The Picture of New Zealand

It was only when the New Zealand and Australian students on the one hand, and the Soviet students on the other, came together, that we discovered our colossal ignorance of each other.

It happened this way, if you remember, when Elvira and Alex and Otari came to New Zealand last year. The first questions that they would be asked when they were put up on the stage in a University hall, would be "Does the U.S.S.R. have a Parliament?" or "How many people in the Soviet Union belong to the Communist Party?". We were asked when we got to the Soviet Union questions which, though they were not so obviously ignorant, were revealing enough in their own way as to what was not known about Australia and New Zealand.

When we sat as a delegation with groups of students we would invariably be asked, "Do your students have bursaries?" and "How do your graduates manage to find jobs?" Now it would have been obvious to a student of the Western type of Welfare State in general and New Zealand in particular, that equality of opportunity in education was one of its hallmarks and that provision of bursaries for students might be taken for granted. By the same token, the Welfare State will ensure, if it is prosperous, something like full employment. But when we explained that we had nothing like a Graduates' Employment Commission and that we had managed fairly well without—the difficulty for a graduate of engineering or of chemistry was to choose among a dozen jobs in New Zealand or Australia or England for which he was qualified—the students were polite but nonetheless incredulous. (When it came to a question of Full Employment, the New Zealanders usually took it on themselves to answer in order to save the Australians a certain embarrassment).

It was, of course, difficult for us in New Zealand to get information if not about Moscow and the Russian Federation, certainly about other parts of the Russian Union. About Georgia, for example, there would be another booklet in a charming series with "Moldavia—an Orchard in Bloom" and "Kazakhstan—the Land of Achievement" all written, it appears, by the Secretary of the Communist Party in the particular republic, to record how many cities, farms and universities the Communist Party has given the area and by what percentage it is overfulfilling the current five-year plan. The pictures will be of the new apartment houses and the new Palaces of Culture which look alike, in any case, from republic to republic. Beyond that, there are dull novels. I hadn't found even a dull novel about present-day Georgia.

Alex told me that before he came out to Australia and New Zealand, he had read everything about us which was available in the U.S.S.R. It didn't amount to very much. For the most part, it was the voyages of sailors around our coasts in the early days of discovery. And you can't find in the U.S.S.R. even the New Zealand equivalent of "Moldavia—an Orchard in Bloom". We have had no legation in Moscow for over a decade When on our departure we presented the Lenin Library with the Yearbook and the 1961 Report on Western Samoa and the Hunn Report on Maoris and other bits of documentation, we'd had with us, the librarian looked genuinely grateful. He said New Zealand material was scarce. We could well believe it.

If I speak more about the Russians' ignorance of Australasia than the Australasians' ignorance of the Soviet Union, I assume that ours was still the less excusable. After all, the Soviet Union is a hundred times bigger than New Zealand and when I contemplated New Zealand from the perspective of Moscow I was more surprised that it did figure on any maps than that it was missed out of most Moreover, the Soviet Union is the chief exponent of a political ideology that holds half mankind in tow and we, on the other hand have had no major wars and no revolutions and it makes little difference to the rest of the world which political party wins any of our elections. We have produced a number of distinguished people, but fewer than most of the republics of the U.S.S.R. in the course of their long history, and no particular idea clings to the men we produce. It is at least fifty years since we were "the social laboratory of the world" and that title wasn't exclusively ours. (We felt b und to apologise from time to time that we were not even a promising arena for the Victory of Communism.)

I had brought with me a couple of films I'd borrowed from the New Zealand High Commissioner in London. There was one about "The New Zealanders" which gave a general survey of the look of our cities and countryside and people and another of "The Maori Today" which showed what was being done in the way of developing Maori land and rehousing Maoris who live in substandard accommodation. I thought they were reasonable films. Both of them were recent, and the "The Maori Today" was good enough technically to have been entered in the Berlin Film Festival.

We didn't often find an English-speaking audience or a theatre fitted for oral translation though Ivan, who was our translator, would have made a first-class job of it. But at Moscow University we found Ivanov, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, who had made a film on his trip out to Australia and New Zealand in 1959 and was as anxious to have our opinion of it as we were to give it. We arranged a screening of all the films in one of the lecture-rooms and Ivanov gathered up a few students at short notice.

We had been shown a couple of tendentious films down in Georgia and I believe we expected a third. We had seen a film which showed how the history of Georgia was fulfilled under the Communist regime and another which recorded the world tour of the Georgian Dance Troupe whose dancing we admired without stint, so that we were only sorry that so much of the film was taken up with the rich audience and then the slums of all the Capitalists cities visited in turn—Rome, Paris, Rio, Mexico City. Only in Havana, for some reason or other, we didn't go looking for slums.

But this was Moscow and most of the people we consorted with in Moscow were, as we came to realise, as allergic to undentiousness, even in a Soviet film, so we were ourselves. They were the university administrators and the student officers for the whole of the Ussr who are conversant enough with Western propaganda as well as their own, not to take either in seriousness.

Ivanov's film turned out to be almost too sympathetic. He had taken the New Zealand countryside and the New Zealand town—Lake Tekapo, a farmhouse, the Timaru wool sales, Auckland suburbia—in a series that Government Tourist and Publicity might envy. Ivanov, it appears, is President of the U.S.S.R. Society for Friendship with New Zealand (I wasn't sure at the time just what this entailed Now that I have met the Society at home, I am still not sure), and presumably this film was to be shown to the members of that Society, as indeed we later showed them our own. Ivanov's delegation had called at Hong Kong on the way back to Moscow and at that stage, naturally enough, the social comment got more pointed.

Ivanov said with a twinkle, how did we like his film of New Zealand? Was it objective enough? Knowing full well this joke about the Westerners (or about the Russians, if you happen to be a Westerner yourself) that only the newest and best things are objective enough to be photographed.

Then we came to Elvira's school in Leningrad where all the children are taught in English from the age of eight. We were ranged up at the front of the room in front of a couple of the senior classes—16 and 17 year olds—and the questioning began. It was our stupidity that we took for granted that they meant what other people had meant, when they said "Tell us about your countries". How do you begin? Tony took an audible breath and stuck his hands in his pocket and started off by saying it was a big place—maybe not as big as Siberia, but still a big place-desert in the inside, cities on the outside—European people like themselves—Aborigines going for "walk-about". I put out a geographical and ethnological primer of New Zealand. We were doing, as we thought, very well.

At the end Tony said, he'd like to ask them a question himself; "How much had they known about Australia before the Australians had come there that morning? The girl who got up to reply did so with a certain diffidence. She said they had wanted something from the Australians which only they could give. Something extraordinary. There was so much that could be got from books—from the novels of Patrick White, which she had read. Somehow a person should be able to give more than a book.

We hardly regained countenance, in spite of the fact that our judgement was appealed to on their performance of the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" and our own un-Maori version of Pokare-kareana was applauded. How were we to have known that all Elvira's students had the idea that Australasia was the most important part of the English-speaking world?

(Afterwards we sent along the films and some books and brochures for the school library in an effort to rehabilitate ourselves.)

The films we'd brought ourselves spoke fairly directly about housing and factory conditions and especially the living conditions of the Maori people. I guess that Ivan thought it was so much window-dressing, and if he had been convinced that what the film showed was really the norm, he would have retorted that in any case the moral reserves of his own nation were superior, if not the housing.

Ivan was our translator, a third-generation revolutionary, and loyal to the Last ditch. Ivan and I would argue about English idioms or just how much "bourgeoisie" did "bourgeoisie" Russia have. But chiefly we would argue about this business of the Capitalist countries' exploiting their workers and their minorities from a choice phrase I found in the Report of the 22nd Congress at the Party.

New Zealand, to Ivan, was a Capitalist country. Capitalist countries, unlike Communist countries, are not founded on Lenin's doctrine of respect between races and between men. Therefore negroes are exploited in South Africa and the U.S.A., and Maoris are exploited in New Zealand, if not so brutally.