Living
D R E A M D E S T I N AT I O N
Picnic Island TASMANIA
Aching to really get away, to amble around watching birds gliding on the breeze, admire penguins returning at sunset, and keep an eye open for dolphins frolicking in the sea? Welcome to Picnic Island, a wild and rugged patch of paradise located off Coles Bay, Tasmania. The accommodation comprises just four cabins, sleeping up to 10 people, which can be booked collectively for private use. Life on this island isn’t about massages and cocktails; instead, the real pleasure is to be found in soaking up the surrounds. Tatyana Leonov FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE
Choice country, bro! BY
Amelia Lester
AARON JONES; ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON LETCH
O
N A recent visit to New Zealand, the best thing I ate was Kapiti black doris plum and crème fraîche ice-cream. It shouldn’t have worked – plums are the ugly ducklings of the fruit world, and crème fraîche seemed far too wimpy – but it did, spectacularly. Which was also my conclusion about New Zealand. I was there to trail the newly appointed PM, Jacinda Ardern, who, according to the country’s devilishly difficult proportional representation rules, had formed an unlikely ruling coalition with NZ First, led by Winston Peters. Unlikely because Peters’ party is nominally nationalist and Ardern is the head of the Labour Party. But I guess, as with elsewhere in the world, left and right are increasingly irrelevant terms. A little more than 100 days in, they, and coalition backers the Greens, are getting along famously. I’d only been to New Zealand once previously, on a backpacking trip, years before film director Peter Jackson populated the landscape with long-lobed elves and hobbits. There’s only
I was struck by how New Zealand’s leaders are concerned with solving actual problems.
so much you can see from the window of a bus, and mostly I recall eating a lot of tinned spaghetti in youth hostels. This time around, in addition to eating better, I was struck by how the country’s leaders are concerned with solving actual problems. Things like climate change and economic inequality. Gay marriage became law a few years ago without a mail-in straw poll; the national conversation around race doesn’t seem hopelessly mired in the same way it does elsewhere. That’s not to say things are perfect. House prices have increased by 10 per cent in just the past year, and in a related phenomenon, homelessness is epidemic in Auckland. In early 2017 it was revealed that the then National government had some years earlier granted citizenship to Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and contender for Worst Man Alive, even though he had only spent 12 days in the country. He’s one of many tech magnates buying up South Island dairy farms on which to sit out the apocalypse. Those poor cows. But you’ve got to love a country where a schoolboy passing the 37-year-old Ardern on a suburban street shouts out that he’s
a “big fan”. And later, when Ardern addresses the crowd at a local university, a young woman stands up in the Q&A to say: “It’s just so cool you’re our prime minister!” I was envious that Ardern was able to pay tribute in her speech to not one but two women who have risen to high office before her. That precedent is surely one of the reasons why her campaign wasn’t greeted with anything like the sexist attacks we’ve seen on other would-be female leaders around the world. Ardern has said, on more than one occasion, that she wants New Zealanders to “feel differently” about their government when she’s done. I didn’t know what she meant at first, but observing first-hand the genuine enthusiasm and optimism she’s engendered, I started to get it. You can’t be what you can’t see. And regardless of ideology, a young woman getting on with the job of making things better for her community is in itself progress. Amid the darkness of current events worldwide, you might even call such a development delicious. Much like that plum and crème fraîche ice-cream cone, enjoyed on a breezy early summer’s day. n
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