Diary

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

Daniel Hannan opens his diary

For a long time, New Zealand made the mistake of marketing itself as a safer, tamer, greener version of Australia. ‘For those who prefer Kiri to Kylie,’ said the slogans. ‘For those who prefer outdoors to Outback.’ ‘For those who prefer friends to Neighbours.’ The idea was that you’d be getting Oz-lite: a gnomic version, with punts and lawns instead of deserts and scorpions. But the appeal of New Zealand is in its vast, empty beauty. South Island, in particular, seems to bring a new ecosystem with every bend in the road. One moment you’re in the Italian lakes, the next in an English meadow, then in the Norwegian fjords, then a Jurassic jungle of primeval ferns. ‘Awesome,’ say young Kiwis, as a general-purpose term covering everything from ‘congratulations’ to ‘you’re welcome’. And that’s exactly what their country is: awesome.

If people are looking differently at New Zealand, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films must take much of the credit. This might seem paradoxical: why should such a raw and majestic landscape need amplification through a camera lens? The answer is that a skilled artist knows how to emphasise aspects of his subject, how to draw attention to them unobtrusively. Tolkien’s trilogy was infused with an almost unbearable sense of wistfulness. His characters pick their way across unpeopled lands, stumbling occasionally upon relics of earlier civilizations. To evoke with wide-angled shots what Tolkien did with gentle subtext — a wilderness brimming with melancholy — was an extraordinary achievement. Few of us truly look at Dorset through Thomas Hardy’s eyes, or Shropshire through A.E. Housman’s; but Peter Jackson has changed the way the world sees his country.

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