Jonathan Milne, June 1996

Tucked away in one of the quieter of Wellington's hill suburbs, dressed in slippers and a dressing gown, lives a man who loves his country.

He loves it in a manner that is different from the nationalistic jingoism that is often taken for patriotism. He never fought wars for New Zealand. He never played rugby for New Zealand, or raced yachts.

Maurice Gee is a writer who has quietly introduced readers, from New Zealand and abroad alike, to many different facets of the country in which he has grown up.

It seems extraordinary that the person who brought New Zealand to so many -- a person who loves New Zealand in such a way -- is also a person unable to swear an Oath of Allegiance to New Zealand's head of state.

"They told me that I couldn't be accepted for Teacher's College unless I took the Oath of Allegiance. I was to go away and think about it for a week and they would call me back and see how I felt. I went away and they never ever called me back to the Principal's Office."

Sitting at home in the couch a number of years later, Gee laughs at the memory now. "I kept on through Teachers' College and got out as a teacher, and I was the only one in my year who got through without taking the Oath of Allegiance. But I was not going to take it under any circumstances.

"I inherited some strong convictions. When it came to the test, I found that I could stand up and be counted. I refused to declare myself a loyal subject -- I hate that word subject -- of a king or a queen on the other side of the world, who seemed to me to be totally irrelevant to this country, New Zealand. That is still my position."

Gee's family had a strong tradition of egalitarianism, of opposition to inherited privilege. There were two outcomes -- republicanism and pacifism.

"I come from a line of pacifists, whose original impetus would have been anti-imperial. This goes back to my grandfather, who actually was imprisoned during the First World War for seditious utterance. One of the charges against him was that he said, in a public lecture, that children should not be taught to sing 'God Save the King', they should be taught to sing 'God Save the People'.

"With that in my background, obviously a lot of that is rubbing off on me. So in my teens I was convinced I was a pacifist. I was convinced I was an anti-imperialist ...and I was a very, very strong 'anti-monarchist', which was a form my early republicanism took."

When Gee was called up for compulsory military training, he went down to the local Post Office and asked for the form to register as a conscientious objector. They didn't have it. "So I went out and thought 'what do I do?'. I thought I'd forget about the whole bloody business and wait for them to come and get me. And in fact I'm still waiting."

His republican sentiments were equally difficult to hide in the post-war era. While nowadays New Zealanders are rarely called upon to prove their loyalty to the Queen, we were perhaps less secure in our nationhood then. Not only was one required to pledge the Oath of Allegiance before entering the civil service or any public role but children at school had to stand for the playing of 'God Save the King'. The same applied to theatre-goers at the start of every movie.

"I can remember when I was first going out with my wife, we were sitting down during the singing. A man leaned forward from two rows back and grabbed her hair, which was in a ponytail. I turned around to have a go at him, but somebody actually standing in the row behind me, the row in front of this man, turned around and dressed him down properly. He said that we had every right to sit down if we wanted to, even though he was standing up himself." Gee, the erst-while pacifist, chuckles. "It saved me going back and fighting him."

There is a second reason for Gee's republicanism. It is the anachronism of having New Zealand's head of state in another country, rather than in our own. "It seems absurd to me that a country whose future is with Europe -- and quite properly too, I would say -- should then be supplying us with our head of state, somebody who is meant to be our representative to the world."

He points out that when he enters the United Kingdom, he is now less welcome than a Frenchman. With a New Zealand passport, he is regarded as an alien. "I remember when people used to talk about 'going Home'. When they visited Britain they said they were 'going Home' for a trip... even though they were born in New Zealand and had never been to the United Kingdom. And there was a lot of emotion involved. It was very real and you can't blame people for feeling that.

"The movement away from Britain is not a strong or dramatic move away, but just a gradual and inevitable drift away. We are not exactly alienating ourselves from Britain, but we are allowing ourselves to find our own position in the world."

Gee is not the type of republican who would see our British legacy entirely denied. Republicanism isn't about destroying the old order. To him, it is simply about egalitarianism and the demise of traditional hierarchies, about recognising our own importance as individuals. And it is about recognition of our own nation, New Zealand's, place in the world.

Gee, the author who loves his country, says he does not mind recognising New Zealand's ties to Britain. "After all, one of the most important things we have comes from there -- our language. But it is time to accept that fewer and fewer New Zealanders find their heritage in Britain."