Peter Calder: Meeting our ethnic neighbours

The Auckland International Cultural Festival brings together a fascinating mix of peoples. Photo / Jason Dorday

Festival celebrates Auckland’s rich cultural diversity — but when do we consider new arrivals to be Kiwis?

It bucketed down on Sunday morning, just as they were setting up for the Auckland International Cultural Festival at the sprawling War Memorial Park in Mt Roskill.

Who knows how many of the cultures represented on the day regard the rain as a good omen? The mayor, Len Brown, remarked during official proceedings that Maori see it as a blessing, although that was news to a couple of kaumatua I later checked with; rain, though often characterised on important occasions as the tears of the ancestors, is more likely to be seen as something that makes you wet.

Anyway, the sun was out by the time things got under way mid-morning and hundreds - probably thousands over the day - turned up as representatives of ethnic groups, clad in their finery, danced and sang and cooked up a storm.

The amplified music poured from three performance stages to cover the entire area with a kind of aural fog, but in front of any given stage, the sound was pretty clear.

Less clear was what you were watching: the first stage I stopped at had a prominently posted running order that suggested the plainly Ukrainian dance troupe was from Afghanistan. They weren't running late either, because the next scheduled group was Irish.

Meanwhile, over on the half-size football fields, where the games seemed to be taking place on fast forward, the running order on the whiteboard was a riot of rubouts and rewrites. Kenya had downed France 2-0 and the Serbs were about to play the Iraqis. Presumably someone was playing close attention to the match-ups; legend has it that one year, teams from neighbouring countries with a long history of strife were fielded together and things got messy.

The slight chaos seemed somehow apt; it chimed with the casual joyfulness of the whole affair, and with its classically Kiwi set-up. It was like any old country fair except that hardly anyone was wearing parkas and gumboots.

The tents and gazebos, arranged in lanes, bore hastily handwritten signs marking them out as the headquarters for the days of particular communities. Every so often was one advancing an agenda of tangential relevance: campaigners for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq; political parties; someone offering a cure for gout.

Food, that most publicly accessible expression of culture, was everywhere. I munched on a langos (pronounced "lungosh"), a crisp Hungarian flatbread, smeared with garlic butter, while I talked to a young Kurdish man handing out pieces of baklava to passers-by.

"I suppose," I said, nodding at the sweet nut-and-honey pastry, which is part of the cuisine of a dozen countries, "there are endless arguments about whose baklava is the best."

"There's no argument," he said, with a wide smile. "The Kurdish one is the best."

Listening to his story - his refugee journey had brought him here via four other countries - was sobering enough, but it was harder still to hear about the dispossession of his people, who live in swathes of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria and are, or have been, persecuted in each.

As it happened, Sunday marked the annual Neighbours Day Aotearoa, part of a campaign to strengthen neighbourhood bonds. The coincidence seemed more than a little loaded. How often, I asked myself, does my contact with the immigrant communities of this city amount to more than eating at an ethnic restaurant?

A letter writer to the Herald a week or so ago, presumably exercised by the discussion about Sikhs and their ceremonial kirpans, upbraided immigrants who were "so selfish as to expect us to put up with their cultures".

"You are now Kiwis," he thundered. It set me wondering what the word "Kiwis" means - indeed what the word "us" in the previous paragraph means. This city is home to 200 ethnic groups speaking 160 languages. One in four of us was born overseas (the biggest group by far is English) and Auckland is more culturally diverse than London.

The letter writer, whose surname suggested Celtic ancestry, seemed like a voice from a distant time, when "we" were all white and native speakers of English (and Maori were tucked tidily out of sight in the country).

We are all immigrants, of course, or descendants of them. You have to wonder how long a family has to be established before it becomes part of the we/us group rather than one of them, before it becomes part of the fabric of what it is to be Kiwi.