What counts as the Deep South and Far North?
It’s probably contextual but I’m just wondering what the national consensus is. Obviously, 90+% of the world would consider us all to be from the south but this is more about domestic lexical differences.
We were at junior rugby this morning, way away in rural Southland, and someone mentioned that their sister-in-law had never been to the Deep South even though she went to Uni in Dunedin. We mostly expressed a wee bit of surprise that she had never travelled south but someone (originally from the Waikato) was surprised that we didn’t consider Dunedin to be the Deep South.
As a term, it’s probably reserved for sports broadcasts and weather forecasts. It’s not often used anyway so it’s no big deal. I just think if people referred to Christchurch as the Deep South I’d get a bit prickly since it’s significantly closer to Wellington than Invercargill.
So we had a think and our consensus was the upper reaches of the Deep South is probably the Clutha and Gore districts. Athol is part of Southland and the Southland district but it’s quite far north so that does count as the Deep South? Dunedin isn’t culturally part of the Deep South but geographically it’s further south than Waikaia.
Anything south of the Waitaki is the south, and anything north of there is not. That point we’re definite on. We weren’t sure about the North Island equivalent but probably anything north of Auckland is the north and anything north of Whangārei is the far North?