Be honest. You already like New Zealand, even if you haven’t been here yet. I thought I should open with that because this, the first of a new weekly column, aims to answer the question I get asked every time I tell someone I am Australian: “What are you doing in New Zealand, then, bro?”

If you have already read my article elsewhere on this website about the recent New Zealand election, you may have mistakenly formed the impression that I don’t much care for this country. If you haven’t already read my article, you should. I know it’s long but you’re only really online to browse internet pornography anyway, so what have you got to lose?

Let’s get one last thing out of the way before I answer the original question. I didn’t leave Sydney because I didn’t like it. If you are after mountains of gay men, drunk English girls, one-sided dress codes, water restrictions, terrorist cells, overrated beaches, inflated house prices and relentless, inescapable real estate babble, then it is definitely the place for you. You learn to love Sydney, warts and all. New Zealand is different; you learn to love her and I have since discovered that you learn to fight with your last breath to keep the warts away. It’s an achievable goal over here.

My migrant story is a little different from the norm. It’s not the disgusting “we arrived from the old world with ten pounds and lived in a rat-infested apartment by the docks while my husband worked for ninety years in a mine and I smoked fish and strung laundry between ghetto buildings” kind of migrant story. Nor is it the ubiquitous story of falling in love with a kiwi living someplace else in the world and moving here to be with them. (I have a theory that the only reason there are women in this country is because they send all the men overseas to woo, catch and bring them back, one misguided English girl at a time.)

My migrant story really began with an innocent ski trip to the South Island with my parents when I was fourteen. (It possibly began with seeing the Footrot Flats movie for the first time about six years earlier. That movie has just come out on DVD. Buy it.) There was something about this place that I couldn’t get out of my head. It has lurked in the background of my complicated mental health rainbow since that first ski trip a decade ago. I would watch the weather forecast for these two funny-shaped islands (yes, I know there’s more than two. Just keep reading.) with interest… Maybe even a faint longing. It was almost as though, when I had incarnated, I had missed my landing pad and ended up a few thousand kilometres west of the mark. The day in school when I first learnt of our historic Closer Economic Agreement a plan was hatched. I would one day move to New Zealand.

This day was agreed upon over a couple of dozen after-work beers with a similarly deranged lesbian in late 2003. We would jump the pond together that coming January. (When my regional manager found out, he threw a chair across the room. I really am that good.) The lesbian upped and fell in love with her best friend, leaving me to take the jump alone. And so one hungover January morning, I arrived in Auckland with my suitcase and my camera, hopped in a cab to the city, bought a cell phone on Queen Street and commenced looking for a house and a job before my accommodation at the backpackers ran out. That was a good day.

I moved to New Zealand because I like it, because I felt somehow drawn here. But you can still make the same decision I did on rational grounds as well. New Zealand has the lowest level of unemployment in the first world, meaning it’s much more likely you will be punching above your weight in your chosen field. An eighteen month stint in New Zealand will allow you to jump up about five career rungs as opposed to, say, two rungs elsewhere. Cost of living is less than Sydney (which is good, because you are paid less). New Zealand seems to be breeding world leaders faster than they are breeding sheep: Karen Walker, Peter Jackson. It’s got a really dynamic cultural scene right now. The Prime Minister is also the Arts Minister and the massive injection of arts funding she arranged is really starting to bear fruit. It is also quite possibly the most beautiful place on planet earth.

It can often be a slow build from the immediate culture shock of being someplace new to falling completely in love with the place but you get there eventually. When I first moved over I wasn’t sure if I was just going to hang about for six months, being a barman or a shopgirl or whatever, then head back home. But it’s safe to say I’m here for the duration. Last weekend I went out and bought seventeen cherry tomato trees for my apartment balcony (I’m figuring that I’ll kill at least half). One of my workmates was mortified. She said they would take over the entire apartment. I smiled. I’m really looking forward to a potential edible Jumanji experience. That’s what living at the ends of the earth teaches you: Learn to love the experimentation, learn to love the chaos of the new. That’s why you go there in the first place.

There’s a Maori word, Tu-ranga-wae-wae, and it means ‘the place where we stand tall.’ In my experience this is often times not your birthplace. It might even be someplace you have yet to visit. And that is the best answer to the question of why I am here. I stand tall in New Zealand.

Gordon White lives in Auckland where he drinks heavily and works for the New Zealand Herald. There is a volcano at the end of his street. He mentions this often.