Over the past few years, I’ve run into a number of ex-pat Kiwis from all walks of life, and have heard the same story many times over. In Berlin, they described themselves as ‘cultural outcasts’ and ‘sexual refugees’. In London, they spoke acrimoniously about New Zealand’s low wage economy, lack of opportunities for career growth and exorbitant levels of student loan debt. Here in Australia, they’re not always so articulate and forthright, but they’re often far more purposeful and permanent.

What’s more interesting is how few of these people have lost their accents and how fascinated they still are with what New Zealand is and what it means.

It seems that being a New Zealander is a malady, a kind of madness which many sufferers come to learn cannot be cured.

I’m always fascinated at the variety of fashions and forms that dislocated people choose to represent their cultural identity. It seems to stress a remarkable divergence in what we really mean when we refer to culture. Are we talking about the cluster of imaginative communication and symbols around which a unified social group coalesces? Or the fulfilment of nationalist ideals at the nexus of ethnicity and regional history?

It’s not easy to disentangle the various distinct strands of culture that intersect with our daily lives. New Zealanders bear the encumbrance of colonialism and the incongruity of being a remote island nation in the South Pacific maintaining a Western, Red-White-Blue, British, or Anglo-Scots identity, depending on who’s talking about it. All of these classifications seem accurate enough, but none can fully encompass the foundation of what New Zealand is and the buried question of Aotearoa, a potential Republic or an independent South Island state.

Most people don’t like confusion and complexity. They want to see patterns. One of the more common ways to dodge difficult, contradictory thoughts about nationalism is to use figurative description and personification. In this way, New Zealand and Australia become young countries: vibrant, youthful, teenage and immature.

Many Kiwis want to believe in a recent renaissance, moving beyond the stultifying colonial identity that emerged in the 20th century, and there is a certain degree of truth to this. The dirty little secret that is that the renaissance was in part funded and facilitated by the 5th Labour Government’s program of cultural nationalism in the early 2000s. Te Ara was a small part of this. More significantly for the artists, writers and musicians of my generation, was an attitude of respect and goodwill engendered towards cultural production across the state services at the time. See for example, the PACE program.

Another way of looking at this is that during the 1980s, an entire generation of children grew up being bombarded with contradictory messages about the economy and their national identity. Many of you will remember the ‘Buy NZ Made’ campaign and the floundering death throes of the New Zealand manufacturing industry which was eventually almost swept away by a tsunami of parallel imports and free trade agreements with China.

You might disagree with my perspective but you can’t say I’m ill-informed.

I was born in Australia and moved to New Zealand as a small child while Muldoon was still in power. That arbitrary birth certificate caused me to be bullied and beaten up at primary school because ‘I wasn’t a real New Zealander’. Being so desperate to prove their identity, those kids intuitively understood how fragile and unstable New Zealand really was.

The spiritual and cultural emptiness facilitated by the neoliberal reforms and globalisation has given rise to a property hungry middle class with no concept of turangawaewae, no interest in shaping and sustaining the long term future of the country or curating its heritage.

A burning desire to fill that void may have been part of the reason why the generation of kids growing up under Rogernomics — my generation — eventually lurched so suddenly towards cultural nationalism. I do not know for sure. This is mostly speculation.

As I remember it, the criticism of Te Ara coincided with the dissipation and eventual collapse of the burgeoning official sentiment that New Zealand arts and culture really mattered. That ‘hope for a generation’. The cultural hegemony of the 5th Labour Government began to falter as the streams of vociferous right wing bile directed at the evils of ‘Helengrad’ coalesced into a much louder and more unified public voice, helped along with attack strategies designed by Crosby|Textor. Don Brash’s round two at Orewa bellyflopped, but the damage was already done. Labour soon shifted into a wholly cynical and reactionary mode.