The more she changes mate, the more she changes
by Jules Older, Destinations

The more she changes mate, the more she changes says Jules Older.

Here’s the deal. Except for a few weeks in 1991, I hadn’t been to New Zealand since 1986. Now I was on a cross-country tour, starting in Queenstown and criss-crossing northward until I hit Auckland.

What I wanted to know was how much hadThe Olde Country changed? And how deep did the changes go? Changing the name of a fish and chip shop is surface, but changing it to a tandoori restaurant is deep. Here are four ways that New Zealand has changed, deeply.

In Queenstown I find not one but two shops devoted to the work of indigenous artisans, including Maori carvers. Back in the earlier days, I didn’t see a single Maori face in Queenstown.

“And I’m still the only one you’ll see in a shop here,”says Ngati Karaka, one of the staff at Ora, an indigenous art and artifact shop on Rees Street.“But Maori have made great gains since you were here. We’re into many more things now.We’re kind of everywhere.”

Since I’d written a book in 1978, The Pakeha Papers, about the absence of Maori in the professions, my heart was gladdened by the change. Here are other ways this change manifests itself.

At The Big Picture, co-owner Phil Parker shows a video to Otago wine-country travellers that includes a scene in which well-dressed friends sit down at a well-appointed table to share a bottle of New Zealand wine.The hostess is a young Maori woman wearing a Maori cloak and chanting a mihi, or welcome. The video’s soundtrack is also sung in Maori.

After the video, Phil asks for questions. Somewhat tentatively, I say, “I want to thank you for including Maori in your presentation.”He grins.“I am Maori. The girl in the film is my daughter.”

This change is no small matter. When I emigrated from NewYork to Dunedin in 1972, the literature the government sent me said that New Zealand appeared to be inhabited only by smiling blondes in tweeds. Maori were virtually invisible.

Today, government pamphlets speak of Maori history, cultural tours, and even provide a list of handy Maori phrases. In hotels, desk clerks wear carved bone pendants. On the Dart River Safari, Bridget, the cheeky young guide, pronounces Maori names with easy fluency. And if that wasn’t enough, the sign outside Queenstown’s Church of England now says,“Haere mai.” That means welcome, and it is welcome.

Change is evident everywhere. High-end lodges are no longer called Glen Something, instead they carry long, multi-syllabic Maori names such as Punatapu Lodge orWharekauhau Country Estate. At Logan Brown, a sophisticated restaurant in Wellington, the meal begins with a koha, the Maori word for gift.

The newfound appreciation of Maori culture has expanded the range of attractions for New Zealand visitors. Take, for example, Hawke’s Bay, where visitors to Te Mata Peak can experience a traditional welcome on a marae (a Maori gathering place) fromTony Mako, or hunt or fish with guides Danny and Kelvin Hemopo, including a bush meal prepared by chef Charles Royal.

In 1972, we spent the first night in our new home at the DB Mangere Hotel in Auckland. At dinner that night, the sommelier, who had the red jacket and formal demeanour, asked what we would like to drink with our meal. “A New Zealand wine.What do you recommend?”I said. I’ve dined out on his answer many times. He replied,“I don’t drink wine myself, but I’ve heard a lot of the fellas say that X is a good one.”

X wasn’t a good one. Nor were the sausages, and my friends still tease me that I actually asked for“a local sausage.”The vegetables were overcooked from a large can of Wattie’s peas and carrots. I heard later that the DB was“deconstructed”in 2005. Maybe it was the peas.

The next day, hoping for better, we wandered down Queen Street until we came to a Chinese restaurant. When they put white bread and butter on the table, I began to suspect that New Zealand restaurants were going to be a challenge.

The changes in New Zealand restaurant food are nothing short of startling. When I lived in Dunedin, home-cooked meals were brilliant, but restaurant meals were not.

If travellers on their way through Central Otago got hungry in Arrowtown, the most they could hope for was fish and chips. If they managed to find whitebait on the menu during the season, the“delicacy”would be so heavily battered there was no whitebait taste.

Today, Arrowtown has restaurants as good as any, anywhere. One of the best, and definitely not cheap, is Saffron, where whitebait comes sautéed, or fried in tempura, each enhancing the flavour of the delicate little fish. Nearby, the Sala Sala Restaurant serves sushi and tempura as good as any served in Tokyo.

At the northern end of the South Island, the Bay of Many Coves Resort looks like the kind of place I’d have warned visitors,“Stick with the basics; they’re going to butcher anything fancy or foreign.”But today, this remote spot on the Marlborough Sounds serves exotic and delicious dishes.

The food served at New Zealand’s many vineyards is astonishingly good. Take the lunch at Church Road Winery in suburban Napier. Their aged beef and outstanding merlot cabernet made my brain disbelieve my taste buds.

Visitors may believe that the tucker for the ordinary bloke is still the same. Only, it’s not. For proof, consider the meat pie. When I lived in Dunedin, pies were essentially fat, gristle, gravy and crust. But now, on Waiheke Island, I sample Jen’s Pies. One is a spicy chicken Thai pie, the other has veggies. Very tasty they were, too, and each cost less than three dollars.

“In my day the town closed up tight at five, Monday through Thursday,”says a lifetime resident of Marlborough, Brian“Herman” Schwass.“Then, on Friday night, the shops in Blenheim stayed open till nine, and the streets were filled with country folk chatting and catching up on the news.They had a meal and a beer, and then everything was shut down till Monday morning.”

And now?“Now, you can get a drink or a coffee or something to eat any day of the week, up to 11 o’clock.”

The difference between then and now is the grape. When Herman was a child, Blenheim was a farming town with sheep, cattle, some garlic, apples and cherries. Now, when you fly in, all you can see is wine grapes.

In the seventies, the white wines, otherwise known as“plonk”, were barely drinkable. The reds were literally undrinkable, and were so laden with tannin that many people developed instant headaches after a glass or two.

Now, great swaths of the country are wine regions. Marlborough, Hawke’s Bay, Central Otago, the Wairarapa and even parts of Taranaki and Northland have replaced their sheep fences with vine wires. The land of rugby, racing and beer has become a southern Sideways.

There is no doubt that switching to a wine culture has made New Zealand a more elegant and sophisticated place. All visitors need do is dine (“eat”sounds much too coarse for the experience) in the Swiss-New Zealand ambience of Herzog in Marlborough, or gape at the bold design of Peregrine cellars near Queenstown to know how broad and deep this change has been.

Of all the four changes, the change from tea culture to coffee culture is the one that most astonishes me.When I arrived, coffee was weak, insipid and nasty. It came in one variety, with an occasional variant in even weaker, nastier decaf.

My, how things have changed. In Blenheim, a country town near the top of the North Island, Cruzies, a strictly local coffee shop, neé tea shoppe, offers flat white, tall black, mocachinno, Viennese and more. In bigger centres, that list is merely the beginning; until I got to Wellington, I’d never heard the words“coffee”and“piccolo”used in the same sentence.

Visitors can read a lot into this simple beverage change. Is New Zealand shedding the English mantle, replacing it with an American or European identification? Is it a stronger link with Australia, which has undergone its own tea-to-coffee transformation?

Or maybe it’s just the call of the new. Whatever it is, New Zealand is suddenly awash in nice little cafés, often with outdoor tables adding vibrancy to the street scene. And man that coffee is good.