Disdain towards them came easy—that boorish, brazen lot; arrogant as they were and lacking in contrition. Witness them on the North Shore in January of 2019, having defiled our sacred public spaces. Then again, weeks later, assuming an insouciant posture of not- really-giving-a-fuck, vulgarities flying out of their mouths: “Come at my uncle again and I’ll knock your brains out,” screams the shirtless child in a Bunnings hat in an almost touching display of loyalty. Years after this incident, the Doran family (or the Johnsons, as they called themselves) will have amassed multiple national headlines, a petition with thousands of signatories calling for their deportation, and even an opera; their partially obscured faces will have festooned the cover of almost every media outlet, providing a foil—a dark backdrop—against which the respectability of many could be pitched. During the summer of 2019, in a land seemingly depleted of worthwhile news stories, they laid claim to copious square inches of page space as they slouched from one misdeed to another. They became symbols, villains, village idiots.

Littering, verbal abuse, dining and dashing: these were among their catalogue of transgressions. Then there was the Christmas tree stolen from the petrol station. And the ants slyly snuck into a meal to avoid the bill. But just what was it that made them so interesting, so worthy of attention? Writer Jonathan Mahon-Heap put their Britishness at the fervid core of the controversy. “They claimed they were Irish,” one reporter wrote, “when they’re actually British.” Some contended they weren’t simply “travellers” but “Irish Travellers”—that is, belonging to a nomadic Indigenous Irish ethnic group— something that threatened to derail the identitarian logic by which everyone was allowed to cast aspersions with impunity on this troupe of wayward, holidaying Brits. (The celebrated tenor Simon O’Neill, commenting on the ordeal’s operatic treatment, said it reeked of racism; he later changed his mind, settling on the label of “middle- class snobbery.”)

The Doran-Johnsons were “in New Zealand to see the hobbits” but instead they became the attraction. Like a posse of clowns in a circus act or, worse, the beasts in tow. “We were treated like animals,” one member of the clan declared. Then Auckland Mayor Phil Goff said they were “leeches” and “worse than pigs.” In typical avuncular fashion, domestic metaphors were trotted out as he reminded us how little New Zealanders enjoy having their hospitality abused. What else is there to do with such an ungracious house guest but “tell them to bugger off”? But there was to be a return, a reprise of sorts, in the form of a comedy-opera, or simply “musical theatre” to the cognoscenti who refused to place it in that hallowed genre, which one commentator likened to a university revue. In defence against those who found the whole protracted debacle undeserving of the NZO’s efforts, the pat, well-rehearsed dictum of art holding up a mirror was wheeled out. Sadly, I missed the stage production of The Unruly Tourists in 2023, and my chance to peer into the cracked looking glass. At any rate, I prefer their bad behaviour ungilded by artistic flourishes or the sublimations of authorial subtext. The family Doran-Johnson gave the nation a performance of comically brazen incivility that is hard to forget.