The other morning, I climbed a volcano. Just a little one, that rejoices in the comic-opera name of Rangitoto and sits on an island of its own near New Zealand’s Auckland harbor. As America’s Cup aficionados know, Auckland is a mariner’s dream of bays and sheltering peninsulas, littered with far-flung islands, and from the summit of Rangitoto the 360 degree panorama — all teal and green sea, flecked with sails and framed in the distance by graciously rounded stretches of land, wooded or urban — leaves the visitor amazed.
Like New Zealand itself, this mountain is young and manages to be simultaneously modest and exotic.
Geologists say that Rangitoto heaved up out of the water around 1300 and was active two centuries ago. Only Maoris witnessed that last eruption. A sketch by a European from the 1880s shows no vegetation, but now the slopes are covered with bush. From the rim, the crater below looks like an enormous bowl lined with treetops.
New Zealand’s only creatures were birds, insects, and lizards until the ninth century. Little is known of its first people, and hundreds more years passed before the “great migration” brought the Maoris — Polynesians, in ocean-going canoes — to the place they called Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. The Dutchman Abel Tasman sailed down the west coast in 1642 and gave the country the name we know it by (“old” Zeeland is a Dutch province). Captain Cook claimed it for England in 1769, but European settlement, mainly from the British Isles, was a 19th and 20th-century phenomenon. Today, a population of 3.5 million — predominantly Anglo, 13 percent Maori — is spread across an area the size of Colorado.
I have just made a sentimental journey to New Zealand. My family lived there in the late 1950s; we left when I was nearly 12. I can report that Huka Falls is, as remembered, turquoise. The luxuriance of the fuchsias and hydrangeas, introduced from Europe, matches the magic of the tree ferns and red pohutukawas. “Hokey pokey” is still the best ice cream in the world.
Some things have changed. The roads are excellent. An economy once dependent on the sale of wool to Britain now features growing and diversified trade oriented to Australia and Asia. There are wineries, and restaurants befitting a tourist destination. Friends who were children are middle-aged, attended by spouses and grown offspring, battered and buoyed by the decades.
The wrecked ship we used to climb on at Waitarere beach is two-thirds buried in the sand. But we found out her name and history: She was a steel- hulled sailing ship called the Hyderabad (pronounced “Hodge-a-bed” by the Kiwi assistant at the Maritime Museum), and her skipper ran her onto the beach in 1878 to escape a hurricane.
This time, I noticed New Zealand’s lively democracy. The first country to grant women the vote (in 1893), it also had an early welfare state — and a bold retreat from statism, with radical marketization starting in 1984. The day we arrived, a power outage began that left Auckland embarrassingly without electricity for weeks, and pundits argued over whether too much privatization or too little were to blame.
Prime Minister Jenny Shipley also made the front pages, with the “Code of Social and Family Responsibility” she mailed to every household. She wants to spark a national conversation about family breakdown, child neglect, and the dole. Columnists sparred: This was a pious waste of time, a sly prelude to further welfare cuts, or an honorable attempt to raise vital issues. When opposition leader Helen Clark pointed out that Shipley’s own “privileged” teenagers are safely stashed at boarding school, the PM told her to “stop being catty.”
At our old school in Lower Hutt, the principal (under the gender-neutral regime, no longer a “headmaster”) explained the new nationwide system of open enrollment and school-based management. An elected parent and community board, including the principal and a staff representative, drafts each school’s goals, manages its budget, and hires its employees, even the principal and teachers. Schools endowed with wise and energetic volunteers have come into their own.
Also unfamiliar is the heightened Maori-consciousness. On the door of a roadside Italian restaurant outside Wanganui, a sign says “Biculturalism Builds Bridges.” My newfound old friend Trisha, who works for a member of Parliament, ends her e-mails, “Must away. Kia ora.”
New Zealand is a middle-class country. Its houses typically nestle behind hedges or stucco walls, in gardens at once gaudy and trim. But Trisha and her family live outside Wellington on a cliff 600 feet above Pukerua Bay. Only half their view — a mere 180 degrees — is ocean. They look out over the Tasman Sea toward Australia (1,200 miles away), with off to the right the mysterious, beautiful profile of Kapiti Island.
Kapiti, like Rangitoto, is uninhabited, a wildlife refuge. The sea was too rough for a crossing the day we were to hike there. That excursion will have to wait. Must return.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
