Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:11a.m.
By Kim Chisnall
Click here for pictures of the Waitangi Day Pub Crawl.
Unsurprisingly for a tradition involving alcohol, nobody is entirely sure when London's Waitangi Day Pub Crawl began. Certainly for those who took part this year, memories of the event will be somewhat hazy.
Beginning at Paddington Tube Station at 10am - the idea is to travel London's Circle Line - stopping at a pub at each tube stop before winding up at Westminster at 4pm for a mass haka in the shadows of Big Ben.
Costumes are optional but encouraged and alcohol seems to be compulsory. This year the Circle Line was closed for maintenance so those along for the ride had to walk it. Like it or loath it, the pub crawl has become almost a rite of passage for young New Zealanders in London for their OE.
We joined the crowds at Westminster to catch the grand finale. The police had barricaded off the gardens and in a muddy park hundreds of young New Zealanders, thousands of kilometers from home, stripped off their shirts on a typically freezing winter's day to perform the haka.
I overheard one a police officers telling a bemused tourist that "they're celebrating the day they became a British colony". A rather interesting take on Waitangi Day! The officer then went on to explain there was never any trouble and the participants were more of a danger to themselves than members of the public.
But why do they do it? Nothing like this happens in New Zealand where people are more likely to spend the public holiday at the beach or relaxing with friends.
Maybe it shows how important national identity becomes when your world has grown that much larger?
Nobody knows how many New Zealanders live in Britain - the rather vague estimate that is often bandied about is somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 at any one time. While most live in London, it's easy to feel isolated in a city of 8 million people where there are over 300 languages spoken.
I've lost count of the number of times I've corrected someone who assumes I'm Australian and to be honest I no longer feel offended. These days I sometimes find it difficult to tell the accents apart myself.
Britain is still, to some extent, the mother country – the land from where so many New Zealanders can trace their ancestry. That doesn’t mean young New Zealanders travelling here now feel at home.
The language might be the same but almost everything about day to day life is just that little bit foreign.
Celebrating not only who you are, but where you’ve come from takes on a whole new importance and what better way to do that than by taking strength from the familiar – in this case a bottle of Speights.