Rows of leaders lined up like school prefects in suit, sherwani or brilliant African cotton with their hands clasped and their hair neatly combed. All the histories of invasion, massacre, displacement of peoples, plague, impoverishment and famine, if not exactly forgotten, had been laid aside. The red stain that had spread over the globe was displaced by a patchwork of independent states with their own anthems, all trumpet and drum roll, and their own flags — except for us and Australia, who insisted upon loyalty by flying a British naval ensign with a few southern stars, four for us, five for them, so you always have to count to be certain.
Where there had been divisiveness and war there was now civilised discourse. The leaders lined up around the solitary woman whose ancestress stands at the heart of cities across the world. Beneath the wings of a golden eagle in London, bird spattered in Kolkata, guarded by a lion in Ottawa, minus her nose and far too heavily draped for the climate in the middle of Georgetown, Guyana, and here, in this city until the quakes, on the plinth in Victoria Square, usually sporting a jaunty little seagull hat. Regina Imperatrix.
As a child of that realm, I learned a rosy history of that empire and my country’s role within it, for empires colonise not just landscapes but the minds and imaginations of their inhabitants.
That history began with Kupe and the pa we built from sticky papier mâché with a palisade of burnt matches. (All the fathers and some mothers smoked: rollies and ready-mades and pipes. There was no shortage of matches.) We looked at the picture of the great waka where people lifted their desperate arms towards the long white cloud, the first to find refuge in these islands.
Then Europeans sailed down here looking for a great continent that did not exist and banged into the west coast more or less by accident and some of them were eaten though they were Dutch so didn’t really count any more than the French or the Spanish except as a footnote. The main story was Captain Cook, who mapped the place properly, apart from Stewart Island which he drew as a peninsula and Banks Peninsula which he made into an island. And then the sealers came, and the whalers and some of them married Maori women, which was why we were so racially harmonious, unlike the Australians who were less enlightened. We had a treaty ensuring equality for all. A pallid reproduction of the signing hung on the classroom wall: the Englishmen looking uncomfortable in their scratchy collars and the Maori chiefs in cloaks bending to make the marks that would make this country one under the rule of the woman in the seagull hat. And soon after that the settlers came, those Noble Pioneers in sturdy boots and sunbonnets depicted on commemorative roadside sculptures up and down the country.
There followed a brief period of unpleasantness when it turned out that Maori were not that satisfied after all with their deal under the treaty and that went on for ages under various premiers whose names no one could remember until you got to Seddon. And that was when the country really came into its own as the world’s social laboratory, giving women the vote and ensuring we became the most decent little country on Earth. Other countries might have possessed great composers, or massive wealth, but New Zealand led the world in being fair.
Then there was a world war where we learned the hard way that it was not a good idea to leave decisions regarding defence and foreign affairs to England, for English generals with their posh accents sent New Zealand troops to certain death on the cliffs of Gallipoli, an act of negligence we remembered each year as we tied to the school gates wreaths of chrysanthemums the exact colour of dried blood, pinned to a circle of cardboard cut from the Kornies packet. We remembered them when we drove past some memorial at a country crossroads, the sun going down on the lists of names, where we checked for double-ups, men from the same family who had given their lives so that we might be free. We looked around at the pub with the faded DB sign, the boarded up butcher’s shop, the paddocks and macrocarpas and sheep nibbling all the way to the horizon. So this was freedom.
There was a Depression when men wore sugarbags instead of proper coats, but the Labour government sorted that out and there was the picture of Michael Joseph Savage carrying the dining table into the first state house in Miramar, and then the other war, the one in which my father had fought the Germans in Egypt for reasons that were never quite clear but was presumably because it was flat and there was all that desert for the tanks to run about. The Maori Battalion marched to victory, then a new queen was crowned and Ed Hillary climbed the world’s highest mountain to celebrate, and history began to race toward the present where we sat drinking our free milk, fortunate citizens of the most beautiful, the most decent, country on Earth.
I GREW UP IN THIS grassy realm in the immediate aftermath of a hideous global war. Its artefacts were all around: in the brass dagger from Egypt that hung on the living room wall with its beautifully engraved, vicious little blade, and in the songs we sang in the car as we drove to the view the Parade of Homes, where my mother looked out the window yearning for brick and tile, picture windows and a breakfast nook rather than verandah lace, double sash, coal stove and washhouse. ‘Happy is the day when a soldier gets his pay,’ we sang. ‘And we all go rolling home!’
I was the child of a benevolent state. The euphoric idealisation of the world’s social laboratory had soured by 1935, and economic disaster had led to poverty, rioting and an unemployment level officially registered as 15 per cent (though as Maori and women were unlisted, it’s safe to double that). But the country had switched political allegiance and a newly elected Labour government saw to it that my generation would be blessed with mouthfuls of free amalgam and free milk — a little warm, it had to be admitted, after its spell at the school gate, but free nevertheless. Our parents received an allowance for our welfare reckoned at 8.8 per cent of the average adult male wage, rather than the niggardly 2 shillings awarded by the previous administration — ‘Not enough,’ Peter Fraser had said, ‘to feed a well-developed fowl.’
Prices for domestic produce were fixed: an egg or an orange would cost the same, whether purchased in Auckland or Invercargill. We would receive free medical and hospital care and an education by teachers whose salaries were the same as those awarded Members of Parliament. We were educated, from the moment we encountered the dress-up box at kindergarten to the graduation in cap and gown, via a system that followed the great reformist principles laid down by Peter Fraser and the educator Clarence Beeby in 1939. A system that insisted that ‘All persons, whatever their ability, rich or poor, whether they live in town or country’ would receive the benefit of ‘a free education, of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers’.
Throughout my childhood, until 1967, there was full employment. In 1944, workers were guaranteed two weeks’ annual leave; in 1945, a minimum wage. The war had created factories manufacturing Bren guns, barbed wire, canned foods and radio transmitters for use in the Pacific, and these formed the basis of post-war industries.
Our country may have been small, with a timid anthem that pleaded for defence from the vaguely articulated terrors of dissension, envy and hate, but it was fair. It was leading the way, like the fox terrier cockily leading the army column. We lived on the edge of an empire whose centre was far away, but we had improved upon the dingy two-up two-down original.
THERE WAS ANOTHER EMPIRE TOO, its centres equally remote in Washington, New York and San Francisco. It demanded less overt obeisance. At a political level there were treaties and alliances, and there had been the shared experience of war in the Pacific when GIs foxtrotted round Wellington, but there were none of those rituals of empire. No royal visits, no anthems. Membership of the American empire seemed optional. It simply seduced with colour and sheer energy, so enchanting that you wanted to be part of it.
To begin with, there were comics, those hypnotically alluring narratives featuring creatures half-animal, half-human, a duck with fingers, a mouse in high heels. Later there was Jughead and Veronica and an exotic universe of dating and college and cars. There were movies with surfers and bikinis and beach par
ties and motorbikes and everyone looked cool and both empires broadcast their music at us in relentless contest for allegiance: would our hearts belong to The Beatles and The Stones, or The Beach Boys and The Dixie Cups?
In true colonial fashion, we formed our own synthesis. Our mouths were colonised, words sliding up and over: ‘the movies’ replaced ‘the pictures’, though ‘cars’ never became ‘automobiles’ or ‘footpaths’ ‘sidewalks’. We lived within the synthesis, in houses that owed their design to British and American architects, houses like those riverside bungalows with their leadlights and cooling airy ceiling vents. As the century wore on, we shifted our allegiance to California, to glass and light and open plan. We wore the synthesis in the most intimate fashion upon our bodies. On schooldays we slipped on England, wearing uniforms with ties and shirts, but at weekends we slipped with relief into America. We wore jeans and sneakers. By the 1960s the allure of the Queen and her golden coach had evaporated. She looked like our mothers with her perm, shaking hands with sick people, while across the Atlantic, America was in the ascendant, the dreary white-jowled presidents of the 1950s giving way to someone who looked like a film star. His hair was wavy, his jaw was lean and his wife was beautiful, with her bouffant flipped up under smart little pillbox hats.
And then appallingly, unbelievably, he was shot and she was trying and trying to climb over the seat to protect him and there was blood all over her pink suit and all was confusion, the car jerking forward, slowing. If you listened carefully you could hear the snap. So little to unleash such chaos, such sadness, the little boy raising his hand in salute, the mother in her black veil like stone, the very image of grief.
From then on, we were caught up in America, in its sheer extremity. We were caught by treaty in the same horrific war. Some of our young men volunteered to go and fight while the rest of us fought to stop them and Holyoake primped on the steps of Parliament in his pointed shoes and we chanted, ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’ And then there were the sleek dark flanks of the nuclear subs sliding into the harbours, tossing aside the fizzboats and kayaks that hoped to bar their way and the young man who clambered from the water somehow up onto the blunt nose of leviathan and danced there, like Zorba, arms outstretched, Stephen Sherry, our man before the tanks, our man placing the flower in the barrel of the gun. And every time the country split into the two halves that have always existed here, as if we lived either side of a massive divide: left/right, Labour/National, stay/go, pro/anti, yes/no. Stop/start.
It is not always easy living on the edges of empires, experiencing the tremors set off by distant detonations.
Boom/crash.
EMPIRES RISE. EMPIRES FALL.
That American empire now has its dystopian face. Wordsworth may have penetrated to the ‘life of things’ in the ruined masonry of a ransacked abbey. It’s harder to make out such wisdom in the abandoned concrete of the Rust Belt, the cities visited and videoed by young men delirious with delight in decay. Their voices are squeaky with excitement as they pan round Gary, Indiana, taking in the Palace Theatre that only a few seconds ago hosted women in furs, there to listen to Rachmaninov before driving home in a Chrysler the size of a billiard table to a house with a kitchen crammed with appliances. The America I’d marvelled at from here, at the periphery, that National Geographic, Hollywood centre of gleaming perfection.
Yet here it is, the Palace Theatre, crumbling as surely as Babylon or Petra, festooned with weed and cat reek and an avalanche of broken seating, though Donald Trump gave it a brief reprieve back in 2002, when he used the façade as a background for a Miss USA pageant, pasting plywood over broken windows and erecting a marquee over the pavement bearing the sign ‘Jackson Five Tonite!’ for a concert that never happened, not in that theatre, not in that town. Michael Jackson was born in Gary, maybe in a hospital like the one the young men are videoing, with its bare corridors awash from broken pipes. The voyeurs paddle about, opening cupboards and calling, ‘Hey! Look at this shit! Medicines and stuff! Looks like they left in a hurry!’ And in the school, lockers gape like dead mouths, though Frank Sinatra did in fact sing here, and not that long ago. In 1945. An eyeblink. To counter a boycott of white students opposing racial integration he sang about a town and its people and how they were, for him, the image of America.
The cameras zoom in on a new angle to America: on a flooded corridor, a stained sink, the special desolation of concrete. The city has tried to halt decline: in the 80s Gary tried a convention centre — the Genesis Centre — and a sports stadium for basketball, both of which proved to be unslakeable drains on funding for maintenance. Planners tried the waterfront development, picking up on that contemporary fixation with views of sea, lake or river. They have tried art, and a museum, seeking the Bilbao effect that brought an international superstar architect and a stunning building to reinvigorate a Spanish port town in its decline. They have tried abandoning the big civic project for cautious baby steps toward recovery, with civic clean-ups and modest programmes of repair to central city housing.
They patch and make do, they reuse what can be reused, like those post-Roman citizens carrying off the stones of a fallen villa to build a barn. Empires rise and fall and the speed of it is breathless. From shingle to concrete to shingle in a single lifetime.
And on the horizon, the new empire rises, the one centred in Beijing, with its multiplicity of manufacture, its industry and spectacle. The empire I am wearing as I drive along River Road, as I once wore Britain and America, next my skin: knickers, socks, bra, jeans, T-shirt, all flicked among billions from those busy machines.
Its new cities rise in an instant. Places like Kangabashi, $160 billion worth of brand-new civic entity, planned to house 300,000, but before it can be inhabited, it is already falling into ruin, cavernous, unoccupied home to a mere 30,000. Or Jing Jin, an eco-city of 104 square kilometres. Empty too. And those strange concrete imitations of Europe: Florentia in Tianjin, with its green canal and pastel concrete frontages, or Little Paris near Shanghai, which was planned to offer gated security to 100,000 beneath the shadow of a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, or the half-timbered village of Thames Town. All of them empty, echoing, crumbling, a single street sweeper desultorily pushing a broom across an empty set.
The cities swell like bubbles, built to sustain that greater bubble, GDP. And pop. Sixty-four million empty apartments, empty malls, the green canal.
I have lived my life under the hegemony of all these empires. And then there have been those other realms, the ones whose borders have been less clearly defined: the empires of business.
UNDERLYING ALL THAT HISTORY of waka, war memorials, free milk, foxtrots and jeans lay a solid bedrock of economic ownership, for like all the colonies whose newly independent representatives lined up for their photo with the Queen, this country was planned primarily to return a healthy profit to head office. It was a plantation, a monoculture like Malaya with its ranks of rubber trees or Ceylon with its tea plantations or Nigeria and Ghana where cacao from South America took root, finding its perfect mate in the sugar cane harvested across the Atlantic in other colonies in the Caribbean.
New Zealand, as W.B. Sutch so perfectly observed in 1972 in Take Over New Zealand, was a colony given over to grass. When I first read that, I was startled. I had lived all my life surrounded by paddocks of nibbled ryegrass and browntop and never thought of it as monoculture, but of course it was. The bush had been cleared to make way for those tiny green leaves just as forcibly as jungle had been forced to give ground to rubber trees or Camellia sinensis.
I was born in a country that depended upon those leaves of grass as the source for its economic well-being. We had a long history of manufacture, beginning with soap and woollen cloth in Nelson in the 1840s, steel in Taranaki in the 1850s. By the 1880s, New Zealand was exporting ploughs, refrigeration machinery and gold dredges in a curious BRIC-state reversal, to Brazil, Russia, India and China. But it was the land itself that was the bedrock: its min
es and forests and fisheries and those plantations of grass and the creatures that grazed upon them. In the 1960s, when I was growing up, mining, forestry and quarrying employed over a third of the labour force in companies owned by British, American and Australian interests. The freezing works, too, were owned overseas, along with the dairy processing factories and the ships that transported their products to markets abroad.
So this afternoon as I drive down River Road it is as the citizen of a country that is unlike other OECD countries in that the majority of its largest companies are foreign owned. One hundred and two of the Top 200 companies listed on the 2012 Deloitte/Management list are at least 50 per cent overseas owned. The financial institutions that underpin this entire landscape are not constitutionally eligible to feature in the Top 200, but they too — the ANZ, Westpac, ASB, BNZ — are Australian owned and, between them, have greater wealth than the top fifteen companies on the list combined.
When Sutch wrote his book, Japan seemed set to be the new global empire, and he noted a new phenomenon: the company that no longer professed any national allegiance whatever, insisting instead on a supra-national identity to which its employees owed a kind of salary-man allegiance. He quoted Max Gloor, then director of Nestlé Alimentaria: ‘We cannot be considered either as pure Swiss, or purely multinational — we are something in-between, a breed of our own … we have the particular Nestlé citizenship.’ And he quoted it with surprise.
It no longer seems surprising. The river has flowed on, Japan has sunk as China has surged to the surface as the global powerhouse, the new capital of empire, and the notion of company citizenship is unremarkable. I drive along the road as a citizen, to use Gloor’s terminology, of a mass of such empires. I am a citizen of Subaru at the edge of the empire of Fuji Heavy Industries. I am a citizen of BNZ which, since 1992, has been a self-governing province in the empire of National Australia Bank.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 24
