Flag and map from Wikipedia.
New Zealand was my home after a 6-week sea voyage from the United Kingdom on the British ship named the Southern Cross when I was 6. We left New Zealand 33 months after arriving, on October 1st, 1960. My first trip by airplane: from Gisborne to Auckland. Where we boarded a boat to Australia, and were fared well by Maori singers and dancers.
New Zealand is a conquered country with a population of 4.4 million, and an awareness that the inhabitants coexist with the Maoris, who came from Polynesia, after migration from Australia. The Southern Cross is a constellation on the flag that can only be seen in the southern hemisphere.
For 3 years my family and I lived on the stop of a hill in house in the grounds of a self-sufficient hospital with fruit and vegetable gardens and its own power generation, on a town on the east coast of the north island of New Zealand, in Gisborne and went to Mangapapa School.
Mangapapa School was later destroyed in an earthquake, and rebuilt differently. Cook Hospital was torn down, perhaps it was also damaged in that earthquake, and luxury houses built on the grounds.
Dr Michael was the hospital pathologist; the only neuropathologist in the whole of New Zealand. Dr Patience took care of us, gave birth to the last of us, and had a break from paid medical work.
For me, New Zealand was tuis singing in trees, kumera and Chinese gooseberries for dinner, and pohutukawa bushes near the peach trees.
Paradise indeed, and inhabited by beautiful, exotic people known as Maoris who were allowed to go to school without shoes and sang hauntingly beautiful songs about the country we knew as the Land of the Long White Cloud.
Charles Heathfield Dodgson, my youngest brother (I had 4 brothers) was born in New Zealand. He has a tiki guard the house which he acquired in Sydney, the house that our parents bought when they moved to Australia.
