Kiwi writer and photographer Melanie Dower has been living in Helsinki with her husband Jonathan and son Miko since 2014. Verve caught up with her to find out about the things she most loves about life in the Finnish capital, and the impact of the pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“I’m the youngest of three girls and my father was a bank manager, so we moved town fairly often,” says Melanie. “Moving a lot as a child has helped me adapt to change as an adult. Even within New Zealand there are differences to be found in each place – the biggest of which for me came when moving from the King Country to Auckland as a pre-teen. I’ve come to believe that there are people who move and people who don’t, and that every town or city benefits from having a mix of both.”
Since her Helsinki move, Melanie says that she’s discovered new levels of resilience similar to what the Finns call ‘sisu’ (“the kind of self-determination needed when it’s -20°C, your phone battery dies and you need to walk home in the dark!”), along with a good dose of adaptability.
“During our first year here, I published a book about Helsinki and the Nordic way of life with a Finnish photographer, something it’s unlikely I would have done were my work options not so limited. It was really important to me that I found my own sense of purpose, which forced me to be creative in finding what that might be.”
The family made their move to the Nordic region in 2014, when Jonathan secured a job with the mobile gaming company, Supercell.
“We’d been living in Sydney for almost 11 years and returned to NZ after Miko was born in 2012. Our plan was to stay for two years before moving overseas again, but we didn’t know where. I had been imagining somewhere closer to home, and when Jonathan started interviewing with Supercell, I felt excited but also really nervous.”
How did you guys meet?
“We met in the year 2000 when I was working at the organic supermarket Huckleberry Farms. He would come in to buy vegetarian food and I always made sure I was on the check-out so we could chat, and we soon started going out. A year later we moved to Sydney together when he got a job as an animator at Disney Toon Studios.”
What do you most miss about New Zealand?
“I miss the ways strangers greet each other or engage in small talk together. My mother told me she spent 20 minutes sharing an umbrella with a stranger recently when they were caught in a downpour, something I cannot imagine happening here. Finnish people tend to value privacy and personal space and if you don’t have something of value to say, it’s considered perfectly acceptable to say nothing at all.”
Melanie adds that Helsinki is a very quiet city, “where people very rarely raise their voices in public or use car horns”. She loves how beautiful buildings from different eras sit alongside modern Nordic architecture, the flatness of the land (“we walk or cycle most places and it’s very safe for children, who tend to get around by themselves from the age of eight”), and the seasons which offer the surroundings an ongoing feeling of fascinating flux.
“Our workplace is housed in the largest wooden office building in Finland and as we look over a harbour, we can watch the sea freeze and thaw during the course of the year. The city is constantly changing, as is the way we interact with it. Whether it’s 25°C or -25°C, we go outside every day – as the Finns say:
‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.’”
“Everywhere I’ve lived, people love New Zealand and want to tell me about their time there or their friend who lives there and how much they love it.”
I ask Melanie how the Finns view New Zealand.
“Everywhere I’ve lived, people love New Zealand and want to tell me about their time there or their friend who lives there and how much they love it. Finns are very humble, and so often ask why we would leave such a paradise to come to a land where the winters are so long, cold and dark. Recently I’ve also met several Muslim people who’ve told me how much they appreciated New Zealand’s response to the mosque shootings in Christchurch.”
Has your view of the country changed since you left?
“I try to keep in touch with New Zealand happenings as much as possible. We’ve only lived there for two of the last 21 years so when we come home, we sometimes feel like visitors and see the country as though for the first time and just how incredibly beautiful it is. Having lived in apartments for nearly two decades it now amazes us how much land is dedicated to single-family dwellings and private yards in New Zealand. We’ve grown used to owning less stuff, using public spaces and parks more often and not being responsible for the maintenance of a large property. Which is not to say we couldn’t adapt back into that life, but it’s a great relief when that property is buried under several feet of snow.”
What are your thoughts on our handling of the pandemic?
“It’s a very different situation there geographically, so it’s understandable that New Zealand would take a very different approach than countries in Europe. I’m grateful that we didn’t have to return home in a hurry though, as it must have been incredibly stressful for those trying to get a place in MIQ. It’s a great relief now that the borders have reopened but there was a time just before Russia invaded Ukraine that I realised that if we had to get home in a hurry it was possible that we wouldn’t be able to get in, which was a very sad, disconcerting feeling.”
Russia’s relations with its Nordic neighbours have been famously frosty at the best of times, but tensions have heightened further with the invasion. Melanie says that when the war started, foreigners unused to the political situation became especially anxious, as did Finns fearing that they would be called up to serve.
“Putin threatening Finland is nothing new, and as Finns are very pragmatic people, they have been preparing for an emergency ever since World War Two. Every apartment building or neighbourhood has an air raid shelter stocked with iodine tablets and there’s been public notices about learning where yours is and clearing them out if they’ve been used for storage. While it seems we’re not in any immediate danger, we have bought power banks and bottled water and have our official documents and cash ready in case we need to leave in a hurry. I’ve noticed an increase too in the number of our Finnish male colleagues who have been called up to do military refresher courses, as most do a year of military training after high school.”
Otherwise, life goes on as normal. I ask about life beyond Helsinki, and Melanie tells me that in a few days they’ll be visiting their “tiny cabin with no power or indoor plumbing” to “celebrate the summer solstice, grill some food, and enjoy the midnight sun”. She recently joined a local Winter Swimming Club which involves plunging into holes cut into the frozen sea, and, more invitingly, access to a sauna on a nearby island.
“We also visited Lapland this year,” she adds, “where we enjoyed a sled ride on a sunny but -23°C day, pulled by a team of huskies. One evening we did a trek through the forest on sleds pulled by reindeer in search of the aurora borealis.”
To find out more about Melanie and order her book, Helsinki: People Make the City, visit melaniedower.com.
