Comeback special

At some stage while we were away someone decided exactly what ‘kiwi summer’ means and forgot to tell us. It’s plastered on every ad and every bottle of ‘kiwi summer’ beer or soft drink – an idyllic tan and brown, moustached, stubby shorted version of 1970’s New Zealand. It’s not that I don’t like it, it just that it seems a little bit early in the piece to stop and decide exactly what we’re all about, and I wasn’t even alive in the 70s.

Sonya and I parked outside a Samoan church in Auckland last Sunday and as we pulled up the whole congregation of big mums in giant hats and even bigger 14 year old boys in crisp white shirts and tapa cloth around their waists flooded out like they were waiting all this time to personally greet us. I love how much NZ feels like a pacific island.

Then we drove up the Coromandel peninsula. Australian birds and trees are like drunk sunburnt Shane Warnes who come and trip over your picnic blanket, spill beer in your salad and try to tell a dirty joke to make it all better but forget the punchline. New Zealand bush is dark and strange but somehow on its best behaviour, and kiwi birds are practical and polite little gentlemen quietly going about their sensible business.

Actually – if the world was a party Australia would be that same sunburnt man but this time hes standing on the coffee table telling the joke properly, drawing the whole room in to every lewd detail. New Zealand is the pretty girl in the hall - not outrageous or particularly glamorous but somehow sensibly stylish - deep in an earnest conversation about something that probably doesn’t really matter.