Home thoughts from abroad

By BRONWYN SELL

I don't remember acknowledging Waitangi Day at home. It was probably spent like any other day off school near the end of summer. A bit of cricket in the front paddock. Gallon drums as wickets, the dog as fielder. She would always bring the ball to me before my brother - after tearing a delirious victory lap around the paddock. The advantage offset my awry bowling.

Or maybe I'd have gone down to the Kawerau town pool with my best friend, Bobbie. Five cents to get in, 40c for a scoop of chips to share afterwards on the witch's hat in the playground, matted hair stuck to our necks, drying in the sun. (Childhood is always sunny in hindsight.)

We'd crawl over the Rotomas in our swimming-club van for the annual Lake Rotoma swim, which seemed like a good idea until you had to jump, shivering, from the boat into ankle-deep slime under trees on a far shore. After what seemed like an eternity of tortuous boredom, I'd stumble ashore, always last, legs buckling under newly rediscovered gravity, hoping the others hadn't eaten all the Cheese Sizzlers on the barbecue.

Years later, in 1999, I spent the day chugging around Lake Rotoiti in the annual Wooden Boat Regatta. There were sandflies and cowpats in the bay where we had lunch.

This year's Waitangi Day will be much the same as the last. I'll go out for a few pints after work, then head to Brixton in South London on the Victoria Line, which will be chocker with greenstone-pendant- and paua-wearing young New Zealanders.

Inside the Brixton Academy will be about 4000 others, making it the second-biggest Kiwi event in Britain, behind the summer food and wine festival, Toast New Zealand.

Last year Dave Dobbyn, Bic Runga and Tim Finn whipped the crowd into a patriotic frenzy, after a roof-lifting powhiri from the British iwi, Ngati Ranana. More than anything else, Dobbyn's Loyal went off.

"That was one of the things where you couldn't do anything wrong," said Dobbyn later. "Everyone was so homesick, they loved everything we did. There were some magic moments there. I got all glassy-eyed when the local iwi gave it heaps at the start."

When you see that kind of patriotism offshore it kind of moves you to understand your New Zealandness on another level. This year Dobbyn is back, with Anika Moa, who we hear is a household name at home. It will be Export Gold, K Bars and half a dozen people I haven't seen since school or AIT.

Elsewhere in London, Edinburgh and Dublin too, the Walkabouts and other antipodean pubs will be roaring with flat vowels and Crowded House. That's the Thursday. Friday night goes more upmarket, with the annual £90-a-head ($270) New Zealand Society black tie dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, on Park Lane, darling. It's been a tradition for 75 years, but women have been allowed in only since the 1970s. It'll be the expat networks, the diplomatic crowd and some celebrities - Don McKinnon and Zinzan Brooke are likely to be among them. I've seen the menu. No, I've salivated over the menu. Roast loin of New Zealand venison with beetroot fondant, woodland mushrooms and seasonal vegetables, potato gratin and juniper cream sauce. For dessert, an "artist's palette" of sorbets: manuka honey, kiwifruit and raspberry - with a brandy basket of seasonal berries.

And alongside all that, Cloudy Bay Pelorous NV sparkling wine, Tohu Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, Villa Maria Cellar Selection Cabernet Merlot (skip the Steinlager). I think I might once again be giving Saturday's unofficial, traditional Circle Line Waitangi Day pub crawl a miss.

Last year I sat at Acton Town tube station in the dim mid-afternoon, waiting for a friend to arrive from Heathrow, watching dozens of young Kiwis in All Black jerseys stumble through the ticket gates, silver ferns stuck to their faces. If they had managed a pint at all the stations on the Circle Line, which, as the name suggests, circles central London (Westminster, Victoria, Notting Hill Gate, Paddington, Baker St, Kings Cross, Tower Hill) and stopped for the customary haka in Trafalgar Square they were doing well. It's usually an all-day commitment, and with 11pm pub closing, you have to start early.

They would have been heading to the notorious antipodean Redback Tavern down the road to finish the celebration. I was happy to leave them to it. There's patriotism and there's just plain madness.

Suffice to say that we celebrate Waitangi Day in the UK with a little more vigour than you will probably be doing at home. Here, it is a three- or four-day celebration.

It's not that I'm staring out at the gloom of the London winter while dreaming of summer at home although sometimes I do. It's not that I yearn to be surrounded by fellow Kiwis and drink New Zealand wine and beer, although sometimes it's nice to relax with people who share a history and understand you innately. It's not that I don't get a buzz every time I walk through bustling Leicester Square at night, or past Buckingham Palace on a clear day in which the sky seems enormous, or this month - through snow in St James Park. It's not that I'm not grateful that Paris is just three hours away by train - but sometimes I wish a wild, deserted west coast beach was within range as well. That's what makes us unsettled - if I'd invented the world, we'd have both.

But even in winter I cannot say I pine for home. As much as it is a part of my soul, I know New Zealand will always be waiting.

However, it is hard not to get wistful sometimes over a photo of a pohutukawa in bloom and the remembered smell of the sea, the taste of feijoas and the sound of cicadas. New Zealand is an easy place to romanticise about, especially when the English weather is miserable, the days are short, and the Christmas and New Year buzz has evaporated - along with most of January's salary - removing even the comfort of winter sales. Especially at a time a terrorist attack on Britain feels inevitable. And when we know Auckland is putting on its best show in the build-up to the America's Cup, and The Lord of the Rings is taunting us with the sweeping landscapes that have the Brits wondering aloud what the hell so many of us are doing here.

I came across a passage by expat novelist Rosie Scott in Pakeha (edited by Michael King), which resonated so boomingly that I scribbled it into my diary: "I have learnt during my frequent stays in other places that my attachment to New Zealand and my sense of nationality are, on one level, purely visceral. A glimpse of clean, clear landscape, the purity of light, a Maori waiata, a gust of fresh west coast wind, that special brand of New Zealand gentleness and decency, certain faces, the scent of gorse - all of these offer a short-cut of instant identification, a certainty about belonging that cannot be easily expressed in words."

In London, Waitangi Day is an innocent celebration of all that, in a month when we would all rather be in the New Zealand summer - no matter how wet it really is. The day loses the ambivalence and apathy that dull it in New Zealand, where it feels less a cause for celebration than something to apologise for.

Here Waitangi Day is an uncomplicated toast to our nationality, a celebration of the experiences that formed our collective character and the kinds of things our compatriots might be doing at home - the cricket in the paddock, the long days playing endless games with a tractor tube in the pool, the tortuous Lake Rotoma swim, the sandflies and cowpats. You have to stand back from your country to get a panoramic perspective of what it is. And February 6 is a day when New Zealanders in the UK might appreciate that, however subconscious the realisation is.

Waitangi Day UK style is no sombre or sober academic reflection on our cultural heritage. That the Australians - our flatmates and friends - celebrated Australia Day last weekend probably flames the ardour for our own country. We all know that the Australians never let a good time pass them by and we all know how New Zealanders hate to be shown up by our neighbours.

Anzac Day has a similar appeal, but we share it with our transtasman friends and rivals, among others. Waitangi Day is ours alone.

I have been bringing up the subject in Kiwi company in the past couple of weeks. One of my friends said she'd never defined Waitangi Day while living in New Zealand. Sure, she has Claudia Orange's The Treaty of Waitangi on her bookshelf (next to the Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring) and can recite the differences in the English and Maori versions of the treaty. And sure, Waitangi Day is the time to acknowledge those differences and the harm they have caused. But she had never thought about what the day meant on a personal level, divorced from its controversial roots.

She realised this while waiting in a queue outside an antipodean pub on a cold Wednesday night last year. A passing Brit asked what the line was for. "I'd never before had to put into words what Waitangi Day meant," she said. "It might have been the beer I'd already drunk, but I found myself explaining the history of the day, then waxing lyrical about the New Zealand that had developed since, and what it was to be a Kiwi."

A New Zealand workmate knows a Maori teacher who plans to take the day off as a cultural/religious day, as allowed in her contract. She wondered if it was a bit cheeky, but figured that the Indian teachers had their cultural days, as did those of other religions. Why should our cultural day be less important?

Am I making it sound as if everyone is making plans? They're not.

Another friend has been invited to drinks with English friends on February 6. It is the third time they have invited her, and she's turned them down twice. She had intended to go to the concert, and was torn for a while, but settled on the English friends. Her New Year's resolution, after all, was to spend less time in the "Kiwi trap" and more time getting to know the locals. "That's what I came here for."

I will have to remember to ask on February 7 whether she spent part of her night explaining Waitangi Day to people who find the word Waitangi unpronounceable.

Meanwhile, in Brixton, I'll be screaming along to Loyal as loudly as the next patriot renewing his or her vows. I didn't even know the words until I came to London.