Recolonisation ended abruptly in the early 1970s when, as he put it, "mother went off to join a German-French commune". They say Belich live is a treat. In screen text, as in books, unrelenting, self-conscious cleverness gets in the way for me.
Then Judge Mick Brown on the national character. Anybody who has ever heard him live knows no medium does justice to his droll spontaneity.
So on to the heavy duty sessions. Expatriates who had been to the mountaintop came back to tell us its secret.
"Thanks to the knowledge wave,"said Ian Narev, of McKinsey and Co, New York, "the best ideas can have global impact. And as these good ideas become more widely accessible, 'okay' ideas are becoming an endangered species.
"A world in which knowledge can travel so freely will place a much higher premium on intellectual capital. And that can only come from the scarcest resource, talented human beings.
"The costs associated with losing talented individuals are rising significantly, and the benefits of having them around are rising just as fast. Here lie the threat and the opportunity."
There was page after page, paper after paper, of that sort of thing. What does it mean? I am sure there was a contradiction in there. Perhaps you had to hear it.
After one day I knew technology was not going to do it for me. Conferences create their own world, which not even "live" television can transmit.
Oddly, when you get there, you find yourself watching the speaker on a big screen anyway, but that doesn't matter. Shut in the room, all eyes on the subject, the mind changes down a gear. Thoughts grind - and so do my teeth at the patois of presentations.
But that wasn't the reason I was not anxious to go.
Once during the Economic Summit Conference in 1984 I think I caught a momentary glimpse of Sir Robert Muldoon. Through the hazy glass wall of a Beehive dining room he was watching the barbarians in the banquet hall. He did not want to be there but could not quite stay away.
The knowledge economy is one of those slippery slogans that can sound innocuous when it needs to be. Knowledge of something is necessary to every economic exchange. We are just talking about education, aren't we?
If you want to. But really the enthusiasts would prefer to talk about two applications of knowledge: digital data applications and genetics. Go to a conference on the subject and you are bound to hear of the urgent necessity for New Zealand (read taxpayers) to stake our future on information services and medical research.
Which might be a good idea. But read any overseas newspaper and you find exactly the same strategy. Every place plans to be Silicon Valley.
I slipped into the back of the Sheraton ballroom on Thursday just as the hundreds around the tables were hearing another impressive emissary from another corporatist state, Singapore, describe how it caught the wave.
New Zealanders, I think, know instinctively that national planning will not work for us. Maybe East Asians and some Europeans can sit down in ministries of economic development, discern the global ebbs and flows of profitable technology and all pull together.
Maybe even the Irish have done it, although every time I hear an Irish statistic I cannot help thinking of another: the Economist mentioned recently that 80 per cent of the budget of the European Union goes in transfers. Farm support takes 45 per cent and regional aid 35 per cent. Think about that - 80 per cent. The EU is one terrific welfare scheme.
By the time I got to the knowledge wave, I think the interest in foreign prescriptions had just about run its course. When good Governor Brash stood up, observed that Singapore did not accept the social liabilities that we do, and suggested how difficult it would be to double the national growth rate, realism returned.
Later, in a working group on economic strategy, the Government did not seriously figure. The talk was entirely of company growth strategies, risk tolerance, cultures of innovation, that kind of thing.
I don't know whether this country is well positioned to become a hotbed of biotechnology discoveries and data applications. We may be. We are a technically capable bunch and we already do good agricultural science. Just do not ask the Government to make the call.
There was plenty of hard-headed enthusiasm and resolve at the Sheraton this week, but you had to be there.
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