New Zealand Journal

After surprising little negotiation and certainly less forethought, I arrived in Auckland the evening of 2nd September, ostensibly to get a feel for the country that I had not visited for 20 years and then on rugby tours, where the most I saw (or at least remember) was being face down in the cold mud with gigantic kiwi forwards using me for traction. Otherwise everything else was through the bottom of a DB bottle. Life was far simpler then.

The fact was, the return Bledisloe Cup was on and as I had seen Australia play (badly) in Sydney, I was duty-bound to be at Eden Park with the poor faithful to see the Walabies get smacked!! As it turned out the game was closer than all had expected. It is well known how the Kiwis treat their rugby a religion - everybody here has had a divine experience of some kind, knowing or being related to an AB.

The crowd was truely stunned. Anything less that a blackwash is considered an insult to the people. That didn't stop the less secure blandly sticking in the knife and twisting with jibes about the cricket.

My initial impressions of the country were of the weather, which is really as the song says "four seasons in one day"; the similarity of Auckland to Sydney in layout; the openess of the people and the number of foreign (mainly Korean from what I could tell) students.

On arriving in New Plymouth - halfway along the Coastal Highway to Wellington, I could see the butt of Mount Taranaki. It would be another 10 days before I sighted the summit and most of those 10 days I saw no indication that a mountain existed. I could imagine the original Moari (Mow-A-ri) people also seeing nothing of the mountain until one day - there it was and the loacls going "where the hell did that come from!!".

It fits nicley with the legend of how it got there, which says that there were 3 mountains living together in central North Isalnd. Ruapehi was married to Tongariro and Taranaki was hanging around attempting to woo Ruapehi. When Tongariro caught Taranaki at it, local custom dictated he be banished from the tribe until he was summoned back after an appropriate time "paying" for his sins.

As a result, one night he moved to the New Plymouth area. To this day no Moaris live in the corridor back up to the other 2 mountains on the assumption that one day Taranaki will be called back to the tribe and create one hell of a mess on the way.

So now its been a week at the Pacific International Hotel Management School (PIHMS) and my orientation was fast and furious. As Vice Principal and Operational Head of the school its strange to see how others undertake the rigors of vocational education. For all of William Blue's slick look and feel, educationally, it does not have the academic underpinning nor the resources to match these larger reesidential schools. The down side is being stuck out in rural New Zealand, PIHMS lacks the contemporary content and location of the city schools in Sydney. All that said, both schools have positives.

I am expectant of much happening here, both personally and professionally. Its amusing that when events happen in your life, you rarely honestly say to yourself that this or that happening will be logged as experience, but much comes to mind when new situations present themselves and you draw on experience. How much do you draw on unconsciously I wonder? Certainly your culture, personal philosophy on the subject, upbringing and so on.

By having a new experience, it allows you to analyse past situations and shape current values or beliefs thus adding another facet to you collective experience. Having a new experience on an familiar issue also puts a different context on what you have done previously. It will at least allow you to critically reflect.

It is interesting to contrast the cultures of Australia and New Zealand. In NZ there are 2 "competing cultures, Maori and "Pukeha". As a result, people here are aware of the cultural differences and their own bias, ethnicity and even nationality. In Australia, at least up until recently, a singular culture did not allow post-colonial Australians to "compare & contrast". Even multiculturalism, encouraging a melting pot did not overtly make us reflect on the fundamentals of our race.

The Maori culture is a strong one and you can see why the British ahd the good sense to make peace. It is a highly patriarchal society and very forceful - there is no word for please in the Maori language but a dozen words for "I".