Refreshingly different

I’ve seen a lot of videos about New Zealand over the years, and the quality has been—varied. Sometimes the information included is merely dated, sometimes it’s flat out wrong, and other times there are at least some accuracies. The video above has far more hits than misses, and that’s extremely refreshing.

The video isn’t perfect of course—I firmly believe that few things created by humans are—but I’d say that what I mainly have mere quibbles rather than objections. The biggest of those is that there’s a growing consensus among scientists that Māori probably arrived in New Zealand several hundred years earlier than around 1250 CE as the video narration states, so it would’ve been nice if that had been acknowledged, even in passing. More seriously, perhaps, was that the appalling treatment of Māori by the Crown, and especially the colonial government, should have been addressed by itself because it strongly influenced how land use developed in New Zealand, as well as many of the problems that exist to this day. Actually, another quibble is how “Māori” is pronounced throughout the narration: While it’s not a bad approximation, and arguably better than usual for the narrator’s accent, it’s not quite right.

On the other hand, at one point the narrator was talking about food production in New Zealand, and, it seemed to me, was a bit unnecessarily negative. At the time, I was thinking to myself, “yeah, but we produce enough food to feed 40 million people,” and then the narrator said exactly that and the quibble was erased (and it gave me a chuckle).

There haven’t been all that many videos about New Zealand that I’ve shared/recommended over the years, and most of those are ones made in New Zealand by New Zealanders. A lot of the videos I’ve shared have been ones I thought were funny, especially if I felt they showcased the NZ sense of humour and sensibilities. Of course, that, too, is a useful way to explain the country. But it’s nice to be able to share a quite recent video explaining something about New Zealand that many people overseas would almost certainly never think to explore.

All of which makes this video a refreshing change.

A Tip o’ the Hat to my nephew for sharing the video with me; I doubt I’d have run across it otherwise.