Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

A Kiwi birthday party

I accidentally discovered a couple of nights ago that cleaning one's teeth with Savlon is not the same as with Colgate. Some person named "It wasn't me!" had been to the first-aid cabinet for a Band Aid and some Savlon and then left the open tube next to the toothpaste.

I began brushing and immediately thought I must have forgotten to use toothpaste - and yet I could have sworn that I had. But then I realised that my mouth felt like I had shoved a spoonful of axle grease into it.

With substances like that you can't actually spit them out easily. Luckily there was some real toothpaste handy and I managed to scour out my gob with a couple of vigorous attempts.

Perhaps I wouldn't have made the mistake had my wife and I not been to a long-lunch birthday celebration at a neighbour's house. Our friend has cracked the half century and wanted to celebrate her entry to the world of geriatrics as monumental occasion.

We took a couple of platters of food as a contribution to the table, but our friend has more relatives than you can shake a stick at. Both she and her dear husband are in their second marriage and have seemingly kept in touch with every cousin - like dozens of them.

It could be something to do with them being New Zealand ex-pats. Tribal business you see. There was certainly a big flock of Kiwis there on Sunday afternoon, and most of them had brought plates of food too.

Kiwis like to drink, and there was plenty on offer. I opted for the Australian champagne, because I have discovered I can drink a lot of it without getting a headache. I think you can buy New Zealand champagne too, but it 's so awful they mix in a bit of metho and send most of it to the Cook Islands and Samoa.

At first I was a bit nervous about being amongst so many Kiwis. They are likely to break out into a haka at any moment, and when they shove a spear in your face you never know if they are joking or not. But usually a Maori needs to be present to trigger such a display, and as far as I could see there were none there on Sunday, just Pakehars.

There was a Canadian. An elderly woman in her late eighties. She recently married our friend's father and so was the new mother-in-law. The couple fell in love when they met on a train trip in Canada and decided to get hitched. So now there is a huge swag of extended Canadian relatives which have been added to the family list, but none of them made the trip on Sunday. The snow has already started falling there and they haven't finished gathering enough acorns for the coming winter.

New Zealand men have a wry sense of humour. Having a conversation with some can be like being confronted with a verbal haka. The more they like you the more they insult you. I can cope with this sort of thing okay and reciprocate sufficiently so that a lasting bond is formed for the duration of the party.

But our friend's father sometimes went where even I wouldn't dare. As one woman was leaving after saying her polite farewells he called after her in a loud voice, "Keep up the good work with the face cream!" Later, he also said something similarly endearing to a Kiwi man he didn't know and who was saying his similarly polite farewells. The insult took a while to register and when it did there was a distinct change of expression. "Did he just insult me?" he asked of no one in particular. I thought for a while I was going to see a couple of geriatrics having a right old punch up, but thankfully a retaliatory insult of sufficient strength in Auklandese was thought up which satisfied the honour of both men. I think it was some sort of a white Kiwi tribal thing going on between them.

The father and his new bride are heading back to the "Land of the Long White Cloud" on Friday. It's called that because there is so much hot air over there which eventually condenses above the mountains. New Zealanders can fly direct from Perth on Air New Zealand and be there in six hours if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Unfortunately it's not a daily service.

There were other interesting guests at the party. One couple were charismatic Christians who had embraced the Hillsong Church Inc. The man was a former Baptist minister who as a youth was raised on a solid diet of Billy Graham. They have just returned from the middle-east where they have been delivering their evangelical message to the Arabs and Jews. Now they are thinking of going to Malaysia to do the same sort of thing there, but were awaiting a sign from God first. A dollar sign maybe? In the past they had also given parts of Africa a scriptural work-over.

It was thirsty work absorbing all this, especially as they had hemmed me in against a wall. I had told them I thought the bloke running Hillsong Church Inc. was a drongo. I think they were hoping to convert me. I finally had to excuse myself by saying I needed to go and find some more booze.

I'm not adverse to a bit of mumbo jumbo now and then. The birthday present we selected for our friend was a book of love spells and amorous recipes - with a couple of sealed pages of special stuff - I know not what. We thought the tongue-in-cheek work would be handy for her to use to consolidate her relationship with her husband. They already have an excellent relationship so this would just be a bit of extra icing on the cake. I hope the additional attention doesn't give him a heart attack. Maybe an oxygen bottle might have been a good idea? There was also a scented candle they can use to save electricity on hot summer nights.

I think the champagne ran out about 4pm. At least the bottle I had secretly stashed alongside me did. I rounded off with an icy beer, which was very nice. New Zealanders never run out of icy beer. It's a law. Luckily my wife is more sensible with alcohol at such times and persuaded me it was time to go.

It was some while after this that I discovered I had put Savlon on my toothbrush, but it was nothing to do with the booze - of course it wasn't.

© MMV Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days.

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