Robyn's Secret Passage

Because I’m currently being a starving artist, I’m considering going on the dole. I’ve heard that ever since Income Support Services and New Zealand Employment Service were combined into one and became WINZ, things have vastly improved.

I do hope so, especially after finding this unmailed letter in a box of my old stuff (the year is wrong – it should have been 1993, but you get the picture):

One of the choice things about New Zealand is the fact that for the last ten years the government has been giving money to bands to make music videos.

Pre-1991, if a band wanted to make a music video it was up to them or their record company to fund it. As things were back then, most of the struggling bands were signed to small record labels without huge promotion budgets.

This resulted in the low budget music video standards: the live performance, the group of friends mucking around in someone’s backyard, and my personal favourite – jigging about in front of a blue screen. All shot on really cheap looking video.

The impressionable youth of the time looked at such music videos and thought to themselves, “man, New Zealand bands suck,” and went off to buy a Vanilla Ice tape, when they could have been buying Upper Hutt Posse. So someone, some good person, decided that one way to make New Zealand music more appealing would be to give struggling bands some cash to make better videos.

So every year NZ On Air gets truckloads of cash from the government. According to their website, in the 2001/2002 financial year, they had $79,000,000 to give to starving artists involved in the world of the broadcasting arts. Of that, $450,000 goes towards music video production. It’s split up into 90 grants of $5000 for bands that have choice tracks to offer the world of music.

Apart from the obvious criteria of having to be New Zealand music, the only other requirement is “airplay potential”. What this means is that it’s not just good songs from good bands that get funding. Popular, lowest-common-denominator type bands – ones who are little more than New Zealand version of American bands – get funding too.

The “airplay potential” criteria also means that the videos produced aren’t necessarily groundbreaking creative masterpieces. Girls in short skirts? Guys running around in funny costumes? It’s all there.

And just because a band gets five grand to make a video doesn’t mean they’re going to make a good video. Sure some bands have are fortunate enough to have a record company who will throw in some extra cash and get something good made, but I don’t think lack of cash is too much of an excuse. Back when I was at tech pretending to be a film student, there were people making no-budget music videos for their mates that looked really good.

But despite the occasional crap video for a crap song from a crap band that gets NZ on Air funding, for the most part the videos are OK. It’s caused the death of jigging about in front of a blue screen, and created good videos that aren’t embarrassing to watch.

The New Zealand government gives bands money to make music videos – that’s so cool.

I was sitting in a cafe in Hamilton. While I was waiting for my order I glanced over at the fridge chilling the cafe’s selection of alcoholic beverages. On the couple of shelves of beer I spotted Waikato, Steinlager, Lion Red, Heineken, DB Export and Lion Ice. Then I realised that I didn’t even have my glasses on to read the names – I had identified those beers by the design of their labels.

Logo politics aside, this made me feel happy. Not in a pisshead kind of way, but after spending three months in Australia, it was nice to be on familiar terms with beer.

Over in Melbourne I’d find myself in really horrible situations involving the ordering of beer.

Person: Do you want a beer?
Me: Ok, that’d be good.
Person: What do you want?
Me: Um… I don’t know. What have they got?
Person: [Rattles off a list of beer names that mean very little to me]
Me: Um… what are you having?
Person: I’m going to be having a Red Bull and vodka.
Me: Ok. Um. Maybe I’ll have one of those too.

As well as not being familiar with the flavour of all these new beers, I also didn’t know about the other stuff that goes along with beer. For example, I know that a certain type of person drinks Waikato, and a different type of person drinks Export. But what type of person would I been seen as if I was drinking VB? Would I be celebrated or shunned if I was spotted with a Carlton cold in my hand?

Even if I’d selected a beer, there was still the matter of size. When I’d only been in Melbourne for a couple of weeks, I was walking past a pub that had a sign advertising, “Pie, Chips, Pot. $10.” I did a double-take – what sort of liberal drug laws did Victoria have? It turned out that a pot is a standard size of glass that beer is available in.

If this wasn’t traumatic enough, names for sizes of beer differed from state-to-state. In New South Wales I had to contend with the schooner, the middy and the pony. I was discussing this with some people from South Australia (another state, another set of sizes) and I mentioned that in New Zealand a handle of beer can be ordered. They all laughed like this was the most absurd thing they had ever heard. Well, ok, but I’d feel like a bit of a girly wuss ordering a my-little-pony of beer.

All the different beer types were driving me crazy. I wanted to live in the simple world of the movie bar, where “a beer” could be ordered and the bar tender would pour a glass of beer without asking what type or size I wanted.

But I eventually managed to do it. In a pub in Newcastle I went up to the bar and said with much pride and excitement, “a schooner of VB, thanks mate.”

This was part of a float in the Melbourne Fringe Festival parade. I saw it and I ran after it with my camera because I thought it was so apt.

Yes, I went to Melbourne and I had many stupid adventures.

Sometimes my digital camera went along for the ride. Here are some of the adventures I had:

Stupid Adventures: Fringe Festival Parade

Viva Brunswick Street!

To mark the start of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, there was a parade held down Brunswick Street. Brunswick Street is approximately the coolest street in the entire universe. It is the home of PolyEster Books, which is the coolest bookshop in the entire universe.

Hey Slag

There was a cage with a couple of slappers in it fighting each other. I think there may have been some kind of Melbourne injoke happening that I missed. I love the “Hey Slag” stop sign. I want one for my lounge.

Naked Man

I looked up and there was a naked man walking a dog. He had “Is it art?” painted on his chest, and “No butts about it” on his back. Good on him. Everyone was staring at his donger. I would have taken a photo of it, but my camera was on playback mode, so I only got his arse.

Less than a week later I saw another manpenis. It the infamous “show us your bits” incident at the National Young Writers Festival. During a spoken word performance, the emcee got the audience to yell out “show us ya bits!” when each performer took to the mike. One dude got up there, unzipped his pants and showed everyone his bits.

The Parade

The parade was lots of fun. It was mostly people promoting various shows and performances that were part of the Fringe Festival. I think it was the most enjoyable parade I’ve been too. There were hotdogs too, which was choice.

Lovely Lady

There was a lovely lady in the parade. As she got down to where I was someone yelled out for her to sing a song, so she launched into “Fitzroy, Fitzroy” a celebration of the suburb we were in. My favourite line was, “I wanna wake up in the suburb that never wakes up!” Along came a guy walking on his hands. Very good.

St. K.F.C.

This was a float promoting a play that had something to do with the St Kilda Saints, the AFL team of St Kilda. I like the Saints, cos their initials are “St. K.F.C.” Like there’s a patron saint of fried chicken.

One cool thing about Australia, particularly Melbourne, is how footy isn’t just the domain of bogans. Really cool, arty people dig football too.

Stupid Adventures: Nine One One

Prayer Vigil

September 11 happened when I was in Melbourne. This sign was outside St Augustine’s Church, a Catholic Church on Bourke Street.

Church and Tower

This is St Augustine’s Church with the Rialto Tower, Melbourne’s tallest building, in the background. It’s like, really symbolic, or something.

Fire

I was waiting for the 96 tram on Spencer Street, just outside the Crown Casino. There’s a walkway that runs along the banks of the Yarra River, and the casino building is on the other side of that. Along the walkway are a number of small towers (about 5 metres tall, I think) and they have water running down the side of them.

Anyway, suddenly there was this loud “whoomp!” noise and a bright flash of light. I turned around and there were flames shooting from the top of these towers. Sometimes just one tower, sometime all of the towers.

The eerie thing was that from the distance I was standing, the towers had about the same proportions as the two World Trade Center towers. To see them with flames shooting out of the top felt really strange. Maybe normally it would have been quite exciting, it might have caused a few people to say “oooh!” but that night all the other people watching at the tram stop were strangely quiet.

US Consulate

I was on the 16 tram going down St Kilda Road. It’s a long tree-line boulevard, but also the location of large office buildings. I noticed one building had a whole lot of bunches of flowers and stuff outside it.

A couple of days later, on the same tram, I got off and took a closer look. It was the United States Consulate, and indeed the garden and front of the building were almost completely covered with bouquets of flowers, signs, cards and bad poetry.

Stupid Adventures: Smack

Needle Disposal

New Zealand doesn’t have a massive heroin problem. Apparently Christchurch is where all the smackheads are (!). But it’s there in Australia. Most public toilets in Mebourne had yellow biohazard needle disposal boxes. This one was at the Victorian Art Gallery.

There were other signs too. The beach at St Kilda was raked every day to remove any needles left there. A local burger restaurant had a sign on the toilet door saying that junkies needn’t bother asking for the toilet key.

Blue Lights

An alternative to the needle disposal boxes is to make it difficult for junkies to shoot up in toilets. This is done by having blue lighting, which I think is meant to make it hard to find veins.

This toilet, in an aracde on Lygon Street, had blue lights. However, there was a window on the far wall, meaning that the cubical nearest that got a lot of natural light. So I guess if you were wanting to shoot up there, there wouldn’t be much stopping you.

Skanc

Ah yeah, see you down at the Skanc for a pint, me old cobber. That’s the St Kilda Army and Navy Club. But oh my, what a wonderful acronym!

The George

This is The George and it’s on Fitzroy Street. It’s a really cool old hotel. All the paint is peeling off it, but it looks so much better like that than if it would if it was freshly painted. Next to it (obscured by the tree) is the George Cinema, for all your cinematic requirements.

Fitzroy Street

This is more of Fitzroy Street. That Burger King suddenly appeared overnight. There were no “coming soon!” signs. There were hordings up, then suddenly one day they came down and there it was. I think this may have been because there’s been a bit of opposition to the appearance of big burger restaurants in the area. Stealthy! But anyway, the building next to it is nice.

Stupid Adventures: Dominant Paradigm Subversion

Stop Mural Experiments

This piece of graffiti makes me happy. It is raging against all those community murals designed by committee that are so determined to include something for everyone, that they end up with nothing much for anyone.

As far as I can tell, the graffiti has been up there for a few years and no one’s made any attempt to paint over it.

Nike

Every Friday a group of protesters gather outside the big Nike store on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets and protest against child labour, capitalism and all the other stuff they read about in “No Logo”.

When the protests started they were intended as a blockade to stop people entering the store, but Nike got the police in, so every Friday a few police stand at the door while a bunch of hippies give out pamphlets.

Marvelously Authentic

I think it’s a traffic controller box. Someone has decided that they are ugly as they are and got a local artist to spruce it up. I was waiting for the 96 or the 16 tram on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets and I saw that someone had cleverly written “how marvellously inauthentic this mural is” on top of it. The great thing is that it blends in so well that looks like it’s actually part of the mural. It’s only when you look closely that you can see it’s written in correction fluid, not paint.

Olympic Training

This is on a wall outside Luna Park. It’s obviously been there for for at least a year, and yet no one has called in the local graffiti removal crew. I think it’s beautiful, both parodying those lose weight/make money signs that people put up around the place, and a call to arms for angry citizens sick of all the Olympics hype.

Stupid Adventures: Footscray

Footscray Station

Seen “Romper Stomper,” the 1992 movie about a bunch of skinheads, starring Russell Crowe? That was set in Footscray, so I wanted to go there and see if it was like it was in the movie.

Footscray was not all blue and gloomy. It was bright and sunny.

No Skinheads

I saw no skinheads in Footscray, but I saw many Vietnamese. It feels very exotic, like maybe I was in some country in South East Asia. Except for the Victorian state licence plates.

Footscray Markets

The Footscray Markets rule. There are plenty of markets around Melbourne that sell similar stuff to the Footscray markets. But unlike the Queen Victoria or Prahran markets, tourists don’t normally go to the Footscray Markets. They have their priorities right: meat on one side, everything else on the other.

Blossoms

This photo is a bit boring because it was getting late in the day and there was no direct sunshine. But yay, pretty pink blossoms in Footscray!

Mural

This is a version of the fairly standard community mural. It runs the gamut, from pre-European times, the arrival of the white man, early days and modern times. It looks fairly sturdy, so if some angry skinheads attacked it, it’d remain standing.

Stupid Adventures: Miscellaneous Melbourne

Commit No Nusance

This was a little street off Bourke Street. Someone had gone to the trouble to paint “COMMIT NO NUISANCE” on the wall. Would this work? If there were a bunch of drunken hooligans on their way to see a game down the road at Colonial Stadium, would they see that and say, “Oh hey guys, not here. Let’s take our bad behaviour around the corner.”

Anti-Cancer

The Anti-Cancer Council is a far more sensible name than the Cancer Society. Wow, maybe all the cancer societies around the world are really pro-cancer? Or maybe it’s a society for people who were born between June 22 and July 22.

Gog and Magog

These two fellows are Gog and Magog and they live at the end of the Royal Arcade which runs between Bourke and Little Collins Streets. When I visited Melbourne ten years ago (right when the Coode Island fires were happening) I took a photo of this and eventually I’ll remember where it is, scan it and stick it up here.

BHP

I think this is the BHP building. I took this picture from Spencer Street Station. I think it looks bleak. It inspires bad poetry.

Foxy Ladies

This was on the side of a pub in Spotswood. There was a movie called “Spotswood” which also featured Russell Crowe. Spotswood has this pub, a bunch of factories and Scienceworks, the science museum. It’s like, you get to Spotswood, then you leave.

Westgate Bridge

What’s big and grey and squashes lunch boxes? The Westgate Bridge. Ha ha! That’s hilarious because in 1970 when the Westgate Bridge was being built something went horribly wrong and part of it collapsed killing 35 construction workers and assumingly 35 lunchboxes too.

Do Not Spit

Spitting must have been enough of a problem at Flinders Street Station for someone to paint “DO NOT SPIT” on the wall. I don’t think the sign really works all that well, cos it looks like it’s been spat upon.

Graffiti

This is some graffiti just down the tracks from the Moorabbin train station, and just down the road from the Ikea store. I include to here to make things look gritty and urban.

Moorabbin Station

More urban grit. This time in the form of my leg, the train station shelter, someone’s almost-empty bottle of Ribena and “WET PAINT” chalked on the ground.

Choose

“Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.”
- “Trainspotting” script, Irvine Welsh and John Hodge, 1996

“Choose Cadbury”
- Cadbury advertisements, 2001

Lygon Street

Lygon Street: it’s full of good things, such as Italian Restaurants, the Vic Roads office (where I got a Victorian drivers licence), and Cinema Nova. I saw a preview of “Lantana” screened there. Four of the actors came and talked before the film, which was rather special.

Stupid Adventures: Public Transport

Trains

Hey, let’s talk about Melbourne’s public tranport: it rocks! This is Spencer Street station (and a lovely lens flare). I caught a few trains from here, my word yes. When I was hooning out to the Ikea store, I got the Frankston train and got off at the Moorabbin station (which meant travelling to a zone 2 station on my zone 1 ticket). But a couple of times I got the Werribee train.

Futura Tram

There’s a new futura tram being introduced to Melbourne. It’s a low ridin’ one, which is good for old ladies. This is the 96 going up Bourke Street to East Brunswick. I never got to ride on one of the new trams, though.

Spencer Street Station

This is the view from a seat at Spencer Street station. I took this while I was waiting for the Werribee train. Note the use of yellow and green in the station sign. That is because those are the national colours of Australia. I guess it’s more interesting than black and white.

Waiting

Most the the time the trains ran with a Mussolini-like precision. But sometimes they didn’t. This was one of those times. It was Saturday, and all these people had been at the Royal Melbourne Show thing and the train they were waiting for at Flinders Street Station had been delayed. So they all hung out with their bags of goodies waiting for their train.

Tram Art

As part of the Fringe Festival, a number of trams had some sentences in orange letters written across them. This is one that was on Swanston Street, outside the Victorian Library. I can’t remember what it said, probably something very cool.

Trams

Here are a bunch of standard, run-of-the-mill trams at the St Kilda interchange. The grey one in front is the 96, which used to be my favourite tram until I discovered the 112. The far one is the 69, and the middle one might be the 16.

I was talking to a guy at the NYWF. He was orignally from Wellington, but was now in Melbourne at university. We were talking about how incredibly cool the trams are. I think it’s due being able to travel without buying a ticket (even though you’re supposed to), so heaps of crazy people get on board. It’s also due to the open layout of the trams. Because they go in both directions, the seats are in pairs facing each other. It’s almost like sitting at a booth in a diner. Trams are good on an almost spiritual level.

(That’s all.)

Despite the fact that the sign at the Qantas check-in counter at Melbourne Airport proclaimed that knives, scissors and sharp instruments could not be carried in cabin baggage, I passed through the metal detector and x-ray scanner with a Swiss Army Knife in my bag. As I walked towards the departure gate, I felt like a notorious criminal gangsta.

Just over two hours later I was in Newcastle and I was feeling pretty good.

“…so I was doing this stupid writing workshop in Germany and I was surrounded by all these teenage boys and I thought, ‘my boyfriend is not here. I can do what I like!”
“You bad girl!”
“Ha, and I can’t believe I’m spilling my guts to you guys. I mean, I just met you yesterday.”
“This is Newcastle. You can say anything.”

This is what I knew about Newcastle: Silverchair and BHP. Oh yeah, and it is the home of the National Young Writers Festival, which is part of the This Is Not Art festival and my reason for being in town.

The only evidence of Silverchair was a record shop that had the neon sign from the “Neon Ballroom” album cover on display in its front window. BHP had left town a couple of years ago and taken their factory with them. The Writer’s Festival was all that remained. Just as well.

“She was like a hurricane that came in and ripped up my wheat fields, and turned my barn upside down.”
“Hey, nice metaphor, man.”

To give you an idea of what the NYWF is like, compare this event description from the Melbourne Writers’ Festival:

“Harry Potter Celebrity Reading: Come and hear celebrities read from their favourite Harry Potter books.”

And this event from the NYWF:

“Our Writing and Our Mental Elf: Noises in our heads speak through the end of our pens.”

That is to say, the people at NYWF were not the kind of people who write stuff about the year they spent in Tuscany.

“Hey, I really liked what you were saying in that panel today.”
“Thanks, yeah, I thought it went really well.”
“Hey, have you got any pot?”
“Uh, no. But, um, if you get any, let me know.”

During the day I attended discussion panels, workshops, and I even made a zine in two hours. Most nights there was at least one spoken word performance event. Some people read bad poetry for way too long, others were superb.

“Hey, you know that hippy guy – the one with the pants?”
“Yeah.”
“Was he being ironic? Was he doing a parody?”
“Uh, no. I don’t think so.”
“Shit, ‘cos I was going to say that if it was, he was really good.”

At one point on Thursday night I found myself listening to a demented reverend (or was he?) singing a song about giving Jesus oral relief as he hung on the cross. I knew that someone, somewhere would find that highly offensive. But it was no one in that room, that night. I was too busy having a good time to be even remotely offended.

“Where’d those guys go?”
“Um, I think they’ve gone off to take some acid.”
“Oh, ok. Let’s go to the pub.”

Since I left my big, evil corporate job almost a year ago, I’ve been putting “writer” as my occupation whenever I’ve filled in various forms. Sometimes I never really felt like a proper writer (whatever that is), but after NYWF I feel like I’ve got a bit more direction. It’s at least heartening to know that there are others like me.

It’s not about money (one spoken word performer announced, to wild applause and cheering, that he’d been on the dole for six years), it’s not about doing stuff that looks good on my CV. For me it’s about doing something I really enjoy, and doing it well.

Life is good.

I was in Newcastle for the National Young Writers Festival, part of the This Is Not Art festival. Most of the time I spent doing festival-related things with all the very talented, very good-looking festival attendees.

But the festival did not exist in a vacuum. It was in Newcastle and Newcastle was undeniably part of the experience.

When I had a few spare hours I’d go walking around the streets, and this is some of what I saw.

The Beach

I took a walk down to the beach. It was an almost cloudless warm sunny day, with blue, blue sky. A bunch of teenaged surfer boys sat nearby. The smell of tomato sauce on a discarded burger wrapper, a faint aroma of the ocean. Sweat, bodies, swearing and bragging. Cheap men’s deodorant is sprayed on a cheap man. The best thing, this was September.

The City Streets

Hunter Street is what I think would be called the main drag. It’s a long street that goes into the heart of the city. It’s ideal to drive up and down on a Friday night. Newcastle has had some tough financial times and there are a notable number of “to lease” signs in empty shop windows.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A flier in the festival program pointed out that Newcastle isn’t a bad place to live if you’re a starving artist. Rent is cheap – both housing and work space. It’s possible to be on the dole and not have to spend all your money on food and rent. And the best thing is, Sydney is a mere two hour train ride away. Damn, if I could get the dole in Australia I’d consider moving there.

The Big Donger

There’s this lookout tower down by the foreshore which I believe is affectionately referred to as the Big Donger. I had a few hours to kill on my last day and was walking around so I took a walk up it. It reminded me of walking up the Amedee lighthouse in New Caledonia, but rather than a view at the top of a tropical island, instead I had a view of Newcastle’s industrial areas. It was also a little unnerving knowing I was standing inside a big donger.

Go The Knights

The This Is Not Art festival was not the only thing going on in town that weekend. In fact, most of Newcastle only care about one thing: the Newcastle Knights had made it to the NFL grand final, mate.

The city streets were adorned with the Knights’ colours of red and blue. Some businesses just put up a few balloons, others went as red and blue as they could.

I soon realised that Newcastle was the sort of place where a female, such as myself, would get yelled at by walking down King Street on the way back to the hotel. But as it got closer to match time on Sunday evening, the yells changed from, “show us ya tits!” to “go The Knights!”

I’ve lived in a city obsessed with footy before. I’ve been in Hamilton when Waikato won the Ranfurly Shield and one of those mooloo parade things was held, I’ve seen the streets of Hamilton adorned with red, gold and black, but I’ve never seen anything as major as what was going down in Newcastle.

Imagine a small town, that maybe has a bit of an inferiority complex. It’s managed to get to the grand finals and is up against a team from big city that it’s often in the shadow of. Now, multiple that by 100, add some beer, and that’s kind of what it was like in Newcastle. The Knights had won once before in 1997, and the city of Newcastle was expecting them to win again.

Sunday evening was madness. Me and my rad new festival friends were in search of a pub. The local was closed. We eventually found another that was open. There were a few TV sets scattered around the bar and most of the locals were gathered around those and they were getting pretty excited.

We left and went back to the bar at one of the festival venues. We were sitting around talking and I suddenly became aware of the noise of car horns going off. Someone asked, “did Newcastle win?” Oh yes, they won.

Walking down Hunter Street, we were surrounded by drunk revellers clad in blue and red. “GO THE KNIGHTS!” they yelled. “NEWCASTLE!” Cars drove up and down Hunter Street adorned with ribbons, balloons, flags. One even had red and blue headlights.

One of my posse was a little bit annoyed that the Novocastrians were overshadowing the festival. I got a little cynical and yelled out, “go ambivalence!” But ultimately it was pretty fun being surrounded by all the intense revelry.

Getting a taxi back to my hotel, the driver told me that the Knights were a top team. You see, they had got to the grand finals twice and won twice. I didn’t ask about all the times they hadn’t even made it to the grand finals.

In an effort to get 500 North Islanders down to Invercargill to live and work, a supplement advertising the wonders of Southland was inserted into every North Island newspaper on October 31.

The Waikato Times got really excited and took up half the front page of that day’s edition with articles and analysis of the promotion.

Part of that included a list of five reasons to stay in Hamilton. It seemed like something hastily written (”Quick – what’s stuff that’s good about the Waikato and what sucks about Southland?”). So let’s take a closer look at those five reasons.

1. “Gore”

Gore is New Zealand’s country music capital. Every year it hosts New Zealand’s Country Music Festival. There is a giant statue of a trout in Gore. This is nature’s way of telling us to stay away.

2. “Winter fog. Mmmm.”

I think they are referring to the winter fog in Hamilton, because as far as I know Southland isn’t particularly foggy. Ok, it is pretty choice seeing the Waikato River enshrouded in fog on a winter’s morning, but have you ever driven in really thick fog? That sucks. Fog isn’t a reason to stay or go.

3. “Cellphone coverage, TV3, Mediterranean food and decent cappucino [sic]“

Hamilton and surrounding populated areas have good Vodafone and Telecom coverage, but there are sparsely populated rural areas that don’t. Invercargill and surrounding populated areas have good Vodafone and Telecom coverage, but there are sparsely populated rural areas that don’t.

As for including TV3 on that list, I phoned TV3/TV4 and spoke to a fellow in Engineering. He said that both TV3 and TV4 were available in Invercargill, with two transmission places. It might require an external aerial, but there shouldn’t be any reason why both signals couldn’t be picked up.

So it’s a bad thing that Southland has an apparent lack of restaurants serving “Mediterranean” style food? Look, it’s not like Hamilton has a large Italian or Greek community and an abundance of restaurants with Mediterranean cuisine. There’s a handful of places with risotto on the menu. There’s some really good places with non-Mediterranean food, and a whole bunch of mediocre places. Invercargill is probably the same, and if you really crave Mediterranean food, there’s always the supermarket.

Fact: there are cafes and places in Invercargill that have espresso machines and that make cappuccino. Whether or an Invercargill cappuccino is “decent” or not, is a matter of personal taste. Talk of “decent” coffee is usually the hallmark of an insecure hicktown trying to prove it’s got sophistication. And y’know, it doesn’t make Hammo look too sophisticated when the Waikato Times can’t even spell cappuccino properly.

4. “You might end up talking funny.”

But here the Times gets it dead on. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that people who speak with the “Southland R” sound like pirates. Most New Zealanders drop the r sound if it’s at the end of a word, Southlanders don’t. For example, I would pronounce the month of my birth as “Decembuh”. A Southlander would pronounce it “Decemburr” – just like a pirate! Har har!

5. “Freedom Air”

Air New Zealand’s budget airline offers cheap flights from Hamilton to Sydney, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Melbourne, which is very convenient. Such a service does not exist in Invercargill, but Freedom does have flights from Dunedin to Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, which is not so convenient.

There are some good reasons in both lists, but there are some dumb reasons too. The Waikato is, like Southland, an area that skilled young people often leave for more exciting places. So I can’t help getting the feeling that the “ha ha Southland” vibe of the Waikato Times is all too much the pot calling the kettle black.

Disclaimer: I ♥ the Waikato Times.