We're almost home. In this final chapter of his round-the-country exploration of the Kiwi psyche, Bruce Munro hunts New Kiwi, looks over the edge into the apocalyptic abyss, and considers two very different views of the Treaty of Waitangi.
I am travelling in unfamiliar territory, seen and unseen.
Firstly, this is not a road I have ever taken to Wellington.
It is early morning, yet again, on the back straight of a nine-day road trip, talking to Kiwis throughout the country about what it means to be a New Zealander.
The sun is crouching behind a long row of tall poplars, throwing columns of warm light across paddocks, fences and cows grazing fresh fodder in the Hawkes Bay countryside.
My teenage son Elliot and I are headed for Wellington, following the GPS satnav's self-assured directions.
But it has ordered us off SH2 on to a secondary road.
It feels disconcertingly as if we are travelling not quite parallel to, and several kilometres to the west of, where I imagine we should be, and veering steadily wider of the mark.
Figuratively, the landscape is also uncharted. T
here have been whispers here, and small comments there, about a new attitude, perhaps even a new Kiwi identity, emerging in some quarters.
So, we are scuttling from Napier to the nation's capital to see what we can find.
Elliot has headphones on and is watching the vineyards, farms and rolling hills slide by the side window, much as he has been doing on and off for the past week.
He turns, and sums up several thousand kilometres of sightseeing in a single sentence.
''New Zealand; it's all hills and grass,'' he declares.
I think I know what he means.
This is not a large country, but it has a lot of space and comparatively few people.
It means we are not continually besieged on all sides by the sight and sound of humanity. Nature has room to make her own voice heard.
It is not to be taken for granted. A couple of hours into our journey, it becomes apparent where we are. Camped on high hills in front of us are enormous wind turbines.
We will not be going through Masterton and over the Rimutakas to enter Wellington from its northern reaches.
Instead, we drive into the Manawatu Gorge, the eastern end of which is guarded by these silent, spinning sentinels, to emerge behind Palmerston North.
Before long, we rejoin the nation's main traffic artery south of Levin for the coastal procession to ... is it to our heart, or our head?
I imagine Auckland is our bloated belly. But what is Wellington?
NEW KIWI
I hope to speak to Mike Bennetts, who is chief executive of Z Energy, headquartered in the windy city.
The national service station and truck stop business was bought from Shell by New Zealand company Infratil and the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation. In 2011, it was rebranded Z Energy.
The head-to-toe revamp was informed by research that asked 17,000 New Zealanders questions on a plethora of topics including their lifestyles and values.
Changing the name was quite a gamble, given the global recognition of its former moniker.
I want to understand what Mr Bennetts knows about New Zealanders that convinces him it has been the right move.
The word on the street is he believes something new is afoot in our outlook and in our view of ourselves.
Unfortunately, he is out of town during the brief Wellington window my road-trip timetable affords.
But I am able to talk to him by phone.
The research findings were a surprise, Mr Bennett tells me.
They show traditional New Zealand self-perceptions: a small country a long way from anywhere, employing a No 8 wire mentality to make do and innovate; a comparatively unsophisticated people who do not tolerate tall poppies.
But a different mindset also makes itself known: a people who are proud of their place in the world, believe their culture is worldly-wise, innovate at the cutting edge, and celebrate others' successes (as long as achievers keep their feet on the ground).
Mr Bennetts calls this mindset New Kiwi.
''The surprise for us was not so much that New Kiwi was there - because the research company we worked with said it had been there in work they had done in recent years - but that it came through much more strongly in our research.''
Which suggests it is a growing part of our identity?Mr Bennetts believes so. And he hopes it will continue to gain strength. He views New Kiwi as a necessary cultural adaptation if we want to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
''There is a sense in which if we don't keep evolving, we will get eaten by the bigger animal,'' he says.
My mind instantly goes to a brief phone conversation with All Black media manager Joe Locke during preparations for this road trip.
I wanted to know why the All Blacks had become such a formidable force - particularly when they were under pressure - given that not many years ago they were as likely to falter as triumph when the heat went on.
I had made a connection between that transformation and wee snippets in the news about training they were receiving in mental toughness.
Could I talk to team members, perhaps even Richie McCaw, about this aspect of their game?Unlikely, Mr Locke responded. Certainly not in detail.
''That's the top 2% of their game. It's what separates them from their opponents,'' he said, succinctly confirming my theory.
Hearing Mr Bennetts, I am left wondering whether the All Blacks' new mental toughness and self-belief are reflections of New Kiwi or are leading the charge in that direction.
He believes this new national persona is growing more quickly in some corners than in others.
''There is nothing proven, but I suspect some demographic variety. I think if you took those families that have child poverty, they would be less attached to New Kiwi because they've got some other things on the go that are much more important.''
And it appears there is some regional variety, urban or perhaps Auckland New Kiwi versus provincial or south-of-the-Bombay-Hills Old Kiwi.
''It could create bigger divisions in society ... It doesn't have to go down that path, but there is a risk it could,'' he cautions.
The queue for vehicles sailing on the Interislander ferry corrals a fascinating cross-section of New Zealanders and foreign tourists. I close in on father and daughter Dean and Hannah Craighead, of Blenheim, to sample their views on how New Zealanders are changing.
Hannah, an engineering student at Victoria, University of Wellington, says schools seem to do more to encourage pupils to succeed. But our culture still has a case of tall poppy syndrome, she says.
''The message is achieve, but don't say you're achieving.''
Eleanor Catton would probably agree.
Is our education system the front line of a battle between Old and New Kiwi thinking?Hannah's father, who works in finance, believes the growing gap between rich and poor has been matched by a decline in the value people place on equality.
''It's a shame we've lost that,'' Mr Craighead says.
I wonder whether New Kiwi might be a bit of a cheerleader for the self-made man.
The ferry crossing to Picton is choppier than our north-bound journey.
But not nearly rough enough to prevent us, for a second time, taking full advantage of the complimentary food and beverages in the VIP lounge.
Full-time score: Munros, 4; Premium Plus Lounge, nil. This morning we were driving past Hawkes Bay vineyards.
Twelve hours later and on a different island, we are still driving past swathes of grapevines, albeit on hills that are browner and drier than their North Island cousins.
As recently as the 1960s, the official line was that the South Island was unsuitable for growing wine grapes. But many vineyards are now producing vintages finding favour the world round.
It is a far cry from the days when it was thought the grapes we could produce in New Zealand were only good for sherry and other fortified wines.
Is this another example of New Kiwi?
A bit further south, the mid-evening light transforms the Kaikoura coastline into a mystical land of milky blue ocean, rock statue shorelines and tussocked hillsides adorned with pom-pom cabbage trees.
Wave after wave of headlands recede into ever-deeper greys until the eyes are suddenly lifted above the shadow to a backdrop of jagged mountains topped with snow.
We are staying in Kaikoura for the night.
Town is buzzing with people heading to Christchurch for a big weekend of shows, sport and shopping.
As a whole, they seem quite pleased to be New Zealanders, enjoying this stunning tourist town and looking forward to revelling in more iconic Kiwi pursuits.
It reminds me of a comment Mr Bennetts made. Seventeen years living and working outside New Zealand had helped make him a New Kiwi, he said.
''I do think New Zealanders have a lot to be proud of, and there is a lot of good stuff that happens in this country. If I didn't believe that I wouldn't have come home.
''For instance, if I think about our relationship around the Treaty of Waitangi, and I think about how things work in New Zealand compared with what I experienced when I worked in South Africa; that's chalk and cheese.''
THE TREATY
An alarm pierces my sleep.
It takes a few moments to realise it is in fact not my alarm but the local fire brigade siren summoning volunteers to answer some emergency.
Forty minutes later we are on the road, driving south of Kaikoura, up into the hills.
The overnight gale-force winds are dying to strong gusts, but the effects are still evident on all sides.
Rounding a corner we suddenly encounter the volunteer fire crew, busy chainsawing felled poplar branches and dragging them off the highway.
We are on our way to Christchurch to interview two quite different people about the Treaty of Waitangi.
This year marks 175 years since the treaty between Maori chiefs and representatives of Queen Victoria was signed, first at Waitangi, in Northland, and then elsewhere around the country including Onuku marae, on Banks Peninsula.
There would scarcely be a person who would not agree the Treaty has a significant place in our nation.
But what is its significance?
What role is it playing in shaping who we are?
And what place should it have?
These are fraught questions. And well worth asking.
The debris-strewn road slows us down. By the time we reach the outskirts of Christchurch we are needing to make up time.
We employ a counterintuitive trick we have picked up during the past 5000km - at roundabouts, take the outside lane.
Drivers appear to think the inside lane is quicker, perhaps because it is a smaller circle.
For whatever reason, most flock to that lane on the approach to a roundabout, leaving the other lane free for us to sail past and shoot out the other side, several cars ahead of our previous position.
It probably reduces the travel time by only a few seconds.
But it certainly makes us feel better.
At swanky Cashmere the car begins the ascent of Dyers Pass. We, and what seems like half the population of Christchurch who have chosen this Saturday morning to don lycra and cycle helmets, are afforded some great views back down over the city and across the Canterbury Plains to the distant Southern Alps.
We repeatedly climb and descend, making our way along the southern edge of Lyttelton Harbour to Port Levy, a small, forgotten seaward inlet on the northern edge of Banks Peninsula.
Up a long tree-lined driveway off an unsealed road we stop in front of a three-storey colonial homestead.
We are greeted by a tail-wagging dog and then its owner, David Round.
Mr Round is a law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.
He specialises in land law, environmental law and law theory.
He is also a self-confessed ''controversialist'' and amateur theatre enthusiast.
We sit outside on chairs beneath the broad veranda roof and sip tea as we talk.
Opera music, wafting from a radio somewhere inside the house, completes the scene.
Mr Round apologises for the state of the garden.
It had to be allowed to become overgrown for a Hollywood movie filmed at the property.
Z for Zachariah, starring Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall St), Chris Pine (Star Trek) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Twelve Years a Slave) was released at the Sundance Film Festival last month.
In the movie, Mr Round's house is the home of the main character who is living there alone in a post-apocalyptic world.
With the years, Mr Round has become increasingly disillusioned with the Treaty of Waitangi and suspicious of the claims settlement process.
There were wrongs that needed righting, he says. But it is the way that the treaty settlements ''keep going on'' and the way the scope of the claims keeps broadening that concerns him and, he says, many others.
''There is a Maori identity being fostered - and identity is a good thing, it is good to know who you are ... But it is dangerous if you see yourself first and foremost not as a New Zealander, but as a member of some wronged minority.''
We've got to foster healing, he says.
''Healing was always the promise, after the ... treaty settlements. That would be the end of the matter and we would all move forwards as New Zealanders. But that hasn't happened.
''And the latest thing is the suggestion of sovereignty.''
He likens treaty aspirations to a ''heart-breakingly beautiful'' Viennese operetta he was listening to just this morning.
''It's Land of Smiles by Lehar ... a wonderful golden world ... a lost world that is half-fantasy, a nostalgic ideal.
''The Treaty is becoming a bit like that; just this siren music calling Maori back to some imagined happy past. They've somehow got the idea that if the Treaty was honoured all would be wonderful.''
The conversation then takes an unexpected turn.
What Mr Round understands to be a Maori yearning to return to small resilient land-based communities is ''very admirable'' and ''the sort of thing that might be forced on all of us in the near future'', he proffers.
His environmental and political reading leads him to the conclusion that globally ''everything is slowly sinking and sagging''.
''I don't wish to sound apocalyptic but ... [evidence suggests] in one way or another, and possibly in several ways, our doom is almost upon us.''
This could be good for race relations in New Zealand, he says.
''We'll all have to knuckle down. And if we don't knuckle down together, we're all doomed.''
Intermarriage is probably the best long-term solution, he suggests.
The road from Port Levy towards Akaroa is a narrow unsealed farm track winding sharply around steep pasture and bush-covered hills high above the many bays of this magnificent volcanic cone.
Elliot and I discuss how best to react if we meet another vehicle coming the other way.
A head-on would offer the safest outcome, we conclude.
Akaroa is an idyllic, if impracticably isolated, settlement on the edge of a picturesque harbour surrounded by high hills and impressive volcanic escarpments.
No wonder the French chose this spot for their only New Zealand colony.
And 5km beyond the township is Onuku marae, the first of three sites in the South Island where the treaty was signed.
BELONGING
Already there, is Dr Abby Suszko.
The young academic grew up in Dunedin and studied at the University of Otago, gaining a doctorate combining law and indigenous studies.
Her PhD examined conflicting Maori and Pakeha views of ownership of the New Zealand seabed and foreshore from cultural and legal perspectives, and sought to create a framework for a compromise solution to the divisive issue.
Dr Suszko has lectured in both disciplines.
Her research is focused on equality for Maori and other indigenous peoples.
She is now working at the University of Canterbury to help implement a plan to see all students become competently and confidently bi-cultural.
Dr Suszko has agreed to talk on the understanding she is speaking personally and not on behalf of the university.
She has two unexpected revelations.
Given her research and her roles, I assume she is at least part-Maori.
''No, I'm Ngati Pakeha,'' she replies, adding that her ethnic heritage includes Scottish, Irish, Ukrainian, French and Tongan elements.
I am surprised. So, what is a white girl from Wakari doing so deeply immersed in the Maori world and the Treaty of Waitangi?
''As part of being a New Zealander, I thought it was important to know my own history,'' she explains.
''One of the cool things is, the more I learnt about te ao Maori [the Maori world] ... the more it allowed me to look at my own culture and my own background.
''We have to move away from the idea that we are one people, to the idea that we are one nation with two founding cultures.''
Her examination of the Treaty opened her eyes to its central place in our national identity.
''It is the constitutional basis for the government we have in New Zealand today.
''I think it also underlies our cultural interactions. It is the basis for our race relations really. What I see is a covenant, a contract, but it is more than that, it is about relationships ... a living document that can ensure continued relationship-building.''
To Dr Suszko, the Treaty is the reason she can call herself a New Zealander.
''Lots of people think it is the Magna Carta for Maori, that it is about Maori rights. But to me, it is the first immigration document in New Zealand. It allowed Pakeha to come here.
''In signing up to the Treaty, we have recognition that the Queen's tribe, essentially, could come here to live ... So you have two peoples who are key in this, Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti.''
Tangata Tiriti, People of the Treaty, encompass Pakeha and Tauiwi, other people groups that have come to live here, she says.
''The coolest thing about being Pakeha is that there are Pakeha nowhere else in the world,'' she says with a broad grin.
And that is when it strikes me; here is the answer to the Pakeha feeling of unease. Almost a week previously, in Auckland, Dr Misha Kavka had linked that pervasive melancholy to European New Zealanders' anxiety that the Treaty, and its acknowledgement of prior inhabitants of these islands, meant they did not truly belong here.
Now Dr Suszko was suggesting that the Treaty, rightly understood, was the very reason Pakeha could call this home.
That rather than harbouring the suspicion that fully honouring the Treaty will see us expelled from this paradise, it can be embraced as the basis for an enduring and equal partnership.
COMING HOME
Elliot and I sit at a water-edge bar on a clear evening. We watch the day die in a Technicolor blaze that gives way to a deep darkness pricked by myriad shimmering stars.
The next morning we are on the homeward leg to Dunedin.
I am keen to complete the circle that began with a swab of cheek cells for an international genetic research project. I give Prof Lisa Matisoo-Smith, of the University of Otago, a phone call to see if she has uncovered the path my mitochondrial DNA took from Africa to Aotearoa. Unfortunately, the results are not expected for another fortnight.
It is disappointing. But as the road climbs and dips, transitioning from Canterbury's plains to Otago's familiar hills I reflect on a comment Prof Matisoo-Smith made.
Your DNA contributes to your identity, but it does not determine who you are, she said.
So, I ask, who does this make us? I think back on the past nine, hectic, exhilarating days during which we have travelled thousands of kilometres from the Deep South to the top of the North and back again, talking to dozens of fascinating academics and fantastic everyday New Zealanders about who we are and who we are becoming. It gives me cause for concern when I think about our need to impress; our unwillingness to think and talk deeply; and, our racial, social and economic divisions. I am, however, proud of our often imperfect but longstanding commitment to bi-culturalism and liberal democratic values. And I am encouraged by signs of a nascent new identity which confidently and resolutely pursues lofty dreams and goals.
Perhaps I cannot answer for all of us. But I can now answer more succinctly for myself. And maybe you can find your own answer in what resonates and where you disagree.
So, I ask again, who am I? There is no gene for antipodean Caucasian, temperate zone Polynesian or South Pacific Asian. But there is no denying I am one of the distinctly recognisable creations of these islands floating at the bottom of the world. I have been shaped by my interactions with these mountains, beaches, forests and rivers, and with the people who do the same.
By comparison with people fashioned by different circumstances, and in common with many other of my fellow countrymen, I am easy-going, honest, friendly, independent, entrepreneurial and adventurous. I like to see people get a fair go, and don't appreciate people getting too big for their boots. I know I have to do the hard yards to get my share of the prize. And I want to see this beautiful country well looked after for my children's children to enjoy.
As true as all that is, I am not merely the product of my environment. My identity is mine to choose and to fulfil. My ancestry may be mostly Scottish, but there are different names by which I proudly call myself. I want my eyes open wide to the real state of affairs. I want to go beyond the superficial; to tremble and stumble until I can freely say what has to be said. I commit to touching the stars without ceasing to champion the cause of those who need assistance. I see in Maori my partners in building this nation. I find in the Treaty my right to stand here and call this land my own.
I am Pakeha, I am a New Zealander. I am home.
Bruce Munro travelled courtesy of Jucy Rentals and the Interislander. His accommodation was hosted by Kaikoura Top 10 Holiday Park and Akaroa Top 10 Holiday Park.
