Survey - Where Have All the Wowsers Gone?

The generation that believed that fornication was a greater sin than tax evasion appears to be in retreat.

– Michael Dean

I remember Palmerston North as a town with broad streets and narrow minds.

– Michael Dean

If you’d asked me then, in the year 1959, to draw a picture of the typical New Zealander, a caricature really, I’d have drawn you a man, of course, a man with a rugby ball under one arm, a keg of beer under the other, and a wife under both feet. A man sensitive to criticism, ignorant of the arts, hostile to the nonconformist, suspicious of excellence and afraid of sex…

– Michael Dean

I used to call the old culture the concrete playground: meaning the pub on one side and the church on the other, and nothing growing in between.

– James K Baxter

These days they’ve got four more hours to get drunk in.

– Michael Dean, on the end of the six o'clock swill

There always was a weak architectural tradition in New Zealand, one that sprang I think from a disregard for the natural beauty around us, the way the rainforests were swept aside … the way power pylons always seemed to have been planted where they could do most injury to the landscape, and the buildings which looked as though they had been dropped onto the shorn hills as afterthoughts.

– Michael Dean