Noelle McCarthy: Key to knowing NZ lies at the heart of summer

Lazy days at the beach are all about sweating, sunscreen and being too hot. Photo / Dean Purcell.

Summer in New Zealand is as easy as falling off a log. Steve Braunias wrote that quote a few years ago, I think. I hope the quote is accurate, it's from memory, but I believe he was describing a summer of love.

Not only is it a perfect image, it is a directive I should have followed long ago. Keep it simple, stupid. That is how you enjoy summertime here.

Summer in New Zealand is about eating and drinking, and star gazing and interminable music festivals, and getting sand in your hair.

It is about driving over the Harbour Bridge, and swimming in your slip at Pakiri and getting chips out at Piha.

It is about reading The Great Gatsby and staying up late, and having Auckland City to yourself on New Year's Day. It's about homicidal Link Bus drivers, hydrangeas and the futility of citronella.

It's about Leigh Sawmill and the smell of brazier smoke on your clothes. It's about nothing happening and orca pods being news. It's about indolence and reflection and gift-giving and sunscreen.

It's about Waiheke and Bob Dylan and a broad-brimmed hat. Summer is a litany, straight-forward and picturesque, but it's taken the best part of eight years to get the hang of it, to tell you the truth.

Most of that was spent getting over myself. Summer is a religion in New Zealand, you can't be happy unless you bend your knee. I struggled. I wasn't calibrated for it.

I have always liked winter more than summer, there being no summertime to speak of really, where I'm from. I see no reason to celebrate sweating and being too hot.

So I couldn't understand it to begin with - the collective madness that steals over the country once daylight saving has begun. And I was contemptuous of it, the ground-pawing, tail-wagging thirst for holidays that kicks in at the end of November and reaches its dionysian climax in an orgy of crayfish on Christmas Day.

The upside-down thing didn't help of course - I'm used to seasons in a different order so blue skies and banana palms broke my heart with their strangeness during my first Christmas here.

The summers that followed were no better, I could never get in sync with them, they kept taking me by surprise.

Summer sunshine is a savage proposition in New Zealand, I spent my first few summers here burnt and disoriented in the blazing heat of Ponsonby Rd. But almost a decade later, I finally get it. And I was ready this year.

We dragged ourselves through last winter and gulped down the soft tastes of spring. And now here we are in summertime, a collective raison d'etre. Summer is the point of New Zealand.

The reason for villas, and the viaduct, the correct context for bad cricket, and overrated sauvignon blanc. We're in the midst of it now, the stinking hot, shimmering, sparkling, clean blueness of it, and we're getting in the groove.

We're on the beach, in the bach, up late, pottering round, we're doing summer, New Zealand-style, which is not doing much at all.

From an immigrant's perspective, Steve Braunias' columns are a magnificent resource. He showed me how to do summer in New Zealand.

I learned everything I know about the history of this place from reading him, which is why I think New Zealand is haunted and mad. Massacres, missioners, PR trouts, bird-watching military men. Jumbo Trudgeon. Tea rooms, rest-homes, stifling courthouses, sighing mangroves, the care in the community insanity of Point Chev. A roster of very ordinary people, places and things, the trivial details of life in a small country at the end of the world.

Steve Braunias, at his best, simply excels in the compassionate elevation of the banal. That is what makes him a great writer of New Zealand, the ability to charm the country into life. His New Zealand is a country to cry over and be maddened by. To marvel over and fail to understand.

A country bathed in lethal sunshine all summer. Terrifying, dilapidated, boring, picturesque.

If we were brave enough, we'd leave his columns at the airport to scare off all the simpletons arriving for the World Cup.