ABSTRACT
For over seven hundred years of human occupation, the weather has been an ongoing daily concern for the people living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Today, it influences health, smooths polite conversation, structures daily routines, affects work and leisure, and shapes thoughts of the recent past, the present and the near future. The nation’s changeable weather features in art, music and popular culture; it illustrates calendars, while television weather presenters are national treasures, referred to fondly by their first names. Popular song lyrics invoke its unpredictability, feeling like four seasons in one day. Some places are known by their climate: the subtropical region at the top of the country
is the “winterless north.” Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, has a reputation for bad weather and the strong winds that funnel into the city. “Windy Wellington” is the butt of a national joke, though locals counterclaim that “nothing beats Wellington on a good day” while conceding such days are few and far between. Even first-time visitors flying into the city (weather permitting) are alerted to the city’s winds: a “Wellington” sign, modeled on the famous Hollywood one, located a stone’s throw from the airport, is made to look as if it is being blown away by a strong gust. New Zealanders’ tendency to dwell on the weather has a corollary with the population
of another island nation, Great Britain, where the weather is said to be “crucial” to Britons’ “apprehension of [their] country and [their] place in it.”1 To this observation, British commentator Richard Mabey adds: the “[w]eather is what happens here and now, to our settlements and landscapes, to us. In that sense, it’s part of our popular culture.”2 He also points out how “the weather, in our culture and our psychology, is intricately linked with time and especially with time’s familiars, memory and expectation.”3The weather literally and imaginatively shapes our past, present and, with less certainty, our future.
