Introduction
As a New Zealander living in Australia, I quite often get asked to explain Aotearoa’s cultural practices, history, and pub quiz trivia factoids to Aussies.
- Why do you have so many sheep? Colonialism and capitalism.
- Have you ever eaten a Kiwi? I’d lose my citizenship if I told you.
- How did New Zealand recover from the War of the Ring and are there still orcs? Yes.
- Why does everyone love rugby to an unsettling degree? Actually, I’m not sure about this one.
- Can you take Russell Crowe back? No.
- Why are you all so insecure and repressed yet surprisingly good lovers? 😉
The list of questions goes on and on and on. So rather than answering each question individually, I thought it would be best to start collating the more curious aspects of New Zealand and explaining them via this hip new thing at the time called “social media”. Dutifully, whenever I was required to return to New Zealand for legal reasons (which for unrelated legal reasons I cannot disclose) I ended up expanding this compendium of knowledge.
Many people (a number in the low to medium single digits) have asked me to publish these vignettes on an accessible platform, unshackled from the dying social media walled gardens, to make this knowledge accessible to all folks curious about Aotearoa New Zealand. So here we go.
Everything you read here is 100% factually true, deeply researched, historically accurate, and peer reviewed by leading academics in the relevant fields.
Wellington Airport’s giant eagles
In a bid to stay culturally relevant, Wellington Airport recently installed these taxidermied Haast’s Eagles as nod to New Zealand’s collective love for the 70s hit rock band the Eagles.
It’s rumoured Don Henley (that is actually him riding the eagle) once recorded a cover version of Hotel California with the Finn brothers which swapped out “California” for “Aotearoa”.
Rugby
In 2009, the John Key National government passed an amendment to the Broadcasting Act 1989 which mandated all televisions must display rugby for 2.5 hours a day at random times.
It was a popular piece of legislation which cemented Key’s reputation as the kind of Prime Minister you could neck a beer with.
Visitors to New Zealand are often confused as to why All Blacks test matches from the early 90s suddenly start playing at 2:47 AM in their motel rooms. This is just one of the “fun” quirks about visiting this country.
Countdown/Woolworths
You may not know this, but Woolworths was actually founded in New Zealand in the 1920s. It took its name from the New Zealand currency at the time: wool.
Yes, as in the stuff that grows out of sheep and no, you can stop with the sheep jokes please.
At the time, a packet of Pineapple Lumps was WORTH about two handfuls of WOOL. The rest is history.
New Zealand moved off the Wool Standard onto decimal currency in 2008. This caused an identity crisis for Woolworths, and marketing scholars suggest the subsequent rebrand to “Countdown” was actually a veiled threat hinting New Zealanders were just COUNTING DOWN the days till the Wool Standard would come back.
As Aotearoa moved through the heady days of the twenty-teens into the turbulent 2020s, calls to move back to Wool Standard came to the fore of the country’s political discourse, with proponents harking back to the halcyon days when three sheep’s worth of wool could buy a house and you’d still have enough spare yarn to afford a fancy meal out at McDonalds.
With Christopher Luxon, the current New Zealand Prime Minister and known Big Wool shill, in power Countdown has stopped counting down and is rebranding its stores back to Woolworths.
Lolly Cake
Lolly Cake is one of the highlights of New Zealand cuisine. No one is quite sure of its origins, but 107% of dieticians agree it is the leading causes of diabetes, obesity, and Morgellons Disease in New Zealand.
The name “Lolly Cake” is actually a misnomer, with New Zealand’s preeminent food scientist Dame Alison Holst and every Kiwi’s favourite recipe reference book the Edmonds Cook Book, both categorising Lolly Cake as a slice.
Like many things in Aotearoa, Lolly Cake has a racist past: until recently the lollies in Lolly Cake were problematically named Eskimos. In the early 2020s the New Zealand Lolly Cake Grand Council (NZLCGC), the peak governing body for Lolly Cake related matters in Aotearoa, used their purchasing power to muscle the manufacturer of Eskimos, Pascalls, to rename the lolly to “Explorers” in a bid to stop being cancelled by woke social justice warrior Zillennials.
Casual racism and taxonomical arguments aside, Lolly Cake is bloody delicious and you should wrap your mouth around one if/when you visit.
Dairys
Dairys — Australians incorrectly call them “Milk Bars”, what dumbasses — are a ubiquitous feature of corners in suburbs and small towns around New Zealand.
You can get pretty much any essential from a dairy: chips, hot pies, duct tape, zip ties, short lengths of rope and obviously a large selection of dairy products, including milk shakes.
The most popular milk shake containers in NZ are the LONGEST DRINK IN TOWN ones pictured here. They’re not a brand of milkshakes. They’re a brand of milkshake cup. No degree of quality of its contents is guaranteed when you get one.
Much like Lolly Cake, the brand’s provenance is lost to the annals of history.
It’s rumoured the giraffe on the cup is a cousin of Harold’s. Longest Drink and Life Education Trust did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kiwifruit
In the late 1890s and early 1900s New Zealand was in a slump.
Prime Minister Richard “King Dick”1 Seddon needed a project that would capture imaginations and nurture the burgeoning identity of this new nation. Seddon directly approached Ernest Rutherford to embark on a series of scientific experiments to create something New Zealanders could be proud of and potentially use as an export to supplement the wool-based economy.
Rutherford conducted a series of experiments where he took Kiwi birds and crossbred them with a little known fruit called the Chinese Gooseberry. Despite knowing fuck all about genetics this absolutely batshit insane scheme worked and the Kiwifruit was born (well technically laid).
Much like Chiko Rolls in Australia, kiwifruit contain no actual bird meat. While technically safe for vegetarians — the furry “fruits” are the eggs of these genetically modified Kiwi — vegans should avoid.
Rutherford went on to win a Nobel Prize for this work and his face now adorns the NZ $100 note. A statue of Seddon was erected in the forecourt of NZ’s Parliament and people still regularly lay offerings of kiwifruit at its feet.
Docos
New Zealand has a proud history of documentary film making that shines a spotlight on Aotearoa’s violent underbelly.
Boy, an investigation into gangland parenting, picks up from Once Were Warriors 20 years later.
The Lord of the Rings was a trilogy of films which showed the harsh impacts to the family and friends of a jewellery thief.
Mass murder, matricide, cetacean harassment, improper placement of pianos, and grand theft auto: kiwi doco makers have (rightly) gone to great lengths to dispel New Zealand’s friendly and safe image.
Outro
That’s probably enough for now, but this is an ongoing series and we’ll pick it up again soon.
Until then…
Stay safe, stay sane,
<3
JJW
- By name and by nature. ↩︎
