Forget rugby, yachting and Kiwi music classics, for David Cohen* the Cantabrians that retrieved the fallen and embraced the survivors of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake represent New Zealand culture, he writes for the RNZ series My NZ.
I think of it sometimes: how it all began. The heaving of the earth's crust fathered our island nation, and something of a similar nature - admittedly on a rather much smaller scale - created me when my parents first met in Christchurch.
My father and mother are from Britain and Ireland respectively, so I know how being a first-generation New Zealander has its particular ups and downs. But it also offers a useful perspective.
Almost exactly five years ago, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch again offered an important cultural lesson. That was the afternoon when the tectonic plates shifted once again, and everything went to hell.
I sat glued to my computer screen in Wellington following the disaster, but also something else - the faces of the business guys in ill-fitting suits, the lolling punks, the young mothers, Māori, Pākehā and the rest - all rolling up their collective sleeves and comforting the afflicted, retrieving the fallen and embracing the survivors.
As someone who has never seen a single rugby game in his life, who never gave a hoot about wins in the America's Cup regatta, and who suffers an acute cramp every time he hears one or other of the usual Kiwi classics playing on the radio, this for me was a cultural moment to cherish. These were my kind of people. This was my New Zealand.
The tremors continue in 2017. Not all of them, alas, have any traces of soothing cultural ointment.
Thanks to a psychotic housing market, the cherished idea that you could live anywhere in the country has been consigned to the wastepaper basket of history.
Street begging, until a decade ago a relatively rare sight, has become ubiquitous in many urban centres, turned the experience of walking down some streets into something akin to running a tragic gauntlet of outstretched hands.
The current government looks nonplussed. If the opposition wasn't so generally shambolic and hooked on identity politics, the current administration would probably be in line for the democratic boot this coming September.
David Cohen says the cherished idea that you could live anywhere in the country has been consigned to the wastepaper basket of history. Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
We'll survive. It is sometimes forgotten that, for all its cultural uncertainty and youthfulness, New Zealand is one of the world's oldest democracies. It's so democratic that we're often not aware of it. Not only was New Zealand the first country to give women the vote, it was among the first to grant men the vote. Our national conversation is generally civilised. The solidity of our political structures is diametrically the opposite of the shaky land.
A generation before my parents arrived in Christchurch, another European émigré, the philosopher Karl Popper, came to the same city and also marvelled at what he beheld.
Anyone who is prepared to compare seriously life in a country such as New Zealand with life in other societies, he later wrote, will be forced to agree that we have one of the "best and most equitable" societies that has ever existed in the whole course of human history.
"Not only are there very few people who acutely suffer from lack of food or lack of housing, but there are infinitely more opportunities for the young people to choose their own future. There is a wealth of possibilities for those who wish to learn, and for those who wish to enjoy themselves in various ways. But perhaps the most important thing is that we are prepared to listen to informed criticism and are certainly happy if reasonable suggestions are made for the betterment of our society. For our society is not only open to reform, but it is anxious to reform itself."
Eighty years on, despite its various challenges, occasional brutalities and ever-present natural threats, my New Zealand still looks pretty good.
*David Cohen is a Wellington-based journalist and author.
Each day this week a New Zealander has shared how they see Aotearoa in 2017 - what they prize about the country, what concerns them and what they hope the country’s future will hold. Read the series here.
