Grisley Isles
sargon press
Written 2 december 2005
By default I am one of those international travellers who return to my country for rest and recreation biennially. As my aeroplane descends into this south seas pearl, New Zealand, I am struck by a tortured patriotism. No other land, except maybe Japan, strikes my eye as so well tended and so hospitable. New Zealand from a smudge on the horizon is truly to the traveller a green land. The viking Eric the Red might have dreamt it.
But I am disquieted and uneasy. Like Charlie Brown with the ball, I hope and am in the end always disillusioned. Each time in my R and R I witness a general deterioration. The New Zealand people don't notice it, like you don't notice gathering heat until it burns you.
To
illustrate I will focus on one public institution and social issue: the
public library service in Auckland.
In my previous R & R I found out Central Auckland residents, not owning
or renting property, had to pay a forty dollar bond to receive lending
services. Now in this R & R I found out the capitalist boot has been
firmly lodged. Now there is not only a forty dollar bond but a thirty
dollar non-refundable charge for lending services. I wondered at first
if this might be easily circumvented. But no. A meticulous structure
is now in place to enforce it. I spoke to the library officer. Why the
charge?
The answer was – I do not pay rates.
Without a public whisper, the great radical principal that shaped the New Zealand I and my parents and grandparents grew up in has been squandered. It is even worse than the old English Tories. Not only do the poor no longer have the free right of the world's knowledge, they are required to pay for it for the rich.
That night, I sat in the YHA and watched the news. In its prime item, the All Blacks, a group of rough looking Polynesian men, performed their haka and at the climax gleefully rolled their fingers across their throats. This can be no more, no less than a gesture of murder to their foes. Then the television comperes, Maori and European, snorted at the wimpish English for asking it be banned. That's it. The land at the end of the world has turned its back on words and articulated thoughts, and returned to the grisly isles.
A discreet email to the Auckland Library Administration soon settled that class atrocity for me.
