Tramp Royale (47 page)

Her attitude was not typically Maori but it was typically New Zealand. The New Zealanders know, beyond any argument, that they have the best thermal displays in the world. I certainly agree that the New Zealand displays are wonderful and beautiful. But let me quote the Encylopaedia Britannica, which states that the geysers of Yellowstone render those "-of New Zealand almost insignificant in comparison" (X, 319, 1954). This truth is self evident to anyone who has seen both-but few New Zealanders have; indeed, their government forbids them to travel to our country save under very special circumstances.

But neither Ticky nor I ever told any New Zealander that Yellowstone was better, and I gather from what I heard that other Americans had been equally forbearing. (Even when I incensed our guide I had not been claiming that Yellowstone was "better"; I had simply attempted to correct an explicit error-nor was I successful even in that.)

The party went on to the replica village where our guide lectured us and several other parties on the virtues and wisdom of the ancient Maori, directing most of her remarks at us. The Maori emigrated here from Tahiti about six centuries ago; every Maori of today traces his descent back to a particular canoe of that heroic migration. Maori social organization was based on blood relationships and each village was a super-family, communal inside the family village. Exogamy was not required but consanguinity closer than second cousins was "tapu" or taboo.

The lecture was very long, the day was hot, and we were packed into the stuffy, windowless "city hall" of the replica village. Besides, the talk was compounded of boasting and of many statements which were, at least, imaginative and idealized rearrangements of history and anthropology. Ticky became faint and I happily excused ourselves and led her away.

A lot of nonsense has been peddled both about the modern Maori and their ancestors. Most modern Maori are fine people indeed, handsome, good-natured, civilized, and acceptably well-educated; they are a real pleasure to know.

But the notion that their ancestors were nature's noblemen is preposterous; the Maori, before the English fought them and tamed them, were the mad dog of Polynesian peoples. They were not simply barbarous, they were bloodthirsty savages, perhaps the worst this wicked planet has seen. Physical courage and family loyalty were their only virtues. They exterminated the unwarlike aboriginal inhabitants of New Zealand, then turned their attention to eating each other, a practice to which they were addicted as the present-day New Zealander is addicted to his beer. Compared with them the lowly Australian aborigine was a civilized gentleman.

All of which has nothing to do with the Maori today; all of us have savage ancestors. It is New Zealand's boast that the present Maori are political and social equals. This boast has a large and admirable measure of truth; the status of the Maori in New Zealand is, in most respects, better than the status of colored people of all sorts in the United States. But it is not literally true. Maori will usually be found in menial jobs and there is much unspoken, "Gentlemen's Agreement"-type discrimination. Politically the Maori may not be a second-class citizen but he is certainly a special-class citizen, for he does not cast a white man's ballot. Instead he votes only for legislative representatives of his own race. He is allowed four out of eighty, or five per cent. But his birth rate is nearly twice as high as that of the whites and his present proportion in the population is nearer ten per cent than five. Exponential growth curves being what they are, one may wonder what the white man will do when these proportions are more nearly equal; will he ever permit the Maori to outvote him, or will he hold him to five per cent and a separate ballot?

In the matter of schools, most of them are mixed; others are "Jim Crow" schools for Maori children.

We attended a concert given at the City Hall of Rotorua under the direction of our guide at the Maori village. She had apparently forgotten her anger at me, or perhaps our meekness under her abuse had mollified her, for she greeted us as old friends and insisted on seating us down front. (Ticky had almost refused to attend; she wanted to claw the woman-with a cannibal feast for the victor, I gathered.) The concert consisted of Maori war dances, story dances, and songs, among them the famous "Now Is the Hour"-which is Maori. The war dances were characterized mainly by sticking tongues out as far as possible, said to be a gesture of defiance. Possibly through years of practice, a Maori can stick his tongue out much farther than a white man, sufficient to cover his chin. The arts and crafts displayed were of the usual barbaric level found all over the globe in all early cultures and almost monotonously alike wherever found-garish colors, overelaboration of detail, and highly traditional, unindividual design. It is considered the proper thing these days to gush over peasant and native art, admire the "marvellous" designs and the patient workmanship. I cannot go along with this fad; most primitive art is obviously poor art, of kindergarten quality, if judged on its own merits without sentimentality about its origin. As for the patient workmanship, to spend pains on such fiddlin' stuff indicates a person with lots of time on his hands and lacking knowledge of anything better. These are simply stages that all of our ancestors went through; we should respect them for what they are but not gush over them for what they are not.

Maori story dances are much like other Polynesian dancing such as hula, but made more interesting to me by the addition of the poi. Poi are light-weight balls on strings, which are swung like Indian clubs with remarkable dexterity. It is a form of precision juggling worked into the choreography and is most pleasing and quite difficult. There are "short poi" with six-inch strings and "long poi" with the strings about as long as the girls' arms, and they produce varied rhythms and incidental slapping sounds. It is an art most graceful, unique with the Maori, as traditional and stylized as classic ballet and (I suspect) almost as difficult.

During our stay at Rotorua we had signed up for one of the government tourist trips scheduled to leave at 2 p.m. from the bus station in town on Saturday afternoon. We showed up there, only to be told that the trip was canceled because nobody wanted to go that day. Nobody but us, that is. I am rather glad, now that it is over, that we were disappointed as it gave us a chance to enjoy a real New Zealand Saturday afternoon.

We asked the clerk at the bus station what else there might be to do in town that day? Nothing, so far as he knew. Now Rotorua is the center of their principal holiday area and it was the height of their tourist season, so I persisted: How about a cricket match? Where could we expect to find one? Ticky had never seen cricket and I thought it was time that she learned why cricket had never displaced baseball in spite of the obvious inanities of our own national sport.

No cricket match scheduled, sorry . . . nor any place he could suggest to look for a "sand lot" game. Well, how about a movie?

Ah yes, there was a cinema performance, starting in about fifteen minutes just down the street-but have you booked tickets?

It had not occurred to us. He shook his head dismally; nevertheless we tried the cinema. It was not a continuous showing, but one performance only, reserved seats only . . . and every seat sold. The one-performance-only rule was, like the sixty-minute meal hours, one of their multitudinous restrictions on working hours; we observe a forty-hour week just as closely as they do, but their approach to it is entirely different.

So we wandered the streets, trying to find something, anything, open. Rotorua is not a large place, but it is more than a wide place in the road; it has more citizens than has Annapolis, Maryland, a few dozen less than Princeton, New Jersey, and in addition has droves of vacationers staying in it. It is also the shopping center of a large farming community, and this was Saturday afternoon when any such farm community in America would be bursting at the seams.

You could have sprayed a machine gun down its main street and never hurt a soul. We were the only people in sight.

We strolled the silent business district, stopping occasionally to peer into locked shops. A drug store had a notice in the window stating that it was the authorized emergency chemist shop for that weekend, prescriptions filled on certified emergency from nine to ten in the morning and from six to seven in the evening. I wondered what would happen if a heart patient had to have digitalis in the middle of the day; would they let him die? A closed filling station had a similar notice, giving the address of another station at which petrol might be purchased in a certified emergency.

At last we found a small restaurant and soda fountain open, one which we had patronized the day we arrived, so we went in, even though we were not really hungry, and ordered milk shakes and sandwiches.

"Ah no," said the waitress.

"No? Well, what can you serve us?"

"Tea."

"Tea? What else?"

"Just tea."

We had tea. There was no lack of food in the place; it was in sight all around us, entertaining the flies. But tea was all that might be legally sold then.

East of the business district we found a large and beautiful park; here there were people, reveling in sports-croquet and bowls. We watched a doubles match at croquet, played for blood, the sort where you take vicious delight in knocking your opponent's ball into the next county. We were beginning to take real interest, when someone rang a dinner bell and all the players on all the courts stopped at once, racked their balls and mallets, and stopped for tea. They did not even leave the balls in position to resume play. It seemed to me a perfect example of the New Zealander's willingness to accept regimentation even in his pleasures. I began to understand why girls' marching teams were a major sport in New Zealand; close order drill suits their temperament and, besides, there isn't much else to do.

After the break for tea, disgusted with the croquet players, we watched bowls. Bowls is not bowling; it is a game played with lopsided spheroids about the size and shape of a loaf of pumpernickel and the principles are those of pitching pennies for a line. But it is a game requiring high skill to play well, as the unbalanced bowl will not go in a straight line. However, as a spectator sport, it cannot compare with chess. It is played mainly by elderly men and I think I could learn to enjoy it in my declining years.

Having exhausted the resources of this holiday resort and ourselves as well we went back and waited for the bus. There was just one, as the movie let out, and it would not hold all the crowd. I don't know whether it went back and picked up the few left behind or not. But our own experience earlier with an unannounced cancellation of a scheduled bus trip made it seem doubtful.

New Zealand is a good place to hunt and fish.

The trip from Rotorua back to Auckland was longish, five hours and a half. Ticky relieved the tedium by singing endless verses of, "In eleven more months and ten more days I'll be out of the calaboose," while I pretended not to know her. The bus stopped for tea at Hamilton; not wishing a mug of tea and ersatz, fly-tromped sandwiches, I inspected a magazine stand instead and bought one somewhat resembling our
Harper's
magazine to read on the bus.

The lead article was "The Great American Hoax," which undertook to prove that the American standard of living was much lower than that of New Zealand. The author had figures to "prove" that most of us live in abject poverty, unable to buy necessities, much less enjoy any comforts, such as autos, radios, decent clothes, etc.

But he did not mention that, per capita, we have more than twice as many automobiles as do New Zealanders, twice as many telephones, four times as many radios. But at the end of the article he advised us to use the legislative measures that had brought such great prosperity to New Zealand.

New Zealanders believe this sort of drivel. They know they have the world's highest standard of living; they have been told so repeatedly. Since they are not allowed to travel to the United States without very special permission (they can get a passport but they are not allowed to buy dollars to make the trip) and since our magazines and books are forbidden entrance to their country, they are not likely to change their opinions.

The embargos against American printed matter seem to me to be one of the most serious breaches between the United States and the Commonwealth nations. It is not a barrier to understanding as tight as the Iron Curtain but it is certainly no small fence. The excuse given, of conserving dollar exchange, is preposterous; the result has been to contribute, at least, to the potentially disastrous drawing apart between former allies which has been increasing since 1945. It is true that a trickle does get through. Some technical books printed in America are allowed under special import licenses-and I did find a dealer in Auckland who bootlegged American pocketbooks under the counter and another dealer who sold old, second-hand American magazines. But these driblets merely point up the tragic lack of communication.

The magazine of opinion and the opinions it inspired took me on into Auckland. It was raining when we arrived and we needed a taxi to take us to the Trans-Tasman Hotel. But the Union Bus Depot of New Zealand's largest city has no taxi stand, nor can one be called. So we carried our bags two blocks in the rain, stood in the rain for forty-five minutes, and arrived soaked. Why the taxi rank should be two squares from the station on a dark, unsheltered corner instead of at the curb in front of the rain shelter immediately outside the station I do not know; it seems simply to be part of the New Zealand genius for doing things the hard way. It will never matter to us again, but it surely inconveniences thousands of local people each year . . . to no purpose. Why do they put up with it? Yet I heard no lone complaint from those who got soaking wet with us.

The Trans-Tasman did turn out to be a better hotel than the Waverly, in that it was cleaner and our room was more cheerful. But it had the same boarding-house & reform-school rules, the same paucity of plumbing, the same lack of central heating; on the scale under which it had won New Zealand's highest official rating of "five stars plus" the Muehlbach in Kansas City would get about seventy-eight stars and a sunburst.