The final three decades of the twentieth century bore witness to the most violent ruptures since colonisation and World War I. This chapter reflects on the revolutions in economic, defence and public policy that changed how this small country related to the world, shook the political landscape into new patterns, and severely unsettled the settler society. New Zealanders found themselves gasping from the change of water in their fishbowl, their ways of life buffeted and transformed. Suddenly – but not inevitably – governments demolished institutions that had been their defining features. It was as if, overnight, everyone lived in another country.

The Depression and war generation to whom British identity and attachment mattered felt the ‘trauma of decolonisation’. No such trauma afflicted baby boomers provided that they were well educated and not in public service jobs, and late boomers were still at school in 1973. Apocalyptically, Britain's turn to Europe overlapped with the abandonment of the idea of the Australasian settlement. In the language of mateship that pervaded the masculine worlds of sport and politics, not only the rules of the game but the game itself had changed. The worker and to a lesser extent the farmer, the sheep farmer especially, were no longer wanted on the team. The structure of the world economy had changed from dominance by agriculture and manufacturing to post-industrial emphasis on the service sector. Changes in technology created new jobs and rendered old unskilled ones obsolete. Traditional jobs for working-class men disappeared, spawning a new problem of low male employment levels. In this context there was no place for the settler contract.