Introduction
I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but this isn’t going to make much sense unless you have read part 1. Go on… we’ll wait for you if you haven’t read it.
Okay, look, if you don’t want to read part 1, that’s cool — I do think you’re an idiot, but here is the TL;DR:
Aotearoa New Zealand is mostly unknown to people outside of Aotearoa New Zealand.
If you ask a random cotton farmer from Istaravshan in Tajikistan, “Where is Aotearoa New Zealand?” they’re probably going to look at you weird and say something like, “Şumo ʙo kadom zaʙon gap mezaned? Man namefahmam. Cī tavr ʙa xoçagii man daromaded. Lutfan raved, vagarna man şumoro ʙo kord mezanam.”
Heck, you could probably ask someone from Eketāhuna the same question and get exactly the same response, word for Tajik word.
Consequently, there is a lot of misinformation about Aotearoa New Zealand floating about on The Internet, WhatsApp groups, and chain letters. Much of it is to do with
- gardening being allowed (it is, in fact, highly illegal),
- we don’t shoot our politicians out of old-timey circus cannons (we want to), and
- Peter Jackson is a nice guy who is super chill and nice to work for (lol, I don’t want to get sued).
So I have taken it upon myself, as an amateur historian and semi-professional philatelist, to track down some of the most widely misunderstood things and put out 100% factually true information which has been deeply researched and is historically accurate and peer-reviewed by leading academics in the relevant fields.
Seriously, go read part 1. Still don’t want to? Fuck you, here’s part 2.
The Briscoes Lady
Get yourself a big-name-brands-at-discount-prices retailer who holds you like the Briscoes Lady holds this random bunch of cutlery.
Briscoes — a New Zealand discount big-box retailer — takes its name from the Jewish ritual performed eight days after a boy is born. Taking a small bit off every day essentials is their trade, and boy do they do it well.
While the company itself was forced to put down the literal scalpel after a series of medical malpractice lawsuits (who would’ve thought offering circumcisions next to air fryers was a dumb idea?), Tammy “The Briscoes Lady” Wells has been ruthlessly wielding a figurative one for more than three decades. Fronting their TV and radio ads to spruik their slashed prices since 1989, many of us millennial Kiwis feel she is our surrogate TV mum who would randomly shout incomprehensible gibberish at us at unexpectedly louder volumes than all the rest of the ads.
We still love you, Briscoes Lady.
Diagonal street crossing
One of the many ways New Zealand is better than other countries (eg. Australia) is that at major intersections in most cities you can cross the road diagonally.
This quirk came about because George Augustus Selwyn, the first and only Anglican Bishop of New Zealand. For some reason the Bishop could never cross the streets of Tāmaki Makaurau perpendicularly.
In 1845 the townsfolk of Auckland — so as to avoid Selwyn meeting God early and therefore angering Him with their carelessness with one of His favourites — unanimously voted to allow pedestrians to cross in any direction.1
Economists have calculated that since this rule was put in place, almost 200 years ago, there has been a net cumulative benefit to the New Zealand economy of about $47.78 (that’s 3.5 handfuls of wool at today’s prices).
Fur chickens
We need to talk about fur chickens.
If you can find it on a map, you’ll see Aotearoa New Zealand is an isolated collection of islands down in the far reaches of the South Pacific. For hundreds of thousands of years the only real land animals inhabiting these shores were birds.
Consequently, many birds like the Kiwi, Tīeke, Huia, and Kākāpō were not really ready for the onslaught of new species arriving, especially when Pākehā really started fucking things up.
One of the most noxious pests whitey brought over was the fur chicken.
These murderous, furry birds got to work quickly decimating‚ then decimating again, the endemic avian population: first knocking off the Moa and making countless other birds and reptiles extinct.
In the early twenty-teens, some guy (who accidentally got rich off his son’s work and took this to mean he could solve all of Aotearoa’s problems) proposed banning fur chickens. He even went so far as to surgically attach a fur chicken to his TOP lip as a stunt for his single issue political party.
Naysayers say the cuteness, comfort, and easy source of protein fur chickens bring to Kiwis (the people, not the birds) more than makes up for their murderous campaign of genocide, but this bird lover remains unconvinced.
Mad ice-cream-on-a-stick game
As far as the ice-cream-on-a-stick situation goes, Kiwis do it best.
Jelly Tip has a vanilla ice cream base with just the tip made up of frozen raspberry jelly. The whole thing is dipped in a thin layer of chocolate.
Choc Bar, the under‑appreciated (but some argue superior) cousin of the Jelly Tip, has a solid‑chocolate centre surrounded by vanilla ice cream and then dipped in a coconut flake‑infused layer of chocolate.
Trumpets2 are another popular choice when lining up at the chiller of your local dairy. Eating a Trumpet was what launched the career of New Zealand’s first supermodel, Rachel Hunter.
Despite consuming multiple Trumpets, Jelly Tips, Choc Bars, Memphis Meltdowns, Grapefruit Frujus, countless 2 litre tubs of Tip Top ice cream, this historian is still waiting for his first modelling contract.
How Aotearoa came to be
Aotearoa sorta means “Land of the Long White Cloud”. The satellite picture (either below or next to this text) doesn’t do it justice, as New Zealand is often blanketed in pillowy clouds.
According to Māori legend, the mighty Māui and his brothers fished up the North Island, giving its Te Reo Māori name Te Ika-a-Māui (The fish of Māui).
The South Island is the waka (canoe) Māui and his brothers sailed in. Its generally agreed upon name in Te Reo is Te Waipounamu, or waters of greenstone.
We have a lot to thank Māui for. He slowed down the sun so we have longer days, brought fire to NZ, made dogs, gave the Tīeke its saddleback, and many other cheeky and amazing feats which culminated in his death (which would never make it into a Disney movie) by being crushed by the Goddess of Night / Hine-nui-te-po’s vagina.
Four Square
On 4 July 1924, Charles “Cheeky” Forskwar, fed up with the high prices of his local dairy and the inconvenient distance to his local supermarket, decided he’d start selling shit out the front of his house, which had four square windows.
Between the date, his name and the happenstance of a plethora of panes, another supermarket-like place was born.
By the 1950s Cheeky Charlie had dominated the supermarket trade. Behind his ever present grin and always erect thumb 👍 was a ruthlessness hitherto unknown in Aotearoa’s already violent supermarket industry.
In a fit of vanity, Charlie pressured prominent New Zealand artist Dick Frizzel to paint his portrait on every single storefront of every single Four Square in all of New Zealand. This broke Frizzel who, soon after, retired from art, never to do anything of note ever again.
In May 1994 Charlie was wounded in a bloody shootout with goons from a rival supermarket chain3 as he exited a Queen Street brothel.
Rushed to Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, the prognosis was not good. Despite being intubated and zonked out on morphine, he managed to give one final thumbs up before slipping into a coma and dying peacefully later that day
Outro
If you still haven’t read part 1 but have made it this far, seriously, wtf are you doing? You’re missing out on all the subtle layers of in-jokes I have built into part 2 that will only make sense if you’ve read part 1. Go read it. Or don’t. I actually don’t care. Much.
We’ll be back for part 3 at some point in the future.
Until then…
Stay safe, stay sane,
<3
JJW
- Some so-called “historians” at Archives New Zealand reckon it was actually 1958 and it’s called the Barnes Dance crossing system. Look, we don’t want to start an academic pissing match, but they’re wrong. So wrong. ↩︎
- Another example of Australia’s insistence of naming things so it sounds like they have chicken in them when they (hopefully) don’t. See “Kiwifruit” section of part 1. Drumsticks. Pffft. Get out, Aussies. ↩︎
- To this day the only clue was a few whisps of wool left at the crime scene, take from this what you
woolwill. ↩︎
