So I’m a Kiwi Chick, eh?

See how I spelled eh? That’s the correct spelling. Aye is what Scots and sailors say, or politicians opposing the nays. Please do not make this mistake again, because one day I might be forced to write a VERY angry letter to the NZ Herald about it.

Now we have that out of the way, let’s get on with my New Zealandness. Yes, I’m that bride on the Suffragette Steps in Auckland, as blogged about by Ashley E. Remer of the Girl Museum: Kiwi Chicks inspire New Zealand

Suffragette Steps, Khartoum Place, Auckland - 19th January 2008 (Photographer: Gerald Shacklock)

In my own small, academic way, I have become one of many symbols for Aotearoa/New Zealand girlhood. I volunteered, and so there are even more pictures of me, my sister, my mother, my aunt, and several other ancestral girls in the Kiwi Chicks exhibition.

As it happens, I’m not too happy about the exhibition being called Kiwi Chicks. Not my decision to make, but as I wrote to Ashley when I first got involved in her project: “As a young(ish) NZ woman, the whole Kiwi Chicks thing gets annoying. I know it works well with kiwis being birds, but hey, we’re girls, not birds. We always tend to default to easy vernacular as a nation, but the ready use of chick means NZ has become a society where to call yourself a woman is perceived as being a bit up yourself. Particularly for teenage girls.”

But I’m prepared to bet that people don’t really think of me when they think of a New Zealand girl. Certainly not when they think of a “Kiwi Chick.” Whatever that is, but surely she’s more sporty or something? Climbs mountains? Maybe she’s really into listening to dub music at back-garden BBQs? Hell, I don’t know.   

National identity is about personal association and can have very little to do with how long you or your family have lived in a place, but I’m unequivocally a Pakeha New Zealander. My settler-society lineage is almost embarrassingly impeccable. I may not be a Colenso, Kemp or Williams (now there’s a burdensome ancestry), but my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and several of my great-great-grandparents were all born in New Zealand. I have family ties from Kamo in Northland right down to Gore in Southland. I was born in Lower Hutt, have lived in Kawerau, began my primary education in Whakatane, even speaking Maori in the playground, and then moved to Howick, where my conversational Te Reo was unsurprisingly of little use.

But my money’s on most people reading me in my teenage incarnation as a Mt Eden EGGS girl (That’s Epsom Girls’ Grammar School for those uninitiated with Auckland Central school slang). As if that urbane existence is somehow a less authentic expression of New Zealand life. Yes, yes, I know it means I’m a JAFA with a soulless and wraith-like national identity.  

Aside from being a proud Aucklander, I hold no other passport and am eligible for no ancestral right of abode in any other country than New Zealand.

Yet, a lot of people just presume I hold British citizenship, unwittingly implying that a red-headed, freckly, pretty well-spoken, choir-singing, book-reading girl couldn’t possibly be from round these parts.

My opera-singer sister gets it even worse.

My private school educated lawyer brother seldom receives such challenges to his national identity. Because he’s a bloke, and plays cricket, and was once pretty good at rugby, so that’s alright then.

Dorothea Turner wrote in 1972 that “The sense of belonging to and of possessing their country, which New Zealanders have been very slow to attain, came first to the less educated. The more a family made books a part of life, the more its mind was divided between the local reality and the equally powerful reality of literature, particularly that of England.” She was reflecting on how the author Jane Mander famously despaired in the 1930s about the suburbanisation of New Zealand, and how art had been reduced to “cake-making” for women and “chest development” for men. When faced with being “pressed into the very domestic, homogenous mould of the frontier,” Turner argues that unconventional New Zealand women had little choice but to accept the “quasiexcommunication” of literature and radicalism.[i]

Most of us are not radicals, but we bookish girls have always been viewed by our neighbours with some suspicion; and my family certainly took to books. My paternal grandmother went to Auckland University in the early 1940s and got a BA in History and Geology; my maternal grandmother left school at 14 to work in a factory, but she was arguably better read than her PhD-attaining granddaughter.

New Zealanders are far more willing now than in 1938 and 1972 to accept the arts and literature as part of our national make-up, but there are still conditions to that acceptance. We celebrate no.8 wire ingenuity, but are uncertain about dedicated study and reflection. We see the physical, the outdoors, the vernacular as our defining identity, and the performing and academic life as something New Zealanders do when overseas. Provided of course we make the news and reflect well on the nation. For New Zealand women there is the added expectation that we will eventually return to have children, because New Zealand is “such a great place to raise a family.” To reject that model, to not have children or to raise them elsewhere, leaves you open to a LOT of questioning from friends, family, and complete strangers. There is the hint that your behaviour is traitorous, or worse, unwomanly.

We’re sometimes too vain to admit it, but there’s still this image of an ideal New Zealand girl barefoot on the beach in a perpetual summer, effortlessly whipping up a pavlova or plate of fairy cakes. Of course, she now calls them cupcakes and has to post an instagram picture of them to Facebook. You know it’s true!

There is no single expression of New Zealandness nor girlhood, and for one moment in my life, I was (and still am) that New Zealand girl who took the time on her wedding day to have a photo on the Suffragette Steps. To briefly acknowledged on a day full of various images and ideals that my life as a married woman would follow a legacy of educated, socially-minded, politically-conscious women. New Zealand women whose DNA makes up some of my own signed that petition for enfranchisement back in 1893, and in the process helped make my Aotearoa/New Zealand and allowed me to be the “Kiwi Chick” <cough> I am today. 

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[i] These quotes come from Dorothea Turner, Jane Mander (New York: Twayne, 1972) 93, 126; and Jane Mander, “New Zealand Novels: The Struggle Against Environment,” The Press 15 December 1934: 19 [NZMS 535 APL].