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During his decade of living in Sydney, David Meech met a lot of Kaussies. That's Kiwi Aussies who, for all intents and purposes, are Australian, but who have a hidden New Zealand soul. Meech says Sydney is full of them. But they blend in so well, no one knows just how many there are.
"The Kaussie is born in New Zealand, has spent a long time in Australia, has a good career there, has taken up nationality, but often goes back to New Zealand for holidays and to see family. They are basically an Aussie until the All Blacks play the Wallabies. After the game they revert to Aussie."
Meech, who has returned home to Auckland for a better quality of family life, says resisting the conversion to Kaussie requires a thick skin and a sense of humour. The wearing down process - derisive joking - begins almost immediately. It didn't help that Meech, who arrived in 1988, lived in Bondi.
"It was a big joke at work - a Kiwi in Bondi. It didn't really matter what you did. If the All Blacks came over and won, everyone was cheesed off with you on Monday. If they lost, that was proof they were better than us and we were losers. If you get a job in Sydney, you're taking a job off an Australian. If you don't get a job, then you're a bludger. If you keep your own passport and stay too long, that's not any good because you should really be becoming an Aussie. If you change you're passport that's proof again that they're better than us."
In the beginning Meech didn't mind the overly competitive silliness and parochialism. He imagined, after the first couple of weeks, people would forget that he was a New Zealander and move on. But they didn't. Two years later, it was still going on and it stayed that way until he left. Yes, it was tedious, but to survive he learned to toughen up and play the game.
He kept a set of stock responses. Eg: "Why are you coming over here to work?" "Because the competition is better." Or: "Oh you Kiwis are 20 years behind the times". Reply: "Well thank Christ for that." He also had several convict jokes at the ready to counter the inevitable sheep jokes. "It was an official test. If you didn't come out of the test well, you were either viewed as a wuss or a future target."
Then there was the kiwi accent. Meech, who worked in the accountancy field, would be greeted with howls of laughter if used kiwi pronunciation for plant (plarnt) or route (root). Did he change how he spoke? "Absolutely - you had to. If you want to be a success in Australia, you have to adopt the Aussie accent - it's pathetic really."
The change in vowels - plant as in ant and route as in out - also highlighted a difference in cultural aspirations. "America is where Australians look to. They see themselves as the junior America whereas we see ourselves as colonial Britain."
Meech sees the competitive put-down humour as the way Australians, and particularly Syndeysiders, stay in control. As he points out, Sydney has one of the highest rates of immigration in the world. He recalls talking to Australians dismayed to find that the area they grew up in becoming overrun by immigrants. Little wonder, he says, that Sydneysiders are so prone to outward shows of patriotism.
But Meech has very fond memories of his time in Sydney - particularly the reliable weather. "My greatest memory of Sydney is working in the city. After work we would go back to the apartment in Bondi, then down to the beach for body surfing. Then a walk around the waterfront to the Bronte pool, have a swim and come back for a beautiful calamari dinner at an outdoor restaurant with a bottle of a really good Australian white. We'd get home at around 9.30pm and feel like we'd had a brilliant day."
Bondi in those days, says Meech, was a "crumbling slum". But, despite the cockroaches everywhere, it was a cheap place to live. He had travelled there with friends and his French Polynesian wife-to-be, attended the University of Technology, Sydney, part time for seven years and completed his Bachelor of Business in finance and accounting.
He reckons we can learn from the Australian way of providing government services attuned to the "Aussie battler" mentality. "The battler must be provided for, must have health care. In New Zealand we tend to desert the lower middle class."
For Meech, Sydney, with its work opportunities, "brilliant social life and great people" was the perfect place to be in his twenties. So what changed? "You get to your 30s and you're thinking about real estate decisions. Try buying a chunk of real estate in Sydney and very soon you understand that every dollar of extra salary that you earn there will be going into your mortgage."
He points out that those who owned houses in the Eastern suburbs where he was living were all asset millionaires. The reality of property ownership there for him was an apartment, possibly a duplex . "For a New Zealander that's hard to take." Coming back to New Zealand he was able to buy a piece of land on Auckland's North Shore, build his dream house - something he could never have afforded in Sydney. Meech now has three children and much prefers that they are growing up in Auckland. "To me they are living in children's paradise - in summer especially when they're running around in bare feet. I'm glad they live a simpler life here. That's not anti-Australian it's just 'thank god we are 25 years behind'." The other thing he loves about being back is the water. "You realise how soft and pure Auckland water is compared to Sydney water - that's actually a big difference in peoples lives."
While he enjoyed his time in Sydney Meech found it "massively exaggerated" how much better Australia was than New Zealand. So what were the bad parts? "When you go and line up for a bus and there is no line, there are just elbows in your face everywhere; when you feel like you're spending two hours of your day in a dirty railway station waiting for dirty trains; when you sit on a beautiful beach and there's hypodermic needles in the sand. The bad part is when you see young kids swearing and spitting in the street and abusing an old Jewish man. The bad part is when you look in an inner city school and there is no playground. You think, 'My god I'm so lucky I grew up in NZ'."
Meech is cynical of talk about the mass exodus to Australia. As a teenager in the Muldoon years he remembers the so called exodus at that time. "Labourites were saying this is proof things in the economy are not right and it's all not working. Muldoon came out with his famous quote: 'It improves the IQ of both countries'. I used that all the time when I was in Australia. Now we have the opposite - people who are sick of the Labour regime saying this is proof the country is falling apart."
Meech says shifting to Australian should be viewed like the OE to the UK. "Every year we ship off thousands of young people, many of whom are qualified, to the UK. We we see that as a positive thing - people expanding their experience of the world and good for them vocationally - they don't view that as escaping this terrible economy. People going to UK are not saying, 'I'm leaving New Zealand for the last time and I'm never coming back. They are saying, 'I'm going over there going to have a look and see how it all pans out'." Meech says for many, that's what the exodus to Australia is about. He recommends it.
