Student Stunts—Kiwi Style

In New Zealand, I learned from my academic counterparts there, the graduation ceremony is called “capping” and is held in May. I also learned that the New Zealand school year runs from March through November. So naturally I asked, “What has May got to do with graduation?”

Years ago, the Kiwi academics explained, the students’ final examinations were sent to England by ship for grading, and the results never arrived back in New Zealand until the following May. So the students wisely postponed their celebrations.

Nowadays, the local teachers grade their own exams, but the graduation rituals have remained unchanged. The graduates celebrate their liberation by putting on satiric stage shows, publishing humorous magazines, going on “pub crawls,” and perpetrating elaborate practical jokes, which have come to be known as “capping stunts.”

In one classic capping stunt, students told a crew of road repairmen that if some police tried to stop their work, they should ignore them, since the police were merely students in disguise. Then the students called the police and reported that a group of students posing as road repairmen were tearing up a stretch of highway.

But Moira Smith, a folklorist who was writing her doctoral dissertation on capping traditions, told me that the prank, although well known, evidently never happened. Everybody seems to have heard about the police, the students, and the highway workers, but nobody witnessed the prank firsthand.

Sounds like an urban legend to me !

Many of the capping stunts involve spreading a rumor that will cause the public to act in a foolish manner. One year at Victoria University in Wellington, for example, graduates circulated a letter saying that a water supply dam above the city would burst unless every tap and hydrant in the city was opened in order to relieve the pressure. A great many Wellington residents turned the water on.

At another university, students posted notices saying that a shipment of bananas that had recently arrived in New Zealand was contaminated and that people should bring their urine samples to the nearest post office, where a checking station would be set up to test for the presence of disease.

Perhaps the most legendary capping ritual is the students’ heavy drinking during capping week. At one time, the pub crawls were so notorious that they became known as “the chunder mile.” “Chunder” in Kiwi slang means to vomit—and that’s quite enough said about the topic, I think.

The capping shows and parades often feature suggestive material and off-key bagpipe concerts by men wearing women’s clothing. The same kind of humor makes up the bulk of capping magazines and has brought on complaints and some restrictions on their distribution.

One former capping tradition that is strictly tabu nowadays is the practice of white students dressing up as Maori warriers and performing mock hakas , or ceremonial dances. The Maoris themselves objected to this desecration of their own traditions, and the pakeha (white) students have now desisted.

The best capping stunt I heard about involved students from Auckland University. The students drove a hearse down a crowded city street, then pulled over to the roadside, as though the vehicle had gotten a flat tire. After getting out the tools to change the tire, the students —all of them dressed as morticians—removed the coffin from the hearse to get at the jack stored underneath, and changed the tire. Then they drove off, leaving the coffin behind on the pavement, with a chorus of confused Aucklanders shouting after them, “Hold on there—you’ve forgotten something!”

My informant for this story, however, wasn’t quite sure when, or even if , the stunt had occurred or what (if anything) was inside the coffin. Could be that it’s just another capping-stunt legend.