Adults in New Zealand in the 1980s didn't believe in Halloween. They seemed neither to understand nor to appreciate the cultural invasion their children welcomed with such open arms. They were in denial. But Sheryl and I had faced up to the truth; the United States was cool, New Zealand was embarrassing. What did we have going for us other than sheep and rugby? Peter Jackson had not yet put us on the map; we had not become Middle Earth in the movies, yet. We were still the end of the Earth - the arse end. When I looked on my brother Kane's blow-up globe, I saw we were right at the bottom of the world, next stop Antarctica. The Artic, of course, was at the top.
          "Why can't it be the other way round?" I asked my brother when I had first examined the globe. 
          "Don't be daft," Kane said. "If you did that then America would be in the bottom half of the world and that wouldn't make any sense."
          He didn't mention China or Russia or Canada or Europe or how they would feel about being relegated to the lower half of the atlas; only America, by which he meant North America, the United States.
          "Cops of the world," said Dad, sipping his local beer. 
           He had been listening from the next room. But he didn't know anything. 
           America seemed to have all the good stuff. Take, for instance, the national symbol - in both of our cases, coincidentally, a bird. The United States had the eagle, a fierce, defiant, beady-eyed bird soaring high through friendly skies. We had the kiwi, a flightless, nocturnal creature, cursed by an over-sized proboscis with which it snuffled around in the dirt, looking for grubs. Surely it didn't bode well. Other countries had national symbols with

 

                                                                                             

Halloween in the Antipodes

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