Julianne Schultz - Griffith REVIEW 43: Pacific Highways

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Contents

GriffithREVIEW 43 AUTUMN 2014

GriffithREVIEW is published four times a year by Griffith University in conjunction with Text Publishing. issn 1448-2924

Publisher Marilyn McMeniman AM

Editor Julianne Schultz AM

Co-editor Lloyd Jones

Deputy Editors Erica Sontheimer, Nicholas Bray

Production Manager Paul Thwaites

Publicist Susan Hornbeck

Publication & Cover Design WH Chong, Text Publishing

Text Publishing Michael Heyward, Kirsty Wilson, Shalini Kunahlan

Proofreading Alan Vaarwerk

Editorial Interns Coco McGrath, Madeleine Watts, Alana Brekelmans, Nicholas Ivanovic, Jessica ONeill, Sam Hooshmand, Kirra Smith

Administration Jane Hunterland

Typesetting Midland Typesetters

Printing Ligare Book Printers

Distribution Penguin Australia

Cover Image Bill Hammond, Watching for Buller, 1993, (Detail),Oil on canvas, 1000 x 1200mm. Courtesy of Collection of the James Wallace Arts Trust

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INTRODUCTION

Looking east

Changing the focal length

Julianne Schultz

FOR A NUMBER of years I travelled on a New Zealand passport. It wasnt so much that I identified with the land of my birth, but for pragmatic reasons: when I first needed a passport to travel fittingly to the Pacific I was a student, and a New Zealand passport cost less than half an Australian one, and lasted twice as long. Even if I hadnt been back since I left at age four, for a penurious twenty-year-old, this was as good a reason as any to identify internationally as a Kiwi.

In the 1970s the boundaries between being a Kiwi and being an Aussie were blurred, and had been for half a century. Citizenship seemed interchangeable, with accompanying rights and responsibilities. My Australian parents happened to be living in Hamilton when I was born, so I was entitled to both, before opting to be officially stamped Australian.

Long before the formal free trade agreements, which focused on goods, services, capital and quarantine, there was effectively a free movement of people that bound the countries together. It was an uneven trade that benefitted Australia, as more left New Zealand than arrived Australians flocked to even more distant shores.

The movement of people has continued, although the rules have changed official Australian Government web pages bristle with daunting category classifications but seem to have done little to stem the flow. More than 650,000 New Zealanders call Australia home, while 60,000 Australians have made a permanent journey east across the Tasman.

The dream of a united Australasia may have withered in the nineteenth century, but the sense of interchangeability lingers like cousins who keep in touch, but keep a distance bumptious and pushy city types on the western shores of the Tasman, versus the kids from the bush on the east.

NEW ZEALAND REMAINS Australians preferred holiday destination, and as they pour off the planes, will readily agree it is arguably, inch for inch, the most beautiful country in the world. Green, watery, hilly, lush the opposite to the ancient, flat, dry plains of Australia.

When they notice the country at all, Australians still tend to talk down to New Zealand, imagining we are in the big league; a continent, rather than a sparsely populated country on the edge of Asia. So while Australians were busy looking north and west, to the east something changed. New Zealand not only made a virtue of its environment, but became home to some of the best wines, movie directors, writers, footballers, sailors, scientists, educators and female leaders in the world.