Our size is our blessing

By MICHELE HEWITSON

When the playwright Roger Hall is "called on to explain New Zealand overseas", he has an opening sentence prepared. It goes like this.

"The best thing about New Zealand is that it has just over three million people; the worst thing about New Zealand is that it has just over three million people," says Hall.

"Suddenly it's four million. How has it happened so quickly? Did anyone ask us if this was what we wanted?"

Is four million a lot, actually? It's a figure which puts us up there with, aah, Croatia, Norway and Moldova.



A bloke on the news, when told we were about to turn four million, said: "It's a nation of 44 million sheep; four million of them think they're humans."

This wouldn't be New Zealand if we failed to mark a statistical occasion with a sheep joke.

Statistics tell us how many of us there are; explaining who we are is the role of the writers, the painters, photographers and the playwrights.

Here's C.K. Stead, the poet, novelist and critic, who last year published a collection of criticism called Kin of Place, on whether numbers matter.

"I'm old enough to remember learning at primary school that our population was one and a half million. The war, the big one, was on, and we still persuaded ourselves that we were significant in the world - and didn't quite believe it.

"Numbers have symbolic significance, but I don't think the difference between one and a half and four is great in an overcrowded planet. I think we are clearly defined more by geographical circumstance than by numbers. We are remote from the centres of power and surrounded by oceans.

"But significance in the world is not defined by size. Some years back, when we were three million, I remember pointing out to an American, who expressed amazement we were so small, that it was the same population as Israel, Nicaragua and Ireland, all of which were 'trouble spots' and in the news at the time.

"It wasn't population size that made us unnoticed but [relative] tranquillity."

It is our curse, and our blessing, says Hall. "Blessing in that it does provide us with open spaces, and a curse if you see it in terms of a market, whether you're selling soap powders or soap operas."

Why not revel in the small, says painter and composer Michael Smither. Our isolation and our smallness have become an appealing thing, rather than a problem.

"New Zealand is the place a lot of people are running to get away from the rest of the world's mess."

Smither has never been tempted to run away to test himself on the international stage. "I always thought that if it could happen, it could happen here."

When Marti Friedlander arrived here in 1958, from bustling, cosmopolitan London, she had to make art to make sense of a foreign country. Foreign and friendly, but somehow threatening. Here's a story about a small country through the eyes of an immigrant:

In 1961, Gerrard Friedlander took his wife Marti camping in the South Island. This trip was her introduction to that great New Zealand tradition: find an isolated patch as far away from people as you can possibly get. This is the lifestyle we still show in the ads to sell ourselves overseas: a beautiful country with mountains, streams and bush. And hardly any faces.

In 1961 the population of New Zealand was just a decade away from turning two million. For Friedlander, lonely for faces, there might as well have been nobody.

The photographer and outsider, who has documented the changing face of the country with few faces, did not delight in the isolation of the campsite. She asked Gerrard to drive to the nearest house and set up camp there.

Look at Friedlander's work, Subdivision, 1966. Here is the family: mum, dad, the three kids. The land has been recently - and brutally - razed to make way for the houses for the families to live in. It is an image of another sort of raw isolation.

"The street was close to where we lived," says Friedlander, "and I wanted to record the hopes of young families for the quarter-acre section. Such developments were in their infancy out west. [The Friedlanders had settled in Henderson.]

"Until this one began, it was still rural around the area. As I observed these subdivisions there was also for me an infinite sadness that lives could be so grounded, a kind of bleakness. But that was my own perspective. I was still a very new migrant, and longed to live in the heart of the city. Still do."

This is not a longing Grahame Sydney shares. From Central Otago, where he paints his portraits of a land - low skies, wide horizons, unpeopled - he ponders the "extraordinary and rapid emergence of a distinct feeling of separation between the North and South".

Sydney says this separation, another form of isolation from within, is "centred on Auckland. The noticeable Asian colonisation of the city, the power gathering behind the Polynesian influence on cultural endeavours and the rampant, cancerous spread of what can only be called repetitive and joyless suburban housing".

Sydney's work evokes a sort of nostalgia for a New Zealand most New Zealanders never knew. He says the "tepid North is becoming colourful, polycultural, complex, crowded, cosmopolitan, and not at all like the New Zealand we nostalgically recall.

"The southern lands are emptier than before, the cities comfortable and conservative. Change has been slower and more measured: that nostalgia is not such a long journey from here."

As a young painter in the early 70s Sydney, like so many before him, undertook the journey to England. Like so many before him, he thought he had to make it overseas if he was to be any sort of artist. In London he hardly painted a thing. He felt like a tourist. "It took the going for me to realise where I belonged."

Friedlander had travelled the other way. Her art came out of a sense of not belonging. Look again at Subdivision. She says this picture best sums up isolation for her.

And now there are four million. For Friedlander the number fails to have an impact. "Four million? It's not very much, is it?"

"Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart." So sang Kipling when he came this way. Kipling was writing about a small city called Auckland.

He might have been writing about the two slivers of land called North Island and South Island: 268,680sq km of lonely, lovely, land, but most of all land apart, a land in which there were so few people that it was a place where those who did live here lived apart from each other.

It certainly seemed that way to Friedlander. She missed faces that "tell their life". Out there in the bush, by the river, she felt "just terribly lonely". She was not a visitor. If she had been, the camping expedition would have been "a huge adventure".

Instead, her reaction was, "My God, I'm going to stay in this primeval place". She feared that sense of isolation "was going to be permanent for me. It was an enormous feeling of emptiness".

Expressing that sense of loneliness did not always go down well. "I think New Zealanders thought I had a big problem. It was the emptiness that they loved, that they extolled the virtues of."

We have always been a defensive people. Even while longing for other things - more people, livelier cities - we made our remoteness and smallness a virtue. An accident of geography and birth is something to be proud of.

That isolation, that celebration of smallness, has taken on a mythical quality. It is why people look at Sydney's vast skies and empty landscapes and experience a yearning to travel to a place where the only people they will meet will be the legendary laconic southern man.

"These types hardly exist, of course," says Sydney. "Owen Marshall, Brian Turner, Sam Neill and I are the slightly more washed versions of these cliches, trotted out occasionally when something marginally more sophisticated is required."

Artist and composer Michael Smither has spent much of his life in small places, including the Taranaki farm he grew up on and now Kuaotunu on the Coromandel Peninsula.

Smither thinks small is good. By merit of that smallness, New Zealand is the perfectly sized lab for an ongoing social experiment in defining our national identity.

"It is only a couple of islands and it is amazing what has happened. It has produced tremendous scientists, artists, writers, politicians and social innovators."

That identity, defined for Smither through the 60 and 70s, came from a sense of being, "prepared to go it alone and be judged on what we decided, not on what the rest of the world was saying was the measure for art at the time".

Stead believes part of our identity "is also language identity - language and hence culture. We are part of the English language diaspora and that to a large extent counterbalances geographical remoteness. Within that we have marked out a distinct political place for ourselves [along with Canada, perhaps] because Labour Governments [the Lange Government and now Helen Clark's], while acknowledging kinship, have also marked out a separateness and an independence.

"The non-nuclear policy was important more than anything for its symbolic value in marking out that political independence. The refusal to become one of George Bush's poodles in Iraq has had the same effect.

"Notice how John Howard came into line and was at once forgotten. When the US and Britain had their 'summit' with Spain in the Azores they forgot to include Australia.

"New Zealand, on the other hand, has earned respect for its firm but courteous refusal to be another parrot. These things rather than numbers - four million, so what? - are what define and give us confidence."

But one among the four million is in mourning. "Frankly, I think it's not a day for celebrating but for wearing a black arm band," says Hall. "It's now never going to go under four million."

The script will have to be rewritten: "I'm going to have to get used to saying: 'The best thing about New Zealand is that it has just over four million people; the worst thing about New Zealand is that it has just over four million people'."

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