Pity then the poor Kiwi, who is bombarded from all sides by cultures which have developed elsewhere.
While we are evolving/have evolved a distinctively New Zealand culture (better described using negative statements than positive), we are a former British colony with essentially British institutions adrift in a sea of American cultural icons, news and views.
My grandmother (and many of her contemporaries) always referred to Britain as "home". Most confusing to a child to whom Britain was a mysterious place on the other side of the world.
It was actually worse than that for us kids - we had New Zealand Chinese neighbours on one side of us and Dutch immigrants on the other. (New Zealand Chinese are very common in the part of NZ that I come from. They have been here for four generations or more - as long as most, if not all the current European immigrants).
The kids from the neighbourhood were colour and culture blind - we spoke bits of three languages, none of them well - and confused the hey out of our parents.
American culture appears to have taken root within a very short time of TV becoming available in the early 1960s, although I believe there was a major effort by the programmers to source lots of British shows. Our own were naive to the point of being extremely embarrassing to watch, a problem they sometimes still have.
Now we have more American input than from anywhere else, with the possible exception of shows from the West Island (you will know it as Australia).
Just as an aside, the thread on Cockney rhyming slang made me laugh. We have incorporated quite a bit of it into normal everyday English as spoken in NZ (known as "Zild").
People like me tend to rabbit on all day without ever wondering where the rabbit came from or why it's a verb!
Cheers
