THE news of young backpacker Grace Millane’s murder would have left people reeling, no matter where it happened. That it was in New Zealand, however, has deepened the shock. Reporters, gabbling to fill space and air time in the absence of concrete facts, remarked that Ms Millane had recently travelled through South America without any trouble, yet met her end in one of the safest countries in the world.
No wonder Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern offered a heartfelt apology to Ms Millane’s parents. She was speaking as a stateswoman, conscious of the damage this brutal case has done to her country’s reputation. But she was also speaking as an ordinary, proud New Zealander, appalled and ashamed that such an act could have been committed on their soil. Her sensitivity to what the Millane family must be going through was a reflection of many New Zealanders: warm, kind, compassionate.
Ms Ardern’s statement, in which she spoke of her shame and hurt and said that “your daughter should have been safe here”, echoes the feelings of all of us when something dreadful takes place on our patch. When the young Irish student nurse Karen Buckley was murdered in Glasgow in 2015, for instance, there was a similar reaction of dismay and disbelief, a collective sense of responsibility, even though it was nobody’s fault but the killer’s.
Yet unlike Glasgow, Auckland has never been in the headlines as a “murder capital”, nor has it been blighted by decades of gangland warfare and serial killings, as Glasgow has been in the past. My travel guide, which I used while visiting for a fortnight earlier this year, cautions that while crimes happen in New Zealand as anywhere else, “the greatest risks are environmental”. After visiting Piha beach a few miles out of Auckland, where we paddled in the thunderous Tasman Sea beyond reach of the breakers’ spray, you can understand the warning. So too when walking a trail in the Waitakere Ranges, a magnificent but astonishingly dense region of forest, where Ms Millane’s body was found.
Ahead of our trip we were fed the usual line that New Zealand was just like Britain 50 years ago. Fondly but patronisingly, the land of Kiwis is portrayed in Blighty as the place that time forgot, where old-fashioned values and traditional lifestyles still prevail – no wonder it’s where they filmed The Hobbit. While elements of that might be true in more remote locations on both islands, as in rural outposts here, it is way off the mark for its cities. Even douce-seeming Christchurch in the south island has trouble with gangs, though nothing compared with Auckland in the north. That metropolis of soaring offices and hotels, meanwhile, has a teeming, multicultural, pan-Asian community, and feels not only intensely modern, but chilled.
Our hotel was in SkyCity, a district built around the 328-metre broadcasting Sky Tower. This 24-hour casino complex, where Ms Millane was seen before entering a nearby hotel where it is said her alleged murderer was staying, is a buzzing night-time hub. You would not feel unsafe here in the wee small hours. The same can’t be said for streets a block away. Within a minute of heading out for a recce, the city’s homeless problems were evident.
Alcoholics, the mentally ill and those who have for whatever reason slipped through the cracks and reached rock bottom, were leaning in doorways and lying on pavements. In daylight there was no menace, but there was the sense of a community facing the same malaises as elsewhere: drug and drink addiction, hand to mouth existences, and utter destitution. This might have no bearing on the tragedy of Ms Millane, but it is a reminder that nowhere is entirely benign or law-abiding. Almost no place on earth exists in a bubble that predates the drug abuse and violent crime that threaten virtually every culture.
There have been at least nine murders of female tourists in New Zealand in the past 50 years. One of them, in 2008, was Karen Aim, from Orkney, who was bludgeoned to death by a 14-year-old in a North Island resort. Compared with other westernised countries, though, that figure is small. As a society, New Zealand is among the most civilised and welcoming you could find. Quite apart from its spectacular scenery, it has an outward-looking, refreshingly well-informed attitude. Incomers and passers-by are greeted with warmth, not suspicion, and if they hear a Scottish accent, there’s a good chance that total strangers will regale you with the life stories of their Caledonian forebears.
It only adds to the misery and incomprehension over Ms Millane’s death that there are few places where it should be easier or more pleasant for an English-speaking woman travelling alone. In her memory, for four nights this week the Sky Tower will shine in “dynamic white”, and tonight the Auckland Harbour Bridge will be lit-up white in solidarity. It is not Paris, but the way in which this city of lights has reacted to a terrible crime reveals the country’s true colours.
Read more: Grace Millane: Body found in backpacker murder probe
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