'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.
My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.
What supposedly bound that Commonwealth together was a mysterious shared identity - Britishness.
I have had many anxieties for our commonwealth, principally occasioned by the depreciation of our money.
One of our targets as a country is to now work very closely with the Commonwealth countries - they could become a very big market for us.
This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.
I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.
New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.
I spent my first 10 years in the Commonwealth. I come from cricket, crumpets, cucumber sandwiches, the Queen.
When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British.