“New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean,” the page preview reads.
However, the next website that comes up is a post made by someone on the social media platform Quora in 2018, asking whether New Zealand is real. The post had 29 answers ranging from genuine to (hopefully) facetious.
One man said, given he has lived in New Zealand his entire life, he hoped it was real, while another took a more abstract approach.
“Does New Zealand exist? Some form of Buddhism believes that nothing really exists, so maybe it doesn’t really exist if you believe that,” he wrote, adding that perhaps the millions of people who lived in Aotearoa were figments of the imagination.
Some commented jokes that New Zealand’s absence from artistic maps or boardgames proved it did not exist. Fortunately, this is something most Kiwis tend to find humorous, prompting the creation of a Reddit page called MapsWithoutNZ with more than 117,000 subscribers, who regularly post photos of, as one could expect, maps without New Zealand on them.
Tourism New Zealand even got in on the fun in 2018 and launched a video campaign called “Get NZ on the map”.
Other people answered the question sincerely, asking how someone could ask such a question.
“Doesn’t anyone learn geography anymore,” one person asked. “While New Zealand is real, your school’s geography lessons seem to be fake,” another wrote.
As a New Zealander, it is difficult to imagine someone would genuinely be uncertain of our country’s existence. Yet, I’ve been asked it myself while travelling abroad.
Perched on a ski lift in Colorado several years ago, I was chatting with a fellow skier when he asked where I was from. When I said New Zealand, the man snorted and said, “oh, come on, I’ve heard that one before, I’ve seen the Lord of the Rings”. Stunned into total silence and at the top of the mountain, we parted ways.
For other travellers, the lack of education has caused more serious issues. In 2016, a young Kiwi claimed she was detained in Kazakhstan after officials refused to believe New Zealand was a country.
Relative to China or America, New Zealand is small but still has around 5.3 million people. While one cause for confusion could be New Zealand’s absence in map renders or geography curriculums, one man’s answer to the Quora question poses another suggestion.
“Take a look at this beautiful scenery around - I think I’ve seen it somewhere. Lord of the Rings? Chronicles of Narnia?,” he posted, adding that “everybody knows that Narnia and Mordor is not real!”
As silly as this sounds, it’s a similar explanation that caused my ski lift companion confusion over New Zealand’s existence; its reputation as a location for fantasy films had simply exceeded its reputation for literally anything else; even existing.
