Kiwis Might Fly
1
Rocking the Cradle
“So,” Siân, my neurologist friend, asked brightly, “are you going to wear one of those motorcycle helmets that covers the back of your head up to your fourth cervical vertebra, so that if you crash you’re left quadriplegic, or are you going to get one of those higher-cut ones so that you’re killed outright instead?”
My stomach lurched. I was deeply afraid.
It had all started a few months earlier, when I’d read a survey that claimed the ordinary Kiwi bloke was about to turn up the toes of his gum boots. He was, apparently, hanging up his sheep shears and moving to the city. A new masculinity was rearing its pretty, hair-gelled head. Men were waxing their backs. In ten years, said the survey, the traditional, hirsute New Zealand man would be dead.
The early New Zealanders had been virile and vigorous. The Maori were fearless warriors. Then the Europeans had arrived after arduous journeys across thousands of miles of treacherous ocean. The life that awaited them was hard.
New Zealand men grew up to be strong. They slaughtered whales, panned for gold, and felled timber. They lear ...
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