TV Review: Kiwi Kountry Kalendar (how utterly false 100% Pure really is)

Of all the things that could be put into a time capsule to commemorate and epitomise the colonial era of the nation, a box set of Country Calendar would have to feature. I would pull out the NZ Company charter and Ross Meurant’s baton to fit in some Country Calendar DVDs.
Barely anything has changed in fifty years of the show, this season’s shows might as well be in black and white (apart from the quad-bikes you wouldn’t be able to tell).

It is the great chronicle of the New Zealand Boer, the laconic settler-farmer, and a tribute to his family and his lifestyle – but not so much hers. There is a farmer and his wife, who is quite often British, and they live in the wops because they’re a bit tight and they send their kids off to a nice white boarding school and he’s developing the farm with his father and his brothers and he wants one of his kids to carry on farming – that is the whole story, every
story, in one sentence. I hardly have to add how great they all think the scenery is too, but one person’s ‘spectacular’ is another’s bleak and barren. So these self-told tales, now more b+b infomercial than a documentary, are self-serving tales.

They are self-promotional stories of independent achievement and effort without much or any background to other people or place. They might mention a pa site on their land but they won’t go further than that to mention the Tangata Whenua on whose land the farm is located.
They will mention they lease a neighbouring Maori block but not think to mention the circumstances of how their farm became so. ”The station’s history goes back over a hundred years…” is the usual broad brush that covers over the confiscation, or seizure, or dirty
deal typically behind a title that rests on little more than the white man’s naked land-grabbing. History only goes back to where the current owner wants it to go back on Country Calendar. They won’t be mentioning the DDT, the dumped asbestos, the old mining tailings, and
they sure won’t be mentioning the bones bulldozed up around ‘the pa’. These most fascinating aspects of cultural impression just don’t seem of any value to them (or the prorgamme maker) beyond another point of interest for the paid walking groups that seem to be the only way
farmers can make a living out of their shitty steep back blocks these days. And they are all character blocks. Partly for the necessary aesthetics of dramatic landscapes for TV, and partly because the couples who want to be on Country Calendar appear to be marginal
entrepreneurs running all manner of tourism-related businesses beyond the reach of the RMA and consents and have submitted themselves to the show on the basis of the free advertising it provides (including a competition run in conjunction with the show’s sponsor that appears
either side of the ad break). It is very much like a long, boring postcard from not terribly interesting people who didn’t really go anywhere interesting and have little to say.

I have never seen anyone but a Pakeha on Country Calendar. It isn’t a show about rural people either, they have to be farming people and in particular white, mumbling, stereotypical farming people, and not Maori farmers. The only brown faces are the Maori shearers and
contracors and workers if it is in the North Island, and the minimum wage foreign workers – upon whose backs the farmers’ viability rests – in the South Island.

The ethos is wrench every last dollar out of the land – that skill or ability – is part of what is being praised and validated by the show. Amid the rampant, unchecked, unremediated destruction of the natural environment over which the farmer presides he will make quite a show of the small amounts of fencing down a gully to protect a slither of swamp as if he were David Attenborough saving a rainforest when all he’s doing it for was the safety of the stock – not the safety of the waterway. These farms are biodiversity wastelands and most efforts
are late in the piece and small scale . The more poisoning, dusting, and over-use the better it seems for profitability. Every farm has weeds and pests galore – all of them, the bad ones – introduced by the settlers as an unwitting curse upon themselves needing expensive killing. I would expect to find that in every episode there will be at least a dozen cabbage trees, but probably at least one thousand gorse bushes.

The worst and saddest thing I ever saw on Country Calendar – and a reminder of how far the old rural NZ is from the urban sensitivities of today – was an episode of some old redneck out the back of Whanganui somewhere making a living by chopping down thousand year old Rimu trees on his bush block. Until I saw it I would have sworn that sort of desecration would have been illegal. But there he was felling this gigantic, ancient tree, many many times older than he without anything so much as a murmur. Unbelievable. And this prick was allowed to say, unchallenged, that the massive damage of the bulldozer path through the bush and the large cleared area around the tree that is now going to be a motorway for weeds into the heart of the forest, and the killing of a giant and irreplaceable tree just to make his retirement a bit sweeter, is all sustainable because he’s going to plant about six rimu seedlings amid the destruction. Horrid. And don’t worry about the massive hole in the forest, ”it lets the new
plants come up…” (like all the weeds spreading through the bulldozed corridors). In that situation his so-called ‘selective’ logging is hugely destructive. To have the show try to portray him as some sort of an environmentalist is obscene. The settler-farmer in all his crimson-nosed, thick-necked, pig-headed glory, wrecking the last remnants of nature. These parasites will bleed the earth itself dry if they thought there was a buck in it. That’s farming, that’s Country Calendar.