist for the coveted Laurence Olivier theatre awards.
And yet the international perception of New Zealand culture is still not strong. A nation brand index by global market research company Anholt-GMI saw this country perform exceptionally well, save for culture, where we placed 19th out of 25 nations.
That’s the global perception. Sadly, it seems few Kiwi cultural icons loom large in the average English mind: it’s still the All Blacks, sheep, the haka, hobbits and a clean, green environment.
But English perceptions are changing dramatically, Evans says. Take films like Whale Rider. “You begin to learn about cultures,” she says, “and not just in a head-on way, about what is happening in countries that you may never visit. And you have a sense of their place and the different ways in which they are telling their stories and engaging in their own culture.”
Jonathan Fleming, senior manager at leading classical music agency Askonas Holt, says there’s nothing wrong in being known for rugby and wide, open spaces. “But the country is now receiving acclaim in other areas, the arts and food and wine, in particular. With the arts, there are very rich seams of work, which bear comparison with the very best that there is around.”
In terms of national identity, artist and photographer Glenn Jowitt, who has chronicled Polynesian culture since the late 70s, believes that much of that art reflects the fact that “New Zealand is fast becoming brown”.
He recalls his American Center of Photography tutor, Ruth Lester (former executive director of Life magazine), in 1980 looking at his early K Rd portraiture and predicting that Polynesians would “change the face of Auckland and New Zealand, just as the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities had in New York”.
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