Dinner In L.A., Or Eastward Ho!

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 18

Dinner In L.A., Or Eastward Ho!

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NORMAN MAGHETH.]

“New Zealanders,*’ said Mrs T., “are more like us than any other people are.** If Mrs T. had been English or Australian, I would have shown no surprise, for I have often heard this from English or Australian people. But Mrs T. is American.

She had often dis* cussed this with her husband, a former officer in the U.S. Air Force, now a Los Angeles company exec* utive, she raid. “New Zealanders feel the same way as we do.” I imagine they have met a great number of foreigners, and they had evidently met many New Zealanders.

Many New Zealanders resent being likened to the English, others (particularly when travelling in England) object to being described as Australians, and many more perhaps, would not care to be identified with the Americans. In each case, though, it is.a safe maxim that if the native tells you you are like him, he intends it as a compliment—however you choose to regard it On this occasion it was easy to feel flattered by the observation. Sixty of us were being feted in one of Los Angeles’s better hotels, at a banquet staged by the Douglas Aircraft Corporation for

one of its smaller customers. Air New Zealand, Ltd, to nwrk the establishment of the airline’s route. “Banquet" is too often used to describe the pretensions of toe host rather than the standard and style of the function. It was no misnomer here. The Cadoro Room in the Beverly Hilton is of elegant proportions, splendid in gilt and white, kt by massive chandeliers. Twenty tables seated 200 guests, with a place-card for each guest. The meal was of four courses, the wines French, the service faultless.

Approaching this function with some trepidation, I felt my worst fears were confirmed when I found myself seated so near the orchestra that conversation was virtually impossible. Fortunately the orchestra disappeared quite early in the evening. By this time the atmosphere fairly crackled with entente cordiale. Then came toe gaffe of the evening. A New Zealand Cabinet Minister told his audience of the motto he had read that day on a nickel: “In God we trust.” He continued: “It might have

added. ‘AU others, cash down*." (Air New Zealand had to borrow 28 million dollars to finance its purchase of three jet aircraft from the Douglas Aircraft Corporation, our hosts). I wish now I had thought to remind Mrs T„ seated next to me, of her earlier remark: "New Zealanders are more like'us than any other people are,” I twitted Mrs T. at the absence of local wines from the wine list, and praised the Californian chablis I had had with lunch. “Americans are wine snobs,” she said, “anything with a French label must be better than the local wine.” This had a familiar ring. I asked her about Americans’ tastes in travel, about the foreign languages they learned, their interest in foreign cultures. Americans, she said, were more interested in Europe than in Asia; more Americans learned French than all the languages of Asia and the Pacific; more Americans visited the Mediterranean countries than those round the Pacific. The same can be said of New Zealanders, perhaps the best educated and most widely travelled of the world’s peoples. But it is education and travel with a bias—a European bias. A European bias was defensible in a British colony; but is it still appropriate? California, with a population of 10 million people, i$ the largest State of the Union. It is also the fastest-growing, with an increase of 2} million in the last decade. The population of the United States has been drifting south-west-ward—away from Europe and the Atlantic, towards Oceania and the Pacific. Mrs T. is .in a small minority today when she deprecates the orientation of her country towards Europe, but is she, perhaps, merely in advance of her time? Air New Zealand’s next major development will be the opening of a service to Hong Kong and the East in March. This route serves an area where New Zealand has, since the last European war, sent troops to Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam. In happier times, New Zealand traders expect our exports to such countries to increase more than to any other region. If Air New Zealand is seeking a new motif to dramatise these two routes, it might depict New Zealand as a tiki suspended on the bosom of the Pacific by thongs stretching to Los Angeles in the east and Hong Kong in the west The motif would symbolise our national destiny—a Pacific destiny.