The Fortunate Country

Sometimes I have a dream; not a dream of the night but a daydream; and in it I see this country as it might be. Superficially there is no great difference from what we now see around us. The hills and the rivers and the beaches are the same. The chief towns are still called Wellington and Auckland and Christchurch and Dunedin. But certain changes have occurred. And these changes have affected very deeply the lives of the people.

That beautiful old council chamber of the Provincial Government in Christchurch is back in service again. The carved heads under the rafters look down in astonishment on groups of people debating again the affairs of their province. Half the tax money of the country passes through their hands – I mean, in each centre, for in each the Provincial Government has been resurrected – and the money is used for local developments, the building of hospitals and theatres, the maintenance of roads, the development of agriculture and industry, by people who know what the local needs are.

If they don’t know, we soon correct them; for our democracy is no longer limited to the use of a vote once in three years. We have become true democrats. We listen carefully in the gallery of our local Parliament. Schoolchildren argue the benefits of this or that course of Government action page 623 in their classes; and the argument is no longer lifeless and insipid.

There are protest marches when the building of a bridge means the destruction of a beautiful vista. We are most careful of the creation that God has made us stewards of. Usually the road has, in such a case, to be diverted, for we would rather travel by a longer route than travel through a desecrated world.

Of course the Central Government still exists. It deals only with the areas of public life which cannot be handled by any manner of means by the Provincial Governments. It is a clearing-house, a place for the tying-up of loose ends, a base for communication with other countries. It has little power and is kept in motion by the ragged remnants of the master race of bureaucrats who once believed that they ruled us.

One of its chief functions, however, is the organisation of relief work and technological advice for other countries. We have become in our own way the Switzerland of the Pacific, determinedly neutral, refusing military bases to any other power, and maintaining only a small standing army for national defence.

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There are major political divisions in the country as to whether the maintenance of such an army is indeed necessary. The dominant Party does at present claim that it is; but a growing minority would like us to do without it entirely. This party incidentally is known as the Christian Democrats.

A stranger visiting our country would probably be struck most of all by three things – our shrines, our theatres and the small amount of traffic on our roads. The first thing came about when a majority of our people became Catholics.

The shrine of St Peter at Paraparaumu, dedicated to the labour of fishermen, is one of the best known. In Greymouth there is the shrine of the Madonna of the Mines; and twenty miles north of Auckland the famous Maori shrine of Our Lady where miracles of healing have been reported. In a sense these shrines have become the spiritual nerve centres of the country. There are local festivals connected with the more important ones. And throughout the country you cannot travel far without passing a roadside Calvary or Pietà decorated with flowers. It has made quite a difference to the way we look at things.

There are two Acts of our Central Parliament which made a big difference to our way of life. One was the total abolition of TV sets and computers. We decided that in the balance TV was doing our people, particularly the children, more harm than good; that they were becoming anaemic and getting square eyes, and that our stringent laws against irresponsible advertising could not be enforced while the TV stations remained. And, after observing the effect of the introduction of computers in England and the U.S.A., we decided page 624 that there would still be one country that counted the quality of human relationships more important than mechanisation. We have our machines. But we are determined they will not be our masters.

The first question we ask when somebody suggests that a new branch of industry should be established is ‘How will it affect the relationships already existing among people in that neighbourhood?’ And the second is: ‘How will its waste products affect the natural environment?’

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Several potentially profitable schemes have been knocked on the head by this way of thinking – notably a scheme to establish a quarry on Mount Egmont to hack out certain rare minerals necessary for building computer parts in space vehicles – but we are glad that we had the guts to hold to our decision.

But perhaps the most far-reaching and important Act of the Central Parliament was the one that radically restricted the use of vehicles on our roads. The impetus for the change came first from Otago. The number of deaths on the roads in that province – not to mention the crippling of thousands – had been steadily rising over a period of ten years. The Otago Provincial Government decided that driving licences within the province would only be issued to people who needed to drive for business reasons or for some other reason of demonstrable value to the citizens of the province. All other journeys would have to be undertaken by other means. The movement spread like wildfire, pushed forward by casualties who had survived motor accidents, by their relatives, and by the Churches. The automobile industry slumped. They tried to bring pressure to bear on the Central Government but failed.

For some years the chief function of Public Works was to build new railway lines. Today the road casualties have shrunk to an insignificant number. The torrent of blood that bathed our roads has shrunk down to a trickle, and the hospitals are free to turn their attention to other kinds of cases.

It would be difficult to give a full account of the resurgence of the arts. Painting, sculpture, songs made and sung by the people – these arts increased in proportion to the decrease in public favour of the canned mental products of commercial radio and TV. People had something else to do than sit in a coma and listen to or watch tired performers dancing for dollars. The art galleries closed down, and the same premises that had been cemeteries of some of the poorest art of the past were used for weekly exhibitions of the work of local artists. Undoubtedly the massive movement of liturgical renewal had something to do with it.

The works of art were rarely specifically religious; but the fact that every Catholic church in the country – and a good many of the Protestant ones, too – were furnished with images and paintings by local artists had made a page 625 very strong impact on our painters. If a boy suggests to his parents nowadays that he would like to become an artist, they no longer talk about sending for a psychiatrist. Art has come to stay.

But our theatres are our greatest glory. Since we no longer have cinemas – did I forget to mention that? – a town of more than ten thousand inhabitants would count itself crippled without a theatre. Many of the finest plays from other countries can be seen weekly in our theatres. But our material has come chiefly from local playwrights. Instead of a meagre and doubtful dozen, we now have several thousand established playwrights in this country; and many drama groups, especially among the young, construct their own plays, which frequently contain satirical comment on local events.

Some of the Bishops and other churchmen are unhappy about the theatre revival. They claim that too much bawdy material is going on the boards. But their voice is not easily heard, because our people remember only too clearly the dreary flow of cretin-making sludge that poured in the past from the TV stations. They don’t mind much if it is bawdy as long as it is intelligent and topical. The theatre revival has indeed changed us remarkably.

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My dream is not Utopia. The people of that imaginary country are sinners still. People fall in and out of love and quarrel and at times kill one another. People misuse power and over-value their material possessions. But the sense of a spiritual and social void is no longer so apparent; and the country looks like a place made for human beings to live in.

This may be mainly because so many of us have large families. It is not counted wholly peculiar for a couple to rear eight or ten children. Of those eight or ten a good half will not themselves marry. They may enter religious orders, nursing orders, contemplative orders, communities who live in poverty and till the ground – these have sprung up everywhere; and there are so many candidates for the priesthood that a man has to be practically a saint and a genius to gain entry. A great many of our priests and nuns are working in other countries. There would simply not be enough for them to do here.

It was interesting to notice that when our Catholic majority finally decided to obey the Church’s injunctions regarding family planning the lost idea of religious celibacy came into prominence again. They found that the spiritual generosity involved in rearing large families carried over to the children so that they did not think it strange to devote themselves to celibate life for the good of others.

The group who continue to practise artificial contraception with real fervour are the bureaucrats of the Central Government. They are in a sense a race apart. They sit in their chromium offices and mourn for a vanished empire of secular monotony and centralised power. But they have their use. page 626 They are kings no longer, but instead the donkey-men who keep the wheels of the minimal degree of social organisation in motion.

I am sorry to wake from my daydream. It was good while it lasted. Today I must go down to the hospital and visit a young friend who impaled himself last Friday on the iron rods protruding from the back of a truck; and after that I have to give a talk on ‘Why We Have No Playwrights’ to a Catholic group who are pressing for democratisation of the Church and the public Baptism of computers.

1968 (535)